Private Schools, Charities, and Power

"Charity is No Substitute for Justice Withheld" (Augustine of Hippo)

'St Christina Giving her Father's Jewels to the Poor' by Evelyn de Morgan

Why bother paying for a public good through taxation, when you can just get it from charities instead?

John Edward, the director of the Scottish Council of Independent Schools (SCIS), has responded to the 'heightened political interest' in the charitable status of independent schools by listing their myriad charitable achievements. Some private schools allowed less fortunate children to, at certain times, make use of their playing fields. Others raised money for mental health charities, or the Royal National Lifeboat Association. All appear to contribute towards a substantial fund providing free places at their schools to carefully selected students who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford one. There is therefore no doubt, in his mind, that they should and indeed would pass the 'rigorous scrutiny' of the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR), demonstrating beyond doubt that public benefit outweighs any private benefit.

"The powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice" (R. Niebuhr)

But there is another angle. In 1934, the American ethicist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about the status of charity in public life. "Philanthropy,” he concluded, “combines genuine pity with the display of power, [and that] the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice." Put simply, charity offers the giver a greater sense of empowerment. They might seem to be doing it for all the right reasons, out of a genuinely held feelings of kindness and sympathy, a desire to help those who need it. But ultimately they have little interest in fundamentally shifting the terrain too far from the status quo. This is in contrast to the notion of social justice, which seeks radical systemic change to empower those who are denied it by the systems as they are.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971)

Conservative governments always tend to be particularly fond of charities, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they like them for their ability to step in where they plan to shrink state intervention. Where the state is big, tyrannical and inefficient, goes the argument, charities can be smaller, more focused, and importantly allow people the freedom to contribute or not as they see fit. Charities also hark back to more 'traditional' models of support for the most vulnerable in society, who would have been provided for by charities in times gone by.

"The voluntary sector should be neither a poor relation nor a cut-price alternative to government. It’s absolutely central to the life of the nation." (David Cameron)

Except, to take each of these points in turn, charities are not an effective way of distributing wealth. Wildlife charities for example know that polar bears, pandas, tigers and orangutans attract many times more investment than less attractive creatures. Yet it turns out much of our natural world is entirely dependent on the survival of those tiny, unloveable creatures, the bees and the beetles that exist way down the food chain and off the promotional materials. Charities rely on appealing to human emotions, and our emotional brains simply do not have the capacity to direct funding to where it is really needed in the long-run. State departments, freed from having to rely on our flawed human minds, can instead rely on scientific data, which can be used to direct funding to where it can be best used.

A weevil: at risk of extinction because it's not as cute as a panda

And when conservatives are looking back to a past when people were looked after by charitable institutions, they are neglecting to see the people whose needs they failed to meet. Women were invariably not supported; those in more isolated, rural areas were neglected. They were segregated by region, and by religion, with huge gaps in the net where, while some people undoubtedly found themselves well looked after, others were left without any help at all. Much of our education system of course was run on a charitable model until the reforms of the late 19th and early 20th Century. It mattered less then, that almost half of primary-age children had no access to schools whatsoever. It mattered even less that many of these children would have had disabilities or learning difficulties. The beauty of state provided education, at least since the Fisher Act of 1918, is the unwritten contract that says that the state will provide what is necessary for all its citizens, regardless of their rank or position. Charities have no such obligation, and are free to distribute their resources to whichever recipients they and their benefactors deem to be most worthy.

Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus by William Blake

But there’s another, final reason why charities are so often the preferred mode of supporting the needy for those on the political right. And that is that the whole system, as Niebuhr realised 80 years ago, serves to justify and indeed reinforce the idea that there is a natural and morally acceptable hierarchy of power and influence in society. By donating to charity, the wealthy and the powerful are able to perform an act that simultaneously justifies their privilege and protects them from guilt. Ultimately, it should be the goal of any left wing government to directly challenge this notion that the charitable sector should be 'central' to the life of our nation. The more effective the government, the less need there would be for charity, the more we could focus instead on a fair and intelligent distribution of wealth that is effective in the long-term.

So it bothers me when private schools offer the chance for students to attend their establishment for free (as long as they pass an entrance test), and then pat themselves on the back for their noble efforts to address social inequality. Their selection of who should benefit is based on the subjective and skewed judgement of groups of biased individuals. It objectifies children from less affluent backgrounds as passive and grateful recipients of their altruism, like lifeboats and pandas. And it blocks discussions of reform, preserving the power imbalance that continues to plague any efforts to create a fairer society for all.