comprehensive
school
f enn autumn and winter has seen giant strides made in English education towards the establishment of a system of comprehensive schools. Over one hundred local education authorities have announced plans for the rapid implementation of fully comprehensive secondary schools in. the course of one or two years. With victory in this campaign near (though there are still some mopping-up operations to do) it is time to take stock of what has been achieved. English education, more classically than in any other country in the world, is deeply divided by class barriers. The long history of educational reform shows the truth of this. The British ruling class always, yesterday as today, has been cautious about extending education to the working class. They are on the horns of this dilemma: if we educate working-class children to the highest levels, they will endanger the stability of our bourgeois rule: if we do not educate many children to high standards of proficiency especially in science and technology, the growth rate of British capitalist industry will fall behind the rest of the captalist world. If ever a policy of Stop-Go found favour anywhere in Britain it has been in educational policy. Its rationale is the dual attitude to it set by the circumstances of the conflict between scientific development of modern industry and its restricted class ownership. There are some who might be shocked to hear that class discrimination is an integral part of English education today. But look at this table which shows what happens to 100 randomly selected infant school children. At A class Enter Grammar Sixth University Birth in School or Form Junior Grammar School Stream in Comprehensive
School, Upper, middle and “professional” , 30 15 se) 8 5 classes Working class 70 20 Io I ° Total 100 35 20 9 5 rr ee, It will be seen, first of all, that the proportion of all children receiy-
“dull” is brought in to justify this state of affairs. We are all so iming “first class” education at each age level falls dramatically. But now compare the fall for each class separately and the class bias in higher education is clear. The Robbins report shows that the proportion of working class children now entering University has fallen since pre-Hitler war days. At every stage of these “restrictive practices”, the concept of “clever” children as opposed to “average” and G
mersed in the type of bourgeois thinking, which is also deeply entrenched in all our institutions, that practically everyone here accepts the idea that “some children are clever” and “some are dull” — and secretly, for all they feel they can do about it, innately so.
Now we do know, from studies in educational psychology in many countries, as we could also deduce from the nature and source of human
abilities, that, apart from the unfor-
tunate few (less than 1%) who are
born with radical malformations of
their central nervous systems, every
child can not only be rated as equally
“clever” but also that all children,
given the correct training, can achieve
high standards in educational attain-
ment. At the risk of elevating a uni-
versity degree above its market
value, we can say that, given the
right social and educational oppor-
tunities, practically every child has
within him the intellectual poten-
tiality to achieve a good university
degree.
What has this to do with com-
prehensive secondary schools? The
more things change, the more
closely they try to stay where they
are. The comprehensive schools
which have come into existence
have not broken with the old modes
of thinking about human ability.
They are activated by the same
class-divisive notions, Instead of
regarding all children as equally
clever, in most “comprehensive”
schools the same early separation
into “clever” and “average” occurs
— the grammar G.C.E. stream fol-
lowing a pre-university course and
the “modern” stream, following
a course of study fitted for the aver-
age — yes — for those whom the
officials in the Ministry of Educa-
tion in -1947 described as the
“future hewers of wood and
drawers of water”.
The next stage, therefore, in
the battle for equality in education
is — first of all — a fairly rapid
rise in the age of compulsory edu-
cation to 18. Side by side with this
should go the planning of organis-
ation within the schools and of
their curricula to prepare every
child for university entrance. A
dream? Certainly an American and
a Russian dream already realised in
several states. And without this, a
four per cent. growth rate in indus-
try is quite, quite unthinkable,
whoever the technocrats are who
man the State.
JOHN
DANIELS
Notes from