Now is Selective Education's Hour

Notes on Education and Political Priorities

A Reminder

That people who subscribe to, repost, like or otherwise engage with anti-Meritocratic content on this website, as on xdotcom, shall be blocked from this substack.

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The sole policy of Andrew Burnham’s government is anti-youth hatred. In his first week, Burnham has hinted that the state pension will be exempt from taxes, the IHT scrapped to better fund ‘social care’ and that working-class parents will be paid to force their children into ‘apprenticeships.’ That nobody on Britain’s dark and dangerous online right has been able to call this for what it is, the inevitable chorus of ‘to be fair, to be fair’ ringing out from WFH laptops, is the best sign yet that the ecosystem does nothing for Reform and the party ought to start viewing it less as an annoyance than as an active enemy. I am decreasingly ironic in my belief that Farage should follow Vladimir Putin’s example and actively repress the British far-right as a pretext for crushing the Left the next year. Such a manoeuvre would either force the courts to pardon hundreds of ‘Nazis’, or go along with it and remove any rational excuse for failing to be similarly strict with ‘anti-fascists.’

What is concerning is that Burnham’s policy has been welcomed by ‘The Sunday Times.’ I increasingly consider refining the concept of Sunday Times Toryism. Since 2023, this once milquetoast paper has silently become an organ of the Badenoch ultra-fringe (Anglo-Gaullism, Cummings etc.) As has been said before, these people were meant to be the intellectual vanguard of a more controlled ‘restoration’ and they can be taken as mouthpieces of the deep state. It is obvious that their approval for this policy is that Burnham, as a gormless Norferner, can assuage a long-term worry of this crowd that ‘too many people are going to university’ in a politically correct way. It is sinister to ponder how this aides the rearmanant agenda: a generation of British youth deprived of free information and then bunged in a factory to build the Katie Lamm class Marine Scots anti-personnel drone.

There is an easy response to this. The time has come for Reform to fully embrace selective education as a manifesto policy. This will consist of both an end to the ban on grammar schools and a mandate of in-person examinations in all universities. Without a return to an academic stream, alongside increased technical redirection of less academic pupils, Burnham’s policy amounts to forcing a generation into serfdom. Given that the Woke are now, in a Woke way, acknowledging the needs of ‘less academic’ pupils the usual Boomer whingeing that accompanies any mention of grammar schools will be impotent. Labour themselves will, nonetheless, not be able to help attacking the policy whereupon Nigel can become the champion of Britain’s youth: claiming he will make examinations matter again and saying that Andy Burnham wants to ban you from using TikTok while sticking you back in a factory. Nobody has thought of combining the issues of digital freedom, academic selection and degree inflation but they are all basically ‘aspirational.’

I have exhaustively detailed views on how education should work in the Meritocracy. It is my belief that this policy must obviously happen hand-in-hand with massive incentives for those who pass the exams given to the students and not their families. One way of doing this, which I proposed back in 2025, is to destroy the Conservative, Unambitious, Low-Risk Taking Faction of Reform’s Social Housing sell-off (smuggling Robert Jenrick’s policies into Reform) by allocating the stock to the highest scoring male candidate in the gaokao on leases of 5 years. This is a blood-in-the-bath-water politics piece, so I shall keep them brief and simply address the problems any ‘return of the grammars’ will face. The first is that, as Peter Hitchens points out, the grammar schools are pointless without the exams for which they were built. Grammar schools weren’t just ‘good schools you have to be smart to get into’, they determined which exams you were able to take in turn. The return of the grammars must happen alongside a European gaokao from which many will be excluded. Standardising university entrance exams will do a lot to stop the accelerating destruction of Oxford and Cambridge, in which the in-person interview is increasingly a vehicle for Bias.

The second issue is stopping the new grammars from becoming ghettos for Indian and Chinese people. There are a number of low-engagement stories about how some surviving grammars have become about 80% Indian in recent years. Doubtless it is, that soon the ‘British Online Right’ will make the inevitable, faux-ressignatory claim that “To be fair, to be fair, why do we even care about grammar schools when they’ve Already Fallen.” The worst trait of the far-right is, in their failure to actually stick by the core part of their platform – apartheid, they demand that all bits of living in a nice society be dismantled as part of a failed rearguard action. To prevent this, Reform need to additionally declare that selective schools may not have the majority of their pupils from immigrant or second-generation immigrant backgrounds on the somewhat defensible grounds these people may’ve benefited from non-meritocratic education elsewhere. Explicit ‘white quotas’ are bad and stupid and should never be encouraged. No white person who fails the exams should be given a place. Rather, if there aren’t enough smart white kids in the area, the school will be treated like any underpopulated school.

It is worth reminding our readership of certain facts by dwelling on this topic. There is no reason, as there is a superficial (but still flawed) one in America, to believe that White people in Britain are less academically able than certain immigrant groups. As David Alongquin so wisely points out, even in the 2020s, with massive DEI and anti-meritocracy, white Brits outperform all categories of Asian in Cambridge across both the humanities and natural sciences. The supposed ‘achievement gap’ between ‘working class white boys’ and other groups is in fact because working class whites are smarter than working class Asians viz. they realise there is no point going to university to make same 40k salary unless you enjoy reading books. Immigrant groups, like South Asians, see university as a caste-signifier and disdain manual labour; hence the trope of the Pakistani criminal barrister suing BPP because he only makes 40k p.a. You could make more as a skilled builder, this is what the non-academic Whites do. The fact that Britain never had a G.I Act and destruction of the grammar schools also suggests that the phenomenon identified in The Bell Curve did not fully take place here; in other words, there are still, affording for dysgenics striking across the broad, a percentage of poor White people with 130 IQs currently going unnused by the state. Anecdotal support for this can be found in the fact Britain is unique in that the upper classes are not, really, much better looking than the proles.

