THE SCHOOL ON THE HILL POSTSCRIPT

Tapton Secondary Modern school

Writing a highly impressionistic portrait of my overwrought childhood and early adolescence came about as the result of an argument I had toward the end of last year about grammar schools.

Grammar schools have always held an attraction for a particular brand of right wing meritocrat,[1] and others nostalgic for the days when a few working class kids could rise up the social ladder by passing their 11+ and going on to excel. Meritocrats are apt to adopt charming analogies to describe this form of social Darwinism, such as separating the wheat from the chaff, or recently by the Mayor of London, who used the eloquent analogy of a box of cornflakes. This might be fine for the wheat, or superior cornflake, though I’m not so sure how much fun, but a pretty dismal affair for the chaff.

Whilst not advocating a puerile all must have prizes culture,- though a system that constantly reinforces the idea of winners and losers is surely just as puerile,- this obsession with crude meritocracy is deeply damaging to any healthy society.  Education is, and must always be, about much more than competition, an obsession with which is related to the desire to turn the education system into a purely functional arm of, in that hideous term, Great Britain PLC.[2] Part of the problem of seeing education only through utilitarian glasses is that it has resulted in a wholescale assault on the humanities, as various overpaid Gradgrind’s with clipboards demand to know what every subject is ‘worth.’ Of course divested of the humanities education merely becomes vocational training, a means to an end, producing useful economic units of production.

The 11+
 Sorting out the Wheat from the Chaff

All of which brings me back to Grammar Schools and the 11+. Leaving aside the morality of dividing children up at this age, even from a purely utilitarian viewpoint the process involved a massive waste of talent. Eleven being far too young to assess a child’s capabilities, millions of children were sentenced to a 2^nd class education. Moreover given a shortage of Grammar school places selection was never based purely on academic attainment, luck always played a part, and sometimes more than luck it would seem. My sister who was a borderline case consequently had to attend an interview to ascertain her suitability for a Grammar school education. Amongst the questions she was asked was, “what does your father do for a living?” It is these millions of children that the great pro-grammar school lobby don’t wish to talk about.

When conceived Secondary Modern schools were supposed to enjoy parity of esteem with Grammar schools, the reality was, as could easily have been envisaged, very different.  The Secondary Modern soon came to be seen as the school for failures. Those who had "failed" their eleven plus were sent to these schools for the most part to learn rudimentary skills before advancing to factory or menial jobs. How else could it be seen when so many Secondary Modern’s emphasised practical utility over the academic. Although some Secondary Modern schools did seek to provide a better education, Meole Brace which I attended was one of the better ones, teaching languages and encouraging A stream students to aim higher. Overall however the focus was away from the humanities, toward more practical skills.

So although art was popular at school amongst many of my classmates, I don’t remember being ever taken to an art gallery, let alone any mention of art theory. Now it may be that we may have hated such a trip, or indeed that any attempt to explore more fully art, poetry and philosophy might have been wasted energy. I do not think so, but could be wrong. What the failure to even attempt such an enterprise illustrates is the poverty of expectations that ran through the whole of my experience of secondary school.[3]

Now my own experience has been that failing the 11+ and being sent to Secondary Modern School was no  great disaster, and this is also true for many of my erstwhile classmates who have gone on to live happy and fulfilled lives. As someone who I was at school with just pointed out “we never stop learning, in fact I think that it’s not until we become adults that the real learning starts.” Which is true and why even the most damaging educational experience can be rectified in later life.
There have also been cases of children who having failed the hurdle of the 11+ have then gone on to excel, ending up in Oxbridge.[4] But these cases were always very much the exception to a very powerful rule and they occurred at a time when social mobility was much more fluid than today. I would hazard a guess that such journeys would be much more difficult now.

The Comprehensive school system did not cure all the problems of the British Education system, but it did represent progress. When I look at the website of my old school now, I know that it is an immeasurably better institution than it was in my day. Indeed across the spectrum the whole education system is vastly improved since the 1960’s and is very different creature from the one from which I emerged in 1971.

That said the problems of the British education system are inextricably interwoven with class and privilege, and so long as such enormous advantages can be purchased through the mechanism of private education there is little hope of this changing.  For those who enjoy these advantages are supported by an entrenched ruling elite,  who, despite the cant about raising public education up to the standards of private schools,[5] have no interest or intention of bringing this about.

Education must never be purely, or even primarily utilitarian. An education that minimizes, downgrades, or even omits the arts and humanities is not really an education at all. If we are to produce fully rounded individuals we must embrace the idea of education for its own sake and fully immerse children in the riches of human experience represented by the humanities; or more poetically “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”(W B Yeats)

---

[1] It is now often forgotten that when Michael Young popularised the term he did so in a satirical essay ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy,’ "merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications."[Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. Fontana Press. 1988. p. 521.]

[2] I am not, nor intend ever to be, merely an employee. I am a citizen.

[3] When I met a careers teacher, sometime early in my fourth year, he asked me what my interests were. When I replied writing, he suggested stores work, since you wrote things down in a job like that, - somewhat less than ironic, my first job after leaving school involved working in store room. He was of course being ‘realistic.’

[4] Though on examination these were often the children of middle class parents who both provided financial backing and motivational support. 

[5] Of course the quality of education in many state schools is often as high as that of the private sector, however when parents purchase an education at Eton they are paying for far more than board, lodging and teaching hours, as our current Prime Minister and our overwhelmingly privately educated cabinet can testify.