Speaking to a meeting organised by Edinburgh West SNP last week, people were surprised when I told them my grandparents lived for many decades in West Pilton Gardens. They were surprised because I look and sound like an English ex-public schoolboy. I appear like this because I attended an English Grammar School, the entire purpose of which was to turn out ersatz public schoolboys. So am I walking proof of Theresa May’s thesis of grammar schools being the answer to social mobility for bright people from poor backgrounds? No.
The wrench has stayed with me for 46 years of my little group of primary school friends being split up between those who were sent off to Paston Grammar School and those who went to the local secondary modern. With the best will in the world, the separation became insuperable very quickly. I am back in Sheringham now for my mother’s funeral. It is very plain that an exam at 11, which you could pass or fail by one mark, changed people’s lives forever. Simply put, the majority of people still around are those who failed the 11 plus, as a pass led on to university and much wider life opportunities. Anyone who tells you that secondary moderns do not carry a stigma is lying – and you cannot create grammar schools without creating secondary moderns, whatever you call them.
Socially it was still worse as two of us four siblings passed the 11 plus and two failed. There is no doubt at all that this exam result at 11 – which had nothing to do with any difference in intelligence or industry in the family – irrevocably affected our careers and even, to some extent, the nature of our family relationships, though we are still very close. What is more it is not a coincidence that the two who passed were the eldest two – and we both had started our primary education when the family was very well off. By the time the younger two started we had fallen on hard times in a big way, and had to move. There are numerous statistics to prove that selection favours the wealthier. I know this.
The grammar school itself was absolutely modelled on the lines of a public (which is Orwellian for private) school and I believe had been one. It had this very strange militaristic ethos, and the teachers were all men who had been profoundly affected by fighting the second world war. There was a Cadet Force where you had to dress in real military uniform once a week and fire guns and march up and down a lot, and it was plain the aim was to turn you from a rustic youth into a member of the officer class. Latin was compulsory, discipline was extreme, and teachers thought it amusing to throw blackboard rubbers – with heavy wooden backs – at children’s heads.
It was so successful in turning out ersatz privately educated pupils that I have been mistaken for one more or less since. And there is no doubt at all that this helped me get in to the fast stream of the FCO – in an intake in which I was one of only two state school educated entrants in the fast stream. There were two graduate entry streams – administrative (fast stream) and executive (slow stream). In 1984 there were just two state school entrants in the fast stream, and no private school entrants in the slow stream.
It is this plucking of hearty young yeomen and turning them into officers for which Theresa May nostalgically yearns. But I absolutely hated the school. I hated the discipline, I hated the militarism, I hated the narrow thought. I hated it so much I performed terribly – I got a B and two E’s at A Level and scraped into university on clearing. Yet once in University with much more personal freedom, I flourished and never in my entire University career came less than top in any exam I took, culminating in a first class degree. The grammar school system had almost destroyed my potential because of my reaction against its class divisiveness.
Once in the FCO, I could perhaps pass in manners, knowledge and speech patterns as one of my fellow high fliers, but thankfully I lacked their class solidarity and social codes. That is why I could be a maverick and a whistleblower, and not go along with torture and extraordinary rendition, with which the Flashmans who dominate the FCO had no problem.
Theresa May was absolutely right that there already is selection in education, and that it is selection by wealth. But those buying a private education are not actually buying a better education – they are buying admission to a social network of wealth and privilege, bonded by common contacts and attitudes. The answer is not to sneak a few people into these networks, but to dismantle the social structures that have beset the UK for generations.
Bringing back grammar schools will not increase social mobility. Abolishing private schools will increase social mobility. The State can and should insist that every child has a state education, secular and of the highest quality. Attendance at secular state school during normal terms and school hours should be compulsory for all children in Britain.
I went to a comprehensive and I can assure you that the wrench happens at comprehensives as well, as people get “streamed” by their ability.
Surely being separated from infant school friends must be the least of an adult’s persons personal traumas. It was going to happen at some point in life anyway, if their ability level is different to yours.
I hated my school life at a comprehensive and I was a considerable under-achiever. This was exacerbated by the fact that both my parents went to grammar school and simply couldn’t understand how bad comprehensives are. You won’t understand it either if you haven’t had to live through it. They can be really bad indeed.
