A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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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. 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. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour.

In other places, it seems to be the size of schools that is key, with both grammars and secondary moderns being seen as successful because they were much smaller than comprehensives. This is an interesting read on two levels: Hitchens provides a view of the grammar schools and the part they played, and in some areas are still playing, in British Secondary Education, before their demise and the development of comprehensive education; and, for those of us who were around at the time, he provides an overview of our own education, when our future was often determined at the age of eleven, and where there was a disparity in grammar school places across counties. The book comments ‘Are we wrong to see in this, deep down, a stern recognition that this outcome was just? Review of Peter Hitchens’s new book ‘A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System’ by Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Head of Department and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, Lancaster University. All the familiar Hitchens tropes are there: rejection of the present in favour of an imagined pre- lapsarian past; the incontinent use of ridiculous hyperbole (Hitchens actually compares the “destruction” of the grammar schools to the Dissolution of the Monasteries and claims that in the golden past taking A- level examinations was equivalent to taking a degree); the assumption of the truth of what he purports (but completely fails) to demonstrate; the use of hostile generalisations and ad hominem attacks to dismiss those who disagree with him (“egalitarians”, “utopians” etc, driven by naïve beliefs and/or personal spite); an approach to evidence that is insouciant, to say the least, and that completely undermines his claim to be a defender of “standards”.

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. This is of course the opposite of what was intended, especially by former Minister of Education Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher, her successor in that role, who closed down many more Grammar Schools than Williams. Hitchens, no doubt, as a tribute to the grammar schools, includes a lengthy list of notable grammar school pupils, including prime ministers.

The book discusses the personal narratives of several ‘egalitarians’, largely to point out their inconsistencies and failings. 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. 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?Hitchens provides both a stimulating reading experience and a thought-provoking study of the successes and failures of British education post-1944. 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.

In 1954 the terms “working class” and “poor” were not synonymous but, leaving that aside, Hitchens fails to explain that the reason for this report was the government’s concern that working class children who passed the 11+ and went to grammar school were not taking advantage of the opportunities offered to them – hence the report’s official title: “Early Leaving”. Hitchens’ work is well referenced and highlights the selection process for free grammar school places, based on academic ability at eleven, and notes, referring to comprehensive schools, how places in popular schools are determined by post codes and parents’ income.Similarly, the claim that a school system based on academic selection would have led to the withering of private schools, does not fully cohere with the book’s view of a middle class which will do anything to ensure that their offspring maintain an educational advantage. An interesting take on the rise and fall of the grammar school/secondary modern system during the middle and towards the end of the twentieth century.