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The young Englishman who goes to the right schools is automatically a member of the elite, gets a better chance to inhabit the room at the top in banking, law, politics, the civil service, the church, or any other traditionally upper-class vocation. A public school education is thus an expensive (around $1,500 a year) form of social security, but so effective that 95% of British parents who earn $2,800 or more a year save, borrow and scrimp to give their children private schooling.
Critics of the system argue that it perpetuates snobbery and conformity, unjustly penalizes the bright working-class child, and deprives the nation of desperately needed scientists, engineers, teachers and other professionals. While the public schools "did at least train a leadership perfectly fitted to the needs of a growing empire," argues Labor M.P. Anthony Crosland, "they are not equally apt for a mid-20th century world of computers. Communism, trade unions and African nationalism.''
Millions for Nylons. Perhaps the greatest single threat to Britain's economic future is that only 4% of young Britons go to a university, v. 25% in the U.S., 12% in Russia; there are more Negroes receiving higher education in the U.S. than there are students at all of Britain's 23 universities. Yet B. V. Bowden, head of Manchester College of Science and Technology, protested recently that Britain has spent less on education than the government's scientific research department "spent on improvements in the manufacture of nylon stockings." Sir Geoffrey Crowther, onetime editor of the Economist, who has headed two commissions that investigated British education, puts its failings more succinctly. He calls it "a formula for decline."*
Last week Britain's first national campaign to expand state education was launched in London. Supported by all political parties, trade unions and religious denominations as well as many other influential groups and public figures, it was hailed as the nation's "greatest ecumenical movement in education."
Once they are aroused, Britons are among the world's most impassioned crusaders. But there is a passive streak in the English character that meekly suffers surly shopkeepers, sleazy architecture, lunatic liquor licensing laws, eternal queues. But only so long. Rising in righteous wrath, 18 TV dealers in Essex last week sued the Eastern Electricity Board for supplying voltage so low that television pictures were shrunken. "Hundreds of customers have complained that we sold them ropy sets,'' declared Dealer Albert Hall of Hornchurch. "We have reached the end of our tether. By law the electricity should be at least 224½ volts, but I've been to homes where it is as low as 149. This has been going on for years.'' The Electricity Board did not deny the charge. Allowed one official: "Demand for more electricity builds up rapidly in an area like this. It is difficult to cope."