Is the British education system designed to polarise people?

Young people need to learn to control the richest 1% who dominate Britain, argues Professor Danny Dorling

I grew up in Oxford, but left my hometown to study and then worked at universities in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield. People who read my words but didn't hear my accent often assumed I was from the north. But now I've come full circle, and have taken up a chair in geography at Oxford University.
It is geography that reveals just how divided we have become as a society in this country. There are places from which it appears almost impossible to succeed educationally and others where it seems very hard to fail. On any given day, a fifth of children in Britain qualify for free school meals. Just one in 100 of those children get to go to either Oxford or Cambridge University. Four private schools and one highly selective state sixth-form college send more children to Oxbridge than do 2,000 other secondary schools. The most prestigious 100 schools secure 30% of all Oxbridge places. And 84 of them are private schools.
People often complain that the national debate on higher education is unfairly dominated by interest in entry to these two universities. But it matters. The richest 1% (people with a pre-tax household income of at least £160,000) dominate decision-making in this country. How they behave is a weathervane for social mobility in Britain.
Income inequality has now reached a new maximum and, for the first time in a century, even those just below the richest 1% are beginning to suffer, to see their disposable income drop. When you exclude the top 1%, income inequality within the rest of the population, within the 99%, is now lower than at any time since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Or, as put in economist-speak by the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year: "Over the past two decades … inequality among the bottom 99% has fallen: the Gini coefficient for the bottom 99% was 5% lower in 2011–12, at 0.30, than in 1991."
We now know that economic inequality changes how we think and is linked to biases in self-perception. When university students from 16 countries around the globe were asked to rate how they individually compared to other students in terms of the big five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, open-mindedness and emotionality) it was those in the more economically unequal countries, such as the US, who were most likely to frequently say that they were superior to their peers. Fortunately, perhaps, the UK was not included in that particular study. When it is, we may find that we are not as self-deprecating when tested in private as we are in public.
Today in education the thinking and attitudes of a few of our elite have come to be presented as common sense. Some of the members of the 1% like to portray state schools as the problem, and they suggest that those schools are the reason why others are paid so little and why incomes have dropped. To be able to do this they sometimes suggest that there was once a golden age of state schooling when the grammar schools gave working-class children a chance. Some may believe this was true, but grammar schools were a relic of an older, even more unequal age. Some of the new top 1% would prefer to see the privatisation of all schools.
It is almost 20 years since Milton Friedman explained to the Washington Post how state education could be privatised in the US. He said: "I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatisation … Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system." Now in the UK we have vouchers, in the form of the pupil premium, that follow poorer children to whichever school they attend. We have academies that are "managed by trusts, companies limited by guarantee", as my old comprehensive school in Oxford is now tagged. We are currently travelling on Friedman's road map. Geographical comparisons show that it is not a good route to take.
The UK's education system is beginning to look more like that of the US than other countries in Europe. Many American private universities now spend just a sixth of their fee income on teaching. These private providers take more than a fifth of fees in profit and spend even more on marketing to cover up the poor quality of what they are offering – subprime degrees not worth the paper they are printed on being sold to very young, very gullible consumers.
Since 2010-11 in Britain the new fully private universities have had access to taxpayers' monies and can make a profit. Pundits now talk of "the subprime student loan" because often what is being bought through borrowing is not worth the initial fee, let alone the interest on that fee. Yet not all privatisation in education is on an upward trend.
The UK's education system is beginning to look more like that of the US than other countries in Europe. Many American private universities now spend just a sixth of their fee income on teaching. These private providers take more than a fifth of fees in profit and spend even more on marketing to cover up the poor quality of what they are offering – subprime degrees not worth the paper they are printed on being sold to very young, very gullible consumers.
Since 2010-11 in Britain the new fully private universities have had access to taxpayers' monies and can make a profit. Pundits now talk of "the subprime student loan" because often what is being bought through borrowing is not worth the initial fee, let alone the interest on that fee. Yet not all privatisation in education is on an upward trend.
For schooling, the country to which utopians look is Finland, where 99.2% of school education is state-funded. In Finland, there is no inspection of teachers, no league tables; pupils are not set or streamed, and, as Diane Reay, professor of education at Cambridge, explains: "In four international surveys, all since 2000, Finnish comprehensive school students have scored above students in all the other participating countries in science and problem-solving skills, and came either first or second in reading and mathematics. These results were achieved despite the amount of homework assigned in Finnish schools being relatively low, and an absence of private tuition."
We have an educational system that is designed to polarise people, one that creates an elite who can easily come to have little respect for the majority of the population, who think that they should earn extraordinarily more than everyone else, and defines the jobs of others as so low-skilled that it apparently justifies many living in relative poverty.
Recently released findings from psychology suggest that many of them may be naturally inclined to be more selfish. It is not so much their fault that they find it hard to understand others' feelings. It is our fault for not controlling the greed of a few and for so long swallowing their shallow arguments as to why they deserve so much.
• Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder professor of human geography at Oxford University. This article is an extract from his inaugural lecture, given this week.