I would have loved the opportunity to go to grammar school but I never even had the opportunity because the area I grew up in didn’t have them.
School is shit! You’ve just got to ask yourself what is it for? Why bundle loads of kids into classrooms where they have do what some person who is supposedly learned so they can create output. It’s a racket, it’s all about control – to make you a good law abiding little citizen. And off we all go, accepting this enforced belief system that really only benefits those at the top as “common sense” and in fact when we question the sense of it at school we are punished and when we question the sense of it as adults we’re written off as crazy or difficult. No, it’s not for me. Schools a racket. There are a million ways of learning that are better that any kind of school.
I think you’re right that the very atmosphere of school is stultifying and, even if the pupils were getting taught a subject they would find interesting outside, they are put off it when taught about it in school. Almost my favourite comedy sketch is that scene in Monty Python’s “Meaning of Life” where John Cleese teaches the class about sex by doing it with his wife in front of them. The kids are as bored as they would have been had the topic been trigonometry.
I would have miserably failed an 11+ since I only learned to read at 10 and was widely considered ‘backward’. My brother would have passed with ease. Thankfully, the 11+ and grammar schools were done away with in my LEA long before.
It’s very hard to make the case against selection in education because the case against is evidence based and statistical while the case for is anecdotal and based on emotion. People want ‘in’ to the grammar school. They don’t care if the system works as long as they can secure a minor advantage.
Grammar schools and private education should be done away with ASAP. If everyone has to go to the local comprehensive then there will be a sudden and massive increase in funding for education – and it is decades of under funding that is the root of all that is wrong in UK education.
Same goes for private hospitals and health care. It’s a kind of apartheid whichever way you parse it.
Craig,
You mentioned your Mother’s funeral – so please accept my condolences.
My mother passed over a decade ago in her early 80s.
Since we are now discussing school, mine is bit different. I did my 11 plus in Jamaica and attended the equivalent of an English Grammar school in Jamaica up to 5th form. Therefrom to England for A levels and matriculated to London University with 4 A levels.
Undergrad economics and political science. Post-grad into law. So, my disposition for public interest cases and in human rights related matters which draws me to your commentaries and activism.
Vwey perceptive, recalling my experience in the USA with terrible army schools which my parents thought could be corrected by tossing me into Phillips Exeter Academy, now catching the headlines with its most unfair treatment of co=educational teenage promiscuity, would make up for all my shortcomings.
Resulted in my wasting my undergraduate days at Columbia which was only corrected by being drafted during the Korean War, serving in the Army’s CIC, and trying journalism for a few tears after my discharge.
Only started getting really educated when I went straight for a Ph/D. in political science which resulted in my trying to smash many educational boxes.
And thanks for sparing us anything about Peter Oborne on Willies, and the ‘Iron Lady’ on policy making.
“…trying journalism for a few tears after my discharge.”
Best and most honest autocorrect I’ve seen in ages!
The (1960s) 11 plus system in Paisley was a mess. There were 4 possible levels, not just pass or fail.
In the class above me, almost all of them went to level 4, in the class below almost all of them went to level 1*. It was a dysfunctional lottery which badly affected two brothers I knew.
* Level 1 was Paisley Grammar, Andrew Neil’s old school. Neil’s father was an army sergeant major.
Eric, thankfully, by the time I was there, 1968-79, the 11-plus had been scrapped. I was very lucky, as I went to Paisley Grammar as it was transitioning from modest fee-paying school to selective (at 13 yrs and again at 15 yrs of age) repository for the local comprehensives, to being fully comprehensive. So I had the best of all worlds. It was great because there were lots of bright kids from working-class backgrounds and different attitudes which prevented a sort of almost incestuous middle-class cabal from developing. Racism was endemic in society at the time, of course. The teachers were excellent. There was no militarism. I was lucky; I didn’t know it at the time of course.
Think you should see the bit about the military, Suhayi, in a bit wider sense.
