Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

Abstract

At a quarter to six on the morning of 16 May 1968, a gas oven exploded on the eighteenth floor of Ronan Point, a London City Council tower block in London. The explosion blew out the exterior wall of one of the upper flats in the building, leading to what the Ministry of Housing and Local Government called in its report a ‘progressive collapse’ as the flats on one corner of Ronan Point gave way, one by one, under the weight of the floors above them.1 Four people were killed and seventeen people injured.2 Less than a year later, the former editors of Critical Quarterly, C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson, chose to use the disaster to frame the state of education in the UK in the first of what would be a series of five ‘Black Papers’, published intermittently between 1969 and 1977. (The Black Papers were so named in order to set them against the standard government White Papers on educational policy). In the open letter to current MPs that they appended to the essays in the first Black Paper, Cox and Dyson wrote that ‘There seems to be a grim humour in “progressive collapse”’, and asked, ‘How far are we witnessing the progressive collapse of education?’3 Cox and Dyson would have been well aware of the rhetorical uses of the pun from their reading of William Empson’s influential Seven Types of Ambiguity. Cox and Dyson use what Empson identifies as the pun’s ability to ‘name two very different things, two ways of judging a situation’ in which ‘their clash in a single word will mirror the tension of the whole situation’.4 At the time Cox and Dyson were writing, ‘progressive education’ referred, strictly speaking, to the promotion of discovery methods in teaching, especially at the primary school level. In the Black Papers, however, the phrase ‘progressive education’ is stretched to cover a very wide range of practices, policies, and developments, including the push to end the practice of ‘streaming’ cohorts of students by intellectual ability, the threatened abolition of the grammar schools in favour of the new comprehensive schools, and the mushrooming of student sit-ins and other forms of protest on university campuses. Cox and Dyson deploy the ‘progressive collapse’ pun in order to revise the usual associations of the word ‘progressive’, making the word appear newly proximate to decline and fall, and directly challenging the implication that progressive developments in education are always better than the traditional forms they would replace. The pun turns Ronan Point into a metaphor for the project of mass education in welfare-state Britain (for, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle observes, ‘A pun is always threatening to turn into metaphor’5) and Ronan Point becomes an architectural analogue for the unfolding collapse of the entire educational system, from the university all the way down to the primary school level. The ‘progressive collapse of education’ pun was rhetorically effective in that it became, as it was probably designed to be, the part of the first Black Paper most frequently quoted in the media. The Black Papers as a whole succeeded in defining the terms of the debate between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ policies and practices in education over the 1970s. But the rhetorical effectiveness of the pun came at the price of an implicit callousness towards the victims of the Ronan Point disaster. The pun might be dismissed simply as an insensitive joke made by people occupying a class position far removed from most of the people who lived in Ronan Point, were it not for the fact that Cox himself, as well as the two men with whom he co-edited instalments of the Black Papers – A.E. Dyson (the co-editor of Black Papers 1–3) and Rhodes Boyson (the co-editor of Black Papers 4–5) – came from lower-class origins. In his memoir The Great Betrayal, Cox wrote ‘My family existed on the borders of the working and lower middle classes’ and described the two people with whom he edited instalments of the Black Papers, Boyson and Dyson, as ‘reared in comparable backgrounds, working-class, but with determination not to submit to its penuries and repressions’.6 Certainly, none of the editors of the Black Papers came from a background of privilege: Cox was the son of a Grimsby coal exporter's clerk and a lady’s maid, Dyson’s parents worked as assistants at a Paddington drapery shop, and Boyson’s father was a Haslingden cotton spinner. The editors of the Black Papers, along with a good number of the contributors, argued that the type of student most harmed by the comprehensive school movement was precisely the kind of student they once had been, for whom grammar school education had been a ladder for escaping the privations of lower-class life. By threatening the grammar schools the Labour Party was, the Black Papers argued, kicking this ladder out from under the intelligent but underprivileged child. This student is an anchoring