Abolishing Private Schools — UCL Political Philosophy Essay (2017)

Eton

Full question: Do private schools violate equality of opportunity? If so, does this mean they shouldn’t be allowed? If not, does this mean they are morally permissible?

The issue of private education is a longstanding political and moral problem that has been debated vehemently for centuries. The question of whether private education should be abolished is not arbitrary. Only 7% of the entire pupil population in the UK attends a private school and yet they make up a disproportionate number in higher education and senior offices (Arnet, 2014, The Sutton Trust, 2019). This essay aims to defend the thesis that private education should be abolished since it violates fair equality of opportunity and results in morally impermissible ‘queue jumping’. I will first state the problem of the essay, and outline the main theories of justice presented by John Rawls in Justice as Fairness that attempt to deal with it. I will consider Adam Swift’s queue jumping objection in some detail, which I maintain is plausible, then I will consider the counter-arguments presented by Elizabeth Anderson.

Before I begin the substantive part of my essay, I would like to define some key terms and briefly outline Rawls’ political conception of justice. In Justice as Fairness, Rawls attempts to describe a ‘well-ordered’ society (the ‘Basic Structure’) where citizens are ‘free’ and ‘equal’ (2001, p8). In the Basic Structure, citizens hold basic rights that are to be realised and upheld by political and social institutions to ensure ‘social cooperation’. Rawls broadly defines social cooperation as the fair terms in which political and social institutions work together and in a manner that allows all citizens to pursue their interests while fulfilling ‘publicly recognised’ duties and obligations (ibid, p9). The Basic Structure is a useful background social framework that we can use to determine whether private education is immoral. Although Rawls’ notion of free and equal is open to interpretation, both he and Swift operate under a contractualist framework, which can be broadly defined as a social arrangement that is acceptable if and only if all affected parties agree that it is so and is conducive to social cooperation (Anderson, 2015, p100). With regards to private education, both Rawls and Swift would agree that society has a duty to establish equal opportunities for education for all regardless of social origin or family income.

It is important to note that Swift presents a more lengthy and persuasive account specifically challenging the existence of private schools in How Not to be a Hypocrite (2003), whereas Rawls is less explicit on the subject. However, Rawls’ two political conceptions of justice, which are in favour of remedying inequalities and preventing ‘excessive concentrations’ of wealth, ‘private power’ and ‘political domination’ (2001, p44), remains solid ground upon which Swift, and, ultimately, I can argue against private education. Rawls’ two principles are defined as follows.

1. First Principle: ‘all citizens have an equally ‘indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties’.
2. Second Principle: social and economic inequalities must satisfy two conditions: (1) ‘they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; (2) they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society’, also known as the difference principle (2001, p42).

Giving a full defence of Rawls’ conception of justice in light of private education is beyond the scope of this paper; my intention here is to argue for the view that private education violates Rawls’ first and second principles specifically in virtue of unfair queue jumping, and there are two reasons to believe this to be the case.

Firstly, private schools violate fair equality of opportunity by enabling their students to unfairly ‘jump the queue’ in the competition for places at top-tier universities and senior positions. How can we determine on impartial grounds whether queue-jumping is unfair? If we imagine a situation where we were oblivious to our social standing, intelligence, gender, religion, race, health and so on, I contend that we would advance fair conceptions of justice and agree that queue-jumping is unjust. This method of reasoning is known as the Original Position. Under these conditions, the notion that a good education, which leads to valuable university places and senior offices, be limited to a select few is grossly unacceptable and morally impermissible. Private schools flagrantly disregard Rawls’ first principle since a good education is a basic liberty that should be available to all. Further, private schools violate Rawls’ second principle because a lack of good education results in the less advantaged, that is, the poor who cannot afford a private education, not being able to realise their ‘native endowments’ (Rawls, 2001, p15) and reach the higher echelons of society. The privately educated have disproportionate access to roles with the highest prestige, wealth, and influence over people’s daily lives. Making such coveted positions accessible to those from all backgrounds is an essential component of a society which cares about fairness and equality. You might wonder how we could arrive to such a conclusion given the ‘veil of ignorance’ (ibid) that has been placed over our eyes in the Original Position.

However, even in the Original Position the affected parties can appeal to primary goods, that is, the necessary and ‘all purpose means’ that enable free, equal and cooperating citizens to develop adequately and fully exercise their two ‘moral powers’: (1) capacity for a sense of justice; (2) capacity for and ability to pursue a determinate conception of the good (ibid, p18, p58). In other words, the Original Position enables us to arrange society in a way that is acceptable to everyone and since everyone can agree that a good education is a primary good that translates to a stable and secure future, it is only just that a good education be treated as a basic liberty freely available to everyone. Further, like Rawls, I would argue that being born to parents who are able to secure a superior quality of education is morally arbitrary since one cannot claim credit for this; it is based on a random choice, an ovarian lottery (ibid, p44). No citizen, therefore, should be favoured or be allowed to ‘jump the queue’ in the competition for valuable university places and senior occupations for they are not entitled to more benefits in virtue of something as arbitrary as family income or social origin.

Secondly, private education is a formative investment, that is, an investment which will ‘bring good things in the future’ including but not limited to wealth (Swift, 2003, p10). I agree with Swift that parents who purchase a private education for their children knowingly improve the financial prospects of their own children at the expense of other people’s children (ibid, p14), and this means that the latter are not able to pursue their conception of the good. A good education is undoubtedly a necessary condition for these students to pursue their conception of the good even if theirs is open to reasonable interpretation and revision (Rawls, 2001, p21). As I alluded to earlier, privately educated individuals are disproportionately represented across a range of coveted roles.

