So, we have another report bewailing the fact that social mobility has been reducing, not increasing in recent decades. Many commentators on the Right seem to think that the obvious culprit is the demise of widespread grammar school education. But it seems to me that a more obvious and more directly culpable factor escapes much criticism: the Left.
What do I mean? Well, the Left spends an inordinate amount of its time telling everybody how prejudiced professional people are and how difficult it is for anyone from a low income background or from a ethnic minority or who is a woman to get ahead in the world. They moan and moan in their defeatist fashion, exaggerating and distorting. Their pernicious negative delusions permeate their client cultures, and in particular the teaching profession.
Teachers then (perhaps without even meaning to - for them it is such an automatic assumption that they are bound to communicate their assumptions about how hard everything is to their students) convince their students from low income backgrounds or from ethnic minorities or who are women to assume, as a given in life, that certain professions and certain forms of attainment are closed to them so that it is little more than shaking your fist at the injustice of the world even to apply for the relevant universities or for the relevant jobs.
Perhaps some of the more go-getting teachers attempt to convey to their students that they ought, nonetheless, to spit in the face of the system by applying, just to demonstrate how unjust everything is. But, the thing is, lots of young people are not going to be interested in wasting their time like this, and if the world is really as unjust as all that they will defy The Man in other ways more opt-out in nature. So they end up with no aspiration of succeeding in terms of The System, and they don't even apply.
Then earnest bureaucrats and ministers do worthy studies and conclude that people from less advantaged backgrounds have low aspirations for themselves and their children, and these low aspirations are a key (perhaps the key) factor holding them back. Well, go figure, guys and gals! You find a lot of vulnerable people and you preach to them that the world is unjust and they have no chance and then they end up with low aspirations. Whose fault do you suppose that might be??
