Tyrants of every hue, be it autocratic, totalitarian, democratic or liberal-democratic, have a vested interest in keeping the population ignorant. They remember that, for the one-eyed man to be king, he first has to blind everyone else.
That’s why British grammar schools, all state-funded, were destroyed in the 1960s. Anthony Crosland, Secretary of State for Education (1965–1967), famously declared: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland”.
He was as good as his word, or almost. If there is something Left-wing tyrants are good at, it’s breaking something that works well for most people and replacing it with something that sounds good to evil ideologues.
Britain’s three-tier education system was a burr under Labour’s blanket. Grammar schools were elective, only admitting children who did well in 11-Plus examinations. Those less capable went to technical or secondary modern schools, where the accent was more on practical skills than on recondite academic disciplines.
The lines separating the tiers were fluid: underachieving grammar school pupils could be sent down, while gifted secondary modern pupils could move up. As a result, some 20 per cent of the population were well-educated, with the rest literate, numerate and more than capable of fending for themselves in the rough-and-tumble of grown-up life.
That wasn’t good enough for Left-wing tyrants. Where was equality in that system? If it was the last thing they did, they were committed to one system for all, with everyone emerging equally ignorant and equally corrupted by wicked brainwashing.
Now, by chance I happened to glance at the curriculum of one of Moscow’s top grammar schools before the revolution, the Polivanov gymnasium. Gymnasia were an equivalent of English grammar schools: elective, state-funded and usually successful.
Pre-revolutionary gymnasia provided a much better education, certainly in the humanities, than post-revolutionary universities. I can attest to that, having been fortunate to know several old alumni of those schools who made me ashamed of my university training.
The Polivanov gymnasium was a venerable Moscow institution. Its graduates included poets Valery Bryusov and Andrey Bely, Leo Tolstoy’s children, the world chess champion Alexander Alekhin and many other illustrious figures.
Polivanov himself defined his mission as “forming personalities capable of serving the common good with the gift of their individuality; capable of choosing a field they love, being inspired only by work directed towards virtue.”
So what kind of curriculum would serve this goal? If you’ve had children in school, read this and weep.
The Polivanov curriculum was designed for nine years. Taught in first form were Scripture, the Russian language, calligraphy, reading, arithmetic and French. In second through fourth forms, these were complemented with Latin, Greek, German, algebra, geometry, geography, Russian history and general history. Fifth form also featured courses in stylistics, literary theory, history of ancient literature. Sixth form added rhetoric, folklore, ancient Russian literature, physics. Taught in the last two forms were history of Russian literature, foreign literature, logic, basic calculus, cosmography. Drawing and PE featured throughout, and there were optional additional courses in most disciplines.
I imagine the curricula of top grammar schools in England, circa 1900, weren’t a million miles away. Even later in the century, grammar schools still functioned well. Some of the best-educated men among my friends were grammar school boys back in the day.
All this just goes to show how progress works. Today’s comprehensives ditch most of those arcane, elitist courses contributing to the exploitation and enslavement of the working classes, women and off-white races.
Instead pupils in modern British comprehensives bone up on such invaluable disciplines as sex education (with an accent on sexual mechanics and condom studies), systemic racism, gender studies, critical race theory, equity and diversity classes, implicit bias, ‘queering’ of science, social and political activism – along with ‘decolonised’ traditional subjects, such as natural science, history, geography and maths.
Many, not to say most, graduates of such progressive schools end up moving their lips when reading and being unable to figure out the change from a tenner when buying a £7.55 item. But they are ready to man the barricades of class war, or else serve as its storm troopers.
They don’t become the typological British equivalents of those old Russians whose school was committed to “forming personalities capable of serving the common good with the gift of their individuality”. They become the equivalents of the ghouls who murdered those educated chaps, banged them up in death camps or drove them out of the country.
The joke is on Anthony Crosland, Shirley Williams and other gauleiters of the comprehensive mayhem. They managed to annihilate a system based on meritocracy and replaced it with one based on plutocracy. Instead of an elite based on intellect and education, they ushered in an elite based on money. Pretending to seek equality, they created a much worse type of inequality.
For people who can afford to spare their offspring the delights of moron-spewing comprehensive indoctrination have to send them to fee-paying public schools. Since the state is no longer prepared to fund academic excellence, parents have to do so themselves.
The fees for top schools are out of sight for most parents. Typically, they run upwards of £70,000 a year. Multiply that by, say, three, and you’ll agree that only wealthy people can afford to educate their children properly.
Perhaps ‘properly’ is an inappropriate word; ‘marginally better’ would work more accurately. The Polivanov standards, along with their English versions, aren’t really on offer in public schools either.
The problem is that any dominant system based on fraudulent principles will inevitably corrupt all minor systems supposedly independent of it. The UK National Curriculum, mandatory for all schools, leaves little room for public schools to manoeuvre. They still have to cram their pupils’ heads full of ideological bilge, with serious academic subjects hogging the margins.
Let’s add parenthetically that universities fail to plug the holes left by secondary schools. The cretinous idea that half the population should receive higher education was first introduced by Tony Blair and faithfully followed by subsequent cretins. As a result, few universities can even approach the standards set by the grammar schools, never mind universities, of yesteryear.
And then ignoramuses educated in that fashion march to the ballot boxes and vote in transparent subversives like Labour and the Greens, parties committed to turning Britain into today’s answer to post-revolutionary Russia.
But don’t let me get going on my pet subject of ‘democracy’, that mendacious modern misnomer for ochlocracy channelled into ideological conduits by evil men.
P.S. Addressing the scaled-down Victory Day parade in Red Square, Putin described 9 May as “the most important day in our calendar”.
What happened to Christmas and Easter? There I was, thinking that Russia is committed to ‘traditional values’, as behoves what Peter Hitchens considers “the most Christian nation in Europe”.