Education Is Failing In Britain Too - Road to the Middle Class

Back in the 1960s the British replaced their ancient system of grammar schools with “comprehensives.” The idea was to eliminate the social evil of streaming, where intelligent students went to government grammar schools in their teens and the lesser lights went to “secondary modern” schools.

Well, thanks very much, says a graduate of the first crop that spent their teen years in comprehensives. Writes Robert Crampton in the London Times, about the kids who went to his school in Hull:

We arrived bright-eyed and keen, and we left, five or seven years later, well entertained, but not especially well educated. Yeah, we had a laugh, but we didn’t learn much. Enough to get by. Your status depended on your looks, your athleticism and your willingness to be disruptive. Academic ability was an irrelevance at best, a hindrance at worst.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

In Britain the great leaders of the nation since World War II on the left almost all went to a grammar school. Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and many of their ministers went to grammar schools.

But no longer. In 1965 the Labour government legislated a policy to push away the ladder on which many of their members had climbed from poverty to eminence. They replaced almost all the grammar schools with comprehensives. What was the result?

The people I was at school with have done OK. That’s what they always say about bright kids in comps, isn’t it? Oh, they’ll be OK. But we haven’t done as well as we could have done if we hadn’t been — there’s no polite way of putting this — shafted by Labour ideology for the past 40 years.

That’s about the long and the short of it. Government schools, coasting to a stop on more and more money, are shafting the children of Britain and the United States. In particular they are denying the bright children of the poor in the inner city of breaking free of the culture of helplessness and victimization.

How much longer will we allow this injustice to continue?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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