"At least prior to 1964, grammar schools trained their students for a more thorough curriculum and tough examinations compared to what was taught in other government schools. However, so long as they are teaching the same curriculum, it is unlikely that the selective nature of grammar schools helps their students to learn much more. "
This caveat more or less makes the rest of the article moot. True, selective schools are not a magic bullet, but they are precondition for doing anything better. You might as well say that if Google put potential employees through the same selection process as McDonalds it would be fine so long as employees at both companies performed the same tasks. Technically true, but so what?
One important point also missed by the article is that, originally, comprehensives were also not supposed to internally stream pupils by ability. This is logical if you believe that mixing up pupils of different ability levels has some sort of positive effect: you can only achieve this effect by putting pupils in the same class, not merely the same institution. However, this was abandoned in nearly every comprehensive school within a decade because trying to teach mixed ability classes of 15 year olds Mathematics is crazy and a complete waste of time. In fact, the GCSE system has for decades had two tracks (Higher and Foundation). The 'Comprehensive' school I went to was, for all academic purposes, two schools in one building. We socialised with the thick kids at break to the extent that we wanted to, and we had mixed ability classes for History and Geography and other subjects that didn't matter much, but that was it. Abolishing grammar schools was thus an incredibly expensive and disruptive way of getting kids from Grammar schools and Secondary Moderns to share breaktime and make History lessons into a joke.
This essay clearly represents a lot of work so I am reluctant to be dismissive. But there is a but....and it's a big one. Anyone reading this without knowledge of its broader context would get a seriously distorted picture of post-war British schooling. The reality is that it has been bedevilled by an endless stream of sub-egalitarian theorising that has been 100% counter-productive. This theorising has pumped out from the utopian petri-dishes of academe and - via teacher training colleges and local authority education bureaucracies - into the school system. I have some experience of this but a comment thread is not a place to discuss the full extent and depth of the tragedy of it. Anyone who wants to go there should read Melanie Philips' All Must Have Prizes (1996), Just one for-instance....in the 1980s education 'experts' deemed that pupils filling in multiple-choice tick boxes was a valid substitute for them showing their learning in sentence form.
1) Grammar schools are extremely rare now. They don't exist in Wales at all and the same is true of many socialist dominated parts of the UK. Only 5% of children in England attend a grammar school, which leads me to believe that only the very best children are accepted and those children likely to be outstanding at a young age. Not only that, children in Wales are NOT SAT tested at the end of KS2 and haven't been since 2005
2) Given 1) why look at outcomes today rather than in the 1960s when grammars were far more common? The results of the 11+ would be far more accurate than any SAT test at predicting IQ
3) The tests at KS2 are so unreliable ALL children are retested when they enter secondary school, this has been the case for the last 12 years at least. Primary schools and teachers are rated on their KS2 results so massive amounts of cheating occurs, it happened in my children's school where the examples of very similar questions that were on the SAT test were left on the board as they took the test.
4) If comprehensive schools are no different in outcome to grammars why not allow comprehensives to convert to grammars? The fact it is absolutely verboten tells you all you need to know - Those making the decisions send their kids private and they don't want the competition from working class grammar school kids.
5) If you want to know if the results were more egalitarian under a grammar system look at MPs, PMs, those at the top of industry. Were grammar school kids at the top of more fields in the 1960s and 1970s than today? They were definitely reaching the top positions in govt, they were not before and they haven't since.
My guess is that cramming children of widely disparate potential in one class both substantially harms the knowledge gained by the brightest even as it improves the gains in knowledge by the majority. Two obvious explanations for this effect are that the course work is adjusted up (for one group) and down (for the other) to an average for the class. The other is that the worst students are disruptive while the best can serve as role models and even assist in teaching.
To the extent this is true, then separating children based upon learning potential (not parent class), would be expected to lead to substantial gains in knowledge and ability for the best and brightest, and minor decreases for the rest (who now miss the former's contributions to the system). The average of it all…who knows? Who cares?
This then leads to the question of whether this dynamic and this distribution is better or worse than integrated learning. This is certainly debatable, but I would argue we would be much better off with most educational brilliance focused on those most capable of leveraging it. We are incalculably better off with a range of Einsteins and midwits, than we are with a slightly higher class of midwits. Thus I argue for meritocracy, and against forced equitability of outcomes.