figure to which the Black Papers’ various polemics against different manifestations of ‘progressivism’ in education continually return. The student figures in the ten ‘Black Paper Basics’, a shibbolethic list of principles appearing at the beginning of Black Paper 1975, of which No. 7 reads ‘Without selection the clever working class child in a deprived area stands little chance of a real academic education’.7 The child who seeks, in education, a means to better their social status along the way to adulthood was a real social type, one that included the Black Paper editors themselves and many of their contributors. But the figure was also an archetype at the centre of those narratives of upward mobility with which Cox and Dyson were familiar as teachers of literature, including David Copperfield, whose protagonist appears in a comic mode, or Jude the Obscure, in a tragic one.8 Appearing in the wake of a period of sustained expansion, the Black Papers illustrate how mass education became a source of anxiety not only for a public-school educated elite, but also for a grammar-school educated and upwardly mobile generation that came of age around the time of the 1944 Education Act.9 Just as mass housing projects became, in the wake of Ronan Point, objects of anxiety, so too did the project of mass education for Boyson, Cox, and Dyson, for whom the reconstruction of the education system in the interests of the many threatened to crush the aspirations of the intelligent few. At the same time, a lingering sense of betrayal continued to haunt the Black Papers project as a whole. Malcolm Bradbury, himself the son of a railwayman, calls attention to the general sense that the university-educated lower-class person has abandoned or even betrayed their former community in his essay ‘The Idea of a Literary Élite’, which appeared in the Critical Quarterly in 1960, in which he observes that, ‘The mobility of the intellectual … breaks him away now more than ever from his cultural roots and family background, until alienations in family and personal relationships dramatize the issue for him; his interests and capacity for discourse usually confine him to the company of others like himself and yet make him aware of the necessity of a wider contact’.10 A great number of the contributors to Critical Quarterly were only too acutely aware of the cost of upward mobility: the fact that mobility entails distance, both physical and emotional, between the upwardly mobile and their families and friends. Both Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, who contributed to Critical Quarterly over the 1960s but were opposed to the Black Papers,11 wrestled with the sense of uprootedness that Bradbury articulates in his essay. In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart’s exploration of the working-class culture of his youth and its deformation under the forces of the tabloid media and cheap paperback fiction, explores the plight of the ‘Scholarship Boy’, who is torn between two classes and divided against himself: ‘He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual; and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and over-wound.’12 In a lecture that was published in Critical Quarterly on the autobiographical dimensions of The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart reflects at length on the difficulties created by a sense of palpable difference between the language used by working-class people and the language that must be used to discuss them in a book like The Uses of Literacy intended for academics and a broadly educated public. Raymond Williams’s autobiographical novel Border Country, published in 1960, three years after The Uses of Literacy, also traces the many ‘borders’ between the grammar-school educated academic Matthew and his childhood village of Glynmawr. These include the physical boundary between England and Wales, the temporal break marked by the stroke that befalls Matthew’s railway signalman father that separates the ‘past’ and ‘present’ storylines of the novel, the contrast between the name he has become accustomed to in his professional life (‘Matthew’) and the name by which he is known in Glynmawr (‘Will’); and the difference between the spoken language used in Glynmawr and the academic language Matthew hears as a ‘separate language in his mind’.13 In both Hoggart and Williams, higher education scores a boundary between the working-class academic and their community, a boundary that is recapitulated within the working-class academic’s consciousness. A sense of ambivalence towards the very educational system that enables upward mobility is apparent in the contrast between Iris Murdoch’s contribution to Black Paper 1975, in which the grammar-school educated Murdoch (descended from a once-prominent Anglo-Irish family that had fallen precipitously) argues for the compatibility of ‘socialism’ and ‘selection’ and the novel she published the same year, A Word Child. In her Black Paper essay, Murdoch writes ‘The aim of becoming an all-round human being is certainly a worthy one, but a clever person should become an all-round clever person; and few things are more agonizing and anxious-making, both in childhood and later, than to feel that one has not had the academic advantages which one deserved’. But in A Word Child, the orphaned protagonist Hilary Burde makes a precipitous ascent from an impoverished youth to a fellowship at an Oxford college in part through the assistance of a grammar-school teacher who recognises his intelligence. But Burde’s life prospects are destroyed when he falls in love with the wife of the young public-school-educated don who supported his fellowship, embarks on an affair with her, and then kills her and her unborn child (to what extent ‘accidentally’ remains unclear) through his own reckless driving directly after she breaks off the affair. Burde gives up his academic career and settles into a squalid life as a minor public servant. A Word Child makes it clear that, for Burde at least, what is ‘agonising and anxious-making’ is not the sense of academic potential not achieved but the unfulfillable desire to erase the social difference that separates him from the upper-class don. A Word Child can be read as a parody of the upward mobility story, a story in which the linear ascent suggested by the protagonist’s punning last name ‘Burde’ is turned back upon itself, trapping the protagonist within cycles of repetition, most obviously manifested in Burde’s habit of riding the Circle Line round and round on the London Underground, which, in one of Burde’s dreams, appears to merge with the examination hall that facilitated his initial rise in society.14 Murdoch’s novel makes plain the ways the upward mobility story as a genre is shadowed by the lingering sense of betraying others: not just people in the upwardly mobile protagonist’s own class (shown in Burde’s shabby treatment of his sister Crystal and her fiancé Arthur) but also one friend in the social class that he aspires to reach, namely the upper-class don whose wife he falls in love with and then kills, only to repeat the same process twenty years later at the novel’s climax. In large part to remedy this sense of deracination and alienation, and to create the conditions under which what Bradbury calls a ‘wider contact’ with people outside the academic caste would become possible, Cox and Dyson founded the Critical Quarterly Society, which was intentionally set up to include schoolteachers and schoolchildren interested in the study of literature together with academics. The Black Papers would work to expose divisions within the intellectual community that Cox and Dyson had nurtured through the Critical Quarterly Society. The political division in this intellectual community that Black Papers laid bare reflected the fundamental division within the lower-class intellectual’s own mind that Hoggart, Williams, and Murdoch all articulate. Cox and Dyson’s activities through this society need to be examined first because they help contextualise what would otherwise seem to be the editors’ abrupt conversion to conservative politics in the Black Papers on education. At the heart of the Critical Quarterly Society was the friendship between Cox and Dyson, who met as undergraduates at Cambridge University. In The Great Betrayal, Cox recounts his alienation from many of the students from public schools there, which he viscerally experienced when, during his first dinner at Pembroke College, he realised he was the only one eating his pudding with a spoon.15 His sense of alienation began to recede after he encounters A.E. (‘Tony’) Dyson while waiting for a seminar, with Cox describing the ensuing friendship as a platonic but nevertheless intimate bond. Cox recounts meeting Dyson ‘almost every day for walks or tea’ and discovering a common passion for Brahms and Mahler.16 Looking back on their long friendship from the perspective of forty years, Cox tells us that ‘Tony Dyson believes there are no completely happy marriages and that we are the exception that proves the rule’ and credits him with the fact that he had a career in academia at all: ‘If he had not become my friend I would never have succeeded in the Tripos examinations, nor become a university teacher’.17 This intense intellectual friendship between the two men, which Cox describes more as providing an alternative to their official Cambridge education than as a supplement to it, would come to define Cox and Dyson’s careers in academia. The friendship was the lynchpin of Cox and Dyson’s flurry of collaborative activity, beginning in the late 1950s, in the service of growing a literary community that would embrace schoolteachers as well as university teachers. In 1959, when Cox was early in his career as a lecturer at the University of Hull, and Dyson a lecturer at the University of Bangor, the two men founded the journal Critical Quarterly with the aim, as Cox described it later, to promote the understanding of literature within