The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (10 page)

Figure 4.1 Membership of voluntary organizations in the UK and US, 2005–2006

Source: World Values Survey Association, World Value Survey, 1981–2008, official aggregate v.20090902 (2009): http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSIntegratedEVSWVSvariables.jsp?Idioma=I.

The decline of British ‘social capital’ has manifestly accelerated. Not only has membership of political parties and trade unions plummeted, long-established charities have seen ‘a marked drop in numbers’. Membership of any type of organization was also lower in 2007 than in 1997. Remarkably, according to the National Council of Voluntary Organizations, just ‘8 per cent of the population [accounts] for almost half of all volunteer hours’.
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Charitable donations show a similar trend. Although the average donation has gone up, the percentage of households giving to charity has fallen since 1978 and more than a third of donations now come from the over-sixty-fives, compared with less than a quarter some thirty years ago. (In the same period, the elderly have gone from 14 per cent to 17 per cent of the population.)
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The final publications of the Citizenship Survey for England made for truly dismal reading.
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In 2009–10:

• Only one in ten people had any involvement in decision-making about local services or in the provision of these services (for example, being a school governor or a magistrate).
  
• Only a quarter of people participated in any kind of formal volunteering at least once a month (of which most either organized or helped to run an event – usually a sporting event – or participated in raising money for one).
  
• The share of people informally volunteering at least once a month (for example, to help elderly neighbours) fell to 29 per cent, down from 35 per cent the previous year. The share giving informal help at least once a year fell from 62 to 54 per cent.
  
• Charitable giving continued its decline since 2005.
  

What is happening? For Putnam, it is primarily technology – first television, then the internet – that has been the death of traditional associational life in America. But I take a different view. Facebook and its ilk create social networks that are huge but weak. With 900 million active users – nine times the number in 2008 – Facebook’s network is a vast tool enabling like-minded people to exchange like-minded opinions about, well, what they like. Maybe, as Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt argue, the consequences of such exchanges will indeed be revolutionary – though just how far Google or Facebook really played a decisive role in the Arab Spring is debatable.
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(After all, Libyans did more than just unfriend Colonel Gaddafi.) But I doubt very much that online communities are a substitute for traditional forms of association.

Could I have cleared the beach by ‘poking’ my Facebook friends or creating a new Facebook group? I doubt it. A 2007 study revealed that most users in fact treat Facebook as a way to maintain contact with existing friends, often ones they no longer see regularly because they no longer live near by. The students surveyed were two and half times more likely to use Facebook this way than to initiate connections with strangers – which is what I had to do to clear the beach.
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It is not technology that has hollowed out civil society. It is something Tocqueville himself anticipated, in what is perhaps the most powerful passage in
Democracy in America
. Here, he vividly imagines a future society in which associational life has died:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone . . .

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood . . .

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
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Tocqueville was surely right. Not technology, but the state – with its seductive promise of ‘security from the cradle to the grave’ – was the real enemy of civil society. Even as he wrote, he recorded and condemned the first attempts to have ‘a government . . . take the place of some of the greatest American associations’.

But what political power would ever be in a state to suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aid of an association? . . . The more it puts itself in place of associations, the more particular persons, losing the idea of associating with each other, will need it to come to their aid . . .

The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk no fewer dangers than its business and its industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere.

Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.
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Amen to that.

Privatizing Schools

To see just how right that wise old Frenchman was, ask yourself: how many clubs do you belong to? For my part, I count three London clubs, one in Oxford, one in New York and one in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am a deplorably inactive member, but I pay my dues and use the sports facilities, the dining facilities and the guest rooms several times a year. I give regularly, though not enough, to two charities. I belong to one gymnasium. I support a soccer club.

I am probably most active as an alumnus of the principal educational institutions I attended in my youth: the Glasgow Academy and Magdalen College, Oxford. I also regularly give time to the schools my children attend, as well as to the university where I teach. Let me explain why I am so partial to these independent
*
educational institutions.

The view I am about to state is highly unfashionable. At a lunch held by the
Guardian
newspaper, I elicited gasps of horror when I uttered the following words: in my opinion, the best institutions in the British Isles today are the independent schools. (Needless to say, those who gasped loudest had all attended such schools.) If there is one educational policy I would like to see adopted throughout the United Kingdom, it would be a policy that aimed to increase significantly the number of private educational institutions – and, at the same time, to establish programmes of vouchers, bursaries and scholarships to allow a substantial number of children from lower-income families to attend them.

