“Bring back Grammar schools,” goes the cry. The prime minister has plans. Lord have mercy.
“Bring back Secondary Moderns,” goes the cry. Well, presumably. You can’t have one without the other.
I went to a grammar school in the 1950s. I feel very ambivalent about this. Mother left school at 12. Father left school at 15. Both were working class, both were quick and clever – and both got no real education, no qualifications. A crying shame. They prayed that this would not happen to me. The post-war dream was breaking. It was 1956. We had the 11-plus.
A miniscule percentage of paupers could succeed nd go to a rarefied grammar school and change class and culture forever. I somehow passed. I still don’t know how. I could spell “necessary” and “accommodate”, knew conditional tenses, could recall with tedious accuracy what I did on my holidays, and differentiate between vegetables and fruit – but I was well nigh innumerate.
Maybe it was a mistake. I still think I’ll get found out. I went to the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, a pretend public school, where teachers in black gowns and mortar boards, resembling undernourished crows, hit us with sticks, filled us with Latin, Muscular Christianity, Deference, Misogyny and much assorted Dead Learning so that we passed exams and went “up” to a fancy university.
I was that soldier. Thus were my parents’ prayers answered. Be careful what you wish for. I hardly spoke to them for years. I had crossed classes. I did alright, Jack. A comfortable, solvent, liberal life was mine. It simply could not have happened without passing the 11-plus. It “saved” me. I’m not quite sure from what. The working classes, I suppose.
They were meanwhile incarcerated in the graveyard of Secondary Moderns, because they were “only good with their hands”. Dear me. Your fate decided 11. We weren’t so clever. We were lucky. Lots more children could have passed.
I never really met the “working class” again until I taught in a comprehensive in the 1970s. The 11-plus had been mostly scrapped and all pupils were nourished and educated at their own pace. Comprehensives were largely successful, but always against massive odds – relentless criticism, woeful underfunding and the perpetual demonising of “left-wing loony teachers”. It wore us out.
Then the ruling classes invented Academies and Free Schools – and now more Grammars, even though they have become merely aspirational middle class ghettos. Paupers need not apply, however smart.
Theresa May and her chums want more of them. They will help “social mobility”. Good grief. Divide and Rule more like.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.