An indispensable post on social mobility from Harry's Place (well if you're interested in education and it's effect on social mobility).
Some of the most interesting stuff is in the comments section - particularly by a poster named Old Peculiar.
I was moved to comment but HP requires an email address which I was not willing to give, so instead my comments are here: (though they make more sense if you've read the other comments on HP first.)
"Living in a deprived neighbourhood with a 10 year old son going to secondary school next year I agree with much of what has been said in these comments.
re: grammar schools. I too have been wishing for their return for the admittedly self-interested reason that it would benefit my son. There is one remaining grammar school in our area. There are 1800 applicants for 180 places, so clearly there is a demand. And yes, the well-off are at an advantage, either through having come from a better primary school, or from being able to afford private tutoring for the entrance exam. More grammars school would at least mean more places.
re: streaming. I think OP is right, that this would be a way to make comps work better. Indeed it may be the best answer all round. No entrance exam. More opportunity to change streams at a later date. My own schooling was in a 'normal' comp - good mix of pupils. Neither desperately deprived or unusually affluent. I certainly benefitted from the fact that in my day there were still O levels and CSEs. Having people taught separately for the two different types of exam was an effective form of streaming and I remember those lessons as being more disciplined and challenging than the mixed ability ones. I then went on to a selective state 6th form college which was the first school I encountered where academic ability was genuinely valued by the pupils rather than being something to be hidden or played down.
Ben G is right when he says that a return to grammar schools is also a return to secondary moderns, though as the second series of C4's That'll Teach 'Em showed, they weren't inherently bad - just chronically under resourced. But yes any selective system needs to make equally good (if different) provision for those who are not so academically inclined."
Note: previous impdec threads on education can be found here.
52 comments:
David Green, director of the think tank Civitas, draws lessons from Sweden's apparently successful school voucher scheme:
Choice in schools benefits the poor
Telegraph Opinion
David Green
20/01/2006
Interesting. They key thing from a Labour rebel point of view is that both in Sweden and in the US Charter schools, selection by ability is categorically not allowed (at least according to the article.) If I understand correctly, the White paper is not as strongly worded on that particular subject (hence backbench disquiet).
unprecedented.
Sometimes it's both.
:)
So you don't agree with any of the conclusions the Civitas guy draws from the Swedish experience?
Wembley, improve your spelling.
School leavers lack basic skills, say universities
Observer
February 9, 2006
Universities are dismayed by the poor levels of literacy and numeracy among school leavers who arrive in higher education expecting to be "spoon-fed", according to a new study. Tutors at 16 universities - including Oxford and Cambridge - complained that many school leavers lacked a good grip of grammar and had a "fear of numbers".
...
Comments on written work included: "They cut and paste essays from the web. Reading books is a skill which has been lost." An admissions tutor at a "selecting" university said: "I was able to skim the cream of candidates, but even they do not necessarily know how to use an apostrophe." Physics admissions tutors complained: "They can't even write in sentences. Their spelling is appalling. They can't be understood ... they graduate with a 2:1 but they still can't spell or write English." And from biology admissions tutors: "Elementary maths is missing. They can't put decent sentences together" and "Students hate numbers, they're scared stiff of numbers."
Perhaps Alexis, with his years of experience of the tourism industry, could comment on whether the questions in the Vocational leisure and tourism GCSE would indeed vex the average worker in that field.
Example: "Other than Indian food, name one other type of food often provided by takeaway restaurants."
How to destroy an outstanding school
Telegraph Education
15/03/2006
The Education (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 abolishes the right of the 69 Northern Ireland grammar schools to select their intake on academic grounds from 2008. Ministers have simply ignored the support for selection expressed so strongly by the public in consultation exercises. ... As one of the teachers at BRA explained to me: "One-size-fits-all comprehensive schools are being bludgeoned through here in total contempt of public and political opinion at the same time as the Prime Minister is rightly trying to extend choice in England."
Talking with a group of passionate first-formers, I am reminded of my own excitement at meeting my Form 1 classmates for the first time. Within a few days of starting at BRA, I was friends with the daughter of the editor of Northern Ireland's morning newspaper, the son of a postman, the daughter of a Jewish family who owned the most exclusive shop in Belfast and a girl whose father was a shipyard worker. Today, Form 1 come from equally diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. Yet, under the Government's plans, few of the group would be able to attend BRA.
In Northern Ireland it is not easy to step out from your neighbourhood, and the demise of the grammar school will force more children to remain in their own ghettos. At a stroke, the social mobility of the Northern Ireland education system will end. At present, 42 per cent of university entrants in the province come from a working-class background compared with 28 per cent in England. Hardly anyone in Northern Ireland is educated privately. But how long will this last when there are no grammar schools ?
Some sound reading advice
The Sunday Times
March 26, 2006
With one in five 11-year-olds unable to read properly, Ruth Miskin offers advice on teaching to concerned parents
The word is out – reading will be taught the old way
The Times
March 21, 2006
ALL children should be reading independently by the age of 6, according to the author of an official reading review. With a fifth of England’s 11-year-olds unable to read and write properly, the Government yesterday accepted that schools must return to the “traditional” phonics method to raise standards.
A couple of things to add to the school debate:
The essay returns as public school create alternative A-levels
'The dying art of the essay is to be resurrected in tough new examinations designed as an alternative to the devalued A-level.
Some of the most successful schools in the country, including Rugby, Shrewsbury and Dulwich College, are working with Cambridge University to develop qualifications.
The exams, called the "Cambridge Pre-U", will reduce modular assessment, cut the unlimited resits of the current A-levels and attempt to restore academic rigour to a system which many argue has been irrevocably "dumbed down".
One of the most damning criticisms is that pupils can gain top grades in the exams by providing only "bite-sized" paragraphs of information or bullet points. Universities have found it difficult to differentiate the top pupils because the proportion of papers which receive an
A grade has risen to 22.8 per cent, up from 11.9 per cent in 1991'
Also on education - Robert Crampton writes that the Labour Party failed his generation in an excellent article in the Times today.
Comprehensively shafted: how the Labour Party failed my generation
"NONE OF the Labour MPs about to vote against the third reading of the education Bill will be swayed by what follows. On this issue, dogma is far more powerful than reason or evidence. How else to explain how a large section of the Labour Party is now more antipathetic towards selection by ability than selection by income?
