How Not to be a Hypocrite

School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent

Adam Swift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134386925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How not to be a hypocrite: the indispensable guide to school choice that morally perplexed parents have been waiting for.
Many of us believe in social justice and equality of opportunity - but we also want the best for our kids. How can we square our political principles with our special concern for our own children? This marvellous book takes us through the moral minefield that is school choice today.
Does a commitment to social justice mean you have to send your children to the local comprehensive - regardless of its academic results? Is it hypocritical to disapprove of private schools and yet send your child to one? Some parents feel guilty but shouldn't. Others should feel guilty but don't. Read How Not to be a Hypocrite, then answer the questionnaire, and work out where you stand on this crucial issue.

Part I
Choosing the school rules

To see whether the charge of hypocrisy sticks, we need to know why people disapprove of private or selective schools, their reasons for thinking that such schools should not be available. I could present these in a merely descriptive way. Hypocrisy is about whether people are acting consistently with their own beliefs and, as we’ll see, that can be decided without any attempt to judge whether those beliefs stand up to critical scrutiny. But I want to do more than that. I will judge as well as describe. And I will argue that people who object to private or selective schools are right to do so.

The claim that private schools should be abolished is so controversial that it may make this part of the book seems uselessly utopian. Abolition of private schools is not on the political agenda. The UN Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children’. The European Convention on Human Rights, which was incorporated into UK law in 2000, states that ‘the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure . . . education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’, a clause widely regarded as making the abolition of private schools illegal. Estelle Morris, former Secretary of State for Education, has said that the Labour Party ‘would always respect the parents’ wish to choose an independent school for their son or daughter’. Meanwhile the government’s attitude towards selection is mixed. Officially in favour of comprehensives, it nonetheless makes it unfairly hard for local parents to get rid of existing grammar schools, and its support for specialised comprehensives is seen by many as encouraging selection under another name.

I don’t expect my argument against both kinds of school to bring about the end of either. But it’s important to see that parents who worry about opting out of the local comp do indeed have something to worry about. The political principles they fear they are betraying are not wrong. They may or may not be justified in opting out. I’ll address that issue in Part II. But they would be right to vote for school rules that did not give them the option.

To see why, we need to consider a host of issues, each of which gets its own chapter. Chapter 1 makes a start on the fundamental question of what parents should be allowed to do for their kids. Nobody should vote for rules that would prevent parents doing things that they are entitled to do. I suggest a way of deciding which kinds of parental partiality are legitimate and which illegitimate. Chapter 2 discusses the complex nature of ‘education’. When a parent sends her child to a private school, or moves into the catchment area of a ‘good’ comprehensive, what exactly is she buying? Then, in Chapter 3, I explore the differences – and similarities – between private and selective schools. Many people opposed to private education have no problem with the idea that schools should select by ability. Does selection within the state system raise moral issues like those raised by the independent sector?

Chapter 4 factors in real world complications. I’m talking about how people should vote in the world as it actually is. Perhaps there are valid objections to private or selective schools in principle, but, in practice, things would be even worse without them. Chapter 5 takes us back to philosophy, and deeper into the issue of legitimate partiality. I explain what it means to talk about parents’ ‘rights’ or ‘duties’ in relation to their children, and consider the moral significance of consequences. What parents can do to help their kids must depend on how many others are affected, and how badly. Part I ends by drawing these various strands together, explaining why even parents whose children would benefit from the existence of private or selective schools should nonetheless vote to abolish them.

1 What can I do for my children?

What can I do for my children? Usually this question is practical, not moral. Given my resources – money, time, energy, information, contacts – and the options they make available to me, how can I act in my children’s best interests? What is the best way to maximise their chances of success and happiness? What can I do to protect them from harm and to equip them with the skills they will need to make their way in the world?

But ‘what can I do for my children?’ is also a moral question. It is about what is morally permissible, not what is practically possible. It arises because there are limits on what parents should be allowed to do for their kids. An American woman was charged with attempted murder, accused of trying to kill a girl who was competing with her daughter for a place as cheerleader. That mother showed excessive concern for her daughter’s interests. She went too far. Most evenings, I read a bedtime story to my kids. I am showing a special, partial interest in my children. I know that reading to them gives them advantages that will help them in the future, advantages not enjoyed by less fortunate others. It is unfair that they don’t get what mine do. The playing field is not level; our bedtime stories tilt it in their favour. Even so, few would advocate that they be banned. Bedtime stories are the right side of the line.