Let us round off this piece with a brief defence of ‘education.’

The total erasure of everything we know to be ‘culture’ is one of the many reasons I find it increasingly hard to care about politics. The idea that you are actually morally better for reading Crime and Punishment and that this should entitle you to a better paid job is intrinsic to my worldview, ethnically and sociologically. I am so tired of everyone pretending that every time something happens which makes everything qualitatively worse for everyone it is some heckin Nick Land rhizome surf da web cyberhack deterritorialisation, when really, we are just too weak and leaderless as a people to do anything about it. It is even more frustrating that talking about this in Britain has been co-opted to a cynical campaign to censor the youth. It is the combination of LLMs, decades-long erosion of standards, a generally anti-intellectual slop culture across media and the increasing inability of anyone, in any corner, including the extremes, of the political spectrum to imagine decisive, vigorous state action. Not the Internet.

When I consider how nobody in any university will know how to read soon, I find myself staring at pictures of Sir William Beveridge. What happened to the smart people? … Why can’t we put the smart people back in charge? ‘Dude, the new dark ages.’ No, I don’t want to hear about that – where are the smart people? “Dude dude dude social hous–” Where are the smart people? I want to pick up the phone and talk to someone smart. “We won’t have jobs in the Singularity… that’s why marc andreesen has put his entire fortune into a sink fund run by chatgpt reading stock market data” The smart people. Where are they? “Dude, Katie Lamm” Where have they gone? Where are the people who can de-toxify sewer systems and set up the NHS in one year? Where are the people who are going to fix this? Who is going to assemble a firing squad? I feel this is the condition of ‘actually existing Fascism’, when the European peoples were under threat, I was preparing for tyranny myself but the end of Books has actually made me prepared to submit to a tyrant as well.

Witnessing the unfolding catastrophe, many on ‘the Right’ seem to take a laudatory or indifferent tone. anti-Education polemics have been popular since Bryan Caplan’s 2009 book. Someone who seems to have gone in this direction of late is Dominic Cummings. It is quite depressing to witness the continued decline of this individual. Cummings’s last two ‘stacks have included direct attacks upon ‘Meritocracy’, pondering ‘family-based’ health insurance (Nick 30 ans has another outflow but Islington dads can plonk £200k in their nepo-babies accounts) and various musings on how Farage will fail. Has everyone forgotten that in the past year….

• The Prime Minister’s House was firebombed by a group of male prostitutes

• The most senior advisor of the New Labour government was found to have been bribed by a likely foreign intelligence asset to leak info concerning the 2008 bailout which destroyed millions of lives

• Said foreign intelligence asset was also close friends with the Duke of York who has yet to stand trial or see any reduction in his income

Ooo op pal am just a focis groop mom me town is full of reipists but i just don think this george cottrell crypto stooff is right an propeh to be fair that katie lamm tho she sounds like she could possibly lead an Anglo-Gaullist pivot centred around cunnfronting the ‘arms of social media, free schools and an Indo-Pacific Tilt.

Nobody is saying this. The man on the street is 100x more radical in his hatred of the system than anyone who has ever worked in British politics. You cannot have an anti-system perspective on politics so long as you pretend pom-bear people have meaningful preferences. Reform have failed at social media. That’s it. The fact their social media is that bad and they’re still crawling Labour week 1 of new PM is a sign Farage will win by a monumental majority. It will only be rubbing salt on the wound to dwell on the absurdity of declaring Reform will not survive “the deep state”’s attacks upon them, while leaving it unclear how a party led by Dr. Lawrence Newport and Ameer Kotecha would do any better. (For the record, I have a comms plan which describes exactly how Farage can deal with the NCA, I wanted to post it here but couldn’t for complex reasons get in touch if you want it.) I believe that Cummings is suffering from a simple case where he realises, deep down, the Overton window has overtaken him and that he now shares more in common with The Sunday Times editorial than the Dark Voices of the Net. The man’s dogged insistence on pairing every mention of immigration with Kevin Spaceyisms about “hate marches”, his Lowean references to “English civilisation” (chips, beer, Dr Who, the Tory Party) as opposed to the actually taboo ‘White’ (Goethe, Alcibiades, the Jet Engine) all point to someone playing catch-up.

Unless you believe the British state is competent enough to build a custom-made chatbot on its own LLM which engages in Socratic-style reasoning with students (it isn’t), you cannot replace education with A.I. It does not take a genius to show even the most advanced models have, not so much gaps in their knowledge but a tendency to get easily confused and improperly systematise information. Because these models are gatekept by Effective Altruist moral philosophy, anyone who can work out the morality can get the chatbot to state incorrect things very easily. I.e: you can make it say that Friedrich Nietzsche believed in human rights, a flatly Wrong claim, within 3 well-worded prompts. If a student pretends they are suicidal unless the A.I affirms their belief on a given topic, the A.I will usually affirm it in some roundabout way. The ideal role of LLMs in education is to make it more difficult, as impartial examiners trained on the rubric who can stop teachers practicing favouritism and argue with students to improve their answers.