Comprehensive schools ARE selective schools. They select plutocratically, by house price. It’s estimated that properties in the catchment area of “good” Comprehensive schools sell for around a third more than market conditions would otherwise predict.
Hitchens’ points out that the real reason leftists abolished Grammar Schools and replaced them with Comprehensives wasn’t the advertised reason. It’s almost funny when lefty headbangers like Fiona Millar regurgitate the Harrison Bergeron egalitarian arguments at face value. Grammar schools had a socially conservative ethos, and they passed on socially conservative values to their pupils. This is what Crosland hated them for. Abolishing them was first and foremost a Rudy Dutschke strategy, to give them a socially leftist bohemian ethos. This was all that mattered to Crosland. He knew full well middle class parents would game the system to make sure Tarquin got into a “good” Comp. But the “good” Comp would proselytise leftist values. That was the point.
I have doubts over the accuracy of "classism. The middle class wants to avoid sending their children to school with the troublesome and dull". No one, regardless of class, wants to send their kids to school with the troublesome. A kindergarten teacher remarked that perhaps more important than the teacher was what other students were in the class. As to the dull (which isn't a very imaginative word and can describe many things) my ADHD kid says that high school isn't harder than middle because of the private environment. She is able to learn much, much more in a class of 15 than 30. Teaching kids who want to be taught is the most important. In regards to the grammar school debate, more capable students should be exposed to a more in depth curriculum. Limiting the curriculum by virtue of IQ only causes resentment, in US middle and high schools anyone can sign uo
Advanced Placement classes and if they can do the work they can stay. This approach gets rid of the resentment towards Gifted and Talented Programs in elementary.
I see no virtue in feeding my kids to the wolves, and no vice (or “classism”) in wanting my kids to enjoy a learning environment with other well-behaved, respectful kids. I have actively sought out classroom settings for my kids that are free from disruptive, poorly behaved, and violent kids. I am in no way ashamed of this. To the contrary, I see it as my duty as a parent.
I can’t be credibly painted with the “classist” brush because “my kids” include a niece and nephew from a severely underprivileged and dysfunctional background.
Politicians and education industry benefited with the educationist myth as they can get more money than with the hereditarian one which is the truth even if it seems edgy, facts don't care about your feelings
The best school in the country for improving kids grades (measured from enrollment to GCSE) is Michaela. Non-selective with many poor black kids. The school's strengths lie in both executive function (kids' agency) and disicipline as well as teacher led academics. Ideally suited to that intake; whereas the schools for eager learners might be optimised differently.
Apparently there was a big program under Lyndon Johnson to discover the "best" method of education, but they basically buried the results when they found that rote learning, via chants, was the best method. Because this seemed super old fashioned, like something a Catholic school might do, and the teachers wanted the answer to be something fancy and new. So they just ignored the results.
I don't know whether the people behind this "michaela" school are aware of this research, or whether they just do it like this for reasons related to their own temperament.
On my visit the school, I did not witness rote learning; what I did witness was concentration by the kids on the teachers the like of which I have never seen in any other situation. I did hear the every lunch time chant "I'm the captain of my soul, the master of my fate." Whatever the methods, they deliver agency, fluency and knowledge to the kids.
Hmm...so give the kids at selective schools IQ tests. Then give kids at non-selective schools IQ tests. Then compare how kids with (roughly) the same IQ from each type of school perform on yet another IQ test. When the results show little or no difference, conclude the education provided by both types of schools is the same.
This has been the difficulty with charter schools in the US as well.
There is evidence that children do more poorly in the long run if they go to schools where they get beat up or are in danger. There is some evidence that the worse a student is, the more they need a good teacher. But beyond that, for the better students schools are pretty much the same. We would all rather there were Something We Could Do (wrings hands and sobs.) For the very brightest students, our best move is often to get out of the way and let them learn to be autodidacts, with a little course correction and showing of interest to keep them interested.
Instinctively I am on the side of keeping grammar schools, but someone recently brought up to me another aspect. By segregating wealthy and successful students so that they do not suffer at the hands of the more "enriching" elements of society, we create a bubble where the future ruling class does not understand the stakes of the immigration debate because they are insulated from the violent and chaotic effects of bringing in low-IQ, low-self-control immigrants.
