A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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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”.

He is a former revolutionary Marxist who now describes himself as a socially conservative Social Democrat.Hitchens was born in 1951 so cannot attest to this personally, of course, any more than he can offer any personal experience of grammar schools, having been educated entirely in private schools. In 1954 the terms “working class” and “poor” were not synonymous but, leaving that aside, Hitchens fails to explain that the reason for this report was the government’s concern that working class children who passed the 11+ and went to grammar school were not taking advantage of the opportunities offered to them – hence the report’s official title: “Early Leaving”.

For students of post-war education, Hitchens provides a useful chronology of secondary education, and refers to the tension between idealism and practice. that it was only to be expected that the children of the poor would be under- represented in grammar schools: Being based on merit, grammar schools…would obviously favour those classes in society that are ambitious and can only attain their aims through merit and hard work. It is a world that, despite the undoubted challenges and inequalities of our current educational reality, I am deeply thankful not to inhabit.

Solid and extensive polemic by Hitchens, though fans will find little surprise in the arguments he has espoused for many years, and enemies will no doubt continue to turn a blind eye. 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. It is spot on about the extent of, and damage done by, educational inequalities and the ways in which a focus on competition and league tables has led to a loss of a meaningful focus on what we are educating for. It is not possible in a short review to deal with more than a few examples of the determinedly anti- intellectual and unscholarly approach favoured by Hitchens but the following is quite typical. 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.

The unapologetic method used to describe selective education could bring about a conversation on the structure of the modern educational system.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”.



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