The Best of Radical with Amol Rajan

22:07Amol Rajan:And the thing is, some of these things are actually possibly happening. And cancer vaccines is a good example. It could be that we're just a couple of years away. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that retains the core of my optimism about this country, is that actually, if you look at, it's such an implausible story that this tiny, cold, wet island in the North Atlantic should have shaped the world in the way that it has. and really the reason that it has, I think, dates back a very long time. You know, England had a, before it was Britain, even had a very distinct set of institutions and culture, you know, kind of long before the Industrial Revolution.

22:47You mean common law, Magda Carta? Common law, yeah, limited government, but also even just things like property rights, things like the invention of trusts, which were sort of forebears of limited companies. You know, there's all these sort of like institutional innovations that come like way before the Industrial Revolution. And, you know, if you read books about like, why did it happen here? A lot of it dates back a very, very long time. And I think at the heart of it is the idea that actually is what I would call like permissionlessness. The idea that actually this country has respected for at least a thousand years the idea that even very ordinary people should be allowed to try stuff.

23:24Now, obviously, there's been enormous limitations on that. I'm not trying to pretend that we haven't had enormous amounts of oppression of different individuals and groups. But this idea of permissionlessness, the idea that you can try stuff, actually has very, very deep roots in this country. And I think if you read, I think one of the best periods to read about is the birth of the scientific revolution. and one of the most fascinating... Mid-17th century?

23:45Amol Rajan:Yeah, exactly. So take maybe the most famous scientist of that era, Isaac Newton. What's so amazing about him is world historical genius, obviously. I mean, everyone knows something about Newton. Was he? Just had an apple bop his head. Exactly, super easy. Was he that cool Newton? But at the same time, he's also really into alchemy and astrology. Yeah. Why do I think this is important? because I think it's really easy to imagine that like, oh, progress in science and technology comes from these like really like buttoned down, you know, kind of prestigious institutions that, you know, kind of turning the handle and great things.

24:21It comes from like weirdness. It comes from people who are like right at the fringes of both the brilliant and the bizarre. And actually, I think we're a place that can tolerate that really, really well. And at our best, we can really celebrate that.

24:37Amol Rajan:So that was Matt Clifford. He wrote the government's AI Opportunities Action Plan. I should say Keir Starmer's government, though actually he was brought into government by Rishi Sunak. So he's a kind of cross-party kind of guy. We're running through some of my favourite episodes and our most intriguing and thought-provoking guests. On to, well, this was definitely one of my favourites. It was brilliant. And God, the response that we got to this podcast episode was nuts. It was Eliza Philby, Dr. Eliza Philby, the historian and author of a book which I really recommend called Inheritocracy. She gave us one of the clearest diagnoses of why so many people in this country feel the future has moved out of reach.

25:17Amol Rajan:And I really, really love this episode because frankly, Eliza, a bit like me, is someone who is much more interested in trends and underlying forces than events. And she's thought hard about them. And her argument was pretty radical, I think, because it challenged the old promise that hard work and education are enough. She basically said that young people in this country, by which she meant millennials or younger people, Generation Z or Gen Z as we call them, have the odds stacked against them. The decisive advantage is now not what you earn or learn, but what your family owns. That's the idea behind inheritocracy.

25:49Amol Rajan:And she said that if you look at the way that pay, what you earn by going to work, property, your chance of owning a home, pensions, your chance of actually having a decent pension when you retire. If you look at how those three Ps have changed in the past 40 years, we have really stacked the odds against young people. And this episode was just fantastic, really, at laying out all the ways in which, frankly, an older generation, in her view, had an easier chance to have a great quality of life than the younger people who they call family. I'm really fascinated by inheritance. I'm really fascinated by generational shifts.

26:23And there's this thing that the financial sort of sector are talking about which is the great wealth transfer this mass transference of basically the largest transference of wealth um down the generations in history trillions of pounds not just in the uk but across the world and actually i'm living it i'm like the best way of telling this story is

26:44Amol Rajan:through me i loved your book i thought it was so um it was the howl of a generation and because we're in the same generation i was sort of howling with you and i say that very very mindful as you are very self-consciously in this book and you sort of keep coming back to it and you've talked about it elsewhere as well that you know you're in a sense one of the lucky ones and i'm one of the lucky ones you know we're you know might feel like our generation uh has to do a bit more for certain things than previous generations who would also argue that they had it tougher than previous generations who served in the war and so on but basically the book has this kind of premise it's called inheritocracy and i want you to explain what that is in just a moment but it starts from this feeling that basically people of your generation were sold a story sold a message about what they needed to do in order to have a certain life and then you get to your mid-30s and you're like well I've done what you said and it's it's not happening and it's not going to happen and this is my time and now I've got kids and what about them and you're very self-conscious in the book as well that our generation I'm 42 I'm not gonna ask you how old you are but roughly the same age our generation has it easier than the next generation for whom my concern is off the charts.

27:48Amol Rajan:What, Dr. Eliza Philby, is the inheritocracy? So, inheritocracy is a deliberately provocative title, the antidote to a meritocracy, the belief that hard work will result in, you know, success and opportunity. And inheritocracy is a society on which it's not what you're earning or learning, but whether you have access to the bank of mum and dad that is defining your opportunity, your safety net and your springboard into adulthood. And that has really been the story that's defined millennials since the 2008 financial crisis, which we go into, and increasingly now Gen Z, and I believe possibly Gen Alpha, our kids.

