Peter Hitchens, alas, gives a masterclass.
Having rehearsed, as is always welcome, the well-known Trotskyist history of Alan Milburn, Hitchens, who is of the same generation and who has a similar backstory, calls for grammar schools as the remedy to the Poshness Test.
Having rehearsed, as is always welcome, the well-known Trotskyist history of Alan Milburn, Hitchens, who is of the same generation and who has a similar backstory, calls for grammar schools as the remedy to the Poshness Test.
But these youths had already
been to university when they were turned down for jobs because they were not
posh enough. This has absolutely nothing to do with grammar schools.
For that point of view,
what good were those, anyway? Who got the best jobs in the Britain of the
1950s? People who had gone to the grammar schools? Never mind those rare birds,
people who had gone to the grammar schools from working-class backgrounds?
Hardly!
Apart from the one who
is simply too old to have done so, all of the candidates for Leader of the Labour Party
attended comprehensive schools. One of those institutions retains the name
"Grammar School", but it has not been selective since its old girl,
Liz Kendall, was too young to have attended it.
The argument that those
therefore cannot have been "real" comprehensives is entirely
circular. Yvette Cooper's comp did not even have a Sixth Form, so she went to
the local college. Then on to Oxford, Harvard, the LSE and the Cabinet.
The grammar schools lobby is one of several, such as the Proportional Representation lobby and the lobby for open primaries, and such as the SNP and UKIP (especially, but not exclusively, on immigration), that have a single answer to every question, and whose call-and-response style is more appropriate to a religious revival than to serious politics.
Hitchens is better than this. He ought to be, as he often is, challenging the lazy shibboleths of popular Rightism, rather than parroting them himself.
From no family background of higher education, comprehensivisation got me into Durham, and then that, Durham and a reference from you got me into Harvard. The people who scream for grammar schools now, didn't they used to use the term itself as an insult?
ReplyDeleteYes, indeed.
DeleteThey acquired any interest in this only when the implementation of their own economic ideology priced them out of the commercial schools.
If they thought that the grammar schools would serve anyone from well above the middle down, then they would be dead against them.
the largest ever Europe-wide 2014 survey of tens of thousands of 15-year-olds across 22 nations published in European Sociological Review which found that "comprehensive schools prevent pupils from poor backgrounds achieving their potential". The results showed how much influence wealth had on pupils’ marks in comprehensively-educated countries, compared to countries with grammar school systems.
ReplyDelete""Overall, 9.4 per cent of the variance in UK performance was explained by the student’s social background, compared with a European average of 4.5 per cent. Scandinavian countries, which have even fewer remaining selective schools than Britain, also had high figures, with Sweden on 9.6 per cent and Norway on 8.1 per cent.""
""However, countries which have retained selective education have virtually eliminated class disadvantage. Germany-which has a grammar school system- had the lowest figure at 1.4 per cent, followed by Hungary (1.5 per cent), Romania (1.6 per cent) and Austria (2.6 per cent).""
The study found "British pupils were among the worst affected in Europe, with only those from Sweden lagging further behind.""
Case closed, Lindsay.
It will come as news, to say the least, to the people in Germany, Hungary, Romania and Austria that their countries had "virtually eliminated class disadvantage". Oh, no, they have not.
DeleteIf you have not been able to get on as well as, say, Andy Burnham, or Yvette Cooper, or Liz Kendall, or Mhairi Black, the MP who is young enough to be my daughter, then the fault is in you. It is not "the system". It's you.