Historical education, a restrained rant
Reading Saville last week prompted me to dig out from the To Read cupboard a book I'd found in a charity shop a while ago and never got round to: Education and the Working Class by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden. A 1960s book by former working class grammar school boys who'd moved on to academia, it's a study of 88 working class pupils who passed A-levels at Huddersfield grammar schools a couple of years either side of 1950, assessing their passage through school to their various destinations and trying to make sense of why so many of their contemporaries fell by the wayside. Maybe it's not everyone's idea of an enjoyable book for the morning commute but I have Big Brother to thank for that (there's a surprise) - 16 or so years ago I saw him with a copy of Friedrich Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England in his hand (which of course I later borrowed), went and read my dad's copy of The Road to Wigan Pier, and that was that.
On a detached level as someone who's interested in history, statistics and the West Riding of Yorkshire (so you can imagine what it's like when they're all together in one volume) it's a very interesting book, raising as many questions as it answers (and it never pretends to answer many, I think the idea was to prompt people into further studies). Some of the attitudes and circumstances are recognisable from Saville, set in the educational background of the 40s, and some are still discernible in some of my contemporaries, educated in the late 80s and 90s. It's depressing and frustrating to think that over those 50 years (and before and since) so much talent has been wasted (or conversely that so much mediocrity has been encouraged into high places by excessive coaching and the supportive wallet of a loving parent) and so many unnecessary obstacles created; one point that was noted was that middle class families in Huddersfield knew how to play the system and overcome bendable rules whereas the working class families often accepted any knockback as final.
Despite all the rhetoric, some things never change and educational opportunities in England are still not equal and universal. An article in Friday's Guardian reported findings that state school pupils reaching university are slightly more likely to get a good degree than peers taking the same course but coming from a private education. Possible explanations are that the extra coaching and special treatment at school leave the privately-educated teenager less well equipped to deal with the realities of university, or that, to put it simply, if you've got to university without all the privileges of a private education you must be pretty clever. It's all politicised, I know, and nothing is ever that simple, but amid all the current arguing over graduate tax, tuition fees and all the rest of it, it makes me want to either tear my hair out or send copies of books like the Jackson and Marsden one to all the squabbling politicians (not that they'd read it). The next book I dug out of the cupboard was The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes 1918-1990 by Eric Hopkins; I must be in that sort of mood.