28:26Amol Rajan:You start by talking about three massive ruptures in the generational shift. So the book starts by talking about three ruptures in values, in education and in wealth. And it was interesting reading about these three ruptures because I realised that I've spent most of the last 20 years thinking about these ruptures. and like you kind of living them in a sense. The unspoken social contract was that life gets better, that each generation has it slightly easier. And that was really the norm for post-war Britain. But there was this generation called the baby boomers, many of whom listened to this podcast, and many of whom are self-conscious that in certain fundamental ways they had it easier than their children.

29:02Amol Rajan:They were part of a rising tide economically. They had the demographic dividend of five or six workers to each retiree. They often had final salary pensions. And if they're lucky, like your mum, they bought houses in 1981 when a five bedroom house in London cost£28 ,000, which in real terms, as a multiple of wages, was a lot lower than it is now. What is the great generational rupture that has happened in terms of values? I like to think of it like this. I think we need to start accepting that the exceptionalism was the baby boomers. What they experienced was exceptional. They're exceptional in numbers, right?

29:42There's so many of them, which is why they've yielded such considerable political power, economic power, corporate and cultural power.

29:51Amol Rajan:They're a big cohort. They're a big, yeah. And actually, you know, in terms of demographics, there wasn't one baby boom that consistently lasted for 20 years. It sort of peaked in trough. So exceptional in number. They're exceptional because they entered the world in the aftermath of the Second World War where there was a promise, right? And the promise to a certain degree, you know, I'm not suggesting that generation didn't experience difficulty, but the promise was from cradle to grave care. OK, the promise was a social security system, a welfare state, expansive education system. There was a promise around wages and particularly the professions, access to the professions.

30:30There was a promise around meritocracy. And to a certain extent, social mobility was rising between that period of 1950 to 1980. So there was a promise, which to a large degree for a number of people, not all, and this is the important point, was delivered. The key thing here is the evolution of the promise. Because when we're talking about then their kids, what do baby boomers do as parents? Well, firstly, they have the economic dividend of the Thatcher years. And that was tough in the 80s to not just buy a house, but hold on to a house. Everyone talks about how easy it was to buy a house. It was still really difficult, particularly for women, but actually it was really hard to hold on to a house, particularly with the repossession surges of the 1990s.

31:10Amol Rajan:And interest rates hit 15 % and so on. Right. And that, but suddenly a home became a really good investment. If you see and chart the amassing sort of value of that house, you suddenly begin to see that Thatcher wasn't creating just a property owning democracy. she created the notion of home ownership as an investment not just an asset so so you suddenly get this idea of home ownership being a right okay it wasn't for my grandparents right so home ownership is a right baby women start to instill this idea that home ownership is a right education is the path to the professions and financial stability okay and so you see this sudden you know tony blair standing up and saying we're going to send as many people to university as possible.

31:57That was a good pledge at the time because we were making the transition, of course, from de-industrialisation to a knowledge economy. This all in hindsight looks wildly, you know, unrealistic, but at the time was totally appropriate. And this sort of actually, one of the things that the children of the 60s and 70s did was break free from their parents. And as we know, the kind of social rupture, feminism, you know, civil rights movement, you know, just decline of religion, actually, probably the most important in all of those, breaking free from a culture of deference and breaking and really sort of heralding the modern world, frankly.

32:37So when I talk about the baby boomers being the exception, one of the really key exceptions is the way that they get on with their kids, you know, and their kids don't rebel against them in a way that, frankly, a lot of baby boomers did. I mean, a lot of my mum's friends left home extremely early because they couldn't stand being under the rule of their father. So, you know, there is a really important cultural rupture, economic rupture, and a belief in education that, particularly for the generation that were marked and scarred by the 11 plus, and the belief that education was a meritocratic endeavour, that generation instilled those values in their kids.

33:18And unfortunately, that promise of a professional career, an educational track, a meritocratic culture, home ownership as a right and financial stability, hasn't worked out in the way that boomers thought it would for their kids. And obviously, their kids thought it would for them.

33:37Amol Rajan:That was Dr. Eliza Philby. Please do go back and listen to that episode at length because, well it was just fantastic. Now the next one that I want to highlight is it's hard to talk about without sounding I don't know emotional or frankly forfeiting my hard-won reputation for impartiality but let me say this I think the conversation that I had with Jacob Dunn from this very chair that I'm sat in right now in this very studio was probably the most moving and powerful conversation with a podcast guest that I've ever had in my life. Jacob who I've gotten to know pretty well is a killer there's no two ways about it he has killed someone he is the complicated profound inspiring man and i think i can say that while staying impartial who killed someone he threw a punch which led to the death of james hodgkinson this happened over 15 years ago jacob went to prison but after coming out of prison and owing to his experiences in prison he's a really transformed person.

34:39Amol Rajan:He's a campaigner for restorative justice and it was his life that James Graham, the fantastic playwright, wrote about, having heard him on a Radio 4 series, wrote about for a play called Punch. And Jacob has a radical idea. It is called restorative justice. He thinks this principle that people who've done bad things, including kill people, should meet the victims of their crime can reduce re-offending by 80-odd percent and transform our justice sector, our criminal justice sector and our prisons, which everyone knows are in big trouble. It's actually in a state of total crisis. That's just a fact.

