Ants and Grasshoppers

A university is a big organisation, employing a lot of people.  I think I'm right in saying that, in most university towns, the "uni" is usually second only to local government as an employer. Where a typical large school might employ a few Jacks and Jills of all trades to do the maintenance and the financial and clerical support, a university will have large teams of "support staff".  Our library system alone employs around 200 staff across five sites.

So, if you're a dedicated and curious people-watcher and all-round nosey devil like me, there's a lot of activity to observe and eavesdrop on, ranging from bawdy exchanges between the cleaners who congregate beneath my office window early in the morning, to high-table gossip over a coffee between senior professorial types.


I learn many things from observing this sample of humanity, but I am often struck by the difference between intelligence and achievement, and how one doesn't necessarily lead to the other.  There are some very stupid professors, and some very bright maintenance men.

There is much talk at the moment about the decline of social mobility in Britain since the 1970s.  This always means, of course, people going up the social scale, never down.  To my mind, a few more public-school-educated binmen would do a lot more for social solidarity than any number of comprehensive-school-educated merchant bankers.

But, politicians being people in search of a quick fix, they don't really want to understand the nature of the problem represented by "social mobility".  Someone has to empty the bins, obviously, though I think we're all now less convinced of the need for merchant bankers.  But the basic assumption seems to be that an intelligent person should not be emptying bins and, given equal opportunity with an Etonian, would choose not to.


My humble suggestion is that this assumption fails to take into account the way your social class can trump your intelligence, when it comes to [under]achievement.  The crux is one's relationship to authority, to deferred gratification, and to work.  Obedience, a willingness to accept on trust the desirability of long-term goals, and a belief in the inherent virtue of hard work are the ant-like hallmarks of the "achieving" classes.

You only have to look at the groundsmen and maintenance guys around campus, to see that the spectrum "dumb binman to smart banker", that wants to correlate intelligence with social position, is too simple.  Some of these guys are considerably smarter than the well-qualified middle-management halfwits who tell them what to do.  And their view of life is often far more mature than that of the self-regarding, narrowly-focussed academics whose offices and essential services they maintain.


But do these "smart guys in dumb jobs" look on the work of middle-managers or of academics with envious eyes?  Do they resent being "managed" by fools?  Do they regret now the choices they made in early life?  Do they wish their parents had made them stay in and do their homework when they wanted to play football, or just hang out?


Of course they don't.  And their heart won't be in it when they try to persuade their own kids not to give up too soon on their schoolwork. This is the core issue of social mobility: horizons of ambition and "pain-to-gain thresholds"* are, for whatever reasons, set low in many working-class families. After all, society has put centuries of effort into persuading people not to get "above themselves", up to and including public hanging and deportation to Australia.  It will take more than a relaxed policy on Oxbridge admissions to counter that.


If you come from a "regular" background, you will know that some of the brightest of your fellows will have left school at the first opportunity (if not well before, mentally).  They did not like or see the point of school.  They did not like or understand teachers.  Happily for them, neither did their parents.  This situation has got worse, not better, since I was at school.


A few do go on to success in business: my old primary school playmate John B. failed the Eleven Plus but, after an apprenticeship, went out to South Africa to start various metal-bashing businesses and, I discovered recently, is now CEO of a multinational company.  Wow! But, mostly, they just wanted to start earning proper money, or to work outdoors or with their hands, or perhaps had ambitions in sport or the creative arena, or even just wanted to sign on the dole and live a life of hand-to-mouth hedonism.  To have ill-defined, "grasshopper" goals that do not demand three hours' homework a night is hardly incompatible with intelligence.


Such goals, however, are completely incompatible with acquiring qualifications.


The ones who do stay on at school will always include a few truly bright, self-motivated, and creative youngsters.**  But the majority will be earnest, unimaginative plodders who will rise without trace and, if they can afford it, will have their own children privately educated, and vote for policies that reward hard-working ants and punish freeloading grasshoppers.


Grasshoppers, of course, rarely vote.  But, as the grasshoppers say, whoever you vote for, the government always gets in.

*  I've just invented that expression


** I reckon there were probably fewer than 60 in my cohort out of a town with a population of 65000; I doubt this ratio has improved.