It really is bizarre that your average Labour rebel, often the personal beneficiary of a selective education, dislikes grammar schools, or whatever Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis are trying to rebrand them as at the moment, more than he does public schools. But this has long been the Labour way. Before Tony Crosland came along, all but the most prestigious public schools were withering on the vine. Now, 40 years on from 10/65, the biggest transmitters of privilege in Britain are booming again. Clever move, Labour Party! Another blow for social equality."
Robert Crampton makes the point here that the end of grammar schools was a blessing for Private Schools. If you ask the Grammar School generation about this they'll confirm that Private Schools were then considered the secondary option for rich parents whose children failed the 11+.
A friend of mine had these astute comments on the Crampton article and his three questions:
---------------
Would I have done better at a grammar?
He seems to think this is a no-brainer - not necessarily.
Good results clearly do not mean a school is working well - grammar schools get better results, of course, but if your intake is good enough you can have every pupil getting top grades but not actually being pushed and getting a good education from the school.
In terms of 'value added' - ie how much better a school makes a pupil - the evidence is more mixed than you might expect. For ages 11-14 grammars appear to be very strong compared to comps, but for ages 14-16 comps seem to do far better. Such measures are quite recent however.
Would the rest have been worse off if the brightest were not there?
Er, yes. Secondary moderns do terribly, compared with grammars, comps, even prisons (I made that one up). While anyone in an area wanting to work in an elite environment goes to the grammar, the school next door goes down the pan - no status, no moneyed motivated parents, no flash facilities.
The idea that the author is demotivating the unwashed rest by his mere presence, dismaying them with the knowledge they will never match his brilliance, is somewhere to the left of bizarre..... I'd also questoion the idea that his elite mates never had any contact with the rest even if there is streaming - not how it was at my place, anyway.
Benefit to the country?
More difficult to assess but on a gut feeling, I think comps have a wider social benefit, aside from any narrower issues about grades. Schools where sexes and types are mixed, I humbly believe, turn out better rounded individuals. Just walking around the quad at places like Jesus College always left me feeling I'd just been landed into inbred-freak-land - but because of their schooling I suspect they thought they were the most normal people in the world...
And I can't say I'm happy with the other view - kids who are academically bright at a certain age (all of 11) should only mix with other bright kids, because they're only going to mix with those types when they're older anyway and we don't want the thickos slowing them up. If you want a terminally-divided society filled with people who feel alien from each other, that seems a perfect way to go about it.
I must say I'm sceptical about the whole 'value added' thing. It doesn't surprise me that comps 'improve' a pupil more than grammars. Pupils who already have a high level of attainment are going to 'improve' less than pupils who enter secondary unable to write their own name. Developing countries often have higher increases in GDP than western ones, but only because they are stating from a much lower base line.
Also, the whole New Labour definition of 'a good education' is getting good grades (hence league tables, SATS, and measuring everything by how many grade A-C passes pupils get in the new-fangled, internet friendly, coursework-heavy, plagiarism ridden GCSEs) so I'm not sure by what criteria the correspondent is judging the worth of a grammar school education. How do you measure how much someone is being 'pushed'?
Secondary Moderns may well do terribly compared to grammars. That seems to be an argument for improving secondary moderns. It does not not necessarily follow that one should therefore abolish grammars. The old polytechnic in Cambridge did not perform as well academically as the University - I don't recall that being an argument to amalgamate the two.
The argument against single sex education is irrelevant here as many grammar schools are indeed mixed.
The current system is INCREASING the divisions in society - not on the basis of ability (heaven forfend) but on the basis of wealth as ever more middle class parents find themselves heading for the private sector so that Jocasta & Benjamin can do their latin prep without fear of being knifed for the ipod.
Harrumph!
While anyone in an area wanting to work in an elite environment goes to the grammar, the school next door goes down the pan - no status, no moneyed motivated parents, no flash facilities.
Would be interested to see the evidence for this assertion. Roy Hattersley makes a similiar claim in the Guardian that the existence of the remaining grammar schools has a detrimental effect upon neighbouring schools:
It is clear why he supports that reform. The survival of about 160 grammar schools - not all of which are the centres of excellence that their apologists claim - has a devastating effect on the whole area from which they select their pupils. To suggest that they can coexist with comprehensive schools is clearly absurd. Every grammar school condemns the three or four secondary schools around it to the level of the old secondary moderns.
But one of the comments questions this assumption:
Mr Hattersley claims that grammar schools have a "devastating effect" on the surrounding area and condemn nearby secondary schools "to the level of the old secondary moderns." I'd like the see the statistics to support this assertion. My sister moved a few years back from Bristol (all-comprehensive in the state sector) to Lincolnshire, where grammar schools have been maintained. Education was a factor in the move. In Bristol, the three local comprehensives to which she could have sent her kids had GCSE pass rates of less than 40 per cent. In Lincolnshire, the local grammar school has a pass rate of 99 per cent (which you might well expect), but all the nearby comprehensives have pass rates of the order of 70 or 80 per cent. Of course, one can't prove from this that the presence of the grammar school somehow improves standards at neighbouring comprehensives. But it does show that Mr Hattersley's assertion is - in at least one area where grammar schools have been retained - utter nonsense.
It may indeed have a negative impact on neighbouring schools but as I said I'd like to see the evidence.
Could you point out where I accepted that in my comments?
I think the point about the 11+ denuding the working class of it's leadership is an interesting point. (Incidently, my Dad was also a Grammar School kid but left school at 15 and he is pretty positive about the education he received there.) I would venture that far from denuding the working class of their leadership taking the Labour party cabinet as an example selective education has supplied much of that leadership:
When it comes to picking his top team, the Fettes-educated Mr Blair still prefers the products of top public and grammar schools. Of the 23 members of the Cabinet, including Mr Blair, seven attended fee-paying schools and a further seven went to grammars. Four members were put through their paces in the Scottish state system, which retained traditional teaching methods, streaming and hot-housing bright pupils even when selection went out of fashion.
A tiny band of five comprehensive and secondary modern pupils has made it to the Cabinet but of these, three came from extraordinary homes with exceptionally talented parents.
David Miliband’s father, Ralph, was a leading left-wing academic. Hilary Armstrong, Cabinet Office minister, and Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, had the benefit of fathers who were MPs. Ms Armstrong’s father, Ernest, represented North West Durham and became Commons deputy speaker. Tony Benn served in the Cabinet under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Only John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Jacqui Smith, the Chief Whip, appear to have had a “bog standard” secondary education. Mr Prescott famously failed his 11-plus and Ms Smith went to her local school in Malvern.