35:15Amol Rajan:The government believes that. Everyone believes that. And he believes that restorative justice can play an amazing and vital role in fixing that system. But it all starts in that conversation with Jacob with his own, frankly, amazing life story. Yeah, I feel all right talking about it. I like, but the same way, because the story is essentially how you move through and beyond and find ways forward. And so sometimes I don't like staying in the past or talking about without the kind of direction moving to forward in a positive, in a positive way. Some people can get sensationalized and want to stick on the kind of what happened.

35:56But that's only the first question in the restorative process.

35:59Amol Rajan:Well, let's, exactly in the spirit that you suggest, let's start, if you like, at the end. What is restorative justice? Restorative justice is where you bring together perpetrators of crime to meet or talk, have a dialogue with victims of crime with the intention of finding a way forward and getting everybody's needs met in a positive way. so it's not about necessarily shaming or being punitive but it's it's about expressing the harm identifying what the victim's needs are essentially before you can even go ahead a restorative justice practitioner will do a needs and risk assessment to make to identify what the victim needs and that could take a very variety of forms it could be to find that piece pieces of the puzzle together about what happened and why they were targeted.

36:55Amol Rajan:And why is restorative justice the radical idea that we need in Britain right now? Because it's about, if you look at restorative justice in the micro, you look at my story in the micro, that's what's happening right now on the stage. But what we want to do is broaden that out to the macro and what that has to say. and the macro is about how we find the common ground across the political divides and whatever other divides are being thrown up right now. How can we, if Jacob, David and Joan can find common ground and move forward and stand together and campaign together after what they went through, then how can we not find common ground?

37:40Amol Rajan:David and Joan being the parents of James Hodgkinson who died in July 2011. So July 2011, this extraordinary backdrop, financial crash, panic, recession, election of a coalition government, which is a novel idea, smartphone, social media. Austerity. Austerity, hot summer, riots in 2011. There's a lot happening in the national story and there's a lot happening in your life. Meanwhile, at home, your mum's drinking, your younger brother, who we'll get to, is having a tough time. meanwhile a chap called James Hodgkinson goes to watch the cricket at Trent Bridge with his dad David and they go on a bit of a pub crawl afterwards and they've had a lot to drink and what happens next you get a message I was out with my friends it was one of them one of my friends birthdays 18th birthday how old are you at this point I'm 19 okay and I got split up from my friends and then got a call and then on the call my friend was like, kick it off, come down.

38:46You know, it's my mate, you know what I mean? I've got to be there for him. You always step in. Were you drunk or high? I was drunk and on all sorts of, you know, probably cocaine, you know, it's a bit of a blur. I was out like all day drinking and celebrating my friend's birthday and high on life and other substances. Yeah, by this point, one in the morning or something at the end of the night um and just went down to the scene where my friends were was in no fit state to be kind of judging or getting a sense of what was going on um and yeah and just running through a punch i saw i saw one of my friends like being aggressive towards another individual not with his fist it was james with his fist clenched my friend had his fish clenched and what was James?

39:41James wasn't wasn't being aggressive so you thought I was looking at my friend going he's trying to attack him so I've got to attack him that's the kind of in a split moment I'm looking at my friend I'm seeing him like surely this person like in my head something's happened but nothing did happen and obviously that's my biggest regret that I live with now is that I didn't say is it worth it I didn't pull my friend away and say, leave it. Well, someone else pulled my friend away. And then I ran in and saw it as my responsibility to be aggressive instead. And then just ran off, didn't realise anything that had happened.

40:26James' dad, David, chased me. And I wasn't even aware that he chased me. Ran home, back to the meadows. and then and then yeah didn't think of it didn't even think of it well the next day my friends came round and were like one punch knocked him out one punch and I was like oh proud of it you know what I mean like we were all like if we'd knocked someone out you'd be like you'd get brownie points for it basically stripes on the points on the scorecard and that's how you kind of earn your respect as friends which was just it's just backwards you know what I mean but that's what happens when you grow up in those environments with all those things we've talked about is that you develop those loving relationships through fear and intimidation.

41:09That's how you earn respect. You don't, because we're not being, and I don't like, again, I don't like making excuses because there's no excuse for throwing punches or carrying knives or being aggressive, but everything has a context.

41:22Amol Rajan:I've, there's absolutely no doubt you're not someone who's here making excuses and, you know, for people who haven't got to this bit of the story or don't know your story, you went to prison and did two and a half years, I think. So, you know, you didn't make excuses then and you haven't since. But just let me ask you one thing explicitly, which I'm sure you got asked in the court of law as well. But when you threw that punch, you were high, you weren't totally with it. But did you, you wanted to hurt him. Did you want to kill him? No. No, I didn't want to. I don't think I've ever wanted to kill anybody.

41:54I never like had that level of hatred towards anyone. it was more fun and games I guess what was prison like?

42:11horrible sometimes it felt like I'd just been in school and it was just a big bit of a big joke but at the same time it was horrible you know you see people like I've seen people dying there I've seen people self-harming and like trying to kill themselves and, you know, all sorts of, you know, all the most vulnerable people. Like, I remember this one young man and he was so used to being homeless, he couldn't sleep on his mattress on his bed because he's just used to sleeping on a hard floor. It's like, I can't sleep on a mattress. He took his mattress off his bed and slept on the metal bed. And I was like, what are you doing?

