A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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I am sure that many will find the holes in the various arguments that Hitchens’ makes, but essentially, he pokes and prods at the issues surrounding the education system in, I assume, a valid attempt to provoke the argument. 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. For example, when discussing the relative outcomes of selective and non-selective education, two hard to access reports which support the superiority of selective education are drawn upon and treated as a smoking gun whilst the extensive academic literature, much of which supports the opposite conclusion, is ignored.

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.

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. There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children. 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. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour.

His overall point is probably the right one: that you can have better education I'd you target it at those who need it, not at those who can't, and that trying to create a fully comprehensive, fully egalitarian system tends to produce the second outcome, not the first.

And what's more, it is a system riddled with anomalies - Sixth Form Colleges select pupils on ability at the age of 15, which rules out any child who does not have major educational backing from home (heavy involvement by working parents or private tutors, for example) and academies also are selective, though they pretend not to be.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Hitchens’ work is well referenced and highlights the selection process for free grammar school places, based on academic ability at eleven, and notes, referring to comprehensive schools, how places in popular schools are determined by post codes and parents’ income.For students of post-war education, Hitchens provides a useful chronology of secondary education, and refers to the tension between idealism and practice.

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.In this way, the book has some potential to stimulate much needed debate about the purposes, shape and structure of our educational system. Also largely ignored are the Robbins Report of 1962 and Jackson and Marsden’s qualitative sociological work of 1968, “Education and the Working Class. For a short while, grammar schools offered the best education imaginable by selecting for prepubescent academic ability.