We can think of the things people do for their children as forming a continuum. Murder at one end, bedtime stories at the other. In between come stealing for them, using personal contacts to help them get a job, bequeathing money, sending them to a private school, paying for private health insurance, taking them on foreign holidays, buying computers and books, helping them with their homework, making sure they eat healthy food . . . Any or all of these are likely to give them advantages over other children. Which of them are justified and which not?

Parental partiality v equality of opportunity

The things parents do for their children have two aspects. They can be good for children while they are children, before they are adult. Call this the consumption aspect. It’s good for a child to get that bike she’s been asking for because then she’ll be able to go on bike rides with her friends. Or they can be good for children in that they are likely to bring good things in the future. Call this the investment (or formative) aspect. It’s good for children to learn to play the piano because then they will be able to play as adults. ‘Investment’ need not be financial return, and the return need not be to the investor. I want my children to be able to play the piano because that will make their lives better in ways that have nothing to do with money and nothing to do with their being well placed to pay me back for my ‘investment’.

Lots of goods are a bit of both. Bikes are good for children at the time they are enjoyed – they have consumption value – but they also tend to make children healthier and more independent. So they have a formative aspect. Conversely, there may be immediate consumption value to piano lessons – if the child enjoys playing, or if they make for a closer parent–child relationship – as well as a longer-term, formative yield. Here’s a somewhat morbid way of getting at the distinction. Imagine that we knew that a child hadn’t long to live. Some of what we did or provided as parents would change simply because the formative aspect would no longer be relevant. In so far as we wanted to do things that were good for our child we would be aiming solely at her current consumption, not at investment in her future well-being.

The well off investing in their children’s futures looks more problematic, morally speaking, than spending on their current consumption. Of course, we might also object to consumption inequalities. Why should Johnny get to go on exotic and exciting holidays just because his dad is rich, while Tony’s parents can’t afford to take him anywhere? Why should Jemima enjoy Indian take-aways while Tracey has to make do with beans on toast? These would be good questions even if Johnny’s holidays and Jemima’s curries produced no future benefits, even if they yielded nothing formative. Johnny and Jemima are better off than Tony and Tracey purely as a result of their parents’ financial position. That looks unfair. But, though these are good questions, they aren’t as troublesome as the ones that can be asked about what parents do for children to make them better off as adults. If well-off parents could limit themselves to improving their children’s consumption, then their kids might have more enjoyable childhoods. But at least children from different social backgrounds would have the same future prospects. It’s the things parents do to give their children unfair advantage over others in the competition for future rewards that are particularly objectionable. Those are what tilt the playing field. They make for inequalities of opportunity.

Suppose you’re unlucky Tony or Tracey. Other kids get holidays and curries, you don’t, and that’s unfair. True. But does their getting those treats harm you? Are you worse off than you would be if nobody enjoyed such luxuries? No. You’re worse off than you would be if your parents were rich like theirs. And you’re worse off than you would be if Johnny and Jemima’s parents spent their money – or half of it – on you. Maybe we should make them do that. But simply preventing well-off parents from buying holidays and curries for their kids would do you no good at all. To be sure, it would remove an inequality and an unfairness. But a law that simply prevented them from indulging their children in that way looks as if it could be motivated only by envy or spite. It would be levelling down, making some worse off without any compensating gain for others.

This is the standard objection to equality. Egalitarians, it is often alleged, are essentially resentful and envious. They can’t bear the idea that some should be better off than others and want to cut them down to size. (C.P. Snow justified sending his son to Eton because he did not believe in ‘cutting down the tall poppies’.) I think that objection is nearly always misplaced. People who want more equality are not motivated by envy and resentment. If they want the well off to have less it’s almost always because, like Robin Hood, they think that’s the best way for the badly off to get more. But let’s suppose the accusation is valid. Suppose those who care about equality are peculiar enough to want it for its own sake, even if it doesn’t help anybody. They would, let’s suppose, prevent Johnny and Jemima from getting their extra consumption just because it’s unfair that they should get it while Tony and Tracey don’t. Even if that were right, caring about equality of opportunity would be very different. It has nothing to do with levelling down.

