Rupert Murdoch on education for the disadvantaged

Murdoch’s “show schools” are inspirational in how they deal with the psychological handicaps that hold back poor children. One of them is named the Eagle Academy for Young Men. This is the opposite of the well-intentioned but infantilising lumping of disadvantaged teenagers with children as “kids”. There must be other ways to address them, that express rather than betray their potential and goals as young adults.

His New York schools promote the value of staying at school for future work success. One of the greatest disadvantages of being disadvantaged is the firm belief held by many students and parents that education will get them nowhere, with anecdotal evidence to prove it. They may be left with gambling or crime as their only perceived routes to social mobility. Every school should publicise its former students who are achieving and the local heroes in fields other than just sport.

Book reading and projects should include the contributions to the world made by those who have started from behind and overcome failures. The bright students who currently must pretend to be dumb to avoid persecution can be made assets of value and honour for the rest of their class. Parents will flock to enrol their children in local schools that they can see are giving real hope. And where there is strong parental support, there is more chance of the alienated being swung around, to join in rather than to disrupt.

Inspiring is Rupert Murdoch’s emphasis on high expectations for all. It is alarming if businesses support primary schools in ways that promote their own commercial interests. Not every teacher realises they may be teaching a future Prime Minister. I remember giving a class a literacy lesson aimed deliberately at three non-reading ten-year-olds. Where were the boys? In a corner playing with fiddlesticks. Why not in the class? “They’re hopeless,” said the teacher.

Alarming is the question of what happens to those children whose intelligence can be raised so far but no further, through genetic or other physical limitations. What of the growing number of children born with fetal alcohol syndrome or other drug addictions, unnecessarily brain-damaged? To have successful schools for all, society must become more successful itself, laying out alternatives to teenagers to avoid the self-harm that goes down to the next generation, and to give status and fair reward to hard and useful work at every level of ability.

Inspiring is Murdoch’s awareness of community and school linkages, particularly in encouraging disinterested business support to primary schools. Children in disadvantaged schools especially need awareness of the possibilities and goals out in the real world, not in escapes. The “fun” class activities designed to keep them under control may be counterproductive for many, because what’s the use of coming to school just to muck around?

Where are the illustrated adult books and magazines for browsing in classrooms from kindergarten up, showing engineering, technology, science, arts, history, DIY and society, to give an advance idea of the advantages of schooling that can open up such wider possibilities for them?

What mentoring is possible for children who lack real life goal models other than sports stars and celebrities? Organisations like the Smith Family are already showing how much is being done and could be done to help provide such mentors, who could include correspondents at an anonymous distance, and with online self-help aids, as well as their direct projects to encourage and assist children’s learning, and ensure they can have school materials, excursions and uniforms like their classmates.

Murdoch makes the important point that in Australia the greatest educational disadvantage is not in inner-city slums, but in rural areas and outer suburbs. So much more can be done here, by higher pay and the best teachers; by developing innovations in multimedia and online distance deliveries of aid for learning; and by brief student and teacher school exchanges to widen horizons.

In his Boyer lectures, Murdoch promotes constant progress in communications technology. His News Ltd drastically changed traditional printing methods, which he saw as not having changed much since Gutenberg’s Bible. Just as backwards remains the still more ancient communications technology of the English writing system. Its unnecessary difficulties as a barrier to literacy are a global oppression for all the disadvantaged whom Murdoch seeks to help. Advances in other areas of communications technology now make it feasible to reduce the unnecessary difficulties in spelling, based on research in cognitive psychology and on knowledge of reforms in other modern languages that topple long-held assumptions.

The very last people who might consider spelling reform were thought to be the conservative Académie Française, but the Académie has recently taken a dramatic lead, explicitly for the sake of wider French literacy.

To really help to level the playing field for the disadvantaged, the Murdoch media could itself take a lead with another sort of “Wapping”, to make fractious English spelling obey its own rules more closely, for learners at least, and let the public experience trials of the possible benefits of such improvements.

We have so many old pencil stubs to exchange for new pencils.