42:51Like, sleeping on your bed? I can't. I'm so, like, I'm just used to sleeping on hard surfaces. Huge amount of drugs in there. Now, you look at independent monitoring boards and inspections, ranges between 40 % to 60%, any prison across the country, if you look at an inspection report, between 40 % and 60%, no matter what prison you pick, are on drugs, have drugs in their system. How is that possible? We've heard the chief inspector. Sometimes people go, I went in there, I'd never smoked. I came out smoking tobacco.

43:28Amol Rajan:It was while you were in prison that James' parents, David and Joan, took the decision to establish contact with you. And you've obviously had a chance to speak to them about that in later life. But the impulse for them, because they had all these unanswered questions, they wanted to connect with you and they wanted to reach out to you. Yeah, I think, well, you know, they realised that me being in prison didn't actually make them feel any better. And they knew I was going to get out. And what actually mattered to them was that I was aware of the impact and the harm that I caused. And whether or not I could answer their questions as to what happened on the night.

44:09So they could try and make sense of, you know, try and find some sort of meaning or make some sense of what happened and express the harm. and to make sure that I hopefully didn't be one of those people we've been talking about, which most people are, which is the re-offending and not learning from my mistakes and wasting, you know, having two lives being lost, essentially. So you've got a hell of a lot going on.

44:36Amol Rajan:You've got this relationship with David and Joan. I'm starting to study my GCSEs again. And where did the impulse to study your GCSEs come from? It came from Joan and David asking me, what are you going to do with your life? And, like, I literally had no other option. As someone coming out of prison with no GCSEs, no work experience, no CB, like, it was just like, you've got to get GCSEs before you can even go on another course. You just need your maths and English. So I was like, I'll do that. I'll go back to college. And I'm so grateful that I've studied. I picked three GCSEs. I did English maths and psychology and psychology is like a mate that was such an important subject for me to study at that time because we were talking earlier about young people and why they end up being so pessimistic and what we're talking about is like social learning and conditioning of people and how they form the views that they have and the limiting values and the beliefs that they have and I was looking at the world and going like my mum has just died I'm a carer for my little brother and that's another thing but having responsibilities because when you go to prison it strips you of all your responsibilities and we want people in prison to be responsible and and but we strip them of all their responsibilities and it's like well actually we want them to come out we want them to pay bills we want them to pay taxes we want them to have a and be able to meet those responsibilities so I was given a responsibility of caring for my little brother which was like I can't go back to prison and my son my little brother goes into care what's he gonna do yeah you know what I mean like so that was like something that was that said that's a deterrent giving people responsibilities giving people something to lose not stripping everything off them so they've got nothing to lose what results to get in your GCSEs I got I got an A star in psychology I got an A star in English and I got a seat in maths rubbish at maths man what happened there you loser what's the matter where's your mental arithmetic simultaneous equation is not your thing no no no that is that is rubbish just enough just enough to like yeah work out like profits and you know if I buy a hundred pound of this stuff okay so so maths not your strong point but you got two A stars absolutely amazing there's a a lesson there by the way for everyone listening in uh who cares about education about how it is a weird thing that most human societies do which is that they cram education into this very particular bit of your life and we don't think particular moment way of delivering it other things going on and actually as everyone who studies this subject ends up concluding you should make education a lifelong thing so you've got your gcscs all owing and the fact you're here all owing to this one question, which is Joan and David saying to you, through a mediator, what do you want to do with your life?

47:32Amol Rajan:What are you going to do with your life now? And meanwhile, your communication with them, which is part of the restorative justice idea and process, is escalating. And one day, someone suggests a face-to-face meeting. So they said, keep us updated with how you're getting on, Jacob, because it's important to us that you don't slip off and end up like everybody else. and true lives aren't lost. So I had that as my motivator. I was like, I can't let David and Joan down. I can't let my brother down, who I'm now caring for. I can't let my mum down. My last words to her were, I'm going to make you proud.

48:11And then my goal from the restorative justice process was one day I want to be able to look in the mirror and say I'm proud of myself. That was my goal. So I got all these kind of like responsibilities, is expectations people like huge people in my life that I'm like making promises to right and there's one on a deathbed one whose son I've killed you know my brother who's living with me and then I was driving to meet these people who completely changed my life and I'd never even met them and I was just a strange feeling of going there and going I can't believe how much respect I've got for these people how much of an impact these people have had in my life just by asking me questions but did you go in there with a specific plan to say sorry the thing about restorative justice is it's the practitioner's job to make sure beyond reasonable doubt that there's no surprises so everything is talked about you go you know how who's going to talk first what are we going to talk about who's you know who's going to be in the room how you how would you feel if someone responded this way so you know all the questions you know what everyone's going to say there's a pretty clear distinction or divide really um as well between david and joan in one sense um does it give you a sort of sadness now i mean in a you know in a 15 year

49:42Amol Rajan:cycle of events that you must have thought about endlessly but does it give you a certain sadness that David is unable to forgive you? No. Because I respect his decision. And if Joan turned around tomorrow and said she doesn't want to forgive me, that would be fine as well. Because I don't want my choices to be dependent on somebody else's forgiveness. And there's a danger with forgiveness. Because I've been in prisons and I've seen forgiveness get talked about or like people know that I've been forgiven by one of the parents and they'll go, oh, I need forgiveness in order to move forward, in order to change.

