A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. On page 18 he adds that these schools are utterly unlike the 1,300 such schools that flourished in the national system before 1965 because they are unfair in that they select by wealth…this is why they help the ancient universities to fulfil their state school quotas without doing too much damage to their quality.

Hitchens refers to politicians who, although appearing to support comprehensive education, either send their children to out-of-area high achieving schools, or to schools in the private sector. To protect academic rigour, it is insistent that we need to select people early and separate those who will be paid to think from those who will not.

Despite agreeing with the urgency of some of the educational challenges identified, I fundamentally disagree with the book’s implicit view of humanity and the purposes of education.

The criticism led, Hitchens contends, to “a huge decline in secondary education,” exacerbated by “a new system of selection by wealth”: students who cannot afford to attend one of England’s fee-paying public schools are subjected to unrigorous “common” schools, where “the old canon of expected and accepted knowledge, in literature and history, has been mocked, deconstructed and replaced. 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. Hardly any mention is made of the massive increase in exam results in the first thirty years of comprehensives,, information freely available online. Hitchens also fails to acknowledge that Sir Samuel Gurney- Dixon himself advises in his introduction to the report that its description of the social backgrounds of grammar school pupils should be treated with caution, being derived entirely from information supplied by the head teachers of the 10% sample of grammar schools on which the report is based.To anyone familiar with the weekly column written by Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday this latest jeremiad will contain no surprises. However, the book also bemoans the significant role of church schools in the current educational system.