We create so much noise around schooling. All it is doing is conditioning. It does not educate children to be their best selves it simply conditions them to slot into a system that actually wants to exploit them. The smarter they are the more it exploits and destroys them. We do not care about real intelligence. We only care about who can be the best pawn for the system. The systems are breaking down and we are fighting over which ones are less broken. We could do better and create one that teaches the children who they really are. Our future will be nothing like the past and the only thing we may have when everything falls apart is what we learned about ourselves. Knowing yourself is the greatest value and education can give when regurgitation has nothing of value because the system does not exist as you were taught it did.
good schooling gives kids agency - capturing some of 'the best that was thought and said' - from which they will be able to learn independently - and building in executive function - exemplified by being able to do your homework. So the very opposite of pawns! Do you think knowing yourself is possible without knowing Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens .. without some insight into biology, mathematics ... on which our current amazing success is based? Empty self absorbed heads will make the kids dumb idiots in the face of change.
Is your question about knowing yourself without reading some English writers for real? My friend you are so snowed you have proven you can't think for yourself. You are exactly what I am talking about about. I have always thought for myself. This is how I am wired. I see oppression and I feel oppression and trust me when I say our schools only job is to make us all feel inadequate. You should be able to know yourself even if you can not read. The idea that a bunch of dead English authors sets myself knowledge is hilarious, culturally egotistical and beyond borderline racist.
School made you feel inadequate and this causes you to externalise that inadequacy and blame some one else - oppression. You find that you are unable to learn from others and to step outside your bubble - that is unfortunate.
Everything in our society is set up to make us feel inadequate. So yes school did but it was not school alone. It was everything that told me to look inward and fix myself. My trauma is healed and I can see school did this to everyone. This is why I share. You can try to shame me but I immune to it. The oppression of systems is very real and only growing. You delude yourself if you think you are or were untouched.
"At least prior to 1964, grammar schools trained their students for a more thorough curriculum and tough examinations compared to what was taught in other government schools. However, so long as they are teaching the same curriculum, it is unlikely that the selective nature of grammar schools helps their students to learn much more. "
This caveat more or less makes the rest of the article moot. True, selective schools are not a magic bullet, but they are precondition for doing anything better. You might as well say that if Google put potential employees through the same selection process as McDonalds it would be fine so long as employees at both companies performed the same tasks. Technically true, but so what?
One important point also missed by the article is that, originally, comprehensives were also not supposed to internally stream pupils by ability. This is logical if you believe that mixing up pupils of different ability levels has some sort of positive effect: you can only achieve this effect by putting pupils in the same class, not merely the same institution. However, this was abandoned in nearly every comprehensive school within a decade because trying to teach mixed ability classes of 15 year olds Mathematics is crazy and a complete waste of time. In fact, the GCSE system has for decades had two tracks (Higher and Foundation). The 'Comprehensive' school I went to was, for all academic purposes, two schools in one building. We socialised with the thick kids at break to the extent that we wanted to, and we had mixed ability classes for History and Geography and other subjects that didn't matter much, but that was it. Abolishing grammar schools was thus an incredibly expensive and disruptive way of getting kids from Grammar schools and Secondary Moderns to share breaktime and make History lessons into a joke.
You're right about streaming. My school didn't have it originally but were forced to switch to streaming when the results were so poor.
This essay clearly represents a lot of work so I am reluctant to be dismissive. But there is a but....and it's a big one. Anyone reading this without knowledge of its broader context would get a seriously distorted picture of post-war British schooling. The reality is that it has been bedevilled by an endless stream of sub-egalitarian theorising that has been 100% counter-productive. This theorising has pumped out from the utopian petri-dishes of academe and - via teacher training colleges and local authority education bureaucracies - into the school system. I have some experience of this but a comment thread is not a place to discuss the full extent and depth of the tragedy of it. Anyone who wants to go there should read Melanie Philips' All Must Have Prizes (1996), Just one for-instance....in the 1980s education 'experts' deemed that pupils filling in multiple-choice tick boxes was a valid substitute for them showing their learning in sentence form.
