Intelligence, Common Sense and Politics

Neither 'pure' intellectual capacity nor the applicability of a person's perception to the events in the visible and audible world around her [or him] can be measured with any degree of accuracy. Yet there is a common assumption within society that some peoples' processing-power for complex and abstract thought is greater than other peoples'; while other people are seen to have a greater-than-average capability to assess the movement of events and the actions of other people in ways that are useful guides for themselves and for others who trust them to base their own actions on. It is usually assumed that people with the highest perceived 'intelligence' are often not very 'practical': and very often it is manifest that a person of highly-rated academic intelligence is not capable of managing all aspects  of their everyday life in a way that the generality of their community would consider to be sensible.

President Macron is well on the way to getting himself regarded as a vain and shallow man by allowing his acolytes to assert that he is 'too intelligent' and his utterances are too complex for ordinary folk [and press reporters] to understand. Some of President Trump's most obviously-infantile tweets are when he asserts that he is of superior intelligence; and he appears to be quite singularly lacking in both pure intellect and common sense. Boris Johnson is often asserted to be of a very high intelligence; but even those who quote this as a qualification for even higher office than he now holds also admit - often, before they are challenged on the point - that he lacks both assiduity in his current duties and any sort of empathy with the 'common man's' reaction to life's vagaries. Rowan Williams was elevated to the Archbishopric of Canterbury on a reputation for extremely superior intelligence: he was an utter failure in the role, as his sermons wandered off into incomprehensibility and his actions showed an almost total failure to address real-world situations.

By contrast, Stephen Hawking has shown, notwithstanding his extreme physical challenges, that he can combine both superior intelligence with the ability to explain theoretical physics to a wide audience. Clement Attlee is often described as the most under-rated prime minister of the twentieth century, and there is no doubt that he mastered every aspect of leading the country through the biggest-ever government-led socio-economic change in modern history; he was notoriously taciturn [thus leaving the fewest possible hostages to fortune] but he always ensured that he was clearly understood by the audience to which he addressed his comments.

The context in which I raise these issues is the present sorry and shameful state of the Brexit issue. A Tory whip who I shall not bother to name has demanded that university heads tell him the names and syllabus summaries of the lecturers who teach students about Brexit: the universities are rightly rejecting those demands, in most cases, as being unacceptable political interference with 'academic freedom'.  The request is not necessary, anyway, as separate data which have recently been released show that a significant majority of lecturers on European affairs in UK universities are emphasising the extreme economic risks that will arise from Brexit, and the almost-certain economic damage that will be done by a 'hard Brexit' or a no-deal situation. Leaders from virtually every sector of business, large and small, are pressing similar views on the government: unless something very close to membership of the European Economic Area [EEA] succeeds EU membership, the effects on the economy, on jobs and on living standards will be catastrophic.

The point is being learned, in most places other than the headbanging quartile of the Conservative party, that tariffs are not 'the big issue': what would be lost by exit from the EEA are common regulatory standards which allow the free passage of goods and services between the member countries. It is the loss of common standards in everything from medicines through nuclear controls to aviation that would really bankrupt Britain if we walzed away into oblivion.

It is impossible to make a positive judgement of the intellectual capacity of the 'other two' Brexit ministers who are meant to form a team with Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary. Liam Fox [Trade Secretary] talks about future trade possibilities as if tariffs and WTO rules are all that really matter - which is fantasy - and David Davis gives increasing cause for worry. As 'Brexit Secretary' Davis is Mrs May's point-man on the 'divorce' negotiations with the EU, and he told the Commons Committee on his chosen subject yesterday that no definitive motion may be put before the Commons until after the Brexit deadline has passed [in March, 2019]; thus implying that whatever has been agreed, or failed to be agreed, by that date will be the future context for the nation to live with. This displays a lack of both intelligence and common sense that is truly spectacular. 'Number Ten' has already begun to 'clarify' what he may have meant, beyond presenting a further demonstration of the government's complete lack of competence. But is it crystal clear that any academic who is honestly and objectively trying to give her students an understanding of the events that are shaping their future lives must be highly critical of the process that is in hand and of the competence of the people who are conducting it.

University Free For All?

The leaked Labour Party Manifesto that the BBC [among others] is brandishing this morning aims clearly at 'old Labour' voters and at first-time voters, in particular.

The promise to abolish tuition fees in UK higher education in England will be hugely popular with students; and also with the millions of working people who are struggling to cope with their own student debt repayments and would love to avoid their children becoming trapped in the same debt tangle in their adult years.

However, there are many consequential issues that need to be considered. The question of how 'free' higher education would be funded needs realistic answers, rather than platitudes. This immediately knocks-on to the question of "how much higher education should be funded by taxpayers?" To which a respondent must ask further questions, of which the first and most fundamental is that which was addressed by Cardinal Newman in the nineteenth century; since when, the opposite of his argument has been the basis on which governments have funded universities. Newman argued unequivocally that the purpose of universities is, and should only be, the humane education of the individual: no utilitarian objective should be allowed to intrude into the process of self-fulfillment.

