From here to here, the message is clear.
The clamour for grammars comes, not from products of them, but from people who would never previously have considered state education for their children, but who have been priced out of the commercial sector by the economic system that they themselves have spent more than 30 years imposing at the ballot box.
It is true, and evident from the first link, that there has been a decline in academic standards at many commercial schools as a result of their transformation into luxury hotels for the progeny of the global megarich, with accommodation based on the Four Seasons, and with the ability of pupils to stable their own horses on site, but with Classics no longer taught.
That last point, at least, is very much like the state sector after the introduction of Thatcher's National Curriculum.
Selection by examination means selection based on parental ability to pay for tuition. It always did, and it always will. Those who claim that that would not apply if the system were a national one ignore the fact that it did when it was, and hope that merely by asserting that it would not, then anyone might believe them, even though their claim is beyond preposterous.
Their true motivation is the avoidance, both, as ever, of normal people's children, and, these days, of enormous school fees. They now expect the rest of us to pay for that in the most upfront way.
If grammar schools had working-class, or even middle-middle-class, people at them, then those now demanding them would refuse to have anything to to with them.
Moreover, admission to grammar schools was, is, and always will be based on more than the examination, quite apart from the fact that primary schools routinely did not and do not enter for the exam pupils who "would not fit in at grammar school".
It was and is just as much based on the letter from the Headteacher of the primary school.
The much-vaunted German Gymnasium system is an even worse variation on this, in which comfortably bourgeois parents and teachers have cosy chats to stitch up admissions brazenly, as the formal operation of the system.
Like our own fee-charging schools, in fact. Except that people who are comfortably bourgeois can no longer afford the entrance charge on the door to such cosy chats, and understandably no longer much like what is now on offer on the other side, anyway.
But they voted for this. So tough. Welcome to the world that everyone else has always - always - inhabited.
The clamour for grammars comes, not from products of them, but from people who would never previously have considered state education for their children, but who have been priced out of the commercial sector by the economic system that they themselves have spent more than 30 years imposing at the ballot box.
It is true, and evident from the first link, that there has been a decline in academic standards at many commercial schools as a result of their transformation into luxury hotels for the progeny of the global megarich, with accommodation based on the Four Seasons, and with the ability of pupils to stable their own horses on site, but with Classics no longer taught.
That last point, at least, is very much like the state sector after the introduction of Thatcher's National Curriculum.
Selection by examination means selection based on parental ability to pay for tuition. It always did, and it always will. Those who claim that that would not apply if the system were a national one ignore the fact that it did when it was, and hope that merely by asserting that it would not, then anyone might believe them, even though their claim is beyond preposterous.
Their true motivation is the avoidance, both, as ever, of normal people's children, and, these days, of enormous school fees. They now expect the rest of us to pay for that in the most upfront way.
If grammar schools had working-class, or even middle-middle-class, people at them, then those now demanding them would refuse to have anything to to with them.
Moreover, admission to grammar schools was, is, and always will be based on more than the examination, quite apart from the fact that primary schools routinely did not and do not enter for the exam pupils who "would not fit in at grammar school".
It was and is just as much based on the letter from the Headteacher of the primary school.
The much-vaunted German Gymnasium system is an even worse variation on this, in which comfortably bourgeois parents and teachers have cosy chats to stitch up admissions brazenly, as the formal operation of the system.
Like our own fee-charging schools, in fact. Except that people who are comfortably bourgeois can no longer afford the entrance charge on the door to such cosy chats, and understandably no longer much like what is now on offer on the other side, anyway.
But they voted for this. So tough. Welcome to the world that everyone else has always - always - inhabited.
Any system, however well designed, will allow the wealthy to buy their children a better education. The question is which system would afford the children of the poor the best opportunity for social mobility, and it seems to me that a tripartite system, comprised of secondary moderns, grammars and vocational schools (with rather more of the latter than there were prior to the 1970s), would be the best possible state system.
ReplyDeleteThe ideal would of course be a largely private system, with school vouchers provided to poorer families, but I recognise that this is politically unfeasible for the near future.
Thank goodness.
ReplyDeleteAlthough you could not have a tripartite system on that privatised basis. Like the old bipartite system, it would require very strong Local Education Authorities in order to make it logistically possible.
That is why "free" schools are forbidden to select academically. They couldn't, even if there allowed to.
'That is why "free" schools are forbidden to select academically. They couldn't, even if there allowed to.'
ReplyDeleteWhy not? And what reason other than your general antipathy to capitalism do you have for objecting to the school vouchers idea?
You're wrong that selection by examination means selection by money.
ReplyDeleteIt's our current system of selection-by-estate-agent that means that.
Building enough grammars and technical schools to cater for the children of every catchment area would ensure that, however many middle-class kids got into them, there'd always be room for the talented poor.
Selection by house price doesn't benefit anyone except the rich.
For everyone else, its Bog Standard Comps all round.
It must be charming that you have only just thought of all of that, Anonymous.
ReplyDelete"The talented poor"? Can you hear yourself? And the people whom you so charmingly thus describe rarely or never went (or go) to grammar schools.
If they did, then you would be against them, at least in the sense that you would want nothing to do with them for your own family.
The suddenly resurgent grammar schools lobby is out of his depth. It knows absolutely nothing about state eduction, and never cared to know anything.
Until its own favoured policies priced it out of the commercial schools. And, it is true, greatly lowered the standards at them.
Education vouchers? Utterly beyond vulgarity. Fees are coarse enough. But vouchers? Urrrggghhh!
'Education vouchers? Utterly beyond vulgarity. Fees are coarse enough. But vouchers? Urrrggghhh!'
ReplyDeleteNext best thing to an argument, I suppose.
You know what I mean.
ReplyDeleteIt's a dated idea, one of those things that used to circulate in the Thatcher years and then in Blair's particularly odd moments.