A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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A subject that is now rather unfashionable and little understood by the British public, but worth a read for anyone with interest in the debate over academic selection and social mobility.

Peter Hitchens here surveys the development of public education in Britain from its origins in the 19th Century - necessary background for the main thrust of the book, which is the shameful failure of successive governments - labour and conservative - to protect high quality education in state schools, particularly in respect of talented children from poor backgrounds (myself included) which flourished in relatively brief period when Grammar Schools afforded those like me a chance of a good education, and the prospects of attending university in the days when a good degree really meant something. This is of course the opposite of what was intended, especially by former Minister of Education Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher, her successor in that role, who closed down many more Grammar Schools than Williams. Hitchens, no doubt, as a tribute to the grammar schools, includes a lengthy list of notable grammar school pupils, including prime ministers. Despite agreeing with the urgency of some of the educational challenges identified, I fundamentally disagree with the book’s implicit view of humanity and the purposes of education.and (2) With most independent schools open to students from across the full ability range, provided of course their fees can be paid, have they unwittingly become more in line with comprehensive principles than they would admit?

Mail on Sunday columnist Hitchens ( The Abolition of Britain) contends in this cranky screed that efforts to level the playing field in British education have backfired. If you want a potted history of the changes to the education from victorian times to the present day, chapter two is up your street. This is an interesting read on two levels: Hitchens provides a view of the grammar schools and the part they played, and in some areas are still playing, in British Secondary Education, before their demise and the development of comprehensive education; and, for those of us who were around at the time, he provides an overview of our own education, when our future was often determined at the age of eleven, and where there was a disparity in grammar school places across counties. No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities. Some examples of this misleading or potentially dishonest discourse are some of the accusations thrown about accusing critics of (pg.Solid and extensive polemic by Hitchens, though fans will find little surprise in the arguments he has espoused for many years, and enemies will no doubt continue to turn a blind eye. For example, when discussing the relative outcomes of selective and non-selective education, two hard to access reports which support the superiority of selective education are drawn upon and treated as a smoking gun whilst the extensive academic literature, much of which supports the opposite conclusion, is ignored. The book comments ‘Are we wrong to see in this, deep down, a stern recognition that this outcome was just?

Hitchens was born in 1951 so cannot attest to this personally, of course, any more than he can offer any personal experience of grammar schools, having been educated entirely in private schools.Thus, whereas pupils from early post- war grammar schools were admitted to Oxbridge “on merit”, the much greater proportion of state educated pupils now admitted to these universities are there as a the result of political pressure exercised through imaginary “quotas”.

To anyone familiar with the weekly column written by Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday this latest jeremiad will contain no surprises.Hitchens also fails to acknowledge that Sir Samuel Gurney- Dixon himself advises in his introduction to the report that its description of the social backgrounds of grammar school pupils should be treated with caution, being derived entirely from information supplied by the head teachers of the 10% sample of grammar schools on which the report is based. If, in 1956, there had been an expansion of grammar schools to meet the baby bulge then this green and pleasant land would have been preserved and led to the abolition of nearly all private education. He doesn't attbeot to tease out, for example, to what extent grammars produced better results because they were better vs better results because they selected the best pupils. His overall point is probably the right one: that you can have better education I'd you target it at those who need it, not at those who can't, and that trying to create a fully comprehensive, fully egalitarian system tends to produce the second outcome, not the first. that it was only to be expected that the children of the poor would be under- represented in grammar schools: Being based on merit, grammar schools…would obviously favour those classes in society that are ambitious and can only attain their aims through merit and hard work.