Broken Britain?

by David Wemyss (September 2011)

My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.

Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.

Several.

So there you go. Others will be better than me at teasing out more of the sad story, but, for many people, the first exhibit in the trial of broken Britain will be the ideological and instrumental destruction of humane education.

In 1945 he wrote to his wife as follows:

I do not pretend to enjoy a socialist system, but I think it right and am prepared to make personal sacrifices for it. But what I do loathe and fear is the decline in spiritual values. Truthfulness is giving place to bigotry. Cruelty is replacing tolerance. And the sanctity of the individual is being blurred by mass emotions. I fear I have not got a communal mind.

Anyway, Ellen Wilkinson could have told them both to think again. She had spoken before her death of her own pre-war education in Manchester as part of an intelligent handful constantly held up and made to wait for the rest of the class, which was why she had rejected all talk of equality of opportunity (even though the idea was well-established on the hard left of her party before and during the war) and emphasised instead the concrete goodwill of finding the clever pupils and helping them to get on, and finding the less able pupils and helping them make the most of their abilities.

But what used to be there?

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