17 April 2008

A world class warfare system

Some comments from a member of the education establishment:

I want to narrow the disparities between people’s attainment, between the highly motivated and the less well motivated, because I want everyone to have a bite at the cherry and a chance to do well ... What I want to ensure is that all universities are really part of a world class system. That means they all have to have resources concentrated on them, right across the board. (Tessa Blackstone, on BBC Radio 4, 26 March 2008, my emphasis)

Here again we find, sixty years after 1945, an overt expression of the motivation that ruined my education, my subsequent life and the lives of my parents (who also had high IQs and a lot of drive and conscientiousness). Also the prevalent social motivation, gaining strength with the passing years and decades, has continued to oppose my attempts to restore myself to a realistic relationship with the society in which I have the misfortune to find myself.

What is being aimed at is not universities being part of a 'world class system', but being part of a ‘class system’, that is, an instrument of class warfare. In effect, Tessa Blackstone is arguing that the greatest possible resources should be devoted to preventing those with higher IQs and strong motivation from achieving more than those with lower IQs and no noticeable motivation at all.

Those who represent the greatest obstruction to the egalitarian outcome are the exceptional; it follows that by far the easiest way to achieve greater equality of outcome is to eliminate the highly able and highly motivated from the picture. Thus, according to exponents of this point of view, those with the highest IQs and the strongest motivation should be thrown right out on the dungheap, and it should be made plain to them they have no place at all in modern society.