Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy?

In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into a flood’, adding that ‘both in intelligence and ambition they compete strongly with the public school boys’. In short, a new, largely state-funded elite was now emerging to rival the familiar products of Eton, Winchester et al.

Yet at this very point, between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, successive Labour and Conservative governments were in the process of encouraging or permitting the conversion of most of the country’s academically selective grammars into non-selective comprehensives. But what if they had not? If instead this rival elite had continued to grow and prosper? No chillaxing David Cameron, no languidly entitled Jacob Rees-Mogg, no cakeist Boris Johnson, but a focused, industrious, unsentimental generation of meritocrats, able to take and implement the long scientific and rational view in the overall national interest?

Although Peter Hitchens does not quite go there in A Revolution Betrayed, he is in no doubt about the entirely negative consequences of what, with typical understatement, he calls ‘a transformation as shocking and swift as the dissolution of the monasteries four centuries before’. It is not that he is dewy-eyed about the grammars themselves, which he concedes were not only of varying quality but also had ‘something fearsome about them, with the whistle of the cane always in the background’. Yet he insists that ultimately what they were about was the pursuit of excellence, albeit sometimes within quite narrowly trammelled lines, and that accordingly something important – in essence, standards and rigour – was lost with their passing:

I think it is incontestably true that modern examinations are less testing than those of 60 years ago.