Don't blame Oxford. The real racists are the hand-wringing liberals who expect b

[Spiraling Leopard]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1376352/Dont-blame-Oxford-The-real-racists-hand-wringing-liberals-expect-black-pupils-fail.html

Don't blame Oxford. The real racists are the hand-wringing liberals who expect black pupils to fail.

Filled with self-righteous indignation, the Prime Minister has launched a scathing attack on the apparent racism of Oxford's admissions policy.
Claiming that just one black British student was given an undergraduate place for 2009, David Cameron described the university's approach as 'disgraceful' and said it 'had to do better'.
This idea of Oxford as a hotbed of racial bigotry has become part of the fashionable consensus in political circles, with such sentiments common in all three major parties. 

Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who has taken to posing as the champion of social mobility, expressed his full support for the Prime Minister, saying this verbal assault had been 'absolutely right'.
Cameron's speech also echoed the views of the black former Labour Education Minister David Lammy, who last December wrote of Oxford's 'shocking' reluctance to admit more black students.
The dons, Lammy argued, 'should be ashamed' for 'entrenching inequality' in modern Britain.

According to the fulminations of the politicians, the city of dreaming spires has become the place of broken dreams for successive generations of young British black students. 
As a black Oxford graduate of part-African heritage, I might be expected to welcome this condemnation of supposed prejudice within the cloisters of the ancient university.
Certainly, I loathe any form of exclusion based on narrow-minded racism. And I am passionate about the need to help black pupils realise their full academic potential, including, for the brightest, gaining admission to one of the world's great seats of learning.

But the theory, propounded by the likes of Cameron, Clegg and Lammy, that the small number of black students at Oxford is entirely the result of crude racial discrimination is absurd.
The real fault lies not with the admissions tutors of the university, but with the gross inadequacy of our modern school system — which has dumbed down standards and imposed a culture of low expectations.
Cameron is aiming at the wrong target.
The true culprit is the disastrous poverty of aspiration which brands young black people as good for nothing except rap and sport.
Indeed, as a mentor of black teenagers in inner London, I think this slew of recent attacks on Oxford has been grossly irresponsible.
Such outbursts might play well in the trendy liberal salons of the metropolitan elite, whose members love to see themselves as the heroic guardians of the oppressed.

But in the real world, this over-blown rhetoric will do nothing to achieve genuine equality.
For a start, the figures quoted by Cameron and Lammy are misleading. Yes, only one applicant of Caribbean origin was admitted last year, but this ignores the fact that 40 other black students, of African or mixed heritage, were given places.
And in total, almost 20 per cent of Oxford's student population is from ethnic minorities — hardly an indicator of rampant prejudice.
Moreover, black pupils tend to apply in the most over-subscribed three subjects: medicine, law and English literature, where there is ferocious competition for places.
Last year, 44 per cent of black applicants tried for these three subjects — compared with 17 per cent of white applicants.
It is therefore inevitable that, proportionately, more of them will be disappointed.

In addition, the denunciations from the Prime Minister ignore all the outreach work — such as open days and school visits — that Oxford undertakes to increase the number of black applicants.
Ultimately, however, admissions tutors are not miracle workers.
They cannot give out places to those who do not apply, and the truth is that far too many young black pupils, who are just as intelligent as any white ones, are not encouraged to think of Oxbridge because of the anti-elitist, self-defeating mindset that prevails in too many state schools, especially in our inner cities.
This brings us to the most worrying aspect of Cameron's speech.
Far from advancing a greater racial balance at Oxford, his remarks could prove counter-productive because they send out a negative message that might put black pupils off from even applying in the first place.
Such comments feed into the depressing cliche of black victimhood, whereby teenagers are urged to believe that racism in Britain is so endemic that they will never be able to break free from their backgrounds.
The shrill emphasis on alleged prejudice means that black failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy — and an excuse for low standards.
Oxford is not a nest of racial hostility — as David Cameron should well know from his own days as an undergraduate.

Indeed, I found my time as a student at Lincoln College in the mid-Nineties both intellectually stimulating and personally liberating.
I was in the heart of a wonderful city dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. It was a bastion of learning, not discrimination.
The lecturers were driven by intellectual inquiry, so they wanted to work with the best students. Race did not come into it.
My devotion to the university meant that, while I was an undergraduate, I served as a volunteer in an access scheme to encourage more applications from ethnic minorities and, ever since, I have strived to give others the chance of enjoying the same enriching experience I had.
One of the ways I do that is through a mentoring scheme in the deprived district of Peckham in South London for 14 to 18-year-olds, a few miles from the private school in Croydon I was lucky enough to attend.
Unlike so many inner-city schools which tolerate the shallow, hip-hop culture in the name of 'anti-racism', this programme is based on rigorous discipline, tough intellectual challenges and a refusal to accept ghetto stereotypes.
Outside school hours, we teach Shakespeare, hold a weekly vocabulary seminar and demand proper grammar rather than street vernacular.
Neither do we allow the wearing of hoods and baseball caps. And contrary to the message of despair that Cameron conveys, we have had many successes.
Two of our former pupils have won places at fine universities — Warwick and Sussex — to read politics, while one girl has just been awarded a scholarship for a sixth-form place at the renowned independent school of Westminster.
What I have learnt, in my mentoring role, is that the greatest obstacle to advancement is the outlook of our state schools, which fail to challenge black pupils or instil in them an enthusiasm for learning.
Instead they indulge in a form of intellectual sabotage. Everything has to be made 'relevant' to the lives of young black students.
So English literature is ignored and proper grammar avoided. Real narrative history is replaced by politically correct topic work.

Teachers terrified of undermining pupils' self-esteem ignore mistakes in their work that would never be accepted at a good university, poor behaviour goes unpunished and praise is lavished indiscriminately.
Remorseless grade inflation in public exams has assisted in the destructive process, too, both by creating the illusion of progress to mask declining standards and by making it impossible for universities to pick out the truly bright pupils.
When so many university applicants get top grades, it is often the private school-educated children who are able to offer so much more than just academic excellence.
The tolerance of failure I've witnessed amounts to an immense betrayal of successive generations of black pupils, who are denied the chance of a brilliant tertiary education through inadequate schooling.
Racism is far less a problem in Britain than it was 30 years ago.
But this doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to education — not in the way David Cameron thinks, though.
The real racists are often those hand-wringing liberals who pander to stereotypes — and judge people by the colour of the skin rather than their characters or their minds.
The problem isn't Oxford, and the university should not be used as an instrument of social engineering to satisfy political whims.
A genuine meritocracy in Britain will be built only when we radically reform our schools.