The Brits could learn something from American education

A correspondent writes with reference to my recent columns: "What's with the geniality? You endanger your hard-won reputation as an old fart neocon!" Well, we can't have that, can we? Here's an ungenial overgeneralization for you: American political life necessarily spawns that aspect of moderation best called mediocrity; British public life, in contrast, still regularly brings forward men and women of real distinction — before trashing them. Margaret Thatcher's reward for saving Britain from its curious death-wish for third-world economic status was (in addition to the howling obloquy of academic intellectuals) to be dumped by a group of Tory hacks. Tony Blair's reward for saving the Labour Party from claiming a place in the museum of British social history is (in addition to the howling obloquy of academic intellectuals) the threat of being dumped by a group of Labour hacks.

There are several strata of the growing hostility to Blair within his own party. At the perhaps subconscious psychic level, many more European than American intellectuals have never moved from the stage of denial to that of grief over the painfully demonstrated demise of Marxism, alias "scientific socialism." More immediately and more respectably, a large number of Britons oppose their government's policy in Iraq. But the explicit ostensible reason many Labour backbenchers are ready to dump Blair is his proposal to reduce by a couple of courses the free lunch now provided for British undergraduates.

The government's outrageous proposal is to assess on a means-tested basis some actual undergraduate tuition costs. I just this minute heard a grave BBC commentator opine that the Prime Minister will lose his job should be continue to insist that student and/or their parents pay something for their higher education. This view did not entirely astonish me. Even as long ago as 1958, when I "went up" to Oxford, I was amazed at the insouciance with which many of my mates regarded their "grants" as a right settled once and for all in 1215, when Johannes Rex affixed his illegible signature to Magna Carta. Not even a "Princeton tradition" matures more quickly to sacred status than does an "entitlement". The BBC guy then switched to a talking head who howled with particular obloquy against the possibility of "American-style so-called 'student loans'." Howling obloquy aside, what Blair is proposing is the simplest common sense: "We must find a better way to combine state funding and student contributions." Though this enrages the welfare purists, it could actually alleviate the dispiriting malaise of British higher education.

How Britain finances higher education is no business of mine, though the issue could be the occasion of some dispassionate philosophical reflection. The number of institutions in which Americans have a plausible claim to international bragging rights is finite, but by any measure our system of higher education is among the dwindling few. It is the envy of the world. Many factors account for the strength of our system: its vast scope, its extraordinary variety, its radically democratic ethos, its effective cooperation of public and private spheres, the continuing importance of institutions based in explicit religious commitment. A very special strength is a generous and capacious conception of "higher education" that can embrace Penn and Penn State, Deep Springs and Dade County Community College. Only in America are there dozens and maybe a hundred good colleges that you have never heard of, including some so specialized that they teach people how to fly airplanes —though not necessarily how to take off or land.

The foundation of this remarkable system is a remarkable national consensus concerning the value of education. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," said Jesus. The reverse is also true, to a degree. The vast private philanthropy lavished on American colleges, ours conspicuous among them, comes from the heart; heartfelt also are untold thousands of college tuitions scraped together by hardworking parents and not infrequently by students themselves, who realize that it is no more outrageous to borrow money to finance education than to finance a house or a car. It is the job of college professors and administrators to vindicate that belief.

Some might say that we jolly well better have good higher education, given the continuing debility of large swaths of our primary and secondary schooling. Even in our country cruel inequity too often gives birth to social pathology, and we have little time to take a smugness break. But as the rest of the world knows, and shows it knows by pedal election, our system of higher education serves us uncommonly well. There are far too many children indeed left behind; yet still in this country very large numbers of young men and women of ability and initiative can and regularly do overcome, through higher education, daunting inherited social limitations. On this one I know whereof I speak. I never spent a penny in nine years of higher education. What a gift! — but a gift with a moral obligation, not an entitlement. The yet greater gift is that in one short lifetime education moved me to a place where I have been able — in symphony with the largesse of my employer and generations of benefactors unknown — to spend more money than once I though existed in the world on seeing my own children to degrees at Barnard, Chicago and Princeton. John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.