A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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Hitchens, no doubt, as a tribute to the grammar schools, includes a lengthy list of notable grammar school pupils, including prime ministers. Secondly little mention is made of the massive cottage industry of private tuition that is used to sustain selective schools.

Controversial, arguing that the destruction of the grammar schools, driven by utopian egalitarians, has ultimately failed. 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. Some examples of this misleading or potentially dishonest discourse are some of the accusations thrown about accusing critics of (pg.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. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The book equally appears to have little time for anyone who wants an open education system in which people have chances to engage with knowledge at different points in their lives and find out how they can use it to contribute to society.

In the 1960s, critics asserted that grammar schools­ (“state secondary schools that selected their pupils on merit and charged no fees”) were entrenching class divisions and unfairly determining a child’s life “by a single test at the age of 11. 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.

To anyone familiar with the weekly column written by Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday this latest jeremiad will contain no surprises. Hitchens refers to politicians who, although appearing to support comprehensive education, either send their children to out-of-area high achieving schools, or to schools in the private sector. I found plenty that I previously didn’t know, but would probably get more pleasure from seeing the arguments thoroughly debated. Based on my experience, it's been a long held falsehood that those who weren't selected for grammar school were devastated by the decision, and, as a consequence, had their lives blighted by this early "failure," and were condemned to having their schooling conducted in Secondary Moderns.

For a short while, grammar schools offered the best education imaginable by selecting for prepubescent academic ability. Peter Hitchens argues that in trying to bring about an educational system which is egalitarian, the politicians have created a system which is the exact opposite. There is quite a good section about the dilution of academic standards that has taken place since the qualifications on offer were altered to fit the new system.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).