In America’s prep schools and I assume Britain’s grammar ones, the schools themselves are the model, being praised for what they apparently are, and wondering if one will measure up to what they are,
I remember most distinctly a math master, who knew little about the subject except algebra and geometry, continually telling me as soon as i arrived that Exeter made a big mistake by accepting me unconditionally. Should have prepped before at places where it sent its rejects. like Choate
It’s still paying for the insult
Interesting. The year I was referring to was 1967, so I must have been in the last year. Good to hear you had a positive experience at the Grammar. I went to Camphill (thanks to my mother). It was pretty rough.
Tiny photo of rector Mr Corbett. He was head of social security tribunals . I met him many times.
http://www.blackandwhitearmy.com/forums/uploads/post-74-1142544358.jpg
Thanks, Eric. Good photo! Small world! Yes, Camphill School, which by the early 1970s, was housed in a brand new Modernist building, had a good educational reputation, as I recall – quite a few people did really well as adults. It also was famous in the area for – luxury of luxuries – having a swimming pool! It’s where I learned to swim, sort of, one summer holiday, in 1971.
There is a vignette in my mind of me being driven back home from one of these lessons one Saturday morning in my father’s silver-coloured Zephyr 6 (in those days, children could sit in the front and the new-fangled seat-belt only went around one’s waist), the sun of the perpetual Scottish not-quite-summer dappling the car bonnet through the leaves of tall trees, and listening to the Marmalade’s ‘ excellent ‘Cousin Norman’ on Radio 1.
Mr Corbett was an old school socialist, I think, though I don’t know for sure. Very Presbyterian, stern, furrowed brows and so on, but fair. He oversaw the seven-year (1969-76) transition to comprehensive. He is the reason I got into the school.
Social mobility was greater than is now the case, when there were private schools and state grammar and secondary modern schools.
If a person earns enough money, why should they not be able to spend it on whatever they like, including a private education for their kids? If they can’t get that in Britain they’ll buy it abroad.
Focus on educational opportunity leads to less social mobility not more.
“More than 50 years of education reforms ‘have not helped social mobility’
Oxford University study led by influential equalities academic finds many born in the 1970s and 1980s are being forced down the social ladder.
More than half a century of sweeping educational reforms have done little to improve Britain’s social mobility, according to one of the country’s leading experts on equality. Instead, young people from less well-off families entering today’s labour market have far less favourable prospects than their parents or even their grandparents, despite having gained much better qualifications.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/12/uk-education-reforms-not-helped-social-mobility
Good point. The key determinant, I think, is distribution of wealth/relative poverty.
The idea that “education” is of more than marginal importance in promoting inequality is wrong, though it is carefully cherished by ‘reformers’ unwilling to get to grips with the real problem, which is in the distribution of power.
The current system of education, however, plays an important role in protecting the system: what educators teach is the ideology of class society. ‘Educating our masters” is about teaching people that though they have the vote they remain powerless in the face of eternal ‘truths’.
One of the most amazing aspects of modern British society is that Private schools are flourishing again. When Rip van Winkle went to sleep in the mid-seventies he was fairly confident that, half a century later, most of the old Public Schools would be closed down or greatly reduced in size and catering largely to a tourist clientele. The new Comprehensives were providing a far better education and the ex-Public School boy was something of a figure of fun, a tyro Blimp, with weird sexual and social appetites, the victim of family snobbery, rather than the beneficiary of those ‘parental sacrifices’ out of which Thatcherism was built.
Private education should be taxed ’till the pips squeak’; every form of public subsidy should be withdrawn from it. And a comprehensive review of the origins of the original, charitable, institutions should be conducted to establish when and how places reserved for the education of ‘poor (in the economic sense) scholars’ became outposts for the indulgence of those for whom scholarship is a joke.
The problem of the new education system must then be addressed; as May’s ideas suggest the ruling idea is that the Public/State divide be extended into the State system, nurturing faux Etons and, their inevitable twins , Slough Secondary Moderns. Isn’t that what the Blair Academy idiocy is about?
What we need to do is to plan an entirely new system of education, designed to free children from the fears and insecurities which cripple their learning. And prepare them for lives of semi slavery and dull acceptance of the conventional dispensation.