Also, on the exams not getting easier. I can't really judge that myself but wondered if Wembley meant Cambridge University are just plain wrong to assert that they are? (It's Cambridge's disatisfaction with the current examination system that has lead them to create the Pre U together with a group of Private Schools.)
btw, surely there are better examples of the benefits of our modern education system than knowing how to programe a video recorder and surfing the web. If that's what they're teaching kids we're really in trouble! :)
I assume Wemb is referring to the following in my comment:
[...] the whole New Labour definition of 'a good education' is getting good grades (hence league tables, SATS, and measuring everything by how many grade A-C passes pupils get in the new-fangled, internet friendly, coursework-heavy, plagiarism ridden GCSEs) so I'm not sure by what criteria the correspondent is judging the worth of a grammar school education. How do you measure how much someone is being 'pushed'?
Perhaps it was inaccurate to say that 'good grades' was a New Labour benchmark of a good education. Maybe the government would prefer to define it by the 'Value Added' score (my suspicion of which is voiced above.) However, current league tables keep the percentage scores separate from the valuie added score, and even give you a handy graph to see how your school compares with the national average. Nonetheless, I'm happy to retract the New Labour comment. The more important point is that parents (in my admittedly limited experience) look at test scores and grades - not value added scores. If when the time comes for fellow bloggers to send their own offspring to school they look at value added scores as more important than test results, I will be surprised. (But then I may be completely wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.)
Re: grammar schools 'making' people middle class, time does not permit a lengthy discussion on how class is defined. For now I'd like to simply register that I find that statement somewhat controversial.
It will come as no surprise that I'm with you on religious schools (at least state funded ones) but you go on to say:
I'm inclined to do away with private schools altogether, not necessarily because they are of themselves 'ideologically' a bad thing, but pragmatically because nothing will improve while the affluent can buy their way out... but that's another can of worms.
It is indeed a can of worms. I'm assuming you'll also legislate to stop the affluent moving into nice areas with good schools? Bussing is an option, I suppose. (No saracasm - I remember it being mentioned a while back. I'd be interested to hear more about the pros and cons.)
Here's my latest idea, admittedly somewhat fanciful. Bring back grammars and moderns (but call them something else with less baggage - e.g. academic and vocational) but DON'T bring back the 11+. Allow kids (and their parents) to choose. Obviously this is predicated on the idea that all those schools would be good and that there were enough of each to go round, so I'm not sure how practical it is. But I throw it out, just in case.
As for exams getting easier, I suppose it depends what you value. True, kids today are learning to use lots of technology we didn't have access to. Mind you, most people I know who weren't taught this stuff picked up basic computer literacy on the job. More specialised tasks seem to have been learnt in more specialised (higher eduacation) courses.) When it comes to the basic stuff like literacy I'm old fashioned and value things like spelling and grammar (however deficient I may be in both). I don't see how we can claim they have improved when no marks are lost for mistakes in those areas at GCSE. The anecdotal evidence is that these particular standards have dropped. Visiting secondary schools myself recently I was shocked by poor compositions and the amount of work that bore more resemblance to a craft project than an essay. My views on coursework have been blogged elsewhere. (I'm agin' it.)
Lastly, I don't see what living without hunger and social privation has to do with exam results? More comfortable studying conditions perhaps. Anyway, there's a cause and effect there that I'm not quite following.
I leave you with this from today's Times:
Selection is good for us, not for you
By Rosemary Bennett
Only five of the Cabinet, which wants to restrict selection, had a comprehensive education
THEY were designed to tear down class barriers and give working-class children an equal chance of making it to the top. But comprehensive schools have failed to produce many stars in Tony Blair’s Cabinet.
When it comes to picking his top team, the Fettes-educated Mr Blair still prefers the products of top public and grammar schools. Of the 23 members of the Cabinet, including Mr Blair, seven attended fee-paying schools and a further seven went to grammars. Four members were put through their paces in the Scottish state system, which retained traditional teaching methods, streaming and hot-housing bright pupils even when selection went out of fashion.
This is not intended as a counter argument, but Wemb's comment about how how schools themselves are far less likely to constitute unmodernised Victorian buildings or even pre-fab demountable blocks made me smile ruefully. My kids' Victorian primary recently burnt down and they now go to school in pre-fabs.
Again, I stress this is an isolated school and not intended as a claim that Wemb's general point is invalid. I just found it amusing.
On an unrelated matter I think it's worth admitting that I do approach education from quite a Londoncentric viewpoint - from what I've read, the bleak prospect that I've encountered is not repeated throughout the country.
Excellent comments there, Wembley. Here are a couple of thoughts.
Good point, well made on the relative youth of the 'Comp Kiddies' - not sure how it applies to the under 50s though I suspect selectives would still be well represented, that's just a hunch though.
I agree about the material improvements in the economy and individual income but I would need convincing it has a real impact on education (I'd like that to be the case so I'm very open to persuasion on this). Here's my problem - I wonder if the comfort and distraction of a multi media world could just as easily make kids complacent and lazy about education. To offer a counter example, children living in today's India where the fear of privation and hunger are real might turn out to be more motivated, dedicated and faster learners than British children. Time will be the judge of whether this is the case. Hope I'm wrong.
Your point about the web is very good one. I think you're right that it has massive potential to education (it is the most incredible research tool EVER created). In a way I think the internet is a challenge to our whole notion of school's role in education because it is at it's best as a self learning tool. In fact, when it comes to computers impact on education in the class-room a recent OFsted study found money spent on new books had more value than money spent on new computers.
As a Dad myself I found your story of how learning was passed down from generation to generation in your family quite inspiring - I would hope to give my kids the same support that your parents gave you. My wife is a teacher and says that the family support you described isn't always typical though (and even when the support is there the last generation's endpoint isn't always the next one's starting point).
Incidentaly, percentages of children leaving school without basic literacy and numeracy is still depressingly high. The percentage is better than the time of the 1870 Education Reform Act but not as much as we all assume. But that's for another discussion.
I take your point that exam results might JUSTIFIABLY be improving exponentially as against a fixed point. The problem is that unlike the sporting analogy of the 4 minute mile the standards we use to measure exam performance have changed over the years so it's impossible to compare.
