Education

Luigi Mangione is officially the “suspect” in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but he is plainly the culprit, and public discussion has moved on to his motives. Why would a young man possessed of intellectual gifts, friends, family, good looks, a winning personality and, apparently, lots of money, gun down a man he had never met? This isn’t the kind of question my organization, the National Association of Scholars, normally takes up. We concern ourselves more with academic standards and questions of state and federal policy. But I’ve been nudged several times with questions about Luigi’s academic background. This has two parts: Luigi’s high school and Luigi’s college.

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child. These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only using approved adjectives from word banks and drop-down menus.

Is it ironic to give a prize for encouraging “open discussion and debate in the classroom” and “creating an environment where all perspectives can be heard” in the name of William F. Buckley Jr.? Although best known today as the founder of National Review and longtime host of Firing Line, Buckley first came to prominence in 1951 with the publication of his book God and Man at Yale, subtitled: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.ˮ Buckley’s secular and secularized Protestant critics might well have considered the firmly Catholic young man, twenty-five years old at the time the book appeared, an apologist for something they regarded as superstition. But Buckley did not mean the term as a compliment when he applied it to academic freedom.

In the weeks since the Labour government came to power, we’ve gone from debating compulsory teaching of maths until age 18 to entertaining the idea that the times tables may be too stressful for children to memorise. My resilience, my determination and my empathy are largely products of being bad at maths When I was at school in Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the response to such a suggestion would have been an eye-roll, or the blowing of a loud raspberry. The comment that ‘if you can’t have what you like, then you must learn to like what you have’ was commonplace, and maths was taken by everyone until age 18. I was at the top of my class until, at age 15, I began to fall behind in maths.

Labour’s proposal to impose VAT on private school fees will, we are often warned, lead to state schools becoming overloaded as parents withdraw their children from the independent sector and try to find alternative arrangements. That may turn out to be true in some areas in the short term, but in the longer term there is a different problem facing the state and independent sectors alike: a falling population of school-age children. It isn’t excessive class sizes which threaten to be an issue so much as shrinking classes, leading to school closures and amalgamations with other institutions. London classrooms appear to be emptying – in 2022, 15.5 per cent of primary school places were unfilled For nursery and primary schools in England, pupil numbers peaked in 2019.

I hated going to school so much as a kid that to this day, the sight of Back to School! signs printed in cutesy kiddy font on glowing school-bus yellow that fill stores every August strikes me with dread. I want to punch them. My elementary school years were fine; I attended a teeny-tiny Catholic school where I think most of the dedicated teachers qualified for food stamps. I knew my classmates so well that they were essentially extended siblings (and a couple of them still are). I graduated first in my class (out of ten) and was star of the pathetic basketball team. High school was a Catholic school too, but insular and snooty. I was an outsider there, from “over the mountain.” I wasn’t bullied or anything, but no matter what, I always felt like I was imprisoned.