Meanwhile, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the masters of industry and commerce in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Bristol were collecting funds from each other to establish university colleges that would teach the young men of the area [by full- and part-time study] the essentials of textile technology, metallurgy, engineering and other applied sciences; with the necessary underpinning of mathematics, physics and chemistry. Into the twentieth century, especially in the light of deficiencies in British technological capability revealed by the First World War [which exposed areas of shameful technical dependence on imports from Germany], government funding for universities - especially in applied sciences - was increased. But technology is hard to learn, and has never had the high prestige that the literate classes have given to music and literature. History is popular relaxation reading: higher mathematics has a very small appeal to the mass market. So it has proved with student preferences: especially in the 'Robbins expansion' of the higher education system in the nineteen sixties [which saw the doubling of the older civic universities, and the establishment of several completely new universities] the arts were allowed to take in many more students, while the science capability of the universities was expanded beyond the level that could be filled by capable and willing UK students. Hence by the nineteen eighties, when the Thatcher governments welcomed university expansion to absorb otherwise-unemployed twenty-year-olds, a pattern was set whereby the arts, social studies and 'media' grew in response to demand; and science labs were stripped out to make more lecture space that could be crammed with people doing 'useless' degrees.

Although teaching media studies requires only a fraction of the unit cost of teaching mechanical engineering [which involves high expenditure on machinery, workshop space, materials, technical support etc], the aggregate cost of allowing hundreds of thousands of people to undertake materially non-productive courses every year was seen as excessive: so tuition fees were brought in; and the 'arts side'of institutions, at least, became virtually self-funding. The residual capacity for teaching and research in applied science was increasingly filled by overseas students, who took their knowledge back to support competition with British industry, while the UK schools system encouraged their pupils to take the cheaper and more popular arts options in which nice children from nice homes got goods grades and so got their schools good gradings. The consequential mega-disaster for the British economy needs no elucidation in this blog today; though it is a subject that must recur frequently in future.

Having opened up the subject, Mr Corbyn and his little friends need to explain how - and why - the universities should be funded. Is there any national interest in maintaining over a hundred and thirty such institutions, many of which have no functioning applied science capabilities? Are the taxpayers really willing to fund a million Newmans a year? Now that the issue has been raised, it needs to be addressed clearly and in full.

How to become a student

One of today's 'shock headlines' in the UK is a report on university admissions that shows that several universities have failed to meet targets for 'fair access'.  'Fairness' in this sense means 'making places available for students with inferior results in the qualifying examinations whose relatively poor scores can be attributed to the inferior quality of the schools that they have attended'. The quota system means that students who gain satisfactory results at good schools could be disadvantaged to the extent that they do not get into their preferred universities.

The problem is principally ascribable to the fact that Britain has three parallel schools systems. One group is schools where the great majority of pupils have the cost of their education paid by their families [though almost all such schools have some scholarships for a few children from less-affluent homes]: in most such schools teaching methods are traditional, discipline is firm and there are ample resources for science and sport and out-of-class activities: many such schools are residential so that they offer a total educational environment.

Second there are a few districts where the local authority provides different sorts of schools: traditional grammar schools which are day schools with most of the attributes of private schools; a few technical schools; and 'secondary modern' schools with a less-demanding curriculum. Selection between the three school types is made at a set age - often eleven years - usually by examination.

Third are comprehensive schools, providing the only education that is available for the overwhelming majority of children over eleven years. While some of these have excellent standards of teaching and discipline, the majority do not. An establishment of politically-correct writers, university Education professors and head teachers has wantonly ignored [or actively denigrated] the example of private and grammar schools. In most comprehensives lax discipline is commonplace and this ensures that disruptive and arrogant children can deny their colleagues any serious educational opportunity. 'Hard' subjects - notably mathematics, serious science, modern and classical languages - are largely ignored in favour of simplified generalised 'science' and 'vocational' subjects like journalism, film, elementary psychology and book-keeping.

Good universities concentrate on 'hard' subjects that are likely to benefit the economy most, as well as giving their graduates the best employment opportunities. It is a simple coincidence that entrants from private and grammar schools are prepared to undertaken 'hard' courses, while most comprehensive school leavers are not qualified to embark upon them without special extra coaching within the university; which is an extra cost of their attempts at 'fair access'. The best - and most popular - universities make very serious efforts to achieve 'fair access' targets, even at the cost of diverting resources from developing the best students to remedial work for the 'disadvantaged'. Every move for greater 'fairness' has a tendency to remove resources from the education of the best-prepared students, regardless of their access route to university: and this conspires to reduce standards and thus the future quality of the national skills base and thereby disadvantage the economy.

Almost everybody in the university system agrees that remedial work is needed in the ethos and standards of comprehensive schools: but that issue is put by politicians and self-styled educationalists into the 'too-difficult' tray; so the chosen 'solution' to a real national problem of educational opportunity is to reduce the quality of the best universities and thereby further reduce the future competitiveness of the country.