IN ITS latest modernising spasm, the Tory party has come out against grammar schools. It's mad. What next? Queen denounces corgis?
David Willetts, shadow education minister, says that grammar schools do not improve "social mobility". I'd like to begin by asking David why the Tory party is adopting left-wing jargon such as "social mobility". But we know what he means. He means that grammar schools are perceived to be outdated institutions which perpetuate class distinction. The answer to this reasonable objection is not to have fewer grammar schools but more of them.
If it is claimed that well-off folk move into grammar school catchment areas where poor people cannot afford to live, then let us solve the problem by having at least one grammar school in every town - so that everyone is in the catchment area.
The war on the grammar schools is based on destructive political ideology and not on any real desire to do the best for all our children. The fact - obvious to anyone who is not a political apparatchik - is that children differ in their abilities and inclinations and so they require different sorts of schooling to suit them.
Only a minority of children would benefit from an academic education. This does not mean that non-academic pupils are second rate: it just means that they have different gifts, skills and aptitudes. It doesn't mean that they are as thick as three short planks. I know this from my own case. I went to a grammar school in Leeds in the 1950s. I was the sort of lad who enjoyed reading and writing. Indeed, my father - a skilled engineer - used to tell me off for "always having your head in a book".
Talking of three short planks, at school I was useless at woodwork and art. One term we were all asked to make a three-legged stool. My construction of the proper woodwork joints for this - don't ask me to remember what these were called - was so awful that my stool had to be nailed together. And when I'd finished it, the woodwork master held it aloft in front of the whole class for them to laugh. Everyone else stained and varnished their stool, but the master said he wasn't going to waste varnish "on your atrocity". And he made me paint it red. If anyone else in the class did something badly after this, he was said to have "made a Mullen of it".
If I was bad at woodwork, I was worse at drawing. In the history class we were learning about the Trojan Wars and the wooden horse. We were asked to draw a picture of the wooden horse of Troy. Again, mine was held up for special ridicule. I said, "I'm sorry, Sir, but I can't draw". He clipped me round the ear and said - and I still remember it with pain - not the clip but his stinging words - "Can't you draw a horse in 12 straight lines, boy?"
I'm still useless practically. Always have been. Some years ago I went for a priest's job in a City parish and the colonel type who was interviewing me said, "You'll be a bit of a one man band here. What are you like with a screwdriver?" I think my reply was on the lines of "What is a screwdriver?"
But I don't think I'm completely useless. I can read and I can write a bit. There is a place for the grammar school as there is for the technical and trades college, the office skills course and the sports academy. Cut the class warfare. When it comes to schooling, it's horses for courses - even horses in 12 straight lines.
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