'We have heard so often that social mobility is all about schools that we assume it must be so. But, really, it had nothing to do with schools. Education was serving the industrial revolution, not causing it... The country went from blue to white-collar. The people who in one era would have walked through the factory gate started walking through the office door instead. They went up the social scale and society seemed mobile just because a lot more clerical and professional jobs were created... The truth is that politicians will probably continue to talk about the easy version of social mobility, in which everyone rises but nobody falls. The accompaniment of this wish is probably an interventionist industrial policy which seeks to create jobs in computer technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, tourism and finance. But there is a hardcore version, a meritocratic zero-sum version of social mobility in which my rise requires your fall. In the competition for the best jobs, my children’s victory means the defeat of yours. That is what social mobility really means and that is why nobody really means it.'
Philip Collins
