The grammar school provides bright children from poor backgrounds with a spring-board to the professions and by extensions, a better standard of living.
Old school leftists hated grammar schools because to them, if you were working class, you had to stay working class. Grammar schools enable working class people to move up in the world so they have to go. This was probably the motivation behind Anthony Crossland’s ‘scorched earth’ approach to selective education in the 1960s.
To modern leftists, grammar schools are hated for a much more base and self-interested reason. Grammar schools enable working class children to compete with their own children for places at elite universities. You would be a laughing stock at dinner parties and receptions if your kid had to go to an ‘ordinary’ university. To the fantastically snooty and egotistical, your ego could not survive such a situation.
If the daughter of Dave the truck driver from Leeds can beat the daughter of Quentin the playwright from Notting Hill to a place at Cambridge that will never do. Now Quentin might hope his daughter can beat the truck driver’s daughter on merit, but you just can’t take that chance. The best way to stop her is by making sure there are no grammar schools for her to go to.
The money the elite typically have means access to a quality education is no problem. However, the only way a bright kid from a poor background can get a quality education is if that education is free. Truck drivers and check-out girls don’t have £15,000 per child per term to send their kids to elite fee-paying grammar schools, so their only hope is a (free) state grammar school.
I don’t have a problem with people spending lots of money on their children’s education if they have it to spend. I do have a problem with people who do have that kind of money denying people who don’t the chance to educate their kids as well. The vindictive destruction of grammar schools and bars on expanding selective education are exactly that: spiteful attempts to stop people with limited financial means giving their own kids a fighting chance at beating the elite’s kids to university places.
One need only to look at the lengths Stephen Twigg MP went to in order to prevent selective education. Twigg is a Labour MP and it is deeply shameful the party of the working class could do such a thing. Shameful, but not surprising.
The leftist elite thrive best in environments where schmoozing and knowing the right people are key. Talent is not a consideration. It’s about going to opening nights of avant-garde plays or attending the right dinner parties or writing fawning reviews in each other’s columns in left-wing publications. A grammar school cuts through this nonsense. It boils education and university places down to what you can do on your own merit. If Tracey the truck driver’s daughter is smarter than Penny the playwright’s daughter, then Tracey will get and deserve that place at Cambridge.
Put simply, grammar schools allow poor kids to beat elite kids to university places, and possibly go on to beat them to high paying jobs too. The leftist elite don’t want this. They prefer a schmoozocracy, where the poor are shut out. Not content with this, they sabotage any advantage a state grammar school would give the poor.
Equality is all well and good, but not if people from the North can beat you to something you want. I mean, that sounds dangerous like equality, and as a good liberal, they can’t have any of that!
Well said! For years I couldn’t understand why Labour was so against grammar schools. Having attended one myself in the 1950s in west London, I can confirm that the majority of the pupils, probably 80%+, were from working class families, who then went on to university, colleges and good jobs. Why wouldn’t Labour want this for their voters? Then, a couple of months ago, the penny dropped. Grammar schools gave pupils aspiration that they could better themselves. And once they have they very often change their voting from Labour to Tory. As you say, Labour want their voters to be kept in their place, forever voting Labour under the illusion that it is the party for the working man.
Good article, about spot on I’d say.
One of the real problems is the lack of grammar schools means that parents have to spend money on private tutoring in order to get their child in. This means the privileged children go their and the working class kids don’t because their parents can’t afford it. The lack of grammar schools makes a surplus of demands, and so parents turn to underhand tactic to get their child in, and you can only do that with money. Build more grammar schools and that problem floats away, so every child that passes their eleven plus can get in. It would also be nice to see the elven plus be a separate qualification, and use SATs to determine grammar school places instead of them just being a badge for the school.
Unfortunately there are grammar schools and grammar schools. There is no national standard and for some schools entry levels are quit unremarkable just to make up the numbers. Now if there were to be a national minimum standard for grammar school entry combined with a separate league table with 100% A*-B threshold then there might be a case.
The Left has also stacked the educational system against boys in numerous ways …
http://web.archive.org/web/20150320091433/http://www.angryharry.com:80/esWellDonetheGirls.htm?
The real scandal is why can’t children have a Grammar School education within the comprehensive system. It can’t be that difficult. To answer my own question: the reason is that the comprehensive system is stuffed full of “leftie” teachers. These teachers cannot abide the thought of a Grammar School ethos and use their positions to brainwash pupils with their left wing views. Allowing the brighter pupils to break free to question this perspective is not in their interest. The Gove/May spat over schools in Birmingham is a distraction to the real indoctrination that is going on in our schools on a daily basis.