You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There is quite a good section about the dilution of academic standards that has taken place since the qualifications on offer were altered to fit the new system. 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.

Hardly any mention is made of the massive increase in exam results in the first thirty years of comprehensives,, information freely available online. 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. If you want a potted history of the changes to the education from victorian times to the present day, chapter two is up your street. Thus, whereas pupils from early post- war grammar schools were admitted to Oxbridge “on merit”, the much greater proportion of state educated pupils now admitted to these universities are there as a the result of political pressure exercised through imaginary “quotas”. Peter Hitchens here surveys the development of public education in Britain from its origins in the 19th Century - necessary background for the main thrust of the book, which is the shameful failure of successive governments - labour and conservative - to protect high quality education in state schools, particularly in respect of talented children from poor backgrounds (myself included) which flourished in relatively brief period when Grammar Schools afforded those like me a chance of a good education, and the prospects of attending university in the days when a good degree really meant something.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. A subject that is now rather unfashionable and little understood by the British public, but worth a read for anyone with interest in the debate over academic selection and social mobility.

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.

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. 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. Some examples of this misleading or potentially dishonest discourse are some of the accusations thrown about accusing critics of (pg. He has been a journalist for nearly 50 years, has reported from 57 countries and was a resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington. 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”.

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. It is a world that, despite the undoubted challenges and inequalities of our current educational reality, I am deeply thankful not to inhabit. Though he pinpoints inequalities and discrepancies within the current system, Hitchens’s condescension toward comprehensive school educators grates, and he fails to seriously consider how socioeconomic factors, rather than “parental hostility or indifference to education,” may affect student performance. 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.For example, when discussing the relative outcomes of selective and non-selective education, two hard to access reports which support the superiority of selective education are drawn upon and treated as a smoking gun whilst the extensive academic literature, much of which supports the opposite conclusion, is ignored.