The original use of the word pauper signified not the lack of goods but the lack of power: the pauper was an impotent person, whose views were of no account. Modern education manufactures such impotence.
“nurturing faux Etons and, their inevitable twins , Slough Secondary Moderns.”
There is always a tendency towards polarisation in state schools. Wealthier parents, who can afford to move into the catchment area of a good state school do so, thus boosting the cost of houses in that catchment area and forcing out poorer parents. In the catchment areas of bad schools the same thing happens in reverse.
“The original use of the word pauper signified not the lack of goods but the lack of power: the pauper was an impotent person, whose views were of no account. ”
That may have been a use of the word, but it is not its original use, which simply was “person destitute of property or means of livelihood,”
Strangely there seems to be no such opposition to selection at 16 for sixth form college and at 18 for university.
“The State can and should insist that every child has a state education, secular and of the highest quality.”
But it won’t be of the highest quality. It will be of lowest quality, dumbed down to the level of the lowest achiever, and infected ideologically at every level by socialist teaching staff, themselves the product of Marxist indoctrination in the education system, who are opposed to individual achievement and believe that if everyone can’t succeed, nobody should at all. And if it is not those teachers who drag your children down, it will be the vast pool of talentless, mediocre and lazy time-servers who can’t be got rid of.
“Latin was compulsory”
Quite right too. I did Latin at a comprehensive and found it a real eye-opener. Most worthwhile subject on the syllabus, by a country mile.
Wish I could say the same about studying Latin.
Nothing more boring sand point;less than going through Caesar’s Gallic Wars but reading other Roman writers could have been okay.
Would have preferred a course, preferably in English, on Rpme’s contributions to Western civilization, especially its imperialism.
I think you can do Ancient History these days.
Didn’t go anywhere near Caesar in Latin, it was more day-to-day stuff like Pliny. The beauty of it though is the insight it gives you into the hidden meanings and origins of much of common English.
A course in ancient history is too soon and too broad for high school students.
Just amazed at how private schools like Exeter have changed, dropping a most dated curriculum with courses like learning
Greek and Latin, for courses which anticipate ones in college.
I found the Gallic Wars stultifying in English, I dread to think what Latin would have been like.
I did Latin to O Grade; it was compulsory in 2nd Year but most people dropped it after that. I did it in 3rd and 4th Years only because it was reqd in those days to get into Law at Uni. and I wanted to keep my options open. I enjoyed the historical and cultural material, but not the linguistics, which I found really dry. I managed to get an A score because I memorised the former and got 99% in it but I disliked the linguistics so much that I only got 50-something% in the latter so that my overall mark was over 70%. I liked French much better.
And yet curiously is there more or less social mobility in France? A country which appears more egalitarian. Europeans often comment informally on how there is in reality actually more social mobility here and that there are many social and trade barriers in their countries.
I went to a grammar school and did ok. So did my wife and my 3 children. Never felt that I was ersatz privately educated. It did my social mobility wonders but that was just the possibility it opened to get to university which no one in my family had done before, even in 1977. A 2.1 and direct entry to the tax inspectorate did the rest. Many of my pre grammar school friends did well some stayed, some have gone and others like me returned home.
I feels some affinity with you and your views Craig but no individuals experience should replace hard solid research on the impact of different education opportunities on working class kids. Does it exist, it should be informing the debate. By coincidence I passed through Sheringham yesterday for an hour and enjoyed a delicious Rhubarb and Ginger ice cream on the sea front.
My condolences on losing your mum but congratulations on the great roots she gave you.
Allowing more grammar schools is not the same as bringing back secondary moderns. I struggle to see the difference between grammar schools and academies/free schools that practice selection. Craig’s grammar school was very different to mine as we had none of the militarism he writes of. Indeed, not one of my contemporaries was in a cadet force of any hue. Nor was Latin compulsory but an option in our second year and that’s with a Headteacher who wrote one off the standard Latin text books. Whatever you call a school it is moulded by the teaching staff, the parents, the governors and the pupils. I am grateful for the opportunities mine gave me. I lived in one of the most deprived parts of London and went onto be a governor in one of the local comprehensives where there is still a struggle to give pupils a good start in life. I don’t think the issue is grammar schools but all the other factors that prevent a level playing field (where they haven’t been sold off.)….
