The Tory plan for grammar schools is about control, not opportunity
The Tories are planning to bring back grammar schools. This fits in with their whole plan to take us back to the 1920s. First, grammar schools and then the abolition of the NHS. More horrors will no doubt be announced shortly.
But why do the Tories believe now is the time to resurrect the whole question of streaming children according to rather arbitrary tests at an early age?
The answer is hardly surprising. Not only have the Tories finally given up the idea of being One Nation Tories — so pathetically claimed by Cameron — but they have given up bothering to pretend that a decent education is a right for all.
Dressed up as a sop to some middle class parents who worry about the effects of ‘the other’ on their children’s education, the Tories have seized the moment to make a bold statement about drones and workers.
Grammar schools will now become the educational equivalent of gated communities. Forget the whole idea of selection by ability giving the brightest an opportunity to shine. (Funding education properly — from teachers to buildings to playing fields would surely do the same.)
On the back of a revamped 11-plus, we’ll see the growth of a private industry of crammers specialising in ensuring that the children of the well-off make it into the grammar school of choice. With extra funding channeled into these new elite schools, the remaining children will be attending run down underfunded establishments, quite possibly sold off to private chains to be run as work-houses. Sorry, academies.
Study after educational study has shown that comprehensive education raises the standards of all pupils and never at the expense of the brightest. Studies — and experts, too, of course — are rarely considered by the ideologically driven.
By removing schools from community control and now creating a level of elite educational establishments, what we’re seeing is an attempt to manufacture a class of workers loyal to the neoliberal free-market capitalist ideology that will continue to underpin the corporate state going forward. Those not educated along corporate state lines will be both expendable and dispensed with. They will be the drones who are fed the pap of reality TV and mainstream media propaganda. As the NHS is sold off and health declines, an increasingly poor and sick underclass will demand less and less attention from the elites.
In short, this is not about improving the chances for the brightest but about removing the last hopes from the sections of society left behind. Left behind and no longer considered worthy even of education.
