The Roots of Political Correctness
Reviewed by Geoff Dench
Click here for PDF version

Political Correctness and Public Finance
by Dennis OÕKeefe
The Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1999,114 pp, £11.00, ISBN 0-255 36478-4

Political correctness is not only an affront to commonsense, but also a threat to civil society. Yet it continues to flourish because of the power given to intellectual cliques by state control and funding of the education system.

Over the last quarter of a century a curiously inverted way of looking at the world has gained currency in the West. In Britain and the US especially, it has imposed itself on public representations of social relations. This new mindset directly reverses many traditional evaluations of behaviour. Much that was formerly seen as good for society, and as symbolising progress and success, has become redefined as retrograde and downright immoral.

For example, most forms of competitive behaviour and the exercise of authority are now widely held up as oppressive, stultifying or even as abuses of human rights. Only the cultures of the weak, or other authentic victims, can safely be lauded.

What makes its rise so curious is that many of us regard the new ideology as an affront to commonsense. But we all or nearly all continue to pay lip service to it. How can this be? What could explain such a wholesale loss of nerve and collective slide into bad faith in societies that rate themselves so highly in the freedom of speech and conscience leagues?

State-financed political correctness

In his incisive and lucid new book, Dennis OÕKeeffe argues that this demonstrates the power given to intellectual cliques by state control and funding of the education system. Compulsory and largely free education, linked to a system of qualifications and accreditation that determines all our life chances, puts tremendous power in the hands of educators. The virtual monopoly they enjoy as intellectual producers means that they are not accountable to consumers, who are but captives in the system.

Within an integrated bureaucratic structure those educators with a shared mission driving them can impose their own ideas and agendas on the curriculum. They then exercise collective influenceÑwhich spreads far out from education itself to the professions and services deriving their legitimacy from itÑat public expense and with no personal risk. They operate, OÕKeeffe suggests, as a parasitic (and essentially socialist) elite living off a larger capitalist system that they abuse, bleed and weaken but do not kill.

One of the most perceptive insights offered by OÕKeeffe in support of this argument is that the core values of contemporary political correctness are the direct descendants of the Ôchild-centredÕ educational doctrines which first had a serious influence on state education in the 1960s.

Progressive approaches to education, which were linked politically with the attack by rising meritocrats on capitalism, drew on bits of Freud and Marx and psychologists like Piaget to conjure up a golden future for mankind if only we could get rid of relationships that were hierarchical.

In a profound reversal of established European thought, human nature was deemed to be inherently good. Children in particular should not be confined and controlled, but be allowed to develop and express themselves uncramped by the burden of adult disapproval, discipline and punishment. The heroic mission of their teachers was to resist parental pressure and unlock their true potential. Anything tainted by the suggestion of authorityÑincluding traditional family relationsÑhad to be swept away.

It is this child-oriented passion to eradicate inequality and its causes that has engendered political correctness, along with new demonologies and idols to replace the old. All figures of authority (especially male, middle-class and white) are out, and with them one might add a useful role for patriarchal religion.

In their place, we have a sentimental pantheon of the worldÕs oppressed, consisting of women, the poor, blacks and any other groups like homosexuals able to convince others that they are victims too. The harrassed child has overturned the moral universe of its judgemental parents.

The root of the problem

OÕKeeffeÕs central proposition is that it is the cloistered nature of state education, insulated from social realities by its monopoly status, which enables ideas like this to gain a commanding position in the humanities and social sciences and the public activities which these inform.

Ideas of political correctness (PC) have never achieved genuinely popular status in British or American society. But anti-authoritarian worldviews have been successively written into the curriculum of university departments, teacher training colleges and, eventually, schools too.

There are centralising and inherently intolerant implications within a unified structure of education. This has allowed zealous educationalists to become self-regulating producers of acceptable knowledge, and gatekeepers of expertise in society as a whole. They are not subject to any competition which could restrain this.

The consumers of education, that is parents and their children, have no effective choice. At the university level there is nowhere else for them to go. All they can do is to avoid those subjects most open to PC infiltration and control. At the school level, if they have the resources, they can opt out into the private sector while continuing to support as taxpayers the state school system. But the influence of the state sector on definitions of knowledge is so great that this offers little real counterbalance. Capitalist publishers fall over each other to provide PC textbooks for the large captive market.

