A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System
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A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System
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Hitchens, no doubt, as a tribute to the grammar schools, includes a lengthy list of notable grammar school pupils, including prime ministers. He has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. He is a former revolutionary Marxist who now describes himself as a socially conservative Social Democrat. The real target of the book seems to be the move to a mass education system in which, according to the author, the essential values of rigour and respect for academic authority have been lost. An interesting take on the rise and fall of the grammar school/secondary modern system during the middle and towards the end of the twentieth century.
No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities.It is interesting to see how those on the left and the right contributed in different ways to eroding of real excellence in public education. The book equally appears to have little time for anyone who wants an open education system in which people have chances to engage with knowledge at different points in their lives and find out how they can use it to contribute to society. There are some extremely valid points, but I am not convinced by their rigour as yet (I need to re-read). However, the book also bemoans the significant role of church schools in the current educational system.
That the latter justify their admission by obtaining better degrees than the privately educated is quietly ignored as it is not consistent with the premise of the book that the education system has been “wrecked”.Hitchens argues that selection by ability has been replaced by selection by wealth; and seeks to show that the idealistic promises of a grammar school education for everyone have utterly failed to materialise. It sees the destruction of the emerging grammar school system as an unforgiveable and irreparable act of cultural vandalism, which cannot simply be remedied by an expansion of the last remaining grammar schools. The book comments ‘Are we wrong to see in this, deep down, a stern recognition that this outcome was just? Finally, he failed to acknowledge the extensive academic literature supporting the opposition and in doing so fails to properly address the obvious counterpoint. In this way, the book has some potential to stimulate much needed debate about the purposes, shape and structure of our educational system.
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There are, however, gaps in his narrative, namely reference to the current standardised testing (SATs) at eleven in primary schools, and how this affects pupil selection in the upper bands of comprehensive schools. Anyone who dares suggest that such divisions might be harmful to society, or feels that determining people’s academic futures at such a young age results in a massive waste of human talent, are dismissed as deluded egalitarians. Hitchens was born in 1951 so cannot attest to this personally, of course, any more than he can offer any personal experience of grammar schools, having been educated entirely in private schools. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. Of course, you can never include everyone, and I was disappointed in the absence of Baroness Hale, former President of the Supreme Court, who attended Richmond Girls’ High School, a county grammar school, in North Yorkshire.
Solid and extensive polemic by Hitchens, though fans will find little surprise in the arguments he has espoused for many years, and enemies will no doubt continue to turn a blind eye. 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”. 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.He was educated at The Leys School Cambridge, Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York.
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- EAN: 764486781913
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