Imagine a world in which parents were not permitted to do anything to improve their kids’ chances in life. Children from rich and poor families have the same, equal chance of achieving desirable goals like places at university or well-rewarded and interesting jobs. Then a government is elected on a new policy. Now parents are allowed to invest in their kids’ futures, to spend money on education to help improve their chances of success. Some parents do and some don’t. The ones who don’t, don’t because they can’t. Are the unlucky kids as well off as before? Of course not. The very fact that the rich kids now have a better chance of success means that the poor kids have a worse one. The new policy doesn’t simply give them a worse chance than that enjoyed by the rich kids. It gives them a worse chance than they had before the policy was introduced. In that sense, because of the competitive aspect, chances of achieving scarce goods are zero sum. If some have more, others must have less. So stopping some getting better chances than others is not levelling down. It is not merely cutting down the tall poppies for its own sake. It is positively benefiting those who would otherwise be worse off.

From the continuum of things parents can do for children, this book focuses on one that has a blatant formative aspect: education. (Of course it also has a consumption aspect, a complication we’ll have to consider in due course.) Nobody thinks that sending a child to a private school is as bad as murder. But if that school gives its children unfair advantages in the competition for university places, good jobs and the money that goes with them, it might still be unjust. The argument is simple and familiar. It’s because education converts into money (among other good things) that money shouldn’t be convertible into education. Equality of opportunity looks like a crucial part of social justice, and it implies that children’s chances of success should not depend on their parents’ bank balance. As bedtime stories show, the importance of close familial relationships means that we should not try to achieve perfect equality of opportunity. But allowing the well off to buy their kids a head start in life has little to do with close familial relationships.

Those sympathetic to private education will insist on the importance of individual freedom. Parents should be free to spend their money on whatever they like, including their children’s future well-being. But the cheerleader example demonstrates that it would be crazy to hold that parents should be free to do whatever they like for their kids. Parents’ freedom must be constrained by a framework of justice, by the duties we have not to harm others. So if private education is unjust, if permitting private schools means failing in our duty to treat others justly, then we may be justified in choosing school rules that ban it – just as we ban murder and theft, and as we (try to) prevent certain kinds of discrimination.

I haven’t, of course, shown that we’d be right to do so. (If I had, that would be the end of Part I.) I’ve simply pointed out that we do interfere with freedom in all kinds of ways, where we are enforcing people’s duties to one another. It could still be that private education is not unjust. Perhaps those disadvantaged by the fact that others are going to private schools are not treated unjustly, are not harmed in the way that would justify abolishing them. Perhaps parents who can afford it have the right to buy their children a head start, a right that justice requires us to protect, even though it results in inequalities of opportunity. In that case, private schools would be like bedtime stories, on the right side of the line separating legitimate from illegitimate partiality.

Murder and bedtime stories are easy cases. Private education is harder, closer to the boundary. Some argue that parents who work hard to earn money to buy education for their kids are acting morally, not selfishly. The selfish ones are those who don’t do what they can to help their children – those who choose not to work so hard, or who prefer to spend their money on themselves. Where the decision not to go private is motivated by principle rather than poverty, parents are making their children suffer for their values. Now that is selfish. The moral case for private education is indeed stronger than that for murdering cheerleaders. But the case against is also strong. Permitting rich parents to spend extra money on schooling offends against the principle of equality of opportunity. Even those who reject equality of outcome are likely to feel the pull of that ideal. Parents who buy their children an education that gives them competitive advantage are worsening the prospects of other people’s children, using their money in a way that gives those others a less than fair start in life. True, they are not spending the money on themselves. But they are still acting selfishly, not merely giving extra weight to their own children – as with curries and holidays – but doing so in a way that makes others worse off than they would otherwise be.

An unbiased test for how biased we can be

Strong arguments on both sides. We need a way of deciding who is right. We need an unbiased way of thinking about how biased people should be allowed to be. Try this.

Imagine that you don’t know whether you’re rich or poor, clever or stupid, educated or uneducated. You don’t know whether you know how to read, or whether you have to work such long hours that you don’t get to see your children before they go to bed. Now suppose somebody asks you what the rules should be. Should parents be allowed to send their kids to private schools? Ignore any factors influencing your judgement that derive from thinking about how those rules would apply to you and your family. Judging the rules by thinking about whether they suit you is the wrong kind of partiality. If we are interested in morality – and not just our own interests – the rules concerning how partial people can be should be justifiable from an impersonal standpoint. We have to think about how it looks from everybody’s point of view. What do you think? You don’t know whether private schools will work to your advantage or disadvantage. Are you going to permit them?

