Next week, HEPI will be running a second review of the same book by a grammar school teacher that takes a different perspective on the arguments.

A disappointing, and most depressing, conclusion, but, thanks to this book, I was able to arrive at it. The real target of the book seems to be the move to a mass education system in which, according to the author, the essential values of rigour and respect for academic authority have been lost.

The unapologetic method used to describe selective education could bring about a conversation on the structure of the modern educational system. In this way, the book has some potential to stimulate much needed debate about the purposes, shape and structure of our educational system. The book discusses the personal narratives of several ‘egalitarians’, largely to point out their inconsistencies and failings. At times, it appears to be academic selection but, at others, critics of grammar schools are accused of blurring ‘the boundary between dislike of examinations and the dislike of the schools that relied on them’ (p.

There are, however, gaps in his narrative, namely reference to the current standardised testing (SATs) at eleven in primary schools, and how this affects pupil selection in the upper bands of comprehensive schools. He has been a journalist for nearly 50 years, has reported from 57 countries and was a resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington. At the same time the parasite grammar that I was down to go to was having an entire new science block added to it.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. He doesn't attbeot to tease out, for example, to what extent grammars produced better results because they were better vs better results because they selected the best pupils. 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.

The book is written in angry tone, it could be argued that this a righteous anger, but it seems more like an anger written from a point of nostalgia. If, in 1956, there had been an expansion of grammar schools to meet the baby bulge then this green and pleasant land would have been preserved and led to the abolition of nearly all private education. 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.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. 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. 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. Of course, you can never include everyone, and I was disappointed in the absence of Baroness Hale, former President of the Supreme Court, who attended Richmond Girls’ High School, a county grammar school, in North Yorkshire. However, the book also bemoans the significant role of church schools in the current educational system.