As you suggested the wider percentage of students with the highest grades also makes it more difficult for Universities or employers to differentiate. This is a particular issue for elite Universities like Cambridge and Oxford. Perhaps the exams should be made more challenging so that only the top 15% got the highest grade rather than the top 30%?
Since people seem to want exams to measure different things (absolute performance against a supposedly permanent yardstick, and relative performance so that unis etc can know who the best pupils are), why not simply provide two marks?
One would be the standard % mark, which will no doubt continue to rise year on year as the standard of teaching & learning in our esteemed schools rockets up.
Alongside this you would get some kind of 'quartile' mark showing whether you were in the top 10%, the next 10% etc.
Note that this obviates the need for any extra 'layers' or examination overhead of any kind.
Were this implemented, I wonder which score people would pay most attention to? I have my suspicions. ;-)
JPs suggestion would help in a way, since the range of students getting the top grade at A level is currently so wide a mark which indicated whether you were in the top 10% or the next 10% would make it easier to discriminate between the very good and the best.
I think Wembley is right that the closest correlation between school exam results and final degree result is the general studies paper.
One of the main changes to A levels has been a shift to more coursework and the ability for students to resit exams. I remember reading a letter from the head of Dulwich College who argued that the only way to restore the credibility of A levels was to return to the written test and reduce the extent to which course work contributed to the final grade. Not sure I agree entirely but course work would be more open to cheating.
Nick Cohen has posted a new item on his blog: 'Rich Kids and Coldplay'. It echoes a lot of the sentiments of Robert Crampton's article. Basically Nick Cohen makes the same point that the end of Grammar Schools disadvantaged the clever poor kids most of all.
Here's the piece in full:
'THE Canonbury Primary School in Islington encapsulates inner-London’s educational apartheid. Half the parents are upper-middle class and half working class or plain poor. The talk of my neighbourhood is what happened when the wealthy parents ran a fund-raising auction.
Boris Johnson, a Canonbury parent, was the celebrity auctioneer. The children of Coldplay’s business manager Paul Makin also go to the school, and he offered the star lot: a promise that Chris Martin would play in the living room of the highest bidder. Then there were bids for a tour of the House of Lords with the education minister, Lord Adonis, a signed Arsenal football and many more prizes until, finally, the parents handed over a staggering £43,000.
The cheap thing to say would be that a school in a uniformly poor area wouldn’t begin to be able to match that. It’s true, but it implies that it is wrong for people with money to help out. Clearly it isn’t– not least in this case because the working class pupils at Canonbury will benefit from the richer families’ generosity.
The real problem is what happens next. If past form is a guide, the wealthy parents will buy their children the best secondary education they can. They will pay for them to go private at 11. And if their children can’t pass the private school exams, they will select by house price. The report in the yesterday’s Standard that rich families were prepared to pay a premium of £300,000 for homes in the catchment areas of good state schools shows as clearly as any study of Britain’s declining social mobility how the quality of children’s education now depends on parental wealth.
Meanwhile bright working class kids from places such as Islington are stuck. Their parents can’t afford to spend £30,000, let alone £300,000 on their education. They have no choice but to send them to bog-standard comprehensives.
The English are famed for their hypocrisy, and there is no greater humbug in modern public debate than the assertion that ‘we abolished state selection’ when we abolished the grammar schools. We abolished selection by ability, certainly, but replaced it with selection by money.
Lord Adonis knows this. Before Tony Blair came to power, he co-authored a powerful book called A Class Act, which said Labour had done the rich an enormous favour in the Sixties by keeping the private schools and taking out the competition from the grammars. But Adonis holds his tongue because, bizarrely, Labour MPs insist on maintaining the status quo. David Willetts, the Tory’s education spokesman, knows it too. But he keep quiet because funky Dave Cameron doesn’t want his party to sound ‘elitist,’ even though the status quo suits elite Old Etonians such as Mr Cameron to a tee.
There is a crying need to stop the British class system becoming ever more rigid by talent-spotting clever children from modest backgrounds. But no politician dare say so.'
Here's a link to Adonis book mentioned:
A Class Act: Myth of Britain's Classless Society
I'd decided to cut down on just posting articles that I found interesting, but this one is irresistable. It doesn't follow directly from the thread above, but it's in the same ballpark.
Rome, wherefore art thou talking stupid?
Martin Samuel
Our schoolchildren are too thick to appreciate Shakespeare, according to one of our educational publishers
STARTER FOR TEN. In which classic work of English literature can this exchange be found?
Girl: What are you thinking about?
Boy: Oh, just moons and spoons, in June.
Girl: Wow. Give us a snog then.
Here's a link to the publisher mentioned in the article. I haven't been able to back trace all the comments quoted by Samuel, though the description of some of the finest plays in the English language is a little toe-curling: "Let's face it, 'Much Ado About Nothing' isn't really a very promising title.. but if it's your set play, you're going to have to read it anyway. So why not sweeten the pill with this cracking CGP version of the play...
We've got the whole Shakespeare text with plenty of chatty notes in plain English to explain what's being said and what's going on. And there are lots of amusing pictures and a comic strip version of the play to keep you (semi-)entertained. Far better than the usual dull Shakespeare play texts, this will really help you get the play clear." [Source CPG] In other words, Shakespeare's a bit gay, but with this book you can ignore the language and find out enough about what's happening to pass your exams.
Great post on dumbing down Shakespeare, I especially liked the quote '"Let's face it, 'Much Ado About Nothing' isn't really a very promising title..'
Here's an interesting article from Stephen Pollard on social mobility and education. One small caveat, I think there may be more to the dominance of private school educated employees in media professions than it simply being a matter of education (for instance in TV, kids who have financial support from their rich families have an advantage over ones from poorer families as entry level jobs in that industry rarely provide a realistic wage.)
Incidently, although Grammar Schools were introduced by the Conservatives, Pollard mentions the interesting fact that Thatcher was the education secretary to close down the most Grammar Schools. Perhaps this could be the key to getting lefties to support selection e.g Thatcher was against Grammar Schools so you should support them!
Clever but poor? Sorry, your child has less hope of making it now tha 40 years ago.
In the late 1960s, state grammar schools and non-state direct grant schools (privately run schools where the state bought a large number of places for pupils) easily outclassed the traditional private school in academic merit.
The proportion of private-school-educated undergraduates at Oxford, for instance, was on a steady downward path after the Second World War.
In 1946, 57 per cent of female students were from private schools. So successful were grammar schools, however, at giving educational opportunities to children who had previously never been stretched, that by 1967 the proportion had fallen to 39 per cent.
