School's out!

The social engineers are at it again. Not content with slowly wrecking an working education system over a generation or two they now continue to believe that the answer is more tinkering, more attention and resources for the unambitious and unworthy, more quotas, more dumbing down and more blithe ignoring of hard working students who happen to have parents who care about their future.
Whatever Mr Milburn may parrot from manifestos past the answer is surely not there.
Let me go back in time. I went to a Grammar School in 1953. They had been invented only a few years earlier and GCE only on 1951. The school had been there since 1908 when it operated as a County Secondary School taking students from North Buckinghamshire towns and villages either on a scholarship or on a fee paying basis. The fees were something like £10 per annum in the 1930s, according to my other.
When it became a Grammar School in 1946 it scarcely missed a beat. Most of the teachers had been there before the war and continued thereafter. Teachers did not move much in those days, unless to become a head. The school hierarchy was very simple - a head, a senior master, a senior mistress, and the rest were simply teachers.
The point here is that schools were stable institutions. An uncle of mine left the army in 1945, trained as a teacher, found a job in his home town, and stayed there for his entire career. he was not untypical of his generation.
The pass rate for the 11+ in my day was about 20-25% so most of my friends went to the Secondary Modern where they received a more rudimentary education. They had no science labs and they did not do French. They probably spent more time doing woodwork or domestic science and they were not burdened with homework. It did not compare with today’s curriculum.
What I can report is what happened to some of my friends and contemporaries who left school at 15. One became a newspaper reporter, one started as an apprentice butcher and eventually went on to become a hotel owner, one started as an office boy in an insurance office and retired as a millionaire, another now owns his own printing business in New York city, one joined the police and rose to the rank of inspector; several took up trade apprenticeships and went on to steady if unspectacular careers. Those of us who went to the Grammar School filled jobs in the Civil Service, Banks, Teaching, and middle management in industry. Since I didn’t hang out with rougher characters I can’t speak for how they turned out but what I have represented is a fair cross section of the middle ranks of society.
Have things really changed that much? We are told that the gap between rich and poor has widened, but that may only be because the rich have become very much richer. The broad swathe of people are still in the middle. On the other and it may well be that those members of society who are not interested in much beyond their immediate needs are still happy to use their disposable income in beer and fags.
In my day those of us who get to the Grammar School were generally grateful for the opportunity and made something of it. Equally, those who didn’t got on with life and made the best of the opportunities they did have. The idea that children were consigned to oblivion at the age of 11 was never remotely true and was usually asserted by well-to-do left wingers who had no experience of how most of us lived. That hasn’t changed either.
George Orwell came to the conclusion many years ago that revolutions are usually initiated by the well-to-do middle classes who massively resent the rich who have so much more. ordinary people are not much bothered and are more interested in getting on with their lives with minimal interference. So the revolution in education has been brought about by people who resent the Etons and Harrows while having no understanding of what most people want or need from education. Grammar Schools, which tended to model themselves on the better Public Schools, had to go.At the same time they decided to make schools larger and more unmanageable - misunderstanding the concept of “economies of scale”.
At each stage in this revolution schools and their masters happily took on every social issue and slowly squeezed out the one thing they used to do well - academic teaching. Tests were massaged, statistics engineered, money squandered as futile attempts were made to prove that the idea of the comprehensive school was the right one.
And there is nothing wrong with the Comprehensive school as an institution which draws upon its neighbourhood. Many countries do this successfully, but they haven’t built huge monolithic housing estates.
Far better to accept that this is England