A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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He has been a journalist for nearly 50 years, has reported from 57 countries and was a resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington. A disappointing, and most depressing, conclusion, but, thanks to this book, I was able to arrive at it. Hitchens dives deep into the history of British education and the political battles waged over the distribution and funding of grammar schools, but readers without a background in the subject will find themselves lost in a sea of obscure names and legislation.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. Some examples of this misleading or potentially dishonest discourse are some of the accusations thrown about accusing critics of (pg. 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”.Hitchens mentions these works in passing but fails to acknowledge, let alone deal with, their central ideas. 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.

His book, however, left me with a couple of questions: (1) Have high achieving comprehensives, where pupils gain places at top universities, taken the place of the grammar schools? 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. 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. In any case, Hitchens’s use of Gurney- Dixon fails on its own terms because, even if nearly 65% of their pupils had indeed come from working class homes, this would still have left working class children seriously under- represented in grammar schools as in 1954 they represented between 75% and 80% of the school population overall.Hitchens, no doubt, as a tribute to the grammar schools, includes a lengthy list of notable grammar school pupils, including prime ministers. In the 1960s, critics asserted that grammar schools­ (“state secondary schools that selected their pupils on merit and charged no fees”) were entrenching class divisions and unfairly determining a child’s life “by a single test at the age of 11. Some good points are made regarding the 11+ system that was in operation to select for the few places that existed in the grammar schools and how it was replaced by a selection based on wealth and catchment area that favoured the elitist system that the comprehensive schools, set up to replace the grammar/secondary modern, were originally designed to prevent.

In his new book, Peter Hitchens describes the misjudgements made by politicians over the years that have led to the increase of class distinction and privilege in our education system.It is a world that, despite the undoubted challenges and inequalities of our current educational reality, I am deeply thankful not to inhabit.

He is a frequent critic of political correctness and describes himself as an Anglican Christian and Burkean conservative. He was educated at The Leys School Cambridge, Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York.There are, however, gaps in his narrative, namely reference to the current standardised testing (SATs) at eleven in primary schools, and how this affects pupil selection in the upper bands of comprehensive schools.