50:31And I'm like, no, you don't. Like, don't give away your agency to somebody else. Like, you are in control of your choices and you can't defer that to anybody else. even no matter how nice it would be at the end of the day you're responsible for your own choices and you know you've got to sleep in the bed you make

50:55Amol Rajan:it's an interesting question of whether Joan whose forgiveness is no doubt sincere but is that forgiveness something she says for your benefit or for hers it's forgiving right but it's like who are you who are you forgiving it to and a lot of the time people resent forgiveness because they think it is forgiving to somebody else. Like if I was to forgive you, it's an act of generosity to bestow on the other person when actually you're giving yourself a gift when you're forgiving someone else because like Joan says, the thing that she's gained the most from restorative justice is that she's no longer stuck in anger and resentment and bitterness and me living rent-free in her head.

51:48Do you know what I mean? That's this mugshot young man. She's been able to move on. She's been able to move forward. And the freedom that comes with that.

51:59Amol Rajan:That was Jacob Dunn with a really memorable contribution to Radical. I'm taking you through some of my highlights on this podcast as I leave this podcast. and one of those highlights was definitely the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley in North West London. It's one of Britain's most uncompromising voices on education. She's known as Britain's strictest head teacher and I think she loves it frankly. She is Catherine Birbel Singh. She told me that children, especially those from poorer backgrounds, need knowledge, discipline, personal responsibility, tough love and a shared culture, not lower expectations.

52:34Amol Rajan:I've chosen this one as a highlight because Catherine Burblesing, who is she would describe herself as traditional or small C conservative. She is pretty bracing, pretty vigorously anti-woke. She's very clear that she's not a big fan of the diversity agenda, she would call it. She believes in setting very, very high standards for kids from poorer backgrounds. And whether you agree with her or not, something that I think is admirable about Catherine Burblesing, It's not only that she is enacting what she believes in, but she wants the best for people who start with the least. And that's why her episode of Radical is definitely worth your time, whether you agree with her or not.

53:13I think we don't understand the role that schools can play in ensuring that multiculturalism succeeds. And I think it can succeed and it does succeed in places and in other places it doesn't succeed. And I think in part that's because we don't pay enough attention to our schools. For instance, at Michaela, we make multiculturalism one of our ambitions to make sure that it succeeds. So the children are friends with each other across various religions and different races and so on. As an example, we eat one meal together every day at lunch. It's family lunch. And so we serve each other and we clean up after each other.

53:56We're teaching them the soft skills of what it is to dine together and eat your food and have a conversation at the same time and so on. When we first started, we started with meat and we divided the children up according to what they ate. Some ate meat without pork. Some ate meat without beef. Some were vegetarian, a variety. And when we divided them all up, I looked at the whole and I thought, well, we're dividing them according to race and religion here. And I'm not doing that. Not on my watch. So we decided to go vegetarian. and it means that we can break bread together and it doesn't matter where our families are from.

54:32We can share in a meal and we all make that sacrifice. And really it's about children understanding the idea that you sacrifice things that might be important to you for the betterment of the whole. And we very much push a British identity amongst all of us. So, we don't have other flags in the school. We just have our British flag. So, we wouldn't have pride flags, that kind of thing. We just have our British flag outside. When it's the World Cup or the European Championships, we have St. George's flags everywhere. uh we even once when the kids came in because there was a football match on during the day like five o 'clock or something uh the kids went home and they came back in their england t-shirts and things and we were painting saint george flags on their on their um on their cheeks and we were we were you know we were just celebrating and and really rooting for england so patriotism is a big

55:34Amol Rajan:part of what you try and do. But it is your intellectual and practical critique of multiculturalism that by an excessive focus on differences, we undermine what we have in common, A, and B, which is, I guess, the real, the criticism of identity politics more broadly, by an excessive focus on differences, you ask people, you invite people into our public square and public domain to define themselves by their membership of minorities. and therefore to think about themselves in terms of their rights rather than duties and to celebrate a kind of feeling of persecution or victimhood. That's exactly right.

56:12The thing is, is that when we go around saying diversity is our strength, look, anyone who's ever been a leader of anything knows that diversity is not a strength. Unity is a strength.

56:24Amol Rajan:But the two aren't necessarily incompatible. You don't want everybody to be exactly the same, but you don't want, And for instance, when the England football team go out to play, they're all wearing the same shirt. If they were all wearing different shirts, they wouldn't know who to pass to. They've also all been trained together. They have a goal when they go out there. Their manager has told them, you're a team and you stand there and you do this. And when so-and-so kicks like that, you do that and so on. They have a plan of action that they're going out with. So it's the same with our school.

56:59Anyone who's ever run anything knows that. You don't just throw everything up in the air and hope for the best and say diversity is our strength. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have people from different places, but it does mean that you need coordination and you need consistency.

57:13Amol Rajan:So prize knowledge is kind of one of the things to which my own life, in fact, my dad's life was dedicated. And I get it theoretically. I present a quiz which is all about prize knowledge. It's one of the many reasons I love doing that job. Roger Scruton, he wrote a book called Culture Counts. Chapter three, I think, is called Teaching Knowledge. And it opens with the sentence, it is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it. And he goes on to say something along the lines of good teachers love their pupils, but they love knowledge more.