The problem with education is learning how to think, and communicate the results to others in effective ways.
Too often it is just seen as an institutionalized, obstacle course, or something silly or stupid to be learned by rote.
Too often whatever is taught is not given the context in which it makes some kind of sense or has some kind of relevance.
Education is the most used self aggrandisement tool of British politicians. Not enough that they fiddle an unfair disproportional voting system until the pips squeak, no, they want to make their mark by pretending that they had the best education ever( free university education) whilst all other methods of education are wrong.
So they go about changing educations aims and objectives at every election, playing up to the masses who don’t get it at all.
Where schools were together and cooperative in the past you now got competition and rivalry. Children and teachers are subjected to forever changing rules regulations and guidelines, continuity and learning is disrupted by moral drives and power plays, with education being subjected to constant change, not progressive, not calm and not conducive to educating children.
Finland has banned all interference by politicians in education, at all levels, they have nothing to do with education bar agreeing the funding. The result is the best education in Europe today.
I shudder when I hear politicians talking of education and what is best for our children, and its always during election time, as if they have the panacea to all societies ills and needs.
They have not!
In Britain a non-politically controlled education would see the end of the current order within a generation and they know that damned well, and that’s why it will never be any different in this country. It’s why Scotland will never leave the UK and it’s why emerging economies will be prone to coups. The Estsblishment in this country have never been beaten and that all goes back to those schools.
Not everyone who attended grammar school had an experience similar to this. Not everyone who attended grammar school flourished at university nor went on to a diplomatic career. But it can certainly be a route to a different world as your career has shown. I hated grammar school – it seemed like an O level factory, and I would have greatly preferred a broader education. But secondary mods and comprehensives are not a tempting alternative. If comprehensive education had been a success in stretching more able pupils, supporting the least able and bringing out the best in those in between, this argument would not still be raging. But I wonder if school structure is the real problem. The philosophy underpinning teaching is woolly to say the least.
“never in my entire University career came less than top in any exam I took”. Only because we took different degree subjects Craig. 🙂
The main points you make here are right on the money. Selection in education, whether based on ability to pay or on the spurious educational basis of a single day’s performance at age 11, is designed to do nothing but sustain the crippling class system which has kept the UK in the dark ages.
The United Kingdom currently has the Fifth biggest economy in the world, we recently over took The Socialist Republic of France,
not doing too bad in comparison with most other places, or else, why would half a million people try to get in here, each year,
I do not know how many people try to get into France each year, most only seem to want to transit France to get into
the United Kingdom – Eldorado, in their eyes.
France overtook you again when the pound tanked after the referendum result
What an excellent post.
The “bring back grammars” debate has run all my life and I’m sick and tired of hearing it.
Really it’s a “bring back secondary moderns” debate, but selling the idea to proud parents that they want to bring back a system that condmens three quarters of kids, their kids, to a second rate education is not a flier.
Instead they have to pretend that there will be Grammars For All when in reality those that cheer for it are cheering for the next generation’s above ground burial.
And what an excellent post from you today. I completely agree. It’s like the gold ticket in Willy Wonker’s chocolate bar, the great unwashed fighting each other just to get to a place where some lunatic tempts you with vices only for you to be punished in some cruel and irreversible way for trying to get them!
Hang on… Didn’t Roald Dahl work for the FCO? Well that puts a new light on Charlie and Chocolate factory…
Who cares about Grammar Schools – more puerile diversion.
The policy is to educate substantially no-one save for a few technicians to required to keep the system ticking over, and a few administrators to administer the work of the technicians.
Let everyone pass exams and have someone tell them how smart they are and they have an absolute right to fulfill their potential. Then pack them off to University and load them down with about GBP 60k of debt and hand them a piece of paper that you could previously acquire in a packet of Kellogs Frosties.
And what about the people selected for preferential educational treatment – why they develop into modern day cargo cultists and write learned papers on how pumping upward of $200 billion of invented money per month into the global economy is good for people.
The entire educational system is a farce and a fraud and has been co-opted into a mass propaganda industry – producing citizens who know nothing and yet simultaneously believe they know a great deal.