Check this approach against the easy examples. Are you going to allow parents to kill one another’s children in order to help their own? Of course not. Not even if they could achieve something rather less trivial than a spot as cheerleader. Not even if killing were the only way to get their children out of a failing school. What about bedtime stories? Do you want a rule that stops parents reading to their kids? I hope not. Banning that kind of interaction would deny people something of fundamental value – an intimate relationship between parents and children. It’s true that some children are disadvantaged by the fact that others get bedtime stories and they don’t. If we imagine ourselves as one of those, our first thought might be to ban the practice altogether. But, on reflection, and even if we fear being one of the unlucky ones, nobody would want to live in a society that prevented parents from reading to their children. Even from the impersonal standpoint, looking at it from everybody’s point of view, that kind of partiality should be allowed.

The suggested approach does seem useful. The test for fair rules is whether they would be agreed to by people ignorant of how they personally would be affected by them. It looks as if we have a way of deciding whether parents should be allowed to send their children to a private school. Parents who care not just about the well-being of their own children, but also about living under rules that treat others fairly, should endorse rules that can be justified from the impersonal standpoint. This looks straightforward enough. Someone adopting that perspective standpoint may endorse rules, like permitting bedtime stories, which in fact favour her own children. But that’s not why she endorses them. Being moral, adopting the impersonal standpoint, she’d endorse them even if they disadvantaged her kids – just as a rich parent who cared about social justice should favour some redistributive policies that will make her, and her family, worse off.

Taking parents’ special relationship with their children into account may well be the right thing to do when we think about morality, and it will doubtless have implications for the rules and institutions that we think we should live under. But all of this is quite consistent with what I’m going to call our test for legitimate partiality. The test rules out only the wrong kind of specialness – the kind that gives one’s own kids too much weight. Nobody is saying that parents must treat other people’s children as if they were their own. We could imagine a moral system that did take impartiality that far. Crude versions of utilitarianism might hold that the moral thing to do in any situation is whatever maximises the overall amount of happiness in society. Everybody’s happiness counts equally. So when I, a parent, decide what to do this evening, I need to think about what will most contribute to the happiness of all my fellow human beings, giving no special weight to the happiness of my children (or myself), having no special regard to the value of our particular relationship. That is impartiality in spades, and most philosophers (including most utilitarians) would reject it. Even from the impersonal standpoint, it seems that bedtime stories – and lots of other partial actions – are justified. They are just too important. They are partial, but legitimately partial precisely because crucial to our understanding of who we are and what we care about.

Does a good parent have to pass the test?

But let’s take a step back. This approach equates morality and impartiality. The rules one should favour on moral grounds are those that can be justified from an impersonal standpoint – even if one’s own children suffer as a result. Isn’t there something a bit cold, a bit bureaucratic, about this approach? Putting oneself in everybody’s shoes, seeing it from all perspectives and not just one’s own, may look like taking the moral point of view. But if it involves ignoring one’s particular relationship to one’s own children, giving them no special weight in the judgement about what the rules should be, perhaps this way of thinking about morality is a mistake. If that’s what morality requires, so much the worse for morality. My children are my flesh and blood, my relationship to them, my concern for their well-being, is one of the most important things about me. What a heartless, inhumane thing morality must be if it requires me to ignore all that. I don’t love other people’s children as I do my own. Nor should I. It would make a mockery of the parent–child relationship if I could care no more about my own children than about anybody else’s. Am I really a better person if I favour rules that pass the test over those beneficial to my own children?

I think that the answer is yes. To see why, let’s clear away a few thoughts that might confuse us.

First, remember that we’re talking about what it would be right for people to do, not what they actually do. It may well be that many parents do in fact find themselves unable to keep within the bounds of legitimate partiality. They are just too selfish – or, putting it more kindly, they just love their kids too much – to take the impersonal standpoint. This may well be true. But, if it is, it is a point about people’s inability to do the right thing, not about what that right thing is. Perhaps, sometimes, doing the right thing is simply beyond us. We’re too weak or cowardly. We are swayed by emotions that interfere with our taking the proper course. If people were always like this, that would certainly be a problem for moral philosophers who intend their theories to guide action. If human beings just can’t ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Choosing the school rules
• Part II Choosing schools given the rules
• Questionnaire on private schools
• Questionnaire on selective schools
• Further reading