A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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i) than those admitted from grammar schools and that the latter, so far from not “doing too much damage” to overall standards, actually outperform the privately educated. If, in 1956, there had been an expansion of grammar schools to meet the baby bulge then this green and pleasant land would have been preserved and led to the abolition of nearly all private education. Peter Hitchens here surveys the development of public education in Britain from its origins in the 19th Century - necessary background for the main thrust of the book, which is the shameful failure of successive governments - labour and conservative - to protect high quality education in state schools, particularly in respect of talented children from poor backgrounds (myself included) which flourished in relatively brief period when Grammar Schools afforded those like me a chance of a good education, and the prospects of attending university in the days when a good degree really meant something.

For a short while, grammar schools offered the best education imaginable by selecting for prepubescent academic ability.The book offers a window into the world in which we might dwell if selective education had triumphed in the 1950s; a world viewed through rose-tinted spectacles with a very selective reading of the available evidence.

However, the book also bemoans the significant role of church schools in the current educational system. I found plenty that I previously didn’t know, but would probably get more pleasure from seeing the arguments thoroughly debated.Also largely ignored are the Robbins Report of 1962 and Jackson and Marsden’s qualitative sociological work of 1968, “Education and the Working Class. At times, it appears to be academic selection but, at others, critics of grammar schools are accused of blurring ‘the boundary between dislike of examinations and the dislike of the schools that relied on them’ (p. In 1966, coming from a working class background, to my surprise, as I was never coached for the 11+, having recently changed schools, I, unwittingly, sat, and passed the test, so went to Enfield Grammar School, whereas many of my friends who didn't "pass," nor expected to, were content to go, as I would have been, "across the road" to Winchmore Hill Secondary Modern, where some were pleased, if not to say proud, to be selected for the 'X' and 'Y,' grammar school, streams of that Secondary School, where they went on to take and pass GCE O' Levels and CSE's, alongside the fun of metal work and car maintenance; experiences denied to us Grammar School boys.