Some months ago this site reported on a very silly speech by someone called Mary Sue Coleman - something on the lines of : We are Diversity, Diversity is Community, Community is Diversity, Diversity is Us, Diverted we rule. Here's a taster:
Let’s stand together to say: We are Michigan and we are diversity.
In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the crowd roars, "We are all individuals." A dissenter pipes up, "I'm not." Diversity, as advocated by Coleman and others, applies to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability and so forth, but not to opinion. When it comes to ideas, a sinister uniformity rules. Diversity is Good. We all agree on that, don't we?
Coleman's ideal is a diverse university, replete with multi-abled, multi-ethnic, polysexual men, women and transsexuals who are all of one mind.
Could Tory leader David Cameron be going down the same road with his plans for our schools? Matthew D'Ancona, editor of The Spectator, thinks so:
One of the many reasons that Alan Bennett's The History Boys has been such a long-running triumph is that it tells a very British story.
A bunch of sixth-form boys in Sheffield try to make the grade as Oxbridge candidates: with names like Scripps, Posner, Rudge and Dakin, these are upper working class and lower middle class Yorkshire lads on the make. You want them to succeed.
Most of the action is set at the fictional Cutler's Grammar School. "I made it a grammar school," writes Bennett in the preface to the script, "only because a comprehensive school would be unlikely to be fielding Oxbridge candidates in such numbers. Unlikely, I subsequently found, to be fielding Oxbridge candidates at all."
The play has much to say about adolescence, sex and intellectual charlatanism. But at its core is a noble idea: that learning should be available to all, and that educational aspiration can be the great social escape hatch. "Pass it on, boys," says Hector, the defiantly humanist teacher. "That's the game I wanted you to learn."
The polenta-eating classes regard academic selection as one step up in the moral scale from bear-baiting, and are indeed applauding Mr Cameron for the stand he is taking. In my experience, such voters are often the first to buy an expensive second property near the only good state school in their area (thus encouraging social selection by wealth), or, failing that, to go private ("I can't put my politics before my children... Plotinus has always had particular needs" etc). But the broader point is that poll after poll shows that the electorate as a whole wants more grammar schools.
Amazingly, I am reliably informed, [Cameron] believes that academies in multi-racial areas like Burnley could select according to ethnicity: 50 per cent black and 50 white. In other words, just about every form of selection would be acceptable apart from the academic variety. In this brave new world, schools would be able to choose by race but not by brains. Diversity of school would be encouraged with one glaring exception: no more grammar schools. Let a thousand flowers bloom, in other words, except for that rather beautiful rose.
Incidentally, the "polenta-eating classes" used to "eat bruschetta". Before that they used to "chatter". Many of them frequent posh restaurants in Islington's Upper Street.
