A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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Taking leave of Downing Street in Oct ober, Liz Truss assured Britain that its best days were ahead of her. For our self-confessed cultural eulogist Peter Hitchens, they are long gone, not least due to the educational self-destruction detailed in his new book. There are other arguments in this book that feel contradictory or unconvincing. 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. However, the book also bemoans the significant role of church schools in the current educational system. 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. That is unless it is assumed that the privileged will maintain their advantage in the face of such selection, which would totally undermine the claim that grammar schools had the potential to seriously challenge educational inequalities. Hitchens admits that it is impossible to know exactly how Britain would function today if the grammars had survived. We can be almost certain that the potential of countless working and lower-middle-class children is being scuppered by the failed comprehensive experiment that leaves a third of Brits functionally illiterate.

Access to more rigorous schooling now relies on one’s postcode or wealth, which are innately connected, far more than it did when we still needed ration books.

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One of the revelations of this book is the extent to which the proponents of the comprehensive system were motivated by red in tooth and claw Marxism. Brian Simon, for example, the intellectual force behind the movement, was a member of the British Communist Party. Hitchens speculates that the deeper motivations for the comprehensive school project were closer to Marxism/Leninism than could ever be admitted. Did the almost deranged hatred of grammars, exemplified by Crosland, have as its wellspring the fear that foot soldiers in a future proletarian army were being lost to the unbiddable ranks of the middle-class? Was the comprehensive school movement a campaign for social immobility and a first, necessary phase in Britain’s ongoing cultural revolution? ‘The process was profoundly political from the beginning,’ says Hitchens. ‘There was never any educational argument for the change.’ The number of pupils in the state system rose from 5 million in 1946 to 7 million in 1960, causing the share of state pupils nationally to fall from 38% to below 30%, which strained public support. Labour endorsed comprehensive schools as early as 1951, when the tripartite era was in its infancy and the Gurney-Dixon Report had not yet been published. Hitchens reminds us that Thatcher was Education Secretary during much of the period of comprehensive reforms, though she was not a principal protagonist like those named above.

Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. It didn’t have to be this way. For a short while, grammar schools offered the best education imaginable by selecting for prepubescent academic ability. This led to unprecedented numbers of working-class children joining the elite. 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. Instead, driven by the hypocrisies and bad faith of ‘the left’ and ‘egalitarians’, and the timidity and cowardice of the conservatives, this revolution was trampled under a communist approach to schooling: the comprehensives. No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities. In the mid-60s, in an act which Hitchens likens to the dissolution of the monasteries, the process of destroying this treasure was begun and the ‘revolution’ – by which Hitchens means the short-lived flirtation with transforming Britain into a less class-ridden, meritocracy, was abandoned. Or ‘betrayed’. The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education (HEPI Occasional Paper 19) He correctly dismisses the lazy assumptions of the anti-grammar ranks, which accuse pro-grammar individuals of seeking a return to the exact education system that existed prior to their enforced decline from 1965.This creates a more meritocratic society where professional, educational and economic success more closely correlate with real ability, rather than inherited privilege. This is not just more fair, but also benefits society as a whole, as the economic potential of the country is maximised. These are not the only faults with the book. Readers are treated to Hitchens’ tedious inverted snobbery and numerous charges of hypocrisy levelled at politicians who send their children to private schools. He quotes a passage from a novel where an MP visiting officer cadets in the Raj asks who won the Battle of Plassey, and a grammar school boy amongst public school toffs is the only one who can answer “Clive, sir” (p. 81) as evidence of the positive and deserved reputations of grammar schools. Grammar schools did not forge a classless utopia because they were never intended to, nor would any schooling system be capable of doing so, as the comprehensive dogma continues to demonstrate. However, they clearly offered able students in difficult circumstances the opportunity to encounter rigorous academics . B y the mid-1960s grammars and direct grant schools were beating private schools in the battle for admissions to most elite universities. Naturally, Hitchens largely ignores the Crowther Report of 1959, whose information was based upon much more comprehensive studies than those of Gurney- Dixon, including a detailed survey of all young men entering National Service between 1956 and 1958. In his conclusions, Crowther states flatly that “a majority of the sons of professional people go to selective schools but only a minority of manual workers’ sons do so” and he adds that “a non- manual worker’s son is nearly three times as likely to go to a selective school as a manual worker’s”.