Private schools were, then, often for dunces whose parents simply bought them access to the cachet of the school’s name.
The bright grammar-school pupil, given a leg up from poverty and unprecedented access to education and opportunity, often fared far better. The country was as close as it has ever been to being a true meritocracy.
Tougher A levels to restore prestige of exam.
A-LEVEL exams will be made tougher with a return to traditional questions as part of sweeping reforms to help universities and employers identify the brightest students.
More open-ended essay-style questions are to be introduced in place of those that lead students through a series of highly structured answers. In addition, a new A* grade is being considered to challenge the most able youngsters, as next month’s exam results are expected to show a record number of passes.
Ken Boston, head of the Government’s examinations regulator, told The Times that there would be major changes to A levels within two years in response to concerns that the exam had been devalued by big increases in the number of top grades. Almost a quarter of A levels were given an A grade last summer, prompting universities to complain that they could no longer distinguish the best applicants from the merely well-drilled.
Quote of the week:
"Some of the most left-wing journalists I know pay school fees, or intend to do so. Other bus (or taxi) their children to a covertly selective state school, while making a fuss about how they didn't 'go private'. I can think of only a handful who chose a conventional council comprehensive."
- Peter Wilby, former editor of the New Statesman (Times Educational Supplement, 28 July 2006)
(hat tip Adam Smith Institute Blog)
The Times reports that one of Britain's leading independent boy's schools is planning to admit students based only on merit, regardless of ability to pay.
'Governors at St Paul’s School for Boys in London have voted to endorse a plan for the school to go “needs-blind”, offering places purely on merit.
Families who could afford to pay would. But those of lesser means would have a proportion of their fees paid, down to those on the lowest incomes paying nothing at all.'
According to the Adam Smith Institute other schools are following the same route. 'Dulwich College thinks it will be able to admit students on a needs blind basis within 15 years, while others are moving away from scholarships and towards bursaries'.
This is interesting for a number of reasons: One, this is a response to Governmental pressure on Public Schools to justify their charitable status; Two, it is in some ways a re-invention of the mission of grammar schools to provide selective education regardless of wealth.
Brilliant from Janet Daley:
'The obsessive vindictiveness against selective schooling was always sold on behalf of those who were not selected. Little attention was paid to the miraculous transformation that took place in the lives of those who were, or to the fact that the very possibility of such selection raised the sights of a generation: it gave them something to try for, a goal to be won, the dream of enormous, transfiguring pride in the achievement if they succeeded.
This challenge – particularly in the much-loathed form of a competitive examination – was especially important to boys, whose interest in learning has largely collapsed since competition was banished from the classroom.
In all the talk of boys falling behind girls in academic performance, scarcely any reference has been made to this crucial difference between the sexes: girls tend to measure their achievement against their own standards (or those of adults); boys measure theirs in competition with their peers. Anyone who has raised, or taught, children of both sexes knows this. The girls may vie for the approval of the teacher but the boys want to race against one another, to come top, to win a prize.
All Children may have to stay on at school until 18
Children will be compelled to stay in full-time education or training until they reach 18 under proposals being considered by ministers for one of the biggest shake-ups in education for decades.
I think this is a pretty silly idea. My Dad left school at 15 and it doesn't seem to have done him any harm. In fact, you could argue Higher Education might have damaged his chances.
The Government are introducing a new A* grade at A Level and widening the number of State Schools that will offer the International baccalaureate.
The Times reports that 'Tony Blair said that the measures were designed to provide more choice to ensure that students could choose the courses that best met their individual abilities and needs.'
Which is fair 'nuf... except it does rather suggest that all those people complaining that the A Levels were being made too easy might just have had a point all along and perhaps weren't the alarmist scrooges the Government painted them as.
Of course it maybe down to the fact that kids' intelligence has accelarated astonishingly over the last 10 years. Well, that theory is about to be tested by the introduction of this new A* grade.
In a Telegraph piece a former chief inspector of schools believes state schools had 'a mountain to climb before they could compete at the "supergrade" announced by ministers last week.'
[...]
Research showed pupils from private schools outperformed those from state schools at the very highest levels and were much more likely to be awarded the new A*, he said.
The grade would therefore probably result in more university places going to pupils educated at private schools, if places were awarded purely on the basis of academic achievement.'
Now since the private sector has been the least effected of all the schools by new Labour reforms, it would stand to reason that if this new grade reveals a widening gap between private and state, with a higher percentage than before of private school students going to our elite Universities, then it may suggest that the rising attainment among pupils in state education under New Labour is largely illusionary and more a case of presentation than reality.
Sorry, I didn't explain myself very well (blame my comp education).
What I meant to write was that the differences in performance between the brightest private and state sector pupils may have been obscured by the lack of differentation in the the current grading of A levels.
This new grade should make these differences more apparent which might in turn make a comparison with past relative differences in performance between state and private sectors pupils, in say 1996, more meaningful.
I say might because I feel a number of factors (more coursework, no penalties for bad spelling etc.) have made the current A level an unreliable indicator of pupil's ability. Following the introduction of this new more competitive grade we will see if the percentage of state pupils entering our top Universities has risen compared with 10 or 15 years ago. However Wembley's right that even if the gap has widened it may be the result of other factors, Universities fees for instance*.
*I thought your point that the fall in state school kids as against private school kids going to uni might have a greater relationship to the introduction of tuition fees was a very interesting and plausible explanation. If this was the case it would embarrass the Government who always argued that it wouldn't have this effect.
I can't remember where the stuff about not penalising for bad spelling comes from. I'll see if I can find it.
Regarding your story about the two twenty somethings who didn't go to University because they could get a decent job without a degree, even leaving aside the question of debt from tuition fees, I think they're right. I don't think that University is necessarily the answer for everyone even if they are intelligent enough. My dad is probably the smartest guy I know and he couldn't wait to leave school (at 15 years old) and start earning money.
I read an interesting report regarding the stats on graduate and non graduates earning abilities (can't remember where but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Daily Mail) .
If I recall correctly overall the statistics did suggest that graduates earned relatively higher than non graduates. However, when the statistics were divided into different categories (e.g Arts or Sciences) the results varied widely. For instance, as would be expected graduates studying medicine or law had much, much higher earning potential than non graduates, but when it came to Arts graduates the statistics suggested that their earning ability was actually lower than non graduates.
