Elective government and selective schools

Between 1965 and now British education slid downhill from being the envy of the world to becoming its laughingstock.

The pre-1965 11-plus exams would confound most of today’s 18-year-olds, including many entering university. Even basic literacy is nowadays seen as an achievement, with some 80 per cent of school leavers having reading problems. Subtracting 1/3 from 1/2 is seen as a pie in the sky, and being able to figure out change in a shop as a sign of uncanny talent.

Why? In a word, democracy.

Or rather modern democracy of one-man-one-vote raised to an absolute and transferred into all areas, including those that in a sane society should have nothing to do with politics. Such as education.

Our crypto-republic is confirming an ineluctable law of nature: all modern republics gravitate towards democracy, all democracies gravitate towards ideological egalitarianism. And, Midas in reverse, egalitarianism turns to shambles everything it touches.

Those 11-plus exams separated academically promising children from those who were better suited to more practical careers. The former went to grammar schools (superior to most of today’s universities), the latter to secondary moderns (superior to most of today’s comprehensives). Thus 25 per cent of the pupils were well-educated, and the rest sufficiently competent to handle themselves in the rough-and-tumble of adult life.

Then, in 1965, in rode the Labour egalitarian brigade led by Education Secretary Anthony Crosland on his high horse. He took an oath, hand on Das Kapital: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school…”

So he did. The downhill slide began, proving yet again that it’s only ever possible to equalise things at the lowest common denominator. Comprehensive education means comprehensive ignorance, rendering millions of people unfit to function in modern life.

Mrs May, herself a grammar school girl, has vowed to bring grammars back, which is laudable. Yet the genie of egalitarianism has acquired a life all its own. It won’t be pushed back into the bottle whence it came.

Egalitarian education has over three generations mostly spawned egalitarian teachers, those who see nothing wrong with the system, realising they wouldn’t do well in any other. Many of them are products of comprehensives themselves.

Over time they’ve formed a whole alphabet soup of unions, organisations, associations and what have you. These are committed to cutting the cables on any lift capable of carrying our education back to the top.

When Education Secretary Justine Greening tried to defend the expansion of grammar schools to a gathering of head masters, she was mercilessly heckled. Educators who don’t educate screamed “Rubbish”, “Shame” and “No” in voices doubtless built up at party rallies and CND marches.

Such strident opposition reminded the government of the aforementioned ineluctable law: egalitarianism has to triumph over sanity; ideology has to trump reason. Hanging its head down in shame, HMG has set out to expiate its mortal sin of elitism.

Plans are being hatched to lower entry marks for children from poorer backgrounds. If such children fail at age 11, they’ll be given other chances with 12-plus and 13-plus exams. That way everyone will be able to benefit from grammar school education.

These ideologised creatures don’t realise that trying to enable everyone to benefit from grammar school education is tantamount to making sure no one will. Making grammars egalitarian will effectively turn them into comprehensives by another name.

That’s just fine for today’s lot, as it was for Crosland and his fellow wreckers. Ideology creates a virtual world, as divorced from reality as the manic delirium of a schizophrenic.

Yet reality does exist, and it’s unsentimental. Contrary to the silly pronouncement adumbrating modernity, all men aren’t created equal. Some are taller than others, some are stronger, some are more aggressive, some are braver, some are kinder. More to the point, some are cleverer than others and better able to absorb academic disciplines.

Such people tend to do better in practical life, and they usually marry within the same group. Their children, on average, are better equipped genetically and culturally for academic pursuits than children from less successful households.

Trained by Marx to ascribe everything to social demarcations, today’s Britons talk about such things in terms of middle class or working class, even though it’s the ‘middle classes’ who these days do most of the work. The same toxic egalitarianism transferred to economic activity has enabled the ‘working classes’ not to work, turning them into déclassé pariahs.

Whatever you call these groups, for all the efforts of our fully paid-up egalitarians, children growing up in households full of books will be better educated than those whose, typically single-parent, households are full of crushed beer cans and discarded syringes. And even those who grow up in families closer to the working classes of old will be at an educational disadvantage.

Free grammar schools are designed to help the brighter of those children overcome such disadvantages. The design doesn’t always work out – perfect systems don’t exist. However, it succeeds often enough, while turning grammar schools into misnomers never will. But that doesn’t matter to our ‘progressives’.

The march of progress is inexorable, as Mrs May with all her good intentions is finding out. Ideologised ignorance will prevail.

8 thoughts on “Elective government and selective schools”

  1. “We ain’t seen nothing yet”. Just wait until this next batch of “Y Gen” “Z?” or whatever we are up to graduate! The big trend is to have “bring your own device” compulsory education. What that suppose to mean is the new wave of youth will be prepared for tomorrow by being totally computer literate. These devices, which have practically replaced paper, will expand their education and have great minds leading the nations into a real-world future. The only problem is that most of the young minds are playing games and watching You-Tube and instantly minimise the evidence when teacher draws near.

  2. “Between 1965 and now British education slid downhill from being the envy of the world to becoming its laughingstock.”

    More than anything else there has been demographic shift too? The educational “system” is sound but the students are not so much so?

  3. Then, in 1965, in rode the Labour egalitarian brigade led by Education Secretary Anthony Crosland on his high horse. He took an oath, hand on Das Kapital: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school’”

    Some clarification needed here. Grammar school in the English context means private school? Where the English elite sends their children, Eton and Rugby for instance.

    1. I’m afraid you’ve got it all wrong. Grammar schools in England are free, selective state schools. Private schools in England, such as Eton, are called public schools because they are financed by foundations.

      1. Grammar Schools in England were free in the Tudor period but later on many charged fees until the Butler Education Act in 1944. Some remain free and selective despite Crossland’s wishes. Manchester GS became fully independent and charged fees like a private school. In that respect, it resembles the self proclaimed Grammar Schools that exist in our former colonies.

  4. Modern commerce ‘don’t need no educashion’ or ‘doesn’t need education’ in the old ‘device free’ language. This is why modern graduates are ideal employees for zero hours contracts and multiple menial jobs. However, their degrees are worthless and a waste of money. Perhaps if we cleared all the riff-raff out of Oxford and Cambridge and re-Booted those degraded universities as the only ones allowed, we could save an enormous amount of money and spend it on all the things that the future degree-lees ‘multiple menials’ could never afford.

  5. The criminal conspiracies of the political elites against the children of England have been manifold and heinous. So diabolical that it is doubtful that history will be able to deineate them.

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