1) Grammar schools are extremely rare now. They don't exist in Wales at all and the same is true of many socialist dominated parts of the UK. Only 5% of children in England attend a grammar school, which leads me to believe that only the very best children are accepted and those children likely to be outstanding at a young age. Not only that, children in Wales are NOT SAT tested at the end of KS2 and haven't been since 2005
2) Given 1) why look at outcomes today rather than in the 1960s when grammars were far more common? The results of the 11+ would be far more accurate than any SAT test at predicting IQ
3) The tests at KS2 are so unreliable ALL children are retested when they enter secondary school, this has been the case for the last 12 years at least. Primary schools and teachers are rated on their KS2 results so massive amounts of cheating occurs, it happened in my children's school where the examples of very similar questions that were on the SAT test were left on the board as they took the test.
4) If comprehensive schools are no different in outcome to grammars why not allow comprehensives to convert to grammars? The fact it is absolutely verboten tells you all you need to know - Those making the decisions send their kids private and they don't want the competition from working class grammar school kids.
5) If you want to know if the results were more egalitarian under a grammar system look at MPs, PMs, those at the top of industry. Were grammar school kids at the top of more fields in the 1960s and 1970s than today? They were definitely reaching the top positions in govt, they were not before and they haven't since.
I wonder if "averages" muddies the discussion.
My guess is that cramming children of widely disparate potential in one class both substantially harms the knowledge gained by the brightest even as it improves the gains in knowledge by the majority. Two obvious explanations for this effect are that the course work is adjusted up (for one group) and down (for the other) to an average for the class. The other is that the worst students are disruptive while the best can serve as role models and even assist in teaching.
To the extent this is true, then separating children based upon learning potential (not parent class), would be expected to lead to substantial gains in knowledge and ability for the best and brightest, and minor decreases for the rest (who now miss the former's contributions to the system). The average of it all…who knows? Who cares?
This then leads to the question of whether this dynamic and this distribution is better or worse than integrated learning. This is certainly debatable, but I would argue we would be much better off with most educational brilliance focused on those most capable of leveraging it. We are incalculably better off with a range of Einsteins and midwits, than we are with a slightly higher class of midwits. Thus I argue for meritocracy, and against forced equitability of outcomes.
Comprehensive schools ARE selective schools. They select plutocratically, by house price. It’s estimated that properties in the catchment area of “good” Comprehensive schools sell for around a third more than market conditions would otherwise predict.
Hitchens’ points out that the real reason leftists abolished Grammar Schools and replaced them with Comprehensives wasn’t the advertised reason. It’s almost funny when lefty headbangers like Fiona Millar regurgitate the Harrison Bergeron egalitarian arguments at face value. Grammar schools had a socially conservative ethos, and they passed on socially conservative values to their pupils. This is what Crosland hated them for. Abolishing them was first and foremost a Rudy Dutschke strategy, to give them a socially leftist bohemian ethos. This was all that mattered to Crosland. He knew full well middle class parents would game the system to make sure Tarquin got into a “good” Comp. But the “good” Comp would proselytise leftist values. That was the point.
I have doubts over the accuracy of "classism. The middle class wants to avoid sending their children to school with the troublesome and dull". No one, regardless of class, wants to send their kids to school with the troublesome. A kindergarten teacher remarked that perhaps more important than the teacher was what other students were in the class. As to the dull (which isn't a very imaginative word and can describe many things) my ADHD kid says that high school isn't harder than middle because of the private environment. She is able to learn much, much more in a class of 15 than 30. Teaching kids who want to be taught is the most important. In regards to the grammar school debate, more capable students should be exposed to a more in depth curriculum. Limiting the curriculum by virtue of IQ only causes resentment, in US middle and high schools anyone can sign uo
Advanced Placement classes and if they can do the work they can stay. This approach gets rid of the resentment towards Gifted and Talented Programs in elementary.
I see no virtue in feeding my kids to the wolves, and no vice (or “classism”) in wanting my kids to enjoy a learning environment with other well-behaved, respectful kids. I have actively sought out classroom settings for my kids that are free from disruptive, poorly behaved, and violent kids. I am in no way ashamed of this. To the contrary, I see it as my duty as a parent.
I can’t be credibly painted with the “classist” brush because “my kids” include a niece and nephew from a severely underprivileged and dysfunctional background.
