Assembly line education

I visit VS Naipaul in his cottage in Wiltshire now and then. The talk this week is about University examination results. On the news, the junior education Minister David Milliband boasts that more and more graduates are coming off the production line. New Labour has, inspired by America, set itself the target of sending 50 per cent of all school-leavers to University.

It has meant renaming several vocational colleges and other institutes of post-school training and giving them the charter and grants of Universities. There are other measures afoot to induce Oxford and Cambridge to take in more boys and girls from state schools and tip the balance against their inbuilt fee-paying school majority. It’s something like the ‘reservation’ issue for scheduled castes in education in India. (Incidentally, the adjectives ‘scheduled’ and ‘gazetted’, as in castes and officers, inheritances of Raj bureaucracy, are peculiar to Indian English— antiques to be uniquely preserved!)

Milliband’s boast was that University degrees, once the preserve of the privileged and the upper classes, were now within easy reach of the working class. Here as in India the debate centres on ‘standards'. Are they being lowered for ‘reservation politics’?

The liberal stance, which seeks to offend none, is to pump money and resources into the secondary education of the working classes and make them as competitive as the ‘haves’. VS, ever the elitist, will have none of it. Standards have become so debased he says, that if this government wants everyone to have University degrees they should simply sell them at the Post Office. I get the drift of his argument and it stops me telling him that my son Danyal, in his second year at Cambridge, has just phoned to say he got a First and is going out to have a drink or two with friends.

I don’t suppose there is any objective way of knowing whether exams have become easier, whether more people are slipping through the net which seemed, when we were undergraduates, to be challengingly tight. Rajiv Gandhi, it may be recalled without malice, was a year ahead of me at Cambridge, failed his second year exams and was ‘sent down’, barred from taking a degree in his third year.

Since the introduction of compulsory secondary schooling in the UK, the practice of ‘failing’ a class was abolished. Children went from one class to the next as they got older.

The school and college to which I went in Pune, in the fifties and sixties, were full of guys who had repeatedly failed their exams. When I got to my final year in school there was at least one fellow who had been in the same class for a few years. He had struggled up the promotion ladder, spending a few years in each class and was now, as the headmaster discovered, a married man with a child. He was, to our great regret, asked to leave.

College and university exams at the time were, to us, exacting. My college was literally full of men who had made a career of being perpetual students, failing exams, remaining in the same year and becoming veterans of the campus, running rackets and raising money in various ways.

One of these picturesque lads was called—well, let’s not reveal his name, he may be rich and famous, a member of parliament or a mafia boss by now. Call him, as Kafka did his shady sufferers, just ‘K’.

K had been around a long time. He would wake up in the mornings and peruse the newspapers for any headlines of disasters in the world. By late morning he would be on campus with a clipboard and a printed petition, asking for charity contributions for the relief of earthquakes in Peru or for the flood relief emergency of Assam. The new girls fell for it every time.

K then decided to pass his exams. He switched to the easier arts subjects and sat his finals. It was well known in college that he took ‘guides’, easy texts which gave the answers to standard questions, concealed in his trousers into the examination hall.

The exams were vast affairs with hundreds of candidates. They were invigilated, in the main, by modest young lecturers and research students, many of them young and female. K, it was reliably reported, opened his texts and his trousers and put the books from which he was copying his answers under his exposed genitals to scare away female invigilators who would not, out of modesty want to look, point or challenge his nakedness. He got a third.   

The columnist is a script-writer based in London.