what he called an ‘expanding élite’.18 In 1962, Cox and Dyson introduced the journal Critical Survey, which was addressed especially to schoolteachers, featuring essays on texts frequently taught at the secondary-school level, surveys of recent criticism, and essays on the state of education in the UK.19 The new journal complemented Critical Quarterly, which was now positioned as the journal primarily intended for an academic audience, focusing on new interpretations of literary classics, essays on current debates in literary criticism, and critical evaluations of contemporary literature. Schoolteachers were sent copies of both Critical Quarterly and Critical Survey as part of their membership of the Critical Quarterly Society, which Cox and Dyson founded in 1962 in order to provide a common point of organisation for their editorial and conference work.20 I know that many people think that most lecturers in English are in the Scrutiny tradition, morally arrogant and teaching their students to feel contemptuous towards larger sections of English Literature; but during the last years a very powerful opposition to such attitudes has emerged, and I like to think that The Critical Quarterly is assisting this movement to restore sanity (and magnanimity!) to the teaching of English.22 In the first issue of Critical Survey, Cox drew attention to the problem that drives the plot of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys: the unequal distribution of ‘insider knowledge’ of what is required to gain entrance to an elite university among the secondary schools. Cox lamented the fact that ‘lack of knowledge causes great injustice in our university entrance system, and many brilliant students never even think of applying at Cambridge, Oxford or London’. He went on to give advice for doing well on the Cambridge Scholarship examination in particular, noting, for example, that ‘The distinctive feature of the Cambridge examinations is their emphasis on practical criticism and the dating of prose and verse passages’.26 Beginning with Cox’s own analysis of Edwin Muir’s ‘The Horses’, issues of Critical Survey included examples of practical criticism whose main purpose was to provide a model short analysis of a poem, such as might be called for in a scholarship examination. The last day of sixth form conferences organised through the Critical Quarterly Society featured a game in which the tutors and lecturers attempted to date unseen passages chosen by attendees at the conference. The implicit rationale for having the game was that if students were to perform well at this task themselves, when it was no longer a game but a question in a Cambridge scholarship examination, it might make the difference between them winning a place at a college and being shut out. Cox and Dyson did not, however, subscribe to the idea that it was only possible to gain an education in the study of literature at Oxbridge. In an early editorial in Critical Quarterly, Dyson explicitly rejected the opposition between Cambridge and Oxford and universities founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Hull and Bangor, where Cox and Dyson began their careers. He protested that ‘To join all our younger universities together under the label “redbrick”, which is then defined against “Oxbridge” in largely negative ways – less tradition, less money, less prestige, less qualified staff, less careers opportunities and so on – is demoralising, and misses the creative emphases that ought to come first’.27 A primary aim of Critical Survey was to help schoolteachers and their sixth formers navigate the expanding network of UK universities. A regular series of essays reflecting on teaching practices and curricula across the UK (and sometimes beyond) appeared over the 1960s, including Ian Watt’s essay on the newly created literature department at the University of East Anglia, founded in 1963, for which he served briefly as Dean before decamping to Stanford University.28 Through the Critical Quarterly Society, Cox and Dyson also helped younger critics, often from similar backgrounds to themselves, establish their careers in academia. One of the many young critics to benefit from his association with the Critical Quarterly Society in its early days was David Lodge. In his first contribution to Critical Quarterly, an essay on Kingsley Amis, Lodge wrote ‘I’m of lower-middle-class origins, brought up in South London, read English at the university, teach English at a provincial university, write novels, like jazz, believe literature is fundamentally untranslatable, feel unhappy abroad, know I’m less educated than the old-fashioned scholar, less cultured than the old-fashioned aesthete, but don’t particularly mind.’ (The next sentence attributes exactly the same characteristics to Amis.) Cox first reached out in a letter to Lodge (addressing him as ‘Mr. Lodge’) on 10 July 1963, asking him if he would act as a tutor for the Critical Quarterly Conference to be held in London, for which he offered £25 plus expenses for his services. Cox mentioned that a mutual friend, Malcolm Bradbury, had recommended Lodge for the job (Bradbury had previously taught alongside Cox at Hull, acted as tutor for the July 1962 conference at Bangor, and was now Lodge’s colleague at Birmingham). Lodge took Cox up on his offer and must have impressed him at the conference, since less than a year later Cox wrote to Lodge (whom he now addressed as ‘David’) to offer him the opportunity to write a review article on three recent books of literary criticism, which ended up appearing in Critical Quarterly the following year.29 Lodge became one of Critical Quarterly’s regular contributors, publishing ten essays in the magazine between 1964 and 1987, when Colin MacCabe took over as editor. Finally, both Critical Quarterly and Critical Survey also provided a means by which post-war writers, many of them from lower-class backgrounds, could represent themselves to themselves in ways that moved beyond the clichés, enabling them to situate themselves within a wider literary and critical traditions. The most ambitious example of this programme was John Wain’s long essay, published across two concurrent issues of Critical Quarterly, the first arguing that the new theatre was rediscovering the origins of drama in ritual, and the second tracing the link between the news media and the novel from the eighteenth century, ending with a call for writers of his generation to push back against the journalistic ‘Angry Young Man’ straitjacket. By writing and publishing critical evaluations of contemporary literature, Dyson, Cox, and their contributors were themselves setting themselves squarely against Leavis who had, Dyson wrote in an early editorial, ‘adopted towards contemporary literature an unfortunately negative approach; his standards of excellence are such that only a few writers in any century could hope to come up to them’.30 By liberating themselves in this respect from Leavis, the younger generations of critics published in Critical Quarterly and Critical Survey were also clearing a space for themselves as scholars and teachers of literature. The Black Papers series whose first instalments would come out in Critical Survey from 1969 was, by contrast, much more of a backward-looking project in which Cox and Dyson attempted to preserve the educational system that had enabled their own social ascent. The first Black Paper was published in March 1969 in Critical Survey. It went on to have an influence beyond the wildest fantasies of the typical editor of an academic journal. The Black Papers were read and debated by politicians in parliament, reported on and excerpted in newspapers, and discussed in editorials and television talk shows. Edward Short, the Secretary of State for Education, lent the Black Papers much free publicity when he called the pamphlet’s appearance ‘one of the blackest days for education in the past century’ at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers, going on to say ‘We should indeed be blind if we did not see this in its wider context of a massive lurch in society towards reaction. It is the reaction of racism. It is the demands for capital and corporal punishment, for the ending of the welfare state, and now reaction in education.’31 Even if they were not actually read, the Black Papers operated as a kind of polemical brand name that helped define the traditional position on educational policy in the minds of the public. Cox and Dyson deliberately set out to have the Black Papers stoke public controversy: a letter from Dyson to Cox shows Dyson strategising how to keep the Black Papers in the news until the publication of a second Black Paper in October 1969: ‘It seems important to keep the present debate going with articles, letters and so on for as long as possible’, Dyson wrote, ‘and at the same time to prepare the most effective possible pamphlet for the autumn’.32 The same energies that Cox and Dyson channelled towards fostering a literary community through the Critical Quarterly Society were now directed towards influencing debates around educational policy on a national stage. All life depends upon passing exams. If you fail at football, they drop you to the reserves. If you fail in business, you go bankrupt. If you fail in politics, you are forced to resign (or, in some countries, get shot). Exams measure people against standards distilled from human traditions and achievements, not against inclinations spun lazily out of the ‘self’. To create an education system without examinations is to fail to prepare children and students for the realities of adult life.33 The difference between Cox and Dyson’s pronouncements on the purpose of education in the Black Papers and their former pronouncements on the same subject in their journals is striking. In his essay on ‘English in the Younger Universities’, published in the second issue of Critical Quarterly in 1959, Dyson had written of his own political awakening during the Suez Crisis