Grammar Schools are the least of anyone’s problems – so it comes as no surprise that the government thinks they would make an interesting talking point.
That pretty well nails it, which is why the mass of British people know virtually nothing that would qualify them as voters in a democratic society.
State schools, which are conduits for state propaganda, should be abolished. In Craig’s day the propaganda was still militaristic imperialistic bollocks. Today it’s collectivist, anti-British, globalist bollocks.
And anyhow, why should anyone pay for someone else’s kid’s education? Has Britain gone Commie, or something? All welfare should be abolished. If nothing else it might slow the genocidal import of people like this.
And anyone who does want to pay for someone else’s kid’s education can go ahead and endow a private grammar school with any entry requirements they like.
The eleven-plus grammar school entry test, incidentally, was bollocks invented by the fraudster Sir Cyril Burt, President of the British Psychological Society.
Loonie, almost correct except remember that schools started purely as propaganda tools and slowly allowed a little bit of education in for a while – but strictly supervised mind
The only kudos I give the education system is that it taught me to read and write. After that I never went to school much and as a result I became a rather handy snooker player.
Just about everyone who meets me takes it as given that I have a university education, despite the fact that I sound like Mick Jagger with a bad cold.
There’s no accounting for the British class system: Craig sounds like a public schoolboy and was fast-tracked through the FCO, whereas I’m having to dig ditches in rural France (due to the fact that our gite business has collapsed because of all this terrorism nonsense). Mind you, I do have a profession and could earn lots of dosh back in the UK, but I’m typing this from a deckchair in laidback and sunny south west France…
All education was there to fit you into the square boxes they had waiting for you. Fortunately education now gives you some freedom to fit into other boxes, unfortunately for some that is coffin shaped as school boards still do not do enough to stop bullying.
Education needs a makeover starting at the top, get rid of the Squares and get some Moderates as the Liberals can be too free and easy. We need discipline and respect but we also need the freedom to excel at what we are good at as it took me years to break the square and remodel it into a dodecahedron with elastic sides.
We are not going to be ruled by 19 yr old managers who cant even manage their own lives never mind anyone else’s, we need to go back to experience promotion as I have seen many university graduates who have memory problems as they keep asking me if I know who they are. Children are being taught they are too good for some jobs but that migrants are bad. We cannot run a country with all office workers as without skilled construction workers we won’t have any offices. Apprenticeships have been screwed by academics who think you can learn a trade in a classroom, believe me, you can’t! I have had to deal with “Modern Apprentices” who came onto a job with no tools and who hadn’t a clue as they had been pampered in a classroom.
My education took a turn after school as I had a job lined up, all I had to do was pass maths, something I was never good at as I had nothing to link it too. I had a job as an Architectural Technician, as I wanted to be an Architect one day, but I failed it yet again. I now have two friends that are Architects and both of them said ” but we don’t use Maths”, jeez. I became an Electrician and my career certainly was one but it was an experience I doubt I would ever have gotten as an Architect.
All in all I would only change the accidents I had that make the continuous pain killer taking a necessity, would I change the gas explosion that put me in hospital for 7 weeks, probably not. You may think that is mad, perhaps it is, perhaps I am but that is what makes me, me. education is packing in so much that there is no time left in the curriculum for freedom to excel in a field you want too and that is wrong, listen to teachers and pupils, they (pupils) may not know much but they know what they want to do if you give them the chance.
You’re right. It would be good to get rid of Public Schools. But there’ll still be elite schools and sink schools. That’s what they have in France. Lycée Henri IV opposite to the Sorbonne for those who will become énarques, and sink lycées in the banlieues for the ethnics. Still I suppose slightly more egalitarian than Public School Britain.
I just remembered what Grammar School taught me: How to write out 100 times
“Few things are more distressing to a well regulated mind than to see a boy, who ought to know better, disporting himself at improper moments”.
I must have used the entire paper output from a small forest writing that out. That and how to watch the clock.
Shows the close interchange between the military and the traditional schools.
Never forget when I was being trained as a gentleman and intelligence expert at Fort Holabird, Maryland, and forget to stop smoking in the latrine during breaks after we had been informed not to.