Politicians and education industry benefited with the educationist myth as they can get more money than with the hereditarian one which is the truth even if it seems edgy, facts don't care about your feelings
The best school in the country for improving kids grades (measured from enrollment to GCSE) is Michaela. Non-selective with many poor black kids. The school's strengths lie in both executive function (kids' agency) and disicipline as well as teacher led academics. Ideally suited to that intake; whereas the schools for eager learners might be optimised differently.
Apparently the Michaela school has an emphasis on rote learning (learning by repetition).
Have a look at this thread. https://twitter.com/s_hall_teach/status/1299729425685192704?s=20
Apparently there was a big program under Lyndon Johnson to discover the "best" method of education, but they basically buried the results when they found that rote learning, via chants, was the best method. Because this seemed super old fashioned, like something a Catholic school might do, and the teachers wanted the answer to be something fancy and new. So they just ignored the results.
I don't know whether the people behind this "michaela" school are aware of this research, or whether they just do it like this for reasons related to their own temperament.
On my visit the school, I did not witness rote learning; what I did witness was concentration by the kids on the teachers the like of which I have never seen in any other situation. I did hear the every lunch time chant "I'm the captain of my soul, the master of my fate." Whatever the methods, they deliver agency, fluency and knowledge to the kids.
Hmm...so give the kids at selective schools IQ tests. Then give kids at non-selective schools IQ tests. Then compare how kids with (roughly) the same IQ from each type of school perform on yet another IQ test. When the results show little or no difference, conclude the education provided by both types of schools is the same.
This has been the difficulty with charter schools in the US as well.
There is evidence that children do more poorly in the long run if they go to schools where they get beat up or are in danger. There is some evidence that the worse a student is, the more they need a good teacher. But beyond that, for the better students schools are pretty much the same. We would all rather there were Something We Could Do (wrings hands and sobs.) For the very brightest students, our best move is often to get out of the way and let them learn to be autodidacts, with a little course correction and showing of interest to keep them interested.
Instinctively I am on the side of keeping grammar schools, but someone recently brought up to me another aspect. By segregating wealthy and successful students so that they do not suffer at the hands of the more "enriching" elements of society, we create a bubble where the future ruling class does not understand the stakes of the immigration debate because they are insulated from the violent and chaotic effects of bringing in low-IQ, low-self-control immigrants.
We create so much noise around schooling. All it is doing is conditioning. It does not educate children to be their best selves it simply conditions them to slot into a system that actually wants to exploit them. The smarter they are the more it exploits and destroys them. We do not care about real intelligence. We only care about who can be the best pawn for the system. The systems are breaking down and we are fighting over which ones are less broken. We could do better and create one that teaches the children who they really are. Our future will be nothing like the past and the only thing we may have when everything falls apart is what we learned about ourselves. Knowing yourself is the greatest value and education can give when regurgitation has nothing of value because the system does not exist as you were taught it did.
good schooling gives kids agency - capturing some of 'the best that was thought and said' - from which they will be able to learn independently - and building in executive function - exemplified by being able to do your homework. So the very opposite of pawns! Do you think knowing yourself is possible without knowing Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens .. without some insight into biology, mathematics ... on which our current amazing success is based? Empty self absorbed heads will make the kids dumb idiots in the face of change.
Is your question about knowing yourself without reading some English writers for real? My friend you are so snowed you have proven you can't think for yourself. You are exactly what I am talking about about. I have always thought for myself. This is how I am wired. I see oppression and I feel oppression and trust me when I say our schools only job is to make us all feel inadequate. You should be able to know yourself even if you can not read. The idea that a bunch of dead English authors sets myself knowledge is hilarious, culturally egotistical and beyond borderline racist.
School made you feel inadequate and this causes you to externalise that inadequacy and blame some one else - oppression. You find that you are unable to learn from others and to step outside your bubble - that is unfortunate.
Everything in our society is set up to make us feel inadequate. So yes school did but it was not school alone. It was everything that told me to look inward and fix myself. My trauma is healed and I can see school did this to everyone. This is why I share. You can try to shame me but I immune to it. The oppression of systems is very real and only growing. You delude yourself if you think you are or were untouched.