Review – A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System by Peter Hitchens. ISBN: 9781399400077
Most people accept that the British education system is broken, and only those with a vested interest deny that it requires drastic and long-term reform. The goal is to have a system which is meritocratic and fair, although the defining principle of the current one is wealth. In this book, Peter Hitchens argues that we once had a meritocratic education system, which for a generation between 1944 and 1965 furthered social mobility and equality of opportunity, but that the revolution was betrayed – dismantled by successive Labour and Conservative governments.
Under the provisions of the Education Act 1944 (the Butler Act), the 11+ exam sorted primary school children on the basis of ability into grammar schools and non-grammar schools. The non-grammar schools were subdivided into technical schools and secondary moderns. These have been attacked on various grounds, but undeniably they compensated for the lack of state secondary education prior to 1944, and taught technical and practical skills that were essential for the functioning of entire professional sectors. The grammar schools were high-standard, innovative, merit-based institutions which, given time to develop, would far have outstripped the public schools. By giving every child in every locality a chance to work their way into the most suitable school for their abilities, the 1944 system allowed countless pupils to advance and achieve to an extent that would have been impossible a generation earlier. (In the appendix to this book, there is a list of prominent beneficiaries of the system). It was the closest Britain ever came to a meritocracy. “If I were a High Tory…who really believes in privilege and keeping the lower orders down,” one peer declared, “one of the first things I should do would be to get rid of grammar schools.”
Hitchens’s championing of grammar schools must be given its full context. After all, there is little to recommend them in their twenty-first-century form. The 160 or so such schools scattered round the country today are sparse and few in number, compared to the 1,300 of them before the start of abolition in 1965; they are out of range of vast swathes of the country; and the few which do exist are largely monopolised by middle-class parents who move into the area and block local working-class mobility. The system is only effective on a national scale.
Of course, many objections have been raised against the grammar schools. Some are specific to the exact system of 1944. These are minor quibbles, on such issues as the age at which exams are taken, and Hitchens emphasises that to support a national meritocracy on grammar-school lines is not to support the exact system established by the Butler Act. It is not even to support the return of technical schools and secondary moderns. Many of the 1944 system’s flaws – such as the occasionally poor quality of the non-grammar schools – could be thought through and fixed if only politicians and experts would apply themselves to the task instead of dismissing the system out of hand.
An altogether separate category of objection opposes the very idea of a grammar schools. A frequent complaint in this case is that the best school system is one which encourages free mixing and egalitarianism. If this could be put into practice, it would be fantastic. In reality, the comprehensive school system, which was designed on just these grounds, has failed disastrously. The worst comprehensives, such as the one I attended, are underfunded, depressing, chaotic cesspits which provide absolutely no prospect of social or economic advancement, even to the majority of pupils who want to succeed. They are the worst obstacles to social mobility or educational enrichment.
Then there is the complaint that selection by merit is inherently wrong and leads to segregation. The obvious rebuff to this is that, if universities and workplaces select by merit, why shouldn’t schools do the same? The qualm as to segregation may, I think, be solved by a mobile system which, rather than cementing children’s futures on the basis of an 11+ exam, would provide an annual if not a termly opportunity for everyone to work their way from one school type into another. In such a system, good behaviour and enthusiasm for learning should be rewarded just as highly as plain aptitude.
In any case, whatever one thinks of selection by merit, there is no doubt that our current system of selection by wealth is worse. Private schools are “indefensible fortresses of money privilege.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on these schools will serve only to strengthen them, by pushing the cost of private education further into the stratosphere of the ultra-rich, and removing the charitable status which incentivises scholarships. Less obviously but just as perniciously as the private schools, catchment areas segregate state schoolchildren on the basis of income. The best comprehensives will generally be found in high-income areas, whereas the worst of them will be concentrated in low-income areas; and a 2017 report in the Independent found that more than 85% of the best-performing state schools took in disproportionately low numbers of disadvantaged pupils.
Some of the more convincing arguments against the principle of grammar schools are not so easy to counter. It is said that by entering grammar schools some working-class pupils feel that they must abandon their roots; they may feel out of place or be ostracised by their peers; or in the end they may “go native” and become staunch defenders of a hierarchical status quo. A great deal also depends on home circumstances – bookless homes, distrust of education, and money pressures are listed here among others – so that full and perfect equality of opportunity remains elusive. But the grammar school system was not designed to abolish the class system or overhaul the structure of society. Its aim, in which it succeeded better than any British education system before or since, was simply to educate children well, regardless of their background or wealth.
Allowing for the bizarre digressions about the inadvisability of universal suffrage or the influence of communism in the Labour Party, A Revolution Betrayed is the best thing that Peter Hitchens has written. The “cranky fogeyism” which makes it impossible to take most of his work seriously has, in this case, allowed him to produce a book which few others would been able to write. If the new government wants to leave behind it a positive and multigenerational impact, it must reform the education system; and this book, crisply and stylishly written, short enough to be read in a few hours, is a necessary one for understanding our current trouble and learning from the past to resolve it.
