Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington
The Lord Young of Dartington | |
|---|---|
| Member of the House of Lords | |
| In office 20 March 1978 – 14 January 2002 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 9 August 1915 Manchester, England |
| Died | 14 January 2002 (aged 86) London, England |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouse(s) | Joan Lawson (m. 1945–1960) Sasha Moorsom (m. 1960–1993) Dorit Uhlemann (m. 1995–2002) |
| Relations | Toby Young, son |
| Children | 3 sons and 3 daughters |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics |
| Awards | Albert Medal (1992) |
Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington (9 August 1915 – 14 January 2002) was a British sociologist, social activist and politician who coined the term "meritocracy".
During an active life he was instrumental in shaping Labour Party thinking, when secretary of the policy committee of the Labour party was responsible for drafting "Let Us Face the Future", Labour's manifesto for the 1945 general election,[1] was a leading protagonist on social reform, and founded or helped found a number of socially useful organisations. These include the Consumers' Association, Which? magazine, the National Consumer Council, the Open University, the National Extension College, the Open College of the Arts and Language Line, a telephone-interpreting business.
Early life
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Young was born in Manchester, the son of an Australian violinist and music critic, and an Irish Bohemian painter and actress. Until he was eight, he grew up in Melbourne, returning to England shortly before his parents' marriage broke up. He attended several schools, eventually entering Dartington Hall, a new progressive school in Devon, in the 1920s. He had a long association with the small school, as student, trustee, deputy chairman and historian. He studied economics at the London School of Economics then became a barrister when he applied to be called to the Bar in 1939.
Political career and thought
Young served under the Labour Party government led by Clement Attlee, but left in 1950. He began studying for a PhD at the London School of Economics in 1952. His studies of housing and local government policy in East London left him disillusioned with the state of community relations and local Labour councillors. This prompted him to found the Institute of Community Studies, which was his principal vehicle for exploring his ideas of social reform. Its basic tenet was to give people more say in running their lives and institutions.
Young co-authored with Peter Willmott Family and Kinship in East London, documenting and analysing the social costs of rehousing a tight-knit community in a suburban housing estate (known affectionately by sociologists as Fakinel and invariably pronounced with a cockney accent).[note 1] Young also wrote the influential satire The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), originally for the Fabian Society, which refused to publish it. In it he coined the word "meritocracy," to which he gave negative connotations, and he became disappointed with the way in which subsequent governments came to suggest that a meritocracy is an achievable concept worth pursuing.[1]
Young's social research also contributed to the change in secondary education that led to widespread abolition of grammar schools and their replacement by comprehensive schools between 1965 and 1976, as well as the abolition of the eleven plus examination.[2]
In the 1950s and 1960s Young helped to found the Consumers' Association, the National Consumer Council, the Open University and the Open College of the Arts. He also founded Language Line, a telephone interpreting business, to enable non-English-speaking people to have equal access to public services. He fostered the work of many younger researchers and "social entrepreneurs", and founded the School for Social Entrepreneurs in 1997. Aspects of Young's work were developed by the Young Foundation, created from the merger of Young's Institute of Community Studies and his Mutual Aid Centre, under the direction of Geoff Mulgan.
Young was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, from 1961 to 1966, and President of Birkbeck, University of London, from 1989 to 1992.
Throughout his life, and particularly in later life, Young was concerned for older people. He co-founded the University of the Third Age and Linkage, bringing together older people without grandchildren and young people without grandparents. In 2001 he co-founded the charity Grandparents Plus to champion the role of the wider family in children's lives.
Young was created a life peer on 20 March 1978, taking the title Baron Young of Dartington.[3]
Personal life
Young married three times. In 1945 he married Joan Lawton, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. They divorced and in 1960 he married Sasha Moorsom, a novelist, sculptor and painter with whom he had a son and a daughter. Young and Moorsom worked together on several projects, including in the townships of South Africa. Moorsom died in 1993 and in 1995 Young married Dorit Uhlemann, with whom he had a daughter.
Toby Young, Michael Young's son with Moorsom, is a journalist and writer.[4]
Bibliography
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Notes
References
- ^ a b Young, Michael (29 June 2001), "Down with meritocracy: The man who coined the word four decades ago wishes Tony Blair would stop using it", The Guardian
- ^ [1] The Guardian obituary, 16 January 2002
See also Grammar schools in the Tripartite System. - ^ "No. 47497". The London Gazette. 23 March 1978.
- ^ Toby Young (24 March 2010). ""My Father Would Be Pleased About the Launch of a British Space Agency"". The Spectator.
External links
- Michael Young 1915–2002 – Social Entrepreneur The Jobs Letter, 14 February 2002
- [2] The Guardian obituary, 16 January 2002
- [3] The New York Times obituary, 25 January 2002
- The Advisory Centre for Education (ACE)
- The Young Foundation – History
- The Young Foundation