I’m sorry, I can’t work out if you live in Britain or Australia. I was under the impression that one plus for the Blair years was a great effort into social services. Perhaps there was, but people with disabilities were not great beneficiaries?

If, as you sound, the disabled person is able to work/study, I would say that in Australia, things have changed immensely over the past five to ten years. Universities have very high-profile “Disability and Equity” teams, and very high-profile pro-disabilities support programs and mechanisms in place.

Both the universities and government provide a great many bursaries, scholarships, fee remissions, extra DSP to help you study. The public service is overflowing with policies and programs to help disabled workers. I know of many employers who are also, but I don’t know how deep that goes.

As to the average person in the street, Australia excels at high profile public health/awareness programs. True, they can often become irritatingly nanny-statish. But there are many others. There are initiatives here such as BeyondBlue and the Black Dog Institute, which are always attracting new high profile public figures “coming out” about their mental illnesses.

Of course the big downside is for people whose disability really constrains their ability to work/study. They are stuck with low pensions, and face the boundary of the otherwise flattering picture I have painted of Australia above.

I’ve been on income support for incapacity for depression for 3 years, and have a number of friends who are on it for mental health problems, ranging from depression to schizophrenia. Even when doing voluntary work, we’ve all had to deal with people who clearly think we’re scroungers, and being asked “when are you going to go and get a job?” when you’re already struggling with the demons of depression is enough to send you into a state of outright despair. One friend got this from someone working at a community garden which has a scheme to help people with mental illness, right after he’d come out of 6 months in psychiatric hospital!

I think the barriers to employment are complex, and there’s no easy political solution. If mental illness has disrupted your education and caused long gaps in your history of employment, it’s very difficult to find anything other than very low wage work, so you’d have to work full-time to have any hope of making up for the loss of benefits. And if you relapse and have a month or two where the depression is so bad you can barely move, you’re back to square one.

There’s also the constant pressure to smile, look cheerful, fit in. No one wants someone serving customers if they’re not able to maintain the cheery mask. I knew someone who was fired from a job collecting trolleys from a supermarket carpark for looking too miserable.

Overall I think many people, and not just the disabled, would benefit from a culture which put more value on sharing, kindness, and simple humanity than on consumerism, competition, and greed. Cameron’s vision of “big society” seems like rhetoric which gives the illusion of promoting those values, whilst offering nothing that actually promotes them in reality.

Thank you for making this point, and the others concerning disability and incapacity benefits.

None of these politicians seem willing to address the real barriers to employment people with disabilities face, or have much awareness of the fact that their stereotyping of us as scroungers increases social stigma which can make our difficulties (particularly mental health problems) even worse.

(1) the provider is also the regulator: wee bit of a conflict of interest there
(2) that conflict of interest also has effects on private schooling, since they share the compromised regulator
(3) it is a fairly well established observation in development economics that government provision has declining productivity over the longer term: there is no reason to think government schools are exempt from this trend
(4) those in charge of developing curricula and teacher training tend to be highly removed from the consequences of their theories/performance, as are those in charge of administering government schools.

There are good reasons to have government funding of schooling (on grounds of fairness and we have a common interest in interacting with literate and numerate folk). Governments running schools? Not so much.

By the way, an Etonian ‘Kings Scholar’ – as was George Orwell, Keynes, Harold McMillan – is not your typical posh school gives a pauper a hand-up!

An Eton King’s Scholar is chosen by examination. I think there are about 15 each year. They all live in the same boarding house and have certain privileges. I don’t know a great deal more. Schools like Eton have – as Jacques notes – several centuries to develop the most arcane traditions, lingo, etc.

No need to apologise AT ALL. I experienced the UK by parachuting in straight into plum jobs and a social network filled with many (though by no stretch ALL) plummy voices. If I had grown up in Britain with the circumstances and social position of my own youth in Australia simply transfered, I’d be more Guy Fawkes than that pansy Trotsky!

JC

I agree with your conclusion. I actually have a very tentatiive hypothesis about the deeper, structural causes of the so-called GFC; an hypothesis that also relates to your comments. It’s only very tentative, and I wasn’t going to start on it until my data collection and analysis was complete. But what the fuck, I’m a blabber-mouth!

My hypothesis is that since WWII the IQ standard deviation in the US and UK has increased. I hypothesis that rather than the bell-curve of the nornmal distribution, we are seeing a collapse of the upper-middle cognitive classes – say IQ 105 to 115 to a more biploar distribution, with peaks around 90 and 120.

Now, I know this is technically impossible, because all an IQ is a ranking on a bell-curve with mean of 100 and s.d of 15/16; so my hypothesis is using IQ more as metaphorical way of positing a cognitive split in the two nations, especially the US.

One of the greater – perhaps greatest – cause of the upper pole is immigration policies focused on skilled immigration. So all these brilliant Indians, Chinese, Ukranian, Australian people creamed of by MIT, Stanford, and the rest of the 50 or so US universities with the cache to attract the foreign cognitive elite increases the spike at IQ of 120 or above. Similar with the top UK universities. Outside the universities, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and so on draw away the cream from the global periphery. This in itself pushes down the less able indigenes.

But most apposite to JC’s observations is that since sometime post-WW2, something has happened to increase the % and raw numbers of the ‘Cognitively Left Behind’ in both the UK and US.I think the data and picture we are drawing here of Britain is related to my hypothesis.

Both Oxford and Cambridge are acknowledged as having gone out of their way developing very sincere and extensive outreach programs to try and increase the % of state school students. They have had some successes, but in the past few years, the numbers have actually reversed.

I have participated in one of these, as someone with both parents who did not complete high school (in the UK). I’m a dual national, my parents were English/Irish assisted passage migrants (I’d say £10 Poms, but the ghost of my mother is likely to visit me from the grave quoting ‘Easter 1916′).

I reckon I’ll award the bulk of the widening gap to worsening mass education.

Amen to that, brother.

There was a series of articles in The Guardian this year about how the top public/private schools were actually increasing their lead over the rest in terms of both A-level results and Oxbridge admissions.

There’s two (not mutually-exclusive) ways this could be happening.

1. The fancy schools are pulling ahead. In the past few years they’ve discovered some new method of education or heretofore unknown pool of privileged students and have been mining that newfound advantage.

2. The public system has been getting progressively worse, making the private schools look better by comparison.

As Einstein might say, it’s all a matter of your frame of reference.

Given that some of those fancy schools have had hundreds of years to perfect their teaching, institutional integration and have had the time to sniff out every privileged family of any kind, I don’t think that they’ve just now discovered some new way to pull ahead. That said, one could expect incremental improvements — a percent here, a percent there — but nothing dramatic.

I reckon I’ll award the bulk of the widening gap to worsening mass education.