The fruit of compulsory (and free) education is thus a self-serving and self-selecting educational elite, which has no need to listen to anyone outside of its own circle, and lives well on public rent. Taxpayers can privately grumble. But they are trapped by the logic of state education into accepting the rule of zealots.

Markets are the solution

OÕKeeffe argues that only by the creation of a genuine market can this cycle be broken. The dismantling of state education and its protective bureaucracy will produce real competition, and with it an educational bourgeoisie more responsive to the needs and wishes of the consumers, and less committed to utopian social engineering.

This is a valuable book. It goes a long way towards showing how doctrines so contemptuous of commonsense and popular attitudes, and so out of step with governing economic institutions, can exercise such great powerÑand indeed how they managed to storm the academies in the first place.

This last point is crucial. The core principles of PCÑthat is the emphasis on the child, or victim, plus utopian denial of the need for competition, or work which might be dull or involve accepting that some arguments might be better than othersÑhave had a devastating effect on levels of literacy and numeracy in the UK and US alike. It is therefore very hard to understand how such counterproductive values could become adopted by teachers in the first place.

OÕKeeffe is at his sharpest here. He proposes very acutely that this is precisely where the Marxist component of the ideology had most effect. For what it did was to deflect attention away from the teaching revolution itself and place responsibility for outcomes from the education system on Ôcapitalist societyÕ.

For twenty years or more leading sociologists of education were slaves to the notion that it was big business, with its handmaiden social class, which determined everything. Traditional schooling merely reflected and reproduced this big picture. And so, absurdly and tragically, teachers in the lecture hall and classroom were encouraged to read the warning signs upside down.

The adoption of student-centred teaching programmes, and avoidance of tiresome rigour and pressure, led quickly enough to a decline in educational achievement. This was particularly marked in essential basic skills, and among working class students who did not have family members able to help them or to provide an alternative model.

But this falling back in performance of students from poorer backgrounds, including immigrants, was then triumphantly held up by dogmatists as proof that capitalist, oppressive forces in society were still in command and taking their toll. Even more vigilant shifts away from traditional values and methods of teaching would be required.

So the very problems which progressive teaching spawned were themselves turned to vindicate its advocates, and to secure the submission or early retirement of fogies opposed to it.

The pursuit of equality

This is all excellent stuff, neatly and economically expressed. It carried me back to the glorious days of debunking, muck-raking sociology, before the clammy embrace of PC suffocated all life out of the subject. Or most of the way back at any rate. Perhaps I have been too affected by youthful memories, but I did finish the book feeling that OÕKeeffe might have been a little too nice, and not quite debunking enough.

He wonders at several points why the British and American establishments, the capitalist masters of the wider systems, have allowed such free reign to an educational elite both hostile to capitalism and incapable of meeting ordinary educational goals.

He notes that this elite can buy its own children out of state schools, and avoid contaminated subjects at university, and that tolerance of dissent (even tolerance of intolerance itself) is an admirable quality in a ruling class. And he also observes that it is the poorest people who suffer the worst effects of PC dogmas, and become consigned by them to underclass status.

But that is all. He holds back from asking whether there might not be an element of collusion here, between a capitalist elite fearful of a stronger challenge from better-educated lower orders, and complacent educationalists committed to a ÔsocialistÕ state education system which persists in frustrating the wishes and aspirations of working class parents. Further questions are in order here. Maybe the visible pursuit of equality is a useful protective strategy for the new meritocracy, not least when the means adopted are counterproductive.

If he is too soft here, though, he may also be a little too hard in arguing that only full marketisation of education can improve accountability and loosen the hold of PC dogmatists. Certainly the greatest responsiveness to the consumer would come from radical privatisation. But that would not be achievable in a hurry. And there may be other strategies available for strengthening the voice of the consumer in the short term.

For instance, we could find ways to facilitate the return of older teachersÑteachers with some life experience and ability to hear what parents say. They would be a marvellous antidote to the cloistered mentality and dotty attitudes of many educational theorists and administrators. Teaching used to be seen as a service to families; and parents had a say. Professionalisation has been one of the means whereby child-oriented progressives have barricaded themselves against the consumers.

To suggest this is not to disagree with OÕKeeffeÕs overall analysis. In fact it is a testimony to this bookÕs thorough analysis and lucid unpicking of the problem that it can stimulate solutions in addition to those it comes up with itself.

Author

Geoff Dench is from the Institute of Community Studies, London.

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