57:45Amol Rajan:They don't so much see knowledge as a benefit to their pupils, but their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. In other words, the primary purpose of education is the transmission of knowledge through the generations. Now, I get that. Lovely prose. I can quote it. I've read that book a few times. But let me just say, because it's an amazing, you know, I love Roger Scruton. I love him. I'm not sure I would meet his standards. And in a way, I feel bad about that because I love him. So when I say that, I went into teaching and I'm still in teaching for the children. That's what I was going to push back on you.

58:21Amol Rajan:I was going to say that if I may say, well, I was going to kind of push back, though I get it theoretically and romantically. It has an instinctive appeal. Something about child-centred learning is, it's a sort of, okay, you might quote Jonathan Haidt, but there is something, and I know this is what motivates you, there is something about the love of the child and the love of the child as an individual. And the belief that you could maybe be flexible to a greater extent than you are, but some other teachers aren't, to kind of accommodate the needs of individual children. No, no, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.

58:47Okay, so we've got Roger Scruton over here saying it's about passing knowledge from generation to generation, and I have a lot of admiration for that. I don't think we're there really in terms of education. I mean, you know, I understand he's from a different generation to me and I get it and I respect it. And in many ways, I wish I were like that. I am somebody who went into teaching for the sake of the children. The reason why I work with disadvantaged children in the inner city and I've only ever worked in the inner city in London is because I believe in social mobility and I'm very much inspired by transforming the lives of my children for the better.

59:22I believe we do that through knowledge. So while Roger Scruton was prioritising knowledge for future generations, and I think we should, I mean, I agree with him on that, I also think we need to prioritise knowledge for this generation and for the children in front of us. Otherwise, they will not be able to make the success of their lives.

59:39Amol Rajan:And knowledge-centric learning is better than child-centric learning because? Because you get more knowledge.

59:47Amol Rajan:Catherine Burble-Singh there, who is known as Britain's strictest headteacher, perhaps because she is. Of course, I could have chosen all our guests as highlights of my time at Radical. Frankly, and I know I'm a bit biased, I don't think we've had a single Duff episode. I think they've all been brilliant. And you can go back and listen to all of them. And please do, because there is an entire catalogue on BBC Sounds. But I wanted to end with an extract from my conversation with James Marriott. He is the Times columnist, creator of a newsletter called Cultural Capital, author of a new book called The New Dark Ages.

1:00:15Amol Rajan:And he came in with an unsettling argument. He argued that there is a kind of supreme irony about this age in which we live, which is that on the one hand, we have loosed upon the world the most astonishing powers of cognitive brilliance, of intelligence. And it's called artificial intelligence, which, by the way, is roughly doubling in speed every six or seven months as I sit behind this microphone right now. But at the same time, as this incredible intelligence is loosed upon the world, we humans are getting stupider and the facts bear it out. For most of the 20th century, global IQ levels were rising.

1:00:51Amol Rajan:For most of this century, they have been falling. And technology may well be the reason smartphones in particular. Now, you can argue a lot about whether this is causation or correlation, but there is in this country today a crisis of reading. We actually had the remarkable Catherine Rundle, brilliant author, including of children's books, in an early episode talking about why we should champion reading. And James Marriott came in and he made it really, really clear that a century ago in this country, mass literacy was a kind of revolutionary technology, which has been replaced these days by short form video.

1:01:26Amol Rajan:But whereas literacy and mass literacy encouraged cogitation, short form video encourages agitation. And he thinks that that has profound implications for democracy. He thinks that reading is not just a sort of quaint hobby or a nice way to pass an afternoon. It's a foundation of a literate and therefore democratic culture. I really want you to hear this episode from James Marriott again because the argument is incredibly timely and it goes to the absolute heart of what we tried to do on this podcast, which is identify the deep forces and trends changing our world and offer some radical ideas like this from James Marriott for the future.

1:02:06it's very easy to think of reading as a kind of hobby you know as a slightly old-fashioned hobby like fly fishing or something and no one reads anymore but whatever no big deal we got our information through our iphones now so that doesn't matter i really strongly believe that modern democracy is a phenomenon of the culture of mass literacy that began to kick off in the middle of the 18th century and came to full flower in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that's when we get the spread of the franchise that's when we get votes for women that's when we get the beginnings of the welfare state.

1:02:36And I think democracy as we know it goes hand in hand with reading and goes hand in hand with print culture. And my fear is that if we lose reading, and there's pretty convincing statistics to suggest that reading isn't just falling, but I mean, really almost collapsing, like falling really severely, I think we could lose democracy. I think we haven't tried to do democracy without a culture of mass literacy. And this is a kind of terrifying experiment that we're embarking on and one that I'm not convinced is going to go very well. Before mass reading, what was the store of knowledge?

1:03:10Amol Rajan:I mean, because if the idea of everyone being able to read is a very recent phenomenon, only a few centuries old really, if you think about, for instance, the idea of Islamic education in sort of 8th century Baghdad, which was this wonderful fountain of geometry and algebra, how are people conveying that information? Is it all much more through a kind of vocal culture and memory? Yeah, exactly. And this is what another of my heroes, the great scholar Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy calls an oral culture, where everything you know about the world is passed on by word of mouth. and the really brilliant point he makes about these kind of oral societies is that every single piece of information you want to preserve if you can't write it down you have to store it in your memory and this totally shapes the entire culture in ways that i think it's hard for us to get our heads around because we're so used to remembering things by writing them down but if you can't write anything down the only way to preserve information is to as he says think memorable thoughts which means that every single piece of information that you preserve has to come encoded in a memorable form.

