A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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None of this interests Hitchens, of course, because for him evidence is just an inconvenient nuisance that cannot even begin to compete with the emotional intensity of his convictions. There are some extremely valid points, but I am not convinced by their rigour as yet (I need to re-read). 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 his conclusions, Crowther states flatly that “a majority of the sons of professional people go to selective schools but only a minority of manual workers’ sons do so” and he adds that “a non- manual worker’s son is nearly three times as likely to go to a selective school as a manual worker’s”. 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. The book equally appears to have little time for anyone who wants an open education system in which people have chances to engage with knowledge at different points in their lives and find out how they can use it to contribute to society. He doesn't attbeot to tease out, for example, to what extent grammars produced better results because they were better vs better results because they selected the best pupils.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. i) than those admitted from grammar schools and that the latter, so far from not “doing too much damage” to overall standards, actually outperform the privately educated. I am sure that many will find the holes in the various arguments that Hitchens’ makes, but essentially, he pokes and prods at the issues surrounding the education system in, I assume, a valid attempt to provoke the argument. The book’s distaste for mass education gives it a ‘golden age’ feel, but it does raise some important questions and urgent issues that we need to address within our educational system. This is an interesting read on two levels: Hitchens provides a view of the grammar schools and the part they played, and in some areas are still playing, in British Secondary Education, before their demise and the development of comprehensive education; and, for those of us who were around at the time, he provides an overview of our own education, when our future was often determined at the age of eleven, and where there was a disparity in grammar school places across counties.

An interesting take on the rise and fall of the grammar school/secondary modern system during the middle and towards the end of the twentieth century. Secondly little mention is made of the massive cottage industry of private tuition that is used to sustain selective schools. Though he pinpoints inequalities and discrepancies within the current system, Hitchens’s condescension toward comprehensive school educators grates, and he fails to seriously consider how socioeconomic factors, rather than “parental hostility or indifference to education,” may affect student performance.

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”.

This is of course the opposite of what was intended, especially by former Minister of Education Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher, her successor in that role, who closed down many more Grammar Schools than Williams. I must correct him on one point: Peter Symonds' School in Winchester, a boy's Grammar School (which I attended from 1952 to 1959) did not become a Comprehensive school, but a mixed-sex Sixth-form college (which it remains) in 1974. Review of Peter Hitchens’s new book ‘A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System’ by Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Head of Department and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, Lancaster University.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. Mail on Sunday columnist Hitchens ( The Abolition of Britain) contends in this cranky screed that efforts to level the playing field in British education have backfired. No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities. Some examples of this misleading or potentially dishonest discourse are some of the accusations thrown about accusing critics of (pg. Peter Hitchens argues that in trying to bring about an educational system which is egalitarian, the politicians have created a system which is the exact opposite.