Had to write 500 times why I would not to it again, andI dutifully said I wouldn’t, provided all kinds of surprises might induce me to do so.
Almost got kicked out of that school. Got saved again apparently by my father being a US Army general
Tie two pens together and it was only half the lines.
Before walking away from the education system I did spend a year or so in a very minor public school. Looking back on it, it was like something out of a Monty Python sketch. In particular was the racism, jingoism and violence. I used to get canned regularly by sadistic bastards who should have been in a sex offenders institution. The most I ever got was four lashes. I remember some poor little sod who got the full works, six lashes. He was hit so hard that afterwards he was bleeding.
But it was all for King and Country, don’t you know.
Yes Craig, me too. Dux of my primary school,I was whisked away from my town to attend secondary school in Paisley. My parents had the option of Paisley Grammar, or the John Neilson Institute for me. I attended the John Neilson. I hated the bullying schoolmasters, and it developed a defiant element in me towards them. My Dad’s job brought about a house move and me to attend a state(?) school. I was more comfortable there, away from kids who referred to hail stanes as whole stones.
And so I have nothing in common with Andra Neil, thankfully.
“But those buying a private education are not actually buying a better education – they are buying admission to a social network of wealth and privilege, bonded by common contacts and attitudes. ”
This is a common misconception amongst people who didn’t actually go to public school. In reality, there are only a handful of schools for which it is even vaguely true, and only one of which it could be said to be substantially true and that is Eton. How much of an “admission to a social network of wealth and privilege, bonded by common contacts and attitudes” do you get as an old boy of Oswestry School? Founded in 1407, it as much a public school as Eton, but have you actually ever heard of it? It is, however, far more representative of public schools as a class than Eton or Harrow or Marlborough, the schools that most people think of when they hear the term. Basically, if as a parent sending your child to Oswestry School, you think you are paying for admission to any sort of social network, then you must be pretty deluded. I know for a fact that my parents would have sent me to the local comp if it had been half decent. Instead I was sent away to get a better education, something that I hated. I find it hard to see how I was supposed to get an entree into a “a social network of wealth and privilege” when almost none of my peers at the school had parents who had either.
That’s not to say that grammar schools are the answer to anything. France and Germany have neither grammar schools nor, in any meaningful sense, private schools. The answer to those who wish to get rid of private education is to improve state education, not make private education illegal. State education does have the huge advantage that it’s free.
Bayard, good points; although of course I’ll add that France and Germany don’t have a class system anywhere near that of Britain, which remains one of the most class-ridden societies on Earth.
And I should also point out that basic education in the UK is not ‘free education’. It’s funded by tax payer’s money, because it’s a very worthwhile investment in the future of the nation. The precise point of the present fascist takeover is to dumb-down the population, and to allow only the ‘chosen ones’ (ie, fellow fascist lunatics) to advance in society.
You might find what I say unpalatable, but it’s happening in Britain right now.
By free, I didn’t mean it cost nothing, I meant that given the choice between using it or not using it, you don’t have to pay extra to use it.
Actually Germany has grammar schools. They are called “Gymnasiums” and many even teach Ancient Greek. The difference is that Germany has a seriously good vocational education system for non academic pupils.
That’s nice of you Habba.
Care to tell us about your education?
I went to a bog standard Secondary Modern Council School,
same as my wife, we both achieved nothing,
still I am happy and still alive at 65, most of my friends are dead,
only relating a story to a friend yesterday, I was in a drinking competition in Little Hampton with friends, I came fourth, the top three are all dead. Great weekend, pity you can’t share memories with the dead.
Just to compare again with France as it is a useful comparison. In France, there are few private schools and they don’t have a particular cachet. There are élite and sink lycées, as I said. The distinction is not so much wealth but one of caste: it is openly recognised. The decision point is the concours (competition by examination) to enter one of the Grandes Ecoles. Just to explain, there’s a double education system in France. The Grandes Ecoles, like ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration), Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po), ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure), Ecole du Louvre, etc, all of which have entry by examination. And the universities, which are open access. Not surprisingly the Grandes Ecoles, which were set up in the 19th century, in my view, because the authorities were fed up with the difficulties with the professors of the Sorbonne, are now claiming to be universities, in order to be classed in the Shanghai rating. Funnily enough, pretty well all the successful students in the concours are nice white middle-class boys and girls. No major French politician had a university degree.
