June 10, 2021 - 11:10am
In his 1961 dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut imagines a world where “everyone is finally equal.” Society is ruled by a man called The Handicapper General, whose agents force citizens to don handicaps in the name of equality: masks for those who are too beautiful, heavy weights for those who are too athletic, earpieces with disruptive white noise for those who are too intelligent. No-one is allowed any natural advantage, and in the end, everyone suffers.
A similar argument could be applied to the abolition of grammar schools. Rather than sending a substantial minority to grammar schools, which would greatly increase the diversity of people working across the professions, we send next to none as we would think it unfair on those left behind. Instead, everyone is left behind.
The impact of grammar schools on social mobility is well-documented in Adrian Wooldridge’s excellent new history, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made The Modern World. Wooldridge argues that grammar schools successfully undermined Britain’s clubby, cronyist establishment; for example, public schools’s share of Oxbridge places declined from 55% in 1959 to 38% in 1967, with the difference made almost entirely by grammar schools.
As grammar schools boomed, public schools entered a prolonged crisis; in 1956, a Tory MP warned the Independent Schools’ Association that private schools might be unable to compete with the “quite fantastic” level of facilities and results in local grammar schools. Sir Eric Anderson, ex-Headmaster of Eton College, speculated that “60% of the public schools would have gone under if grammar schools had remained.” Ironically, many of the Labour MPs who pushed through the abolition of grammar schools, like Anthony Crosland and Shirley Williams, were privately educated.
This therefore raises an intriguing hypothetical: if grammar schools had been allowed to continue, would private schools have been the casualties of Britain’s ‘meritocratic moment’? And if so, is the abolition of grammar schools at least partly to blame for our current poshocracy?
Grammar schools are, of course, far from perfect. The 11+ is a crude, overly coached entrance exam and existing grammar schools only take a tiny percentage of students on free school meals. Nonetheless, as Wooldridge points out, “academically selective schools have an impressive record in providing an escalator into the elite”. However, rather than creating a national system that makes an arbitrary division at the age of 11, Wooldridge contends that instead we should create a highly-variegated school system that has lots of different types of schools, including academically selective ones.
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SubscribeCorrect about the abolition of grammars – it was a moral, educational and political disaster, predicated on hard left notions of equality which involve the active crushing of talent. As for the 11+, it might have been crude, but it remains more refined than heaping a vast diversity of aptitude under one roof, and expecting it to do more than implode. Education is the identification and cultivation of capacity; it is not there to make up for the dispensations of nature or the inadequacies of society. Thinking otherwise is no more intelligent than trying to use a bucket to slice bread. On the public schools, yes – their popularity among egalitarian vandals remains an excellent debating point, but they represent far more than that. In brief, they represent liberty – liberty to work as a teacher for something other than the state; liberty to acquire an education from something other than the state; liberty to set up and sustain a business supplying education in competition with the state; liberty to work in a non-teaching role for such a business – and so on. They have also carried the banner of excellence through the dark years of comprehensive folly, although – thanks to “woke” pressure and infiltration – they are buckling now. That we have to fight this battle again and again is an object lesson in human folly.
The challenge surely is that whatever you do to improve schools, how do you stop Labour spitefully wrecking it when it gets back in?
Two quotes are relevant here.
Anthony Crosland, Labour Education Secretary, 1965-67
and:
John Prescott, Labour yob
To Labour, good schools are bad, and only bad schools are acceptable.
This is the challenge facing every Tory administration on every issue; but much of Lady Thatcher’s settlement survived a long spell of Blairism, which means that if education reform is entrenched and successful, the vandals of the left will hesitate in their plans to uproot it.
‘Ironically, many of the Labour MPs who pushed through the abolition of grammar schools, like Anthony Crosland and Shirley Williams, were privately educated.’
Not ‘ironic’ at all. The guilty conscience of the privileged has been a major cause of the gesture, virtue-signalling policies that have failed to generate equality.
And Jeremy Corbyn and Kier Starker.
Starting with Attlee, I believe every Labour leader has been selectively educated. One or two before were privately educated.
The only exception is Ed Miliband, but of course Holland Park Comp selects by wealth; his rich family were able to afford to live in its exclusive catchment area.
Not the case actually, with Miliband and HP. You’re thinking of Benn. Though checking on Wikipedia doesn’t give one the sense that his life was anything other than privileged.
More importantly they have made sure that others have paid the price while safeguarding the ladder that they used for use by their children
…I was in the last year who attended Grammar School in my native City (where there were sufficent places for one boy and girl in four to attend)…so I enjoyed the benefits of that education amongst clever children from every possible background…as the years below ours became comprehensive. By the time we started discussing these matters seriously in the Sixth Form, we were all pretty much convinced that the whole thing was deliberately engineered by those public school boys to preserve their existing class privilege…because we knew, as they did…that we were a great deal smarter than most of them, and much better educated.
The other thing that we observed was that the private sector in the City grew exponentially…having always been just a single Prep School preparing boys for the Common Entrance Exam for Public School, taken at 13…because people were losing faith in the state system.
Many years on, my own Son attended a “Posh Comp” doing well in the comfortable suburbs where I grew up, and brought him up subsequently…and the thing that struck me most forcibly was how very narrow socially his school was…essentially well-brought up children from comfortable backgrounds with pretty much exactly the same life experience…but no clue as to how less well-off people in their own City experience life…
An absolute disaster in terms of social mobility, and indeed the identification of real intellectual promise across society.
All we did by removing grammars was exchange selection by 11+ for selection by wealth.