Artificial Equality

As reported in Reuters, the government aims to give students from poorer backgrounds more chance of entering university, by letting admissions officers see family occupations and whether their parents have a degree themselves.
And once they know that the parents have degrees, what happens? Do applicants whose parents have no degrees get points? The government’s initiative aims to widen the social mix in universities, presently skewed heavily towards middle class students. Presumably ‘widening participation’ means that Universities will give precedence to candidates from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’.
I wholly agree that selection should not be solely based on candidate’s performance at A-levels. There is a need for a more complete picture in order to assess one’s attitude and abilities. I think there should be exams and interviews, and maybe CVs.
There are people who have had fewer opportunities than others, whose social background has affected one’s learning. There are those who have suffered from a mental or physical illness and so on. There is also discrimination within the educational system. However, these are separate issues that should be tackled separately instead of being labelled ‘disadvantage’ or made to fall under an equality strand. I’m not convinced that one’s intellectual abilities are seriously jeopardised by one’s social-economic background, unlike learning. Social background affects one’s opportunities to learn and acquire knowledge. People whose parents speak various languages are more likely to speak more than one language. In my childhood, I was traumatised when taught maths, so I don’t ‘do’ maths, however I can still understand the concepts and I have a strange liking for local government finance. 'Social determinism' is just as flawed as 'biological/genetic determinism'.

This initiative is an example of the essentialisation of ‘disadvantage’. It also means that ethnicity or some parents’ occupations end up being considered a disadvantage.
A parallel issue is the low number of women MPs, which is a real concern, however the reasons behind this are discrimination, the lack of support women receive and the prejudices they endure within their party. I’d like to see a political party offer training on gender equality (to men in particular) rather than patronise the women with segregated training on how to campaign. I’d like to see a more open and inclusive mentality within political parties.
Instead of labelling people, the Government should have the guts to tackle discrimination, poverty, the widening gap between rich and poor with an adequate politics of redistribution and civic education (including gender, racial stereotypes etc.).
The ‘equality strands’ agenda paints a simplistic picture of people’s diversity. It essentialises strands leaving no room for complexity, for different interpretation, for overlapping identities. It divides society into groups competing for the same resources instead of creating a society where the common good is paramount and to which each one of us has the duty to contribute.