Of course, this is the kind of thing that the left reflexively denounces as ‘elitist’. Even some Conservatives, like George Walden, regard private schools as a cause of inequality, institutions so pernicious that they should be abolished. Let me explain why such views are utterly wrong.

For about a hundred years, no doubt, the expansion of public education was a good thing. As Peter Lindert has pointed out, schools were the exception that proved Tocqueville’s rule, for it was the American states that led the way in setting up local taxes to fund universal and indeed compulsory schooling after 1852. With few exceptions, widening the franchise elsewhere in the world led swiftly to the adoption of similar systems. This was economically important, because the returns to universal education were high: literate and numerate people are much more productive workers.
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But we need to recognize the limits of public monopolies in education, especially for societies that have long ago achieved mass literacy. The problem is that public monopoly providers of education suffer from the same problems that afflict monopoly providers of anything: quality declines because of lack of competition and the creeping power of vested ‘producer’ interests. We also need to acknowledge, no matter what our ideological prejudices, that there is a good reason why private educational institutions play a crucial role in setting and raising educational standards all over the world.

I am not arguing for private schools against state schools. I am arguing for both, because ‘biodiversity’ is preferable to monopoly. A mix of public and private institutions with meaningful competition favours excellence. That is why American universities (which operate within an increasingly global competitive system) are the best in the world – twenty-two out of the world’s top thirty according to rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University – while American high schools (in a localized monopoly system) are generally rather bad – witness the 2009 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment for mathematical attainment at age fifteen. Would Harvard be Harvard if it had at some point been nationalized by either the State of Massachusetts or the federal government? You know the answer.

In the United Kingdom, we have the opposite system: it is the universities that have essentially been reduced to agencies of a government-financed National Higher Education Service – despite the advent in England and Wales of top-up fees that are still below what the best institutions should be charging – whereas there is a lively and financially unconstrained independent sector in secondary education. The results? Apart from the elite, which retain their own resources and/or reputations, most UK universities are in a state of crisis. Only seven made it into
The
Times Higher Education Supplement
’s latest global top fifty. Yet we boast some of the finest secondary schools on the planet.

The apologists of traditional state education need to grasp a simple point: by providing ‘free’ state schooling that is generally of mediocre quality, you incentivize the emergence of a really good private system (since nobody is going to pay between £10,000 and £30,000 a year for an education that is just a wee bit better than the free option).
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It is rather ironic that, at the time of writing, the policies being introduced to address the problem of low-quality public education in England are the responsibility of a Scotsman. Michael Gove picked up the idea from an Old Fettesian named Tony Blair: turning failing schools into self-governing academies. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of academies went from just 200 to approaching half of all secondary schools. Schools like Mossbourne Academy in Hackney or Durand Academy, a primary in Stockwell, show what can be achieved even in impoverished neighbourhoods when the dead hand of local authority control is removed.
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Even more promising are the new ‘free schools’ being set up by parents, teachers and others, like Toby Young, who has finally worked out the real way to win friends and influence people.
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Notice that these schools are not selective. They remain state funded. But their increased autonomy has swiftly led to much higher standards of both discipline and learning.

There are many on the left who deplore these developments. (Many Labour MPs would happily disown the very idea of academies.) Yet they are part of a global trend. All over the world, smart countries are moving away from the outdated model of state education monopolies and allowing civil society back into education, where it belongs.

Many people erroneously believe that Scandinavia is a place where the old-fashioned welfare state is alive and well. In fact, only Finland has maintained a strict state monopoly on education, the success of which makes that country the exception that proves my rule. By contrast, Sweden and Denmark have been pioneers of educational reform. Thanks to a bold scheme of decentralization and vouchers, the number of independent schools has soared in Sweden. Denmark’s ‘free’ schools are independently run and receive a government grant per pupil, but are able to charge fees and raise funds in other ways if they can justify doing so in terms of results. (Similar reforms have meant that around two-thirds of Dutch students are now in independent schools.)
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Today in the United States, there are more than 2,000 charter schools – like English academies, publicly funded but independently run – bringing choice in education to around 2 million families in some of the country’s poorest urban areas. Organizations like Success Academy have to endure vilification and intimidation from the US teachers’ unions precisely because the higher standards at their charter schools pose such a threat to the status quo of under-performance and under-achievement. In New York City’s public schools, 62 per cent of third, fourth and fifth graders passed their maths exams last year. The latest figure at Harlem Success Academy was 99 per cent. For science it was 100 per cent.
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And this is not because the charter schools cherry-pick the best students or attract the most motivated parents. Students are admitted to Harlem Success by lottery. They do better because the school is both accountable and autonomous.