and argued that the disciplined study of literature was not simply an end in itself but something that could help sensitise readers to injustice: ‘literature, with its intense respect and concern for people constitutes a permanent challenge to the insensitivities and inhumanities of our civilisation, whether they are perpetrated by teddy-boys with flick-knives or by statesmen and bishops with the full approval of the powers-that be’.35 Dyson had founded the Homosexual Reform Society in 1958, the year before the launch of Critical Quarterly, and his work as an academic over the 1960s was conducted alongside his political work as a leading figure in the gay rights movement. Cox, for his part, had published in 1965 an essay in Critical Survey in which he provided a generally sympathetic account of his observation of student protests during his year as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He explained that the students were protesting the exploitation of neighbouring Oakland’s mainly poor minority population for cheap labour and calling attention to racially discriminatory hiring practices by businesses in Berkeley. He criticised those right-wing commentators in the media who ‘pilloried the students as unprincipled agitators, and made no reference to the main issue behind the controversy’.36 Five years later, however, Cox was organising signatories for a ‘Letter on Academic Freedom’, opposing ‘sit-ins’ and other forms of protest in UK universities, and printing right-wing denunciations of student protesters in the Black Papers. The Grammar School will always be to me – as to many of you – the school which gave the working class child a chance to compete with the product of the public school and made it a principle that any scheme of reorganization which does not give as good an academic choice and chance to the talented child from the working class home as he had before is not only misguided – it is evil. 37 Cartoon by Richard Wilson, in the Observer, 13 April 1969, 10. Amis and his friend Robert Conquest, the poet and historian, became regular contributors to the Black Papers, writing more straightforward contributions as single authors, and humorous parodies and satires together. Their update of Gustav Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Wisdom entitled ‘An Educational Dictionary’, which appeared in the third Black Paper, gave mock definitions of buzzwords in the mouths of student activists and progressive educationalists. Amis and Conquest defined ‘elitism’, for example, as ‘The theory that some people are better at some things than others are. In education, specifically, the idea that children of high “intelligence” who have “learnt” a lot should have a higher claim to further education than those lacking in, or actively resistant to, these qualities.’ The title of their contribution to the second Black Paper, ‘The Anti-Sex, Croquet-Playing, Statistic-Snubbing, Boyle-Baiting, Black Fascist Paper’, is in much the same vein, taking aim at the chorus of critics condemning the Black Papers. Amis’s and Conquest’s contributions to the Black Papers drew on both men’s fondness for parody and satire. Conquest had earlier published an interpretation of Amis’s Lucky Jim as a Christian allegory in Critical Quarterly in the full knowledge of the editors that it was a hoax satirising earnest overinterpretations of literary texts. Amis’s humour in Lucky Jim itself, as Lodge notes in his Critical Quarterly essay on Amis, leans heavily on ‘the way in which Jim picks up a phrase, usually a cliché – his own or another person’s – and mentally subjects it to sceptical scrutiny’.42 Amis’s carefully crafted voice as a political commentator, which drew on the same rhetorical techniques as the hero of his first novel does, helped inform the editorial style of the Black Papers, a style that reflects situation of the parvenu alienated from the language of the class in which he finds himself. One point of continuity between the Black Papers and the previous issues of Cox and Dyson’s journals was the dominance of male voices such as that of Amis. The first Black Paper was particularly egregious in this respect, with the sole female contributor being G.F. Browne, who contributed a few ‘Notes from a Junior School Headmistress’ to the bottom of page 50. On receiving the advertisement for the first Black Paper, Margaret Higginson, the headteacher of Bolton School in Lancashire, wrote to Cox to tell him ‘I warmly welcome your initiative in producing the pamphlet, “Fight for Education”’ and to order four copies. But she went on to chastise Cox for the fact that ‘as usual’ there were ‘fifteen men to one woman’ among the contributors. She concluded her letter by commenting ‘No doubt your venture will be attacked as being reactionary and old-fashioned. Isn’t it a pity that in this one respect the charge will be so well-founded?’43 Although Cox and Dyson would include more women as Black Paper contributors, including Iris Murdoch and June Wedgwood Benn,