1:04:14So information is spread through cliches and proverbs and songs and heavily rhythmic poetry, and it's stored in exciting stories. There's a whole theory that the Iliad is basically this enormous mnemonic device, is the phrase. It's basically this enormous exciting story that is a way of storing all the most vital information by ancient Greek culture. We view it as like a story. Actually, it's full of information about customs, sacrifices, religion. And because it's an exciting story and because it's highly rhythmic, you can commit it to memory. And in an oral culture, you need to preserve huge quantities of information about your society in your memory.

1:04:50And this means that oral cultures are very preoccupied with the past. You're constantly thinking about the past because you need to preserve the past. And the advent of writing in ancient Greece, it's often argued, was the cause of an intellectual revolution because suddenly you free up so much cognitive space from memory and skills of criticism, skills of analysis become far more important. And you're no longer limited to the kinds of memorable thoughts that are required to store information in your mind. So you don't have to think, not everything that you know has to be encoded in like a vivid story or proverb.

1:05:23You have access to more abstract, more kind of boring kinds of information, but these boring kinds of information like abstract logic underpin our whole society. but you need writing to get there.

1:05:33Amol Rajan:But also if you've got an oral culture which elevates memory, that suggests that a kind of reverence for the elderly is a sort of immediate follow-on because the older you are, as long as your memory isn't fading, and there's some evidence that memory does fade amongst people who get to a certain age, but the older you are, the more lived memory you have of things and also the more kind of time you've had to submit other things to memory. So you have this kind of reverence of the elders. No, it's totally true. And I mean, this is a point that was made by people like Walter Ong, and it's also been backed up by modern anthropologists.

1:06:05Jared Diamond has a great book, The World of Yesterday, about hunter-gatherer communities. And he talks about how they have this intense care and reverence for old people because he says, you know, your old people are like your encyclopedias, your hydrographic charts. They have the long memories. And if you lose them, you lose like a whole wealth of information. It's like someone turning the Internet off. They're the people who remember what you did to get through a famine. They're the people who remember where the poisonous plants are. And when you are no longer reliant on memory and you've got it all written down, old people lose some of their function because you just have it all on a bit of papyrus or a bit of pot shard next to you.

1:06:42And the emphasis of society, the argument goes, moves towards young people, moves towards cognitive speed, criticism, new ways of thinking, and the whole kind of social emphasis of society subtly shifts.

1:06:54Amol Rajan:What are the other kind of key moments then that go from the kind of mid 18th century, the spread of reading, the use of reading, particularly by an elite who kind of need it for bureaucracy and legal verification and so forth, to kind of what happened in the late 19th, early 20th century, which is what we'd call mass literacy? Yeah, I think the key points there are the Education Act at the end of the 19th century, which really move us from a world in which only some people can read, and that's been growing throughout the 19th century, to a world in which literally everyone can read. And this is like a major social transformation.

1:07:28Like mass literacy is such a recent phenomenon. You know, if you go back through the whole of history, literacy rate in ancient Rome, like 10%, less than that in the early Middle Ages, inching up by then. It really is so recent that everybody has been able to read. There's a great H.G. Wells quote where he talks about how the great divide between the reading and the non-reading population, like one of the fundamental divides in history, suddenly has become a minor difference in education levels. and ordinary people who, without reading, had no access to information about politics, no access to information about their governments, no access to, like, how do you find out about science or culture or anything?

1:08:05Suddenly, they're as well-informed about this stuff or have the potential to be as well-informed about this stuff as their social betters. And I think that is just such a... We're so used to literacy now and we're so used to theatre that everyone can read and we forget to find it remarkable. There's like a major social transformation. People suddenly have access to the same amounts of information plus, importantly, the same kinds of skills of criticism, analysis, abstraction that we know are totally vital.

1:08:30Amol Rajan:And literacy then becomes a kind of form of mass enfranchisement. Suddenly people who are kind of not really involved in the public conversation can get involved and sort of be equipped with the same knowledge. And it's also quite clearly a major kind of social mobility device. You know, one of my biggest influences is a book called The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. And he talks about growing up in the interwar years in Leeds. and he basically talks about literacy as a kind of form of escape from the poverty and the grimness of those years but also a way of kind of talking on equal terms with all the posh people that run the country it's an amazing it's kind of i mean the word meritocracy is very very complicated but in terms of social mobility literacy did more for millions of people in this country and elsewhere than many other policies i completely agree there's another great book the intellectual lives of the british working class by jonathan rose which is a lot about literacy among working class people in the 19th and 20th centuries.

1:09:24And it's exactly the phenomenon you're talking about. This whole generation of working class Labour MPs who are basically the first generation of working class legislators almost in the history of the world. That working class legislator had not been a category of person that existed in any society. And what these people all talk about in their memoirs, and Jonathan Rose has tons of amazing quotations from them, is the importance of the library. I was born in this desperate poverty among people who didn't read, and I was going to read Charles Dickens, John Milton, history, all kinds of stuff. And as you say, this was the thing that gave them the ability to go toe-to-toe with their social bettors, social bettors, inverted commas, and, you know, argue their economic case, argue the case of their class.