Recently things have changed. The present Prime Minister, Emmanuel Valls, has a degree from Université de Paris 1. Sarkozy from Paris X Nanterre.
It all looks pretty much like privileged Britain, but a bit different.
Thanks for those observations. Much will depend upon widely held perceptions. If teachers, parents, pupils, colleges and employers believe mobility is possible and good then it occurs. If people are pessimistic it fails. If course comps should be preferred as a model ie because it is so much more egalitarian. Some comps fail and some succeed. I don’t know the determining factors, but would presume them to be a mix of socio / economic background and vision / perception.
I hadn’t realised until a few years ago that there used to be different types of grammars. There were those that followed leading public schools albeit for lower levels of public office, whilst others focused on engineering ie for local industry. I thought this patronising, but am now undecided.
How do you choose between one mad, corrupt, woman, and a mad, corrupt, guy? i fear for the future, when the election is over. I’m getting my supplies together….
Though I passed the exams for Grammar School, I failed at the oral interview, Sounds like I had a lucky escape!
Instead I went to a ‘Technical School’.
But not for long – I (along with my mother, brother and half-sister was soon off to Morocco to join my stepfather (USAF) and went to High School on an American base.
Paul, just out of interest, if you went to school in an American overseas base how come you are such a free thinker?
(apologies if you’ve answered this before: I just don’t have the hours in the day to read everything that gets posted on this board)
This retired officer of the U.S. Navy can testify from experience that the U.S. military has its share of independent thinkers. And the same is true of U.S. military brats. Jim Morrison of the Doors, for example, was the son of an admiral in the U.S. Navy. That elder Morrison even commanded U.S. carrier forces off Vietnam during the Tonkin Gulf incident.
One of the most principled and consistent critics of the Vietnam War was a top-grade military officer, Marine Corps General David Schoup.
Sorry. Shoup.
A B and two E’s Craig, all the best people get those grades…. I didn’t stroll a 1st though only a 2:1 at a CHE. The middle class tossers I occasionally met heartily resented it, in their class prejudice, they got even more narked when they realised that I didn’t notice. Since I walked away I have hardly met a middle class tosser, which is nice….
Melissa Benn points out in her Guardian article, 6th Sept, to forget the 11plus, that social mobility needs addressing much earlier in our children’s lives. Advocating high quality support in the early years, she quotes Michael Pavey, director of Labour Friends of Sure Start, “Neuroscience shows that a child’s brain is approximately 25% formed at birth, and that by the age of three it is 80% formed. It is during this crucial time that gaps open up between children from different backgrounds.” Melissa asks, ” So how does testing 10 and 11year olds help?”
Interventions should focus on early years “targeting maternal health, school readiness, home environment and parenting skills.” She quotes the cuts to Safe Start — half of funding slashed, with 800 precious Sure Start centres closed since Theresa May was in government.
As a Home-Start York volunteer ( We are a charity supporting families with under fives, in times of difficulty or crisis), I would add that Local Authority/Health Service cuts to our funding are threatening the vital work we do in the home. Our team is having to spend time fund raising to survive. Other Home-Start branches nationally have had to close.
Here is the painful irony. We have a government blindly falling back into darkness, investing in elitist education for our salvation and simultaneously undermining or destroying the organisations which truly improve social mobility, health and welfare. Home-Start often lifts families from the brink of expensive Social Service intervention. Most of us are trained volunteers. Our charity is cost efficient.
This government needs to stop self-harming with grammars and cuts to early years services and start heeding neuroscience.
(Craig, if anyone is moved to reverse this damage, please may they consider us for their Christmas donation list? Home-Start York, 49 Cemetery Road, York YO10 5AJ
@Homestartyork1 )
Jayne, that isn’t irony, it’s deliberate. They’d cut it all a damned sight faster if they thought they’d get away with it too, I wouldn’t put the notion of labour camps beyond this bunch of fiends.