Unless your two lasses were planning on studying something like medicine or accountancy they were probably right to judge that uni wouldn't offer any financial benefit (potentially quite the opposite since they would be entering the job market later and with student debt). I do wonder if one of the side effects of tuition fees might be to discourage kids from taking Arts degrees.
Whatever happened to meritocracy?
The Sunday Times
February 04, 2007
Ten years ago two of Britain’s most prolific policy wonks, Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, co-wrote a book, A Class Act, which aimed to explode the myth that Britain was becoming a classless society. Education, the monarchy, the armed forces, health, politics, housing and race all came under scrutiny; but in particular they argued that the scrapping of grammar schools had damaged social mobility.
more...
In this Guardian interview Richard Sykes, head of Imperial College is very critical of the new GCSEs:
'Sitting in his neat office in Imperial's main administration building - a dizzying cube of blue glass that hovers at the centre of the South Kensington campus - he still gets worked up at the thought of the new GCSE. "It's superficial stuff, fine for the general populous, but where are these people who are going to be the drivers and leaders of tomorrow? How are they going to do their A-levels if they're never getting the grounding of the single subjects?"
His tirade against falling standards is backed up by a count of those he welcomes to his college every year. "More and more come from outside the UK: 30% of our students now come from outside the EU and 50% come from outside the UK. What we're doing is educating the elite of the world, not the elite of the UK. Young people in the UK today, particularly from the state schools, are not able to get the qualifications to come to a place like this."
Furthermore he believes that "Young people in the UK today, particularly from the state schools, are not able to get the qualifications to come to a place like this (Imperial College)'
Another surprising piece in the Education Guardian, this time advocating school voucher schemes:
Why Cameron must go private
What is the point of David Cameron if he is going to send his children to maintained schools? Why have a Tory leader who leads his children towards an underperforming nationalised industry?
We have had universal free state education in Britain for more than a century, yet swaths of our population remain uneducated. The government's own Moser report of 1999 found that one in five adults was functionally illiterate (given the Yellow Pages, they could not find the page for plumbers). Jim Knight confirmed last year that 300,000 pupils a year (47%) leave school at 16 without having achieved level 2 in functional maths, while 265,000 (42%) fail to achieve level 2 in functional English. Level 2 is what the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority deems necessary to "participate in life, learning and work". So our education system fails to meet the basic needs of four pupils in 10.
Universal free state education has failed. But the independent schools of England, as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has shown, are the best in the world. They are the best, not because they have more money, but because they are independent.
In a study of the impact of government money on the state schools of 108 countries between 1960 and 1995, Daniele Checchi, professor of economics at Milan University, concluded that "there is no clear evidence for a relevant impact of invested resources" and that governments waste their money by "spending additional resources on building schools and hiring teachers".
In short, however much money governments pour into state education, it rarely improves relative to the private sector. That is because the great determinant of quality in education is not money but independence from the government.
And the great source of independence is the voucher. In Holland, parents receive vouchers covering the full costs of education for each child. They can be spent in government or independent schools, but the costs of creating independent schools are so low that syndicates of parents and teachers are forever creating new schools. Consequently, 70% of children attend independent schools. Each parent is a customer, every school competes, the government is sidelined, and efficiency is delivered.
Cameron should advocate vouchers for the UK. He may have found a good maintained school but, by sending his children there, he has ignored the many pupils who leave school functionally illiterate and innumerate. Denis Healey said that "all parents would send their children to private schools if they could afford it". Cameron can and should.
Terence Kealey
Vice-chancellor of Buckingham University
I wonder who among us would find nothing amiss with the principle that a school can be punished for this.
School caught selecting best pupils
Telegraph
28/03/2007
One of the top comprehensives in the country for exam results has been found guilty and fined for selecting hard-working pupils from good homes.
I had a similar thought to Wemb regarding the illegality of the school's actions, but I think it involves begging JP's implicit question.
I wonder who among us would find nothing amiss with the principle that a school can be punished for this.
If you interpret JP's comment as meaning 'the principle that someone (or something) can be punished for breaking the law' then your response about legality is perfectly valid. However, I'd be surprised if JP was questioning that particular principle.
His comment surely refers to the principle of selection, that great hoodie-clad elephant that sits ignored by the forgers of social democratic consensus whenever education (and the alleged declining standards thereof) are discussed.
Wemb, I imagine you still disagree with JP (and the school), but the issue here is not whether a code was conformed to, but the validity of that code in the first place.
When you say that a good education is needed by "the kids that the school excluded", you leave to our imaginations what that good education might be and how best to achieve it.
This is at the heart of our discussion and (I would speculate) of our divergence of opinion.
Dan's surmise as to the principle I was questioning is 100% correct.
Thanks for clarifying your position. When it comes to streaming I suspect we have a lot of common ground. (Though in some other respects I fear we find ourselves on opposite sides of a yawning chasm.)
But all that aside, this, surely, is nonsense:
The system that exists is the product of a democratic system of law, and as such the illegality of selection is a democratically determined issue. If JP wants to challenge the rights and wrongs of the case, it's a challenge to the legitimacy of democracy.
Does this mean that every time you disagreed with the Conservative governments of 1979-1997, you were challenging the legitimacy of democracy? Is your avowed desire to do away with faith schools a similar challenge?
I call your bluff, sir!
Had an interesting lunch discussing this with Dan and Andy (and a delectable waitress called Elida).
Putting on my philosophical hat and going back to basics, I would like to ask Wembley for his views on these questions:
* should there be *any* selection process for matching schools with pupils?
* if so, where should the power to make this selection lie among the various interested groups (pupils, parents, schools, LEAs, govt, other)?
* if so, what criteria does he consider unacceptable/acceptable for making this choice? eg perhaps selection by gender would be ok, by race not, by musical ability acceptable, by academic ability not etc.
Just some clarification, if poss, Wemblers. You answered my question should there be *any* selection process for matching schools with pupils? with the answer not if at all possible. I was surprised by this answer, as if you were to truly have no selection process *at all*, you would have to be allocating all school places completely at random. Would you in fact be in favour of that?
And indeed you have also said that kids schooling should be determined, primarily, with a map and a ruler. Presumably this means you consider selection by the criterion of *geographical location* to be valid, in contradiction of the "no selection at all" principle. Again, pls confirm.
