A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. From the book’s perspective, you either believe education is for academic rigour, selection and knowledge or you believe it is for in social engineering in the name of equality. No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities.

One of those discussed is the TV presenter Joan Bakewell, who went to a grammar school and gained a life much more privileged than her sister who did not. To protect academic rigour, it is insistent that we need to select people early and separate those who will be paid to think from those who will not. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.Naturally, Hitchens largely ignores the Crowther Report of 1959, whose information was based upon much more comprehensive studies than those of Gurney- Dixon, including a detailed survey of all young men entering National Service between 1956 and 1958. The criticism led, Hitchens contends, to “a huge decline in secondary education,” exacerbated by “a new system of selection by wealth”: students who cannot afford to attend one of England’s fee-paying public schools are subjected to unrigorous “common” schools, where “the old canon of expected and accepted knowledge, in literature and history, has been mocked, deconstructed and replaced.

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. He has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. Some examples of this misleading or potentially dishonest discourse are some of the accusations thrown about accusing critics of (pg. 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.

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. I found plenty that I previously didn’t know, but would probably get more pleasure from seeing the arguments thoroughly debated. There is, of course, no such evidence: admissions at Oxbridge are ultimately in the hands of the individual colleges and these vary considerably in the proportion of state educated students whom they admit.