As McKibben notes selection was got rid of for three reasons : 1) Telling the vast majority of your young people that they are failures at the age of 11 was a huge waste of national potential, 2) Democracy requires some social commonality of experience, and selection only reduced that; and 3) It was impacting on the middle classes who found their families split down the middle. McKibben believes all of these reasons remain valid today.
McKibben could have added a few facts that proponents of grammar schools always forget. The split between grammars and secondary moderns was something like 20:80. This is why the middle classes were so aggrieved-- worse in fact than the working class or the upper class as the former had essentially given up on education so badly had it been treated and the latter, understandably, paid its way out of trouble. As McKibben notes this is the reason Mrs Thatcher created so many comprehensives, and the reason many Conservative councils were the first to get rid of selection when they could.
posted by Matthew @ 11/23/2002 01:23:00 PM
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