Re this: The only radical alternative I could offer would be this: ABSOLUTE selection. Total free market, but spending some kind of universally available currency (ie NOT dependent on parents financial staus, but still linking school performance to a market driven system). Don't know how that could work.. Perhaps Dan/Andy could comment on whether the voucher system they told me about at lunch would fulfil Wembers' wishes.
Re this: I suppose you could say my underlying philosophy is that the situation of the parents should not influence the education of the children and more than it will already... the supportive families might well give their kids better resources, better home life environment, more support... but the kids who's parents don't care or can't work the system should not be further penalised by having to deal with whichever places are left once the dynamic or affluent parents have finished.. Here I think Andy should come back with his lunch points about why his teacher wife providing educational succour should be acceptable, but him paying for a 3rd party to do so is not.
Looks like we have a good debate on our hands, gentlemen! :-)
Can't necessarily stop parents moving to get inside a school's catchement area. But very few do.
A memorable interviewee in a series of vox pops I conducted once claimed, "I don't know the statistics because I'm not a statistician", before reeling off an opinion liberally sprinkled with unsubstantiated assertions. Like the young lady in that interview, I too do not have figures to hand. However, I would be curious to know the basis for the claim that 'very few do'. Apparently enough of them do to warrant them being branded immoral by a private school head, for the Guardian to report on the trend in its financial pages and for the FT to report on the effect on house prices of the new Brighton lottery for secondary school places. It is perhaps a phenomenon that is more widespread in larger urban areas, so it may be more apparent to members of this blog community who live in London (and have children of secondary school age.)
In answer to JP's question about voucher schemes, they are best understand as being similar to the grant that paid our university fees many years ago. In other words the choice of, and acceptance into, university was a matter between us and the admissions board - the funding then followed us to wherever we had chosen to go (and been accepted by.)
In the last paragraph (above) understand should read 'understood'.
So no music schools allowed to select on musical ability & interest?
No sports schools allowed to select on sporting ability & interest?
No art schools allowed to select on artistic ability & interest?
No schools with say, a bias towards languages, allowed to select students with a bias in that direction?
In short, nothing other than a single type of comprehensive, following a single national syllabus?
Why should schools not adopt some elements of this organisational structure? Across 10 high schools, there may only be a few needing high-level maths tuition, or high level music tuition, or elite athletic coaching. Why not make these resources available without destroying the principle of locality in registration?
Some very good ideas, which I would no doubt support whereever competently implemented. But I have no objection to this "collegiate" principle working for some areas & disciplines, and specialist schools working in others, since for me the 'principle of locality' does not have the super-privileged status it has for you.
And I suspect that such multi-owned and multi-used facilities are more likely to suffer a tragedy-of-the-commons neglect than similar facilities owned and run by a single, dedicated institution. After all, the music block of a music school is far more likely to be well-cared for than a music block used sparingly by each of 10 different schools.
Am confused. I'm not clear now where you stand on specialisation, as you seem to be in favour of it, yet still vehemently against selection?
Also the NHS analogy speaks in favour of better schools further away from home, but I thought you were arguing for the 'principle of locality'.
At least we both agree to be against universal mediocrity ;-)
So education's in the news. Cameron abandons Tory tradition on Grammar Schools, while Alan Johnson threatens independent schools' charitable status.
Here the (often-odious) Simon Jenkins applauds Cameron.
Cameron’s historic victory over the gilded myth of grammars
Simon Jenkins
The Sunday Times
May 27, 2007
Here Daley attacks both Cameron and Johnson, in doing so providing a powerful argument against our own Wembley's beloved principle of locality (search for the word 'tutu'). Oh, and there's this prize snippet:
only 40 per cent of secondary schools use setting and streaming even though they have been encouraged to do so by official policy for years
Classrooms won't improve until class war ends
Janet Daley
Telegraph
28/05/2007
This country's education problems are never going to be solved until politicians stop talking class war and rectify their ignorance about what goes on, and has gone on, in the state schools. In the past week, political manoeuvring of the most crass and cynical kind has utterly overwhelmed any sense of intellectual integrity or even historical accuracy.
The comments of the noisiest spokesmen of both major parties have been marked by a shocking ignorance of some of the basic facts of life in the classroom and even of recent educational history. Alan Johnson demands that private schools offer more of their expertise to the state sector, as if this was some unprecedented request to a smug bastion of selfish privilege.
But I can remember when the Tory government hoped to co-opt the private schools into becoming training grounds for prospective teachers - and the private schools expressed themselves happy to comply. (This was going to be an antidote to the ideological stranglehold that the progressive education establishment had on teacher training.) Why did the plan come to nothing? Because many university departments of education and the education authorities whose co-operation would have been necessary refused to have anything to do with it.
They reacted then pretty much as the teachers' unions are doing to Mr Johnson's proposal now. They had no interest in being instructed by their "betters" from the toff sector: private schooling was, as far as they were concerned, tainted and alien. It had nothing to offer the disadvantaged pupils with whom the state sector had to deal. (In truth, they disliked what they saw as the "authoritarian", highly structured pedagogic style that remained in force in much private school teaching methodology.) Then, as now, the problem was not the private sector failing to reach out, but the state sector refusing to grasp the helping hand. It was this attitude among Mr Johnson's party members that led to the abolition of the assisted places scheme, which had allowed hundreds of thousands of poorer children to benefit directly from private school teaching.
Team Cameron, meanwhile, sinks deeper into utter confusion and incoherence. On the one hand, it insists that the past week's political nightmare (including the chorus of attacks from critics like me) has been just what it wanted; on the other, it bursts into floods of tears and accuses me of being nasty and unhelpful for pointing out the potholes in its own road to the future. Conservative spokesmen are apparently allowed to say vindictive and merciless things about the way middle-class parents raise their children, but those who take the assault personally must remain constructive and helpful in their response. OK, this is me being helpful.
First, get your facts right. It is not the case, as Conservative (and Labour) spokesmen constantly claim, that not "a single new grammar school" was created under the last Conservative government. Up in north London we have one of the most outstanding grammar schools in the country, Queen Elizabeth School for Boys, Barnet. It was a comprehensive school when it took grant-maintained status in 1989. In 1994 it petitioned the (Conservative) secretary of state for education for permission to become a grammar school. That permission was granted. The rest is history.
