A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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An interesting take on the rise and fall of the grammar school/secondary modern system during the middle and towards the end of the twentieth century. Hitchens argues that selection by ability has been replaced by selection by wealth; and seeks to show that the idealistic promises of a grammar school education for everyone have utterly failed to materialise. It is a world that, despite the undoubted challenges and inequalities of our current educational reality, I am deeply thankful not to inhabit. I am sure that many will find the holes in the various arguments that Hitchens’ makes, but essentially, he pokes and prods at the issues surrounding the education system in, I assume, a valid attempt to provoke the argument. 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?

Hitchens asserts that the 163 selective grammar schools that have survived in England are no longer allowed to be the sort of schools that they once were (whatever that may mean). He has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought.The book offers a window into the world in which we might dwell if selective education had triumphed in the 1950s; a world viewed through rose-tinted spectacles with a very selective reading of the available evidence. Meanwhile hypocritical Labour politicians like Diane Abbott send their children to expensive private day schools. It sees the destruction of the emerging grammar school system as an unforgiveable and irreparable act of cultural vandalism, which cannot simply be remedied by an expansion of the last remaining grammar schools.

I must correct him on one point: Peter Symonds' School in Winchester, a boy's Grammar School (which I attended from 1952 to 1959) did not become a Comprehensive school, but a mixed-sex Sixth-form college (which it remains) in 1974.

It is not possible in a short review to deal with more than a few examples of the determinedly anti- intellectual and unscholarly approach favoured by Hitchens but the following is quite typical. Hitchens’ work is well referenced and highlights the selection process for free grammar school places, based on academic ability at eleven, and notes, referring to comprehensive schools, how places in popular schools are determined by post codes and parents’ income.

It is suggested that much of the egalitarians’ hatred of grammar schools came from a fear of ordinary people having access to schools that were conservative, hierarchical and Christian. The criticism led, Hitchens contends, to “a huge decline in secondary education,” exacerbated by “a new system of selection by wealth”: students who cannot afford to attend one of England’s fee-paying public schools are subjected to unrigorous “common” schools, where “the old canon of expected and accepted knowledge, in literature and history, has been mocked, deconstructed and replaced.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

On page 18 he adds that these schools are utterly unlike the 1,300 such schools that flourished in the national system before 1965 because they are unfair in that they select by wealth…this is why they help the ancient universities to fulfil their state school quotas without doing too much damage to their quality. 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. Of course, you can never include everyone, and I was disappointed in the absence of Baroness Hale, former President of the Supreme Court, who attended Richmond Girls’ High School, a county grammar school, in North Yorkshire. I found plenty that I previously didn’t know, but would probably get more pleasure from seeing the arguments thoroughly debated. Similarly, the claim that a school system based on academic selection would have led to the withering of private schools, does not fully cohere with the book’s view of a middle class which will do anything to ensure that their offspring maintain an educational advantage.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.