Capital With A Human Face

The Secretary of State for Faith Schools and Top-up Fees, Alan Johnson, has been targeting blame for the fact that not enough people are advantagising themselves of the Government's Club 18-30 initiative for universities. The Government wishes to get half of the population within that age range into whatever remains of our higher education industry by 2010. Messages are getting back to Alan Johnson about the ways in which teachers advise pupils on their future.

"Problems of aspiration in deprived areas are very real," observed Drummond Bone, vice-chancellor of Liverpool University and president among vice-chancellors. But with a well-placed preposition, the Guardian's education correspondent implies that Bone's statement is an argument against the National Union of Teachers' contention that "teachers in areas of deprivation have a harder battle to overcome the damage they have suffered." But perhaps that was how Bone intended it.

According to Alan Johnson's spies, some teachers in deprived areas "encourage children to aim pretty low", and as a result "we squander human capital and waste individual potential". This is certainly too bad. The squandering of human capital, in a culture where capital means so much, is a serious waste of resources, and might be inexcusable if that particular type of capital were a little less easy to replace. The idea that children should aim low - just because they were born low, brought up on low incomes, educated on low resources and given a low priority by their lords and masters - shows a criminal lack of perspective now that Tony's Choice Emporium requires a decent supply of unemployed graduates.