A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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If obliged to confront this inconvenient fact, Hitchens would probably argue, without evidence, that the degree examinations are in some way “biased” towards the state educated, thanks to the machinations of “egalitarians”. The real target of the book seems to be the move to a mass education system in which, according to the author, the essential values of rigour and respect for academic authority have been lost. Hitchens provides both a stimulating reading experience and a thought-provoking study of the successes and failures of British education post-1944. For students of post-war education, Hitchens provides a useful chronology of secondary education, and refers to the tension between idealism and practice.

In his new book, Peter Hitchens describes the misjudgements made by politicians over the years that have led to the increase of class distinction and privilege in our education system.Hitchens mentions these works in passing but fails to acknowledge, let alone deal with, their central ideas. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. He is a former revolutionary Marxist who now describes himself as a socially conservative Social Democrat. Meanwhile hypocritical Labour politicians like Diane Abbott send their children to expensive private day schools. The book discusses the personal narratives of several ‘egalitarians’, largely to point out their inconsistencies and failings.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Review of Peter Hitchens’s new book ‘A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System’ by Paul Ashwin, Professor of Higher Education, Head of Department and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, Lancaster University. For example, when discussing the relative outcomes of selective and non-selective education, two hard to access reports which support the superiority of selective education are drawn upon and treated as a smoking gun whilst the extensive academic literature, much of which supports the opposite conclusion, is ignored. He has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. While I fundamentally disagree with the kind of education system argued for, the unapologetic way in which the book spells out its defence of selective education is illuminating.It is not possible in a short review to deal with more than a few examples of the determinedly anti- intellectual and unscholarly approach favoured by Hitchens but the following is quite typical. He was educated at The Leys School Cambridge, Oxford College of Further Education and the University of York. For example, in relation to higher education, ‘the growth in numbers attending universities was done at the expense of quality, a fact nobody can seriously deny’ (pp.

In 1966, coming from a working class background, to my surprise, as I was never coached for the 11+, having recently changed schools, I, unwittingly, sat, and passed the test, so went to Enfield Grammar School, whereas many of my friends who didn't "pass," nor expected to, were content to go, as I would have been, "across the road" to Winchmore Hill Secondary Modern, where some were pleased, if not to say proud, to be selected for the 'X' and 'Y,' grammar school, streams of that Secondary School, where they went on to take and pass GCE O' Levels and CSE's, alongside the fun of metal work and car maintenance; experiences denied to us Grammar School boys. However, the data presented in support of this model is at best cherry-picked and at worst dishonest. An interesting take on the rise and fall of the grammar school/secondary modern system during the middle and towards the end of the twentieth century. And what's more, it is a system riddled with anomalies - Sixth Form Colleges select pupils on ability at the age of 15, which rules out any child who does not have major educational backing from home (heavy involvement by working parents or private tutors, for example) and academies also are selective, though they pretend not to be.Mail on Sunday columnist Hitchens ( The Abolition of Britain) contends in this cranky screed that efforts to level the playing field in British education have backfired. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour.

On page 18 he adds that these schools are utterly unlike the 1,300 such schools that flourished in the national system before 1965 because they are unfair in that they select by wealth…this is why they help the ancient universities to fulfil their state school quotas without doing too much damage to their quality. It is a world that, despite the undoubted challenges and inequalities of our current educational reality, I am deeply thankful not to inhabit. Naturally, Hitchens largely ignores the Crowther Report of 1959, whose information was based upon much more comprehensive studies than those of Gurney- Dixon, including a detailed survey of all young men entering National Service between 1956 and 1958. If you want a potted history of the changes to the education from victorian times to the present day, chapter two is up your street. In other places, it seems to be the size of schools that is key, with both grammars and secondary moderns being seen as successful because they were much smaller than comprehensives.Finally, he failed to acknowledge the extensive academic literature supporting the opposition and in doing so fails to properly address the obvious counterpoint.