A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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There is quite a good section about the dilution of academic standards that has taken place since the qualifications on offer were altered to fit the new system. Review of Peter Hitchens’s new book ‘A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System’ by Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Head of Department and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, Lancaster University. Some good points are made regarding the 11+ system that was in operation to select for the few places that existed in the grammar schools and how it was replaced by a selection based on wealth and catchment area that favoured the elitist system that the comprehensive schools, set up to replace the grammar/secondary modern, were originally designed to prevent. 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”.

Secondly little mention is made of the massive cottage industry of private tuition that is used to sustain selective schools. He has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. 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.

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. There is, of course, no such evidence: admissions at Oxbridge are ultimately in the hands of the individual colleges and these vary considerably in the proportion of state educated students whom they admit. 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”. The book is written in angry tone, it could be argued that this a righteous anger, but it seems more like an anger written from a point of nostalgia.

He was educated at The Leys School Cambridge, Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York. All the familiar Hitchens tropes are there: rejection of the present in favour of an imagined pre- lapsarian past; the incontinent use of ridiculous hyperbole (Hitchens actually compares the “destruction” of the grammar schools to the Dissolution of the Monasteries and claims that in the golden past taking A- level examinations was equivalent to taking a degree); the assumption of the truth of what he purports (but completely fails) to demonstrate; the use of hostile generalisations and ad hominem attacks to dismiss those who disagree with him (“egalitarians”, “utopians” etc, driven by naïve beliefs and/or personal spite); an approach to evidence that is insouciant, to say the least, and that completely undermines his claim to be a defender of “standards”.At the same time the parasite grammar that I was down to go to was having an entire new science block added to it. Hardly any mention is made of the massive increase in exam results in the first thirty years of comprehensives,, information freely available online. A subject that is now rather unfashionable and little understood by the British public, but worth a read for anyone with interest in the debate over academic selection and social mobility.

Thus, whereas pupils from early post- war grammar schools were admitted to Oxbridge “on merit”, the much greater proportion of state educated pupils now admitted to these universities are there as a the result of political pressure exercised through imaginary “quotas”. Also largely ignored are the Robbins Report of 1962 and Jackson and Marsden’s qualitative sociological work of 1968, “Education and the Working Class. He is a frequent critic of political correctness and describes himself as an Anglican Christian and Burkean conservative.That is unless it is assumed that the privileged will maintain their advantage in the face of such selection, which would totally undermine the claim that grammar schools had the potential to seriously challenge educational inequalities. In his new book, Peter Hitchens describes the misjudgements made by politicians over the years that have led to the increase of class distinction and privilege in our education system.

Based on my experience, it's been a long held falsehood that those who weren't selected for grammar school were devastated by the decision, and, as a consequence, had their lives blighted by this early "failure," and were condemned to having their schooling conducted in Secondary Moderns. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This is captured in despairing terms on the penultimate page of the book when commenting on the public outcry when a highly qualified state school student failed to get into the University of Oxford: ‘After 50 years of falling standards and weakening rigour, such emotion is seldom opposed by cool reason or factual knowledge, because we lack a properly educated elite with confidence to stand against the electronic mob which increasingly rules all decisions’ (p. The unapologetic method used to describe selective education could bring about a conversation on the structure of the modern educational system.

Hitchens provides both a stimulating reading experience and a thought-provoking study of the successes and failures of British education post-1944. 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. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. Next week, HEPI will be running a second review of the same book by a grammar school teacher that takes a different perspective on the arguments. I must correct him on one point: Peter Symonds' School in Winchester, a boy's Grammar School (which I attended from 1952 to 1959) did not become a Comprehensive school, but a mixed-sex Sixth-form college (which it remains) in 1974.