Is the purpose of education to educate or socially engineer? It was announced yesterday that England is to have its first new grammar school in decades, and the strange thing is that not a single person in the media (that I could see) asked whether this would improve education standards. Instead the entire debate was about whether it improved social mobility.
On the Today programme and the New Statesman website, a statistic was quoted showing that grammar schools have a smaller percentage of pupils on free school meals than comprehensives.
There are probably many reasons for this, but most likely the largest factor involved is that intelligence is hereditary and social class correlates with IQ; in other words, middle-class kids tend on average to be more intelligent than working-class ones. You could make the system fairer by replacing grammar entrance exams (for which richer parents hire tutors to help their children pass) with straight-up IQ tests, but the number of poorer children would still be disproportionately low.
In fact the more social mobility we have over the generations, as everyone seems to want, the more that social class will correlate with intelligence. Richard Herrnstein pointed this out more than four decades ago. Many years earlier, Michael Young warned about this very process in The Rise of the Meritocracy. Social mobility does have its downsides; that’s because intelligence is just another privilege you inherit from mummy and daddy.
I don’t know what difference grammars make. One expert suggests that ‘Grammars didn’t result in more people moving upwards, but those who did move rose further,’ and that seems plausible to me.
But so what if grammar schools don’t improve social mobility? The purpose of education policy should surely be raising education standards, not social engineering, whether it’s increasing mobility or reducing equality; those are surely benefits of rising standards, but to make them the aim seems perverse. No one running the military would say that the purpose of the army was to increase social mobility through the ranks, surely? As with education, a successful system would allow talent to rise up, but that’s not its purpose.
My general impression is that grammar schools were successful, and remain popular, because they often maintain a pre-1960s ethos of rigour and discipline; I’m not the passionate believer in grammar schools I once was because it’s clear comprehensives can do the same. Partly the problem with 1970s-era comps was that they came about alongside a new ethos of education, a child-centred vision that wanted to give children more space. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work, or at least not among the majority of children who don’t possess high levels of conscientiousness.
I went to a former grammar that had become a comprehensive in the 1970s, Cardinal Vaughan School in west London. Unlike most comps the teachers wore gowns, they kept school houses, Latin classes, lots of homework, lots of detentions, walls commemorating those who died in Flanders and various other things that in the 1980s were considered ludicrously reactionary by the educational establishment; despite scientific socialism having proven these things to be outmoded, for some reason parents still really wanted them for their children.
Down the road was Holland Park Comprehensive, the ‘socialist Eton’ as it was called when the likes of Tony Benn sent their children there in the 1970s; by the 1980s, in the absence of rigour or a guiding ethos, it had become a dystopia reminiscent of pre-Giuliani New York. The middle class had fled.
Today, with homework, discipline, and all those things that came back to fashion in the 2000s, Holland Park is now a good school, although it has to be said that enough of its alumni have been killed fighting for Isis to justify their own memorial wall.
Cardinal Vaughan did, and does, a great job of sending poor but intelligent boys onto university; but it’s worth pointing out that it didn’t send any poor but dull-witted boys onto further education. It gave them a better education than Holland Park would have, but it’s sometimes forgotten that teachers are not miracle workers.
Both of these schools are now successful, but they also, despite their comprehensive status, can select. The Vaughan is eight times oversubscribed, so can filter out uncommitted parents by asking that they attend Mass every week; people willing to make such extra sacrifices are more likely to have children with the necessary self-discipline to succeed in education. It has a lot of kids on free school meals, but they are from very dedicated families (often immigrants).
Holland Park is located in one of the most expensive postcodes in Britain, and schools in rich areas are liable to attract the children of the wealthy who, on average, will be smarter than the population as a whole.
All successful schools select to some extent, and selection will by definition entail a higher proportion of those further up the social scale. Shouldn’t we instead focus on improving overall education standards, rather than social engineering, previous attempts at which have all failed?
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