1:10:08And I think that really only happens with literacy. If you don't have the information or the kind of critical thinking skills, that is a huge class advantage to the people at the top of society, which is why literacy has remained an elite thing for most of history and why the spread of literacy has often provoked a lot of unease among social elites because they know that literacy equals power.

1:10:30Amol Rajan:You know, I've never thought about it in this context. It's so interesting talking to you about it, that Thomas Paine's revolutionary writings, you know, The Rights of Man or Common Sense and Other Writings, it would have been so exhilarating for those who were minded to throw off monarchies and to campaign for revolution that this book would have been a kind of new technology would have been like the smartphone of today here's this thing you can hold and it's got words and they convey information and by the way that person around the corner has read it and that person down the road's read it and people would be saying have you read this book and i know that sounds you can still say that today if you go into you know good bookshops or even online retailers and get a book that someone else has read but it would have been it would have been so exciting that you could hold a book Thomas Paine is a great example he crops up in the Neil Postman book and Neil Postman calculates that you know hundreds of thousands of people read this Thomas Paine book and I think he has this he says you know relative to the size of the population in colonial America versus the population of America in 1985 this was a media event that was like the equivalent of the Super Bowl like that's how that's the proportion of the population this book was reaching and the really important point is that like a hundred years earlier, Thomas Paine, whose father was a farm labourer, there is no way anybody from that social background is reaching hundreds of thousands of people with their political ideas at all.

1:11:48The monopoly on political ideas was entirely possessed by social elites, by the aristocracy, who often were, you know, imposing their kind of ideology, not through like writing an argument, but through like parades, palaces, this highly visual culture. Suddenly, with mass literacy, someone like Thomas Paine, who comes from a social background, nobody from that kind of background has had any political influence before mass literacy. Suddenly, not only can someone from that background write his political ideas down, which, by the way, unsurprisingly happen to be quite anti-monarchical, they can be read by hundreds of thousands of people.

1:12:21And that is just a huge shift in power that just can't be put back in the bottle.

1:12:25Amol Rajan:This is the great promise of technology is that it would democratise, lower the barriers to entry, democratise access to information, and make it easier for lots of people to reach, you know, millions of people, billions of people perhaps, as you can now with this weird device on the table in front of me, which we call a smartphone. And isn't it a supreme irony of our time that we have this technology which fits in our pocket, which can connect us to anyone, anywhere, pretty much, half the global population is still not online, we should point out as an important caveat. And yet we feel more sort of disconnected and atomised and lonely than ever before.

1:12:58Amol Rajan:I mean, why is it that despite this extraordinary technology, we're living or heading towards these new dark ages? I mean, I think you're totally right that the story begins with TV. That Robert Putnam book, which I quote in my book, is fascinating how much everything he says about television is an earlier version of everything he says about smartphones. People aren't reading. Newspapers are declining. People are at home all the time. They're not socializing. They're having friends less. And it's not hard. It's not particularly hard to understand why. When screens arrive, talking about the idea that reading is actually quite hard to do, like concentrating on a page is quite difficult, interpreting text is quite difficult.

1:13:38These are cognitively taxing processes. Whenever you have the choice between a page and a screen, people choose the screen. It's easier. It's more passive. It's more exciting. It's more visual. It's just less cognitively demanding for us. and that sort of seems like a minor point, but we can just see it's playing out on a vast social scale now and I think has been since really the 1950s, the 1960s. This is why the Neil Postman book is so important and when I was writing my book, thinking about where to begin the story, when you look at the first people talking about the decline of reading, I was able to naively go into it thinking this is a recent phenomenon.

1:14:14Actually, it begins in the 60s. Some of the best data for the decline of reading comes from the Netherlands and the really dramatic declines are happening in the 50s and 60s and 70s as television comes into people's homes and people start reading less and again this whole thing has just vindicated this idea that ultimately comes from Marshall McLuhan the medium is the message the way we consume information determines the kinds of information we get and we are just discovering that there are all kinds of ways of talking and thinking about the world that depend on literacy and reading and if you lose literacy and reading we end up in a totally different way of thinking about the world which is more fragmented more shallow more visual more personality based and I'm not sure that's a way of thinking that is particularly compatible with democracy

1:15:03Amol Rajan:Thank you to James Marriott look out for his book The New Dark Ages which is going to be terrific and thank you again to you thanks to the incredible incredible incredible people on the other side of the glass who have made this podcast so smooth and fun and joyful for me they do all the hard work I have the easy job of talking to interesting people talking of that thank you to the many many many in fact the over 50 brilliant minds that have come on this podcast and thanks to you for giving it so much of your time the engagement the response that you guys have given me including when you've seen me around the country in person has been heartwarming stuff listen I'm going to try very hard not to cry but I'm going to say that I have loved doing this podcast and I wish Radical and you all the very best it is going to continue there'll be more episodes along soon and rest assured I am not retiring at all you're going to find me in all the usual places in the coming months.

1:15:52Amol Rajan:But for now, I just want to say it's been a great pleasure and a privilege doing Radical. And I think it's needed more than ever. So my last words to you are please keep listening and stay radical.

1:16:14Is the American dream still possible? I'm Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. One of the most successful exports the United States has ever sold the world is the American dream, that tantalizing promise of a better, freer, richer life. But is it still attainable? I feel like the American dream is alive, but not well. For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.