My secondary education was unusual. I attended a comprehensive school until I was sixteen, and then a grammar school for sixth form. The comprehensive was superior because, through the diversity of its pupils and the inventiveness and experience of its staff, it taught me to think critically. My grammar was just a crammer for exams. I found it narrowing. I wrote as much in the Guardian recently. My article received plenty of criticism, as you’d expect from such a divisive policy issue — nothing, it seems, fires people up like education. Among the reaction was this full-blown response from Toby Young in a recent issue of the Spectator.
Young accused me — but really he was accusing my generation of state educated pupils — of being an ‘automaton’ who is ‘programmed to vote Labour’ because I accept ‘the prevailing orthodoxies of the Blob (Michael Gove’s word for the education establishment)… without a murmur of dissent.’
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