Parents stuck with bog-standard comprehensives might like to take a look at its website and weep. Not only has the advent of QE Boys as a grammar been lost in the Conservative race memory, but so has the lesson that it offers. It is absurd to claim that permitting schools to select by academic ability must mean "building" more grammar schools or reverting to an unreconstructed rendition of the 1944 Education Act division between grammars and secondary moderns. All that is needed is to give schools independence from government so that they are free to develop an ethos, a code of discipline and a sense of autonomous direction that will carry conviction. That direction might be academic or it might be technical or artistic, but it would be their own.
Then, forget about being able to create a "grammar stream" within every school. Do you know why only 40 per cent of secondary schools use setting and streaming even though they have been encouraged to do so by official policy for years? Because a huge proportion of the teaching profession still resists even the minimal selection process. Mixed-ability teaching remains an article of immovable faith among a huge swath of the state sector.
Those head teachers and their staffs who have refused to sift their pupils by ability are unlikely to be persuaded (or coerced) by a Tory government. The two Davids, Cameron and Willetts, profess themselves most concerned with the truly deprived pupils who are underachieving so dramatically in our schools - which means working-class boys in the roughest urban schools. Do they have any idea of the social repercussions that would follow for such a boy who found himself in the top stream of an inner-city school? You might as well force him to wear a tutu.
There is only one way to rescue disadvantaged children from their local street culture, just as there is only one way to stop the racial segregation that is threatening to become a fixture in our multicultural cities. We have to break the hold of the neighbourhood: we must permit children, especially at adolescence when they are so susceptible to peer pressure, to escape from the limitations of their backgrounds into an institution that can offer them the sustenance of its own self-reinforcing atmosphere.
More than anything, we must loosen the grip of opportunist politicians - the professionals at Westminster and the amateurs in the education establishment - on the schooling of children, by giving real power to parents. And here Mr Willetts may be leaning the right way. Give parents a voucher for the amount of money the state is willing to spend on their children's education and let them take it to any school that will accept them, state or private, since once all schools are independent of government control, there will be no irrevocable divide between the two. It follows that if all schools are to develop their own methods for attracting parents, then they must have the right to select pupils on whatever grounds they believe to be appropriate: that will be essential to the reciprocal understanding that would be necessary to create a school community.
So there, how helpful is that?
See here for more on locality in education:
Dalrymple on Honeyford - the man who predicted the race riots
Interesting articles from Daley and Jenkins.
Personally, I think Cameron was right to get rid of the baggage of grammar schools. Firstly, it's politically prudent: at their peak grammar schools only taught 15% of children the rest went to secondary moderns. Focusing on grammar schools isn't going to help them win any more votes. Secondly, nobody is going to support going back to separating children into two groups - comprehensives (secondary moderns) and grammars.
However, I think Daley's piece makes some strong arguements, particularly on the principle of locality. Now, I agree that locality can create a strong sense of community, but for this to happen there needs to be a commonly-shared cohesive sense of local identity. In many boroughs in London, for example, there isn't a shared cultural identity in this sense. Also, even when there is a shared cultural identity, peer group pressure can makes it harder for poor bright kids to excel.
Daley also raises some problems with Cameron's principle of grammar streaming - namely the deep-seated resistance from many teachers (surmountable, I think) and grammar streaming's limited effectiveness in the most difficult schools (more challenging). This arguement is much more directly relevant to Cameron and Willet's than her points on locality (I don't believe Willets & Cameron have said much on the issue of local selection).
Reading between the lines of what Cameron and Willets have said they seem to be advocating a form of voucher scheme, something Daley would agree with. Where Cameron appears to part company with Daley is over academic selection. His support for grammar streaming suggests that he isn't planning to give more schools the freedom to set their own selection policy. I think this is a shame. A voucher system will work best with a diversified market of schools all making their own decisions on how they select. It was a good idea for the Conservatives not to make any promises to create more grammar schools because those decisions shouldn't be being made at a national governmental level anyway.
More on the Cameron/grammar schools debate, a must-read article from Anatole Kaletsky:
Lesson one: get the yobs out of the classroom.
What we need is new borstal-style schools
David Cameron wants to end the “pointless and delusional” debate about selection at 11 and concentrate on the education of “the many, not the few”. This is a sensible, even admirable, ambition. But before he can succeed, Mr Cameron, backed up by his brilliant education spokesman, David Willetts, will have to be more precise in defining the problem – and bolder in facing the controversies through which it would have to be solved.
It is true that selection at 11 was wrong, but not because selection was in itself evil. The big mistake was to make almost irreversible judgments about academic potential at the wrong age – 11 was simply too young, especially for boys. It is also true, on the other hand, that comprehensive education in Britain has been a failure. But this is not because we have segregated a small talented minority at the top. It is because we have refused to segregate an even smaller disruptive minority at the bottom.
German Lessons
Daniel Johnson
Standpoint Magazine: July/August 2009
A recent trip to Berlin reminded me of the timidity that characterises the debate on education in England. The German capital, like every other Land, has control over its own schools: no centralised diktat there, but instead acceptance of the fact that people grow attached to the institutions in their locality. The ruling coalition of the centre-Left Social Democrats and the far-Left party known as Die Linke has just decided to abolish comprehensive schools and go back to a selective system of grammar schools and secondary schools. The other parties do not oppose the main thrust of the plan. The only controversy concerns the method of selection: the proposal is to give schools the power to choose 70 per cent of their pupils and submit to a lottery for the remaining 30 per cent. The centre-Right Christian Democrats oppose lotteries. Here in Britain, such freedom for state schools is almost unimaginable.
Here, by contrast, none of the main parties even mentions selection. The Tories have done their best to bury the whole issue, failing to raise any objection to the abolition of grammar schools in Northern Ireland and only reluctantly defending those that remain in England. Labour and the Liberal Democrats treat the comprehensive principle as axiomatic, despite the accumulating evidence over 40 years that it has reduced academic standards and social mobility.
Instead, we have a bidding war in which the main parties compete to appease the teaching unions. The Conservative promise to abolish SATs at the end of primary school is only the latest concession. Nobody considers the wishes of parents.
Yet the head teacher of a leading Berlin gymnasium (grammar school) explained to me that her pupils all learned Latin and Greek. Many learn Hebrew too, not to mention English, French and several other modern languages. All students also study religion, philosophy, mathematics and science. Not even the best comprehensives in Britain can offer such a broad humanistic curriculum. Parents in Berlin are queuing up to give their children this old-fashioned academic education. Passing on the best of Western civilisation is not seen as a peculiarly conservative preoccupation, but as the right of every child with the ability to benefit from it.
Post a Comment