A lesson learnt?

A good school education is one of the most important processes to drive forward a country.  This is why I am pleased to hear that Kent County Council are circumventing the rules in place to allow the opening of a first new grammar school in Britain for 50 years, that is, an existing grammar school is opening an ‘annexe’ in another locality.  My feelings towards the council is that it is run by pompous, bumptious Tories and that would still be my view even if Medway wasn’t a separate unitary authority (please, Queen Liz, don’t waste your jubilee gift in making Medway a city – we already have one called Rochester, even though they let the city charter lapse deliberately).  On this though they are right.

I am an ardent believer in the benefits of grammar schools.  There are plenty of (anti)progressives that still mistakenly equate the pursuit of excellence with social injustice.  It was probably the Labour Party’s greatest mistake of the 1960s - the drive to abolish grammar schools.  Even decades later, left-wingers still have more hang-ups than a CofE conference debating women and gay priests.  The Guardian sneered in March 2011 that working-class kids only earn slightly more than their parents if they go to a grammar school (though grudgingly admitted that the same is true for middle-class kids).  Isn’t earning more, no matter the amount, a good thing?  The same paper is up in arms that private schools are creating a social ‘apartheid’ (a favourite Grauniad word) in society as an elite become distanced from the populace.  Their bigoted blindness means they fail to realise that it is not private schools driving this wedge but the misguided anti-grammar school policies as nature asserts itself.

Several years ago, a survey was carried out looking at the one hundred most influential people in a series of fields – business, media, politics, etc – to follow on from a survey that was carried out three decades prior.  In the 1970s, the education of the movers and shakers was thus – a small percentage were comprehensive alumni; about a quarter who went to private fee-paying school; and a vast majority were those who attended grammar school.  By the early 2000s, there had been a seismic shift – the number of those coming from grammar schools had been crippled, being a very low figure; those who learnt at comprehensives had more than doubled but were still quite small; however, the overwhelming majority of those who now head the elite went to private fee-paying schools – indeed a greater percentage than of those in the 1970s who went to grammar schools.  In the name of equality, they created worse inequality.  Ideology triumphing over expertise and proving disastrous.  A Cultural Revolution in more than just name. 

It is common sense that such a policy fall between two stools and satisfies no-one.  Plenty of middle-class parents determined enough would scrimp and save just to ensure their children went to a good school – if they were denied the grammar option, then they certainly weren’t going to allow their kids take the comprehensive route.  The progeny of working-class parents – who could never afford the fees – were left behind – the ladder, in many ways, hoisted up.  So the divide between haves and have-nots broadened immensely.  Strange that they cling to Darwin as a saint, yet many liberals don’t recognise the natural selection (survival of the fittest) here – nature taking its course as defined by the obstacles placed in its way.  If you dam part of a river, the water will flow ever stronger through the open part.

John Prescott famously moaned about being ‘hurt’ after he failed his 11+, but would he have become deputy prime minister if he hadn’t been driven to prove the system wrong?  Would he have been elected as a shop steward, let alone an MP, if he had succeeded in the test?  Hypotheticals maybe but I think there is truth present.  I did enough to pass my 11+, cruising in maths, yet just scraping by in English.  I went to a grammar school and I didn’t fully recognise how lucky I was but time grants perspective.  Those seven years were hellish – I didn’t fully recognise then but time grants perspective.  Unlike John Prescott, my ego isn’t so inflated to think “I’m unhappy, so the system must be wrong.”  My misery was caused by my peers but that can happen at any faculty – it was not a specific failing of the concept of the grammar school.  Letting one’s childhood traumas affect the direction of a nation is, though, heinous.  Do they worry about those hurts feelings in places with advanced education like Scandinavia? They do but they build environments so that everyone can achieve in their own distinct way.  They are constructive not destructive like too many British left-wingers.  There was an outcry against academies first came into being (still is), but they were an attempt to fill a natural need in places where grammar schools were distant memories.  Let’s have none of this Marxist bollocks about man taming nature – we are governed by the latter, whether we like it or not.  The system before was not perfect but it was far better than what we have now.  Where once working-class and middle-class kids could mingle and gain insights into each other’s backgrounds, now both sides are impoverished and regard the other contemptuously. Watch us fall away in the international league tables. Bravo, you ivory tower lefties, bravo.