One Good Question, and one Wearisome Repetition

I have selected two responses to the Grammar School article for comment – the first (from Mr Mckay) interesting, and the second, (from Christopher Charles), tedious and serially unresponsive.

 

Firstly, here is Joe Mckay:

 

‘I have asked this question for years. Never got a good response. What does a grammar school offer that a comprehensive school (that channels classes into 'top', 'middle' and 'bottom' sets) doesn't? Is hanging around the 'thick' kids on the playground during lunch enough to cause bright kids to fall behind? Is this the key difference between Grammar and schools and Comprehensives? Or is it the traditions of the school which filter through to the kids via osmosis? I am just curious as to what the key difference is?’

 

I suspect there are several elements here. The first is a simple one of ethos and authority, greatly affected by size. Grammar schools, because their intake is almost all capable of ‘A-level ‘  study,  do not need to be as physically  big as Comprehensives to sustain a viable Sixth Form , or whatever the final two years of pre-university study are now called. The personal authority of the Head is therefore more easily imposed through direct  presence and contact.

 

Next, almost every parent is in alliance with the staff to attain the same end, whereas this alliance is far weaker in comprehensives.

 

But I suspect the strongest element is that the nature of the Grammar School is conservative, hierarchical, traditional  and authoritarian, whereas the nature of the comprehensive is radical, anti-authoritarian, discovery-based rather than pedagogical. This used to be, and to much lesser extent still is, enforced though architecture and ceremony, honours boards, teachers wearing gowns and mortar boards, classrooms arranged in rows, ‘houses’ and other public school devices for creating loyalties and identifiable peer groups. Above all, the mixing of the social classes takes place on the understanding that it is desirable to become middle class.  Those supporters of Comprehensives who claim that they favour the mixing of the classes *as such* are not being truthful. They favour this mixing only if the middle classes are encouraged to become less so, and to adopt the patois and attitudes of their working-class fellow pupils.

 

In the early comprehensive era, this division was nothing like as obvious, as many of the first comprehensives, in the 1950s and early 1960s, continued to maintain strong discipline, to have teachers in gowns and mortar-boards, religious daily assemblies, houses and so forth.

 

The difference only really became apparent when the huge expansion of teacher training launched by the Wilson government changed the nature of the teaching profession (incredibly, the Daily Telegraph, not the Guardian, used to be the favourite newspaper of teachers, and the one in which teaching posts were mainly advertised).The paradox of this, of course, is that many of the new radical teachers were grammar-school products. Also the general cultural revolution made it very hard for large, inner-city comprehensives to maintain the old traditions. A single charismatic head could achieve a great deal, but as soon as he or she moved on, the chaotic nature of the comprehensive system took over. My point is that the grammar school idea is institutionally effective, and will produce reasonable results even with mediocre personnel. The Comprehensive idea (being political, not educational, at root)  is institutionally defective and will only work (after a fashion) when exceptional people are in charge, or exceptional circumstances, such as various forms of covert selection,  apply.

 

But the grammar school’s morally and socially conservative nature is one of the reasons why the Left hate these institutions so.

 

Now to Christopher Charles, who says (as if this tired boilerplate is some new-minted piece of brilliant and original thinking) :

 

‘The two words that don't crop up in PH's post are 'secondary modern'. The type of school to which 75% of pupils would go if PH's ideas were to prevail. He seems to concern himself only with the 25% that will benefit; the rest seemingly can go hang. Understand this: I am very unhappy with the way most schools are currently run. But that has nothing to do with their status. I'm unhappy because teachers simply aren't allowed to teach. The stultifying national curriculum has drained all the enthusiasm out of the profession. Kids today are just items that have to be processed. And we wonder why so many of them hate it. I would also like to ask PH [for the umpteenth time because I've yet to receive a properly thought out response] exactly how any political party is going to push through a measure [the reintroduction of Grammar Schools] that is only going to benefit a quarter of the population? Political parties are often corrupt and stupid, but they rarely seek to commit electoral suicide. How would PH sell it to the voters? [If PH is simply going to claim that he's 'right' and leave it at that, then I'm afraid that doesn't constitute an answer. He might be happy to defend elitism on this blog. Try doing it in a party political broadcast.]’

 

I cannot say how many times I have rebutted these points. I cannot understand how Mr Charles can have missed all these rebuttals, though his contribution is written as if I had never made them, and makes no attempt to respond to them. This, then,  is the last time I shall trouble to reply to him on this or another matter unless he shows some sign of engaging with what I say.

 

I will be very simple.

1.Destroying the grammar schools did not make the Secondary Moderns better.

2.On the contrary, it condemned many people who had previously had an escape route from this, to a Secondary Modern education.

3.A large number of modern comprehensives are without doubt worse than the Secondary Moderns they replaced, in terms of discipline, educational attainment , teaching quality, bullying and disorder, etc. If we were able to judge them by a constant measure, rather than through the inflated and worthless examination certificates of modern Britain, this would be quite obvious.

4.Thus, the supposed concern of the ‘Wot about the Secondary Moderns. Eh? Eh? Eh?’ claque is entirely false. They don’t really care about the educational fate of the poor. They just display their phoney woe to obscure the fact that their ideology demands the destruction of good schools. Who can blame them? It is (unsurprisingly) embarrassing for them to acknowledge that their beliefs have had such a stupid and wasteful outcome, and have hurt the poor people whom they claim to champion.

 

Rather than have the academically-able minority provided with good schools, they condemn the bright children of the poor to hopelessness.

 

5. I have many times said, and here repeat, that the 1944 system was in need of reform. I just don’t accept that Circular 10/65 was the right reform.  Here are several reforms which would have been valuable, and which would not have destroyed hundreds of fine and irreplaceable schools.

1. A more even provision of grammar schools throughout the country.

2.More girls’ grammar schools

3. The building and staffing of the technical schools envisaged in the 1944 Act so that such schools were available in every part of the country.

4. A more flexible test for grammar school entry, as applied in Germany.

 

All these could have been achieved well within the enormous budgets expended on going comprehensive, and the subsequent vast expenditure on education in this country, which largely still cannot , in eleven years of full-time education, produce people who can read, write and count.

 

AS to how a political party can get such a proposal past a general election, just give me a political party, a general election, and let me try. How can anyone claim that giving a good education to the poor benefits only those who win places in selective schools? A better-educated country which refuses to waste its talents as we do,  is better for everyone in it – its people are more civilised, its services more efficient, its sciences more alive and inventive, its industries more successful, its media and its political class better informed and wiser.

 

(I will also re-run here the old Randolph Churchill joke which so well illustrates the nature of this question. News was brought to Evelyn Waugh that Randolph Churchill was in hospital for the removal of a non-malignant tumour. Waugh remarked ‘How typical of the medical profession to rummage through the entire vast body of Randolph Churchill, find the one thing in it that is not malignant, and remove it.’

 

 Much the same could be said of the education reformers who examined our school system in 1965, located the one part of it that was working well, and smashed it to pieces).