A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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There are some extremely valid points, but I am not convinced by their rigour as yet (I need to re-read). There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children.

Instead, driven by the hypocrisies and bad faith of ‘the left’ and ‘egalitarians’, and the timidity and cowardice of the conservatives, this revolution was trampled under a communist approach to schooling: the comprehensives. 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.

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. It is suggested that much of the egalitarians’ hatred of grammar schools came from a fear of ordinary people having access to schools that were conservative, hierarchical and Christian. Controversial, arguing that the destruction of the grammar schools, driven by utopian egalitarians, has ultimately failed. 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?

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. His overall point is probably the right one: that you can have better education I'd you target it at those who need it, not at those who can't, and that trying to create a fully comprehensive, fully egalitarian system tends to produce the second outcome, not the first. It sees the destruction of the emerging grammar school system as an unforgiveable and irreparable act of cultural vandalism, which cannot simply be remedied by an expansion of the last remaining grammar schools.In this way, the book has some potential to stimulate much needed debate about the purposes, shape and structure of our educational system. Hitchens mentions these works in passing but fails to acknowledge, let alone deal with, their central ideas.

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. 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. 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. He is a former revolutionary Marxist who now describes himself as a socially conservative Social Democrat.He has published several books, including The Abolition of Britain and The Rage Against God , also published by Bloomsbury Continuum, mainly on aspects of what he regards as a Cultural Revolution which has transformed Britain for the worse in the last half century.

He was educated at The Leys School Cambridge, Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York. However, the data presented in support of this model is at best cherry-picked and at worst dishonest. Hardly any mention is made of the massive increase in exam results in the first thirty years of comprehensives,, information freely available online. Despite agreeing with the urgency of some of the educational challenges identified, I fundamentally disagree with the book’s implicit view of humanity and the purposes of education.This is captured in despairing terms on the penultimate page of the book when commenting on the public outcry when a highly qualified state school student failed to get into the University of Oxford: ‘After 50 years of falling standards and weakening rigour, such emotion is seldom opposed by cool reason or factual knowledge, because we lack a properly educated elite with confidence to stand against the electronic mob which increasingly rules all decisions’ (p. For students of post-war education, Hitchens provides a useful chronology of secondary education, and refers to the tension between idealism and practice. At the same time the parasite grammar that I was down to go to was having an entire new science block added to it.