there is now considerable discontent brewing about education. It arises from many different quarters—among teachers and administrators (Cf. the recent controversy in The Observer between Mr. Amis and his colleagues and Dr. Petersen), academic authorities (Cf. the reports of several recent conferences), parents (Cf. the recent PEP pamphlet, Parents’ Views On Education, 3s. 6d.) and students (see Oxford Opinions below). Only the Labour Party remains sweetly oblivious.
The common thread which link these different aspects is the continuing existence of a two-tiered, two-class structure. Luck, sweat, scholarships and grants may all provide ladders or switch-points, by means of which young men and women may, at some point in their education, shift from one stream to another. But these ameliorative measures cannot disguise the central fact that, in secondary as in further education, there is a “high-road” and a “back-door”; and the standards which apply or the resources which are set aside differ, depending upon which stream you are in, as sharply as they do in, say, our provision in old age.
In the last ten years, parallel with other shifts in the patterns of class relations in our society, the gap between Grammar School and Public School has been narrowing, the chasm between the Secondary Modern and the rest widening. The Public School boy may still have an edge over his competitor from the top Grammar Schools, because of those indefinable social virtues bred in the ethos of the Public School, which are still considered recommendations in themselves, both at Oxbridge and in industry: but generally, the pattern of recruitment to university, and thence to business and industry, has been widened to admit the best of the Grammar school output more or less directly into some quarter or other of the meritocracy. The way there may be harder: it is often an interlocking grind of examination and results, weeding and creaming, application, cramming and narrowing specialisation—but, so far as the “job-opportunities” are concerned at the end of the process, it is well worth it.