To permit the existence of private schools, therefore, is to provide no reciprocal advantage to all citizens as Rawls’ first principle requires; it is a zero-sum game where all the benefits of a private education are conferred to the very few who can afford it. If the choice of attending a private school, which currently provides superior education to its state-school counterpart, is available only to the few who can afford it, then it upholds the class-ridden, elitist society that we seek to overthrow in the place of Rawls’ fair and equal society.

Anderson might respond to my arguments in several ways. For instance, she could say that a policy restricting how parents can spend money on their children’s education violates the parents’ liberties since parents allegedly have the right to spend their money on their children’s future in whatever way they wish provided they are not depriving anyone of a good education. However, this response fails because it assumes parental property rights includes spending money in any way that does not violate other people’s negative Lockean rights. I contend that when a parent purchases private education for their child they are indeed violating the negative rights of those who attend state schools, and it is not hard to see why this is the case.

For example, schools in the state sector, which cater to the vast majority of students in the UK, receive disproportionately poor resources. If Anderson takes negative Lockean rights seriously, she would have to justify how we can accept that an average of only £3,300 is spent on each child in the state sector while the average fees for a day pupil in a private school is £6,705 (Swift, 2003, p22). Among other things, this lack of funding towards students in the state sector results in larger class sizes, which means these students receive less attention than their private-school counterparts. For these students to develop the sort of ‘self-confidence’ (Rawls, 2001, p59) and verbal fluency necessary for civil and political participation, both of which are fundamental negative Lockean rights, they need smaller classroom sizes to be able to develop this skill. Private schools might not intentionally cause this, but that alone is not a sufficient warrant for their existence. There is no denying that only when private schools are abolished will it be possible for the state to redistribute staff and facilities equitably and in a way that upholds students’ negative Lockean rights, namely, the ability to engage in civil and political life without the fear of ‘political domination’ (Rawls, 2001, p44) or discrimination by the privately educated who currently dominate the political class.

Another way that Anderson might respond to my arguments is by maintaining that parents who choose to purchase private education for their children do so not with the intention of depriving others of a good education but simply as a way to ensure that their children are not worse off otherwise. In other words, these parents are not interested in jumping the queue as Swift contends. This response also fails because regardless of the parents’ intention, the simple fact that children who, by going private, gain a competitive advantage over children who attend a state school is an unacceptable consequence in a society that seeks to treat everyone on free and equal terms. To be free and equal in a Rawlsian sense is to be able to pursue one’s conception of the good irrespective of one’s background, and if we run a society that favours the few that can afford private education, we would be undermining the inherent dignity of those who cannot afford one and neglecting their indefeasible claim to a good education. Further, I cannot see how Anderson could reasonably suggest that securing a private education for one’s child is mutually exclusive from ensuring that one’s child fares better than the rest who cannot afford private education. As Swift highlights, education is a positional good, that is, the value of one’s education is measured against the education of others (2003, p23). Children who are privately educated unfairly jump the queue for better university places and better jobs because they are relatively guaranteed better results than their state-school counterparts in virtue of having relatively better resources, and Anderson fails to refute this.

Another way that Anderson responds to the queue-jumping objection is by suggesting that parents who purchase a private education for their children do so because they ‘care’ more about the intrinsic value of education than others who do not purchase a private education for their children (2001, p105). In Anderson’s view, the parents who send their children to state schools are the ones to blame, not private schools. This response also fails because those who fail to purchase private education for their children do so not because they ‘care’ less about the intrinsic (or instrumental) value of education; they simply cannot afford it! Children schooled in the state sector are fully aware that they are at a disadvantage and I imagine would do anything to reverse their situation. Anderson commits a non sequitur by suggesting otherwise.

So we have seen that none of Anderson’s replies to my argument are valid. Hence, we should reject her objection to abolishing private schools and accept that private schools violate fair equality of opportunity and are morally impermissible in a fair and equal society.

Word count: 1,999

References

1. Arnett, G. (2014). Elitism in Britain — breakdown by profession. the Guardian. Retrieved 10 December 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/28/elitism-in-britain-breakdown-by-profession
2. Anderson, E. (2015). Rethinking equality of opportunity: Comment on Adam Swift’s How Not to be a Hypocrite (pp. 99–110). Sage Publications. Retrieved from https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2961071/mod_resource/content/1/Anderson%20-%20Rethinking%20Equality%20of%20Opportunity.pdf
3. Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as Fairness (pp. 1–25, 38–131). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Retrieved from https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3597605/mod_resource/content/1/Rawls%20-%20Justice%20as%20Fairness%20I.pdf; https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3597609/mod_resource/content/1/Rawls%20-%20Justice%20as%20Fairness%20II.pdf; https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3597933/mod_resource/content/1/Rawls%20-%20Justice%20as%20Fairness%20III.pdf
4. The Sutton Trust (2019). Elitist Britain: The educational background of Britain’s leading people. Retrieved from https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Elitist-Britain-2019.pdf
5. Swift, A. (2003). How Not to be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the morally perplexed parent (pp. 9–33). London: Routledge. Retrieved from https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3117639/mod_resource/content/1/Swift%20-%20How%20not%20to%20be%20a%20hypocrite%2C%201%20and%202.pdf