This was not how the cautious, self-disciplined Prime Minister Theresa May was supposed to sound. “Yesterday I laid out the first step of an ambitious plan to set Britain on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world,” she wrote in the September 9 Daily Mail. “It is a vision of a Britain where advantage is based on merit not privilege, talent not circumstance, hard work not background. . . . A vision of a society where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow.
“And the plan I laid out . . . —a good school place for every child that caters to their individual talents, abilities and needs—is the starting point: putting government firmly at the service of ordinary working class people and building a great meritocracy in our nation.”
In short, Theresa May plans to let any English state-supported secondary school convert itself into a grammar school, selecting its students by competitive examination. Unlike Free Schools—comparable to American charter schools and the great achievement of the David Cameron government that preceded May’s—these grammars wouldn’t have to be painstakingly started from scratch but simply converted from existing schools. May’s plan also obliges many universities to establish or sponsor secondary schools, imposes new scholarship requirements on private schools, and encourages faith schools. Together, it would drive the greatest transfer of intellectual capital from class to mass in 50 years, a period during which Labour and Tory governments alike forced down the number of grammar schools from well over a thousand to about 160.
The U.K. education establishment had a difficult time swallowing the Free School movement, which Michael Gove, Cameron’s visionary education secretary, set in motion in 2010. Toby Young, whose championship of Free Schools I chronicled in these pages (“Rise of a Free School,” June 17, 2013), is no friend to selective-only schools. He believes that well-run Free Schools, with entry by lottery, already offer “a grammar school education for all,” and worries that new grammars will skim their most talented kids. But May’s daring impresses him. Her reforms “are far more radical than anything Michael Gove came up with. And he was the most radical member of the last government.” Young is agnostic on the principle of selection, but salutes her gallantry: “Put aside the detail. Think about the [prime minister’s] indifference to the good opinion of the liberal elite.”
The liberal elite—Labour, LibDem, Tory, and media—made their reaction to being ignored abundantly clear. May was threatening to return to a system the abolition of which was the great egalitarian achievement of the 1960s and ’70s. Grammars are “retrograde”; permitting them “turned back the clock” and will “benefit the few.” May’s proposals carefully reform the iniquities of the old system, but it makes no difference. She has “declared class war.”
May’s opponents know better because, it turns out, almost all of them had in fact attended selective grammar schools in the bad old days, an education that paradoxically granted them the prominence of a media platform from which to revile their own schooling.
At the New Statesman earlier this summer, Peter Wilby noted May’s appointment of Justine Greening, the first education secretary in history to have been educated entirely at a comprehensive school. “Pro-comprehensive groups were almost lyrical in praise of her appointment,” he wrote. But Wilby discerned in Greening ingratitude for the privilege of having been spared an elite education. Here we have a new literary form, which we might call “gramsplaining”:
Wilby’s memory is no doubt faultless, but back when he was editor of the Independent on Sunday he might have queried a writer’s assertion that a 15-year-old would know the class origin of every pupil in his school. That’s the confidence grammar school education gives one, presumably.
The art of the gramsplanation has flowered in the days since May’s announcement. Dozens of grammar school old boys and girls, now MPs and columnists on major newspapers, explain daily why their own schools failed to help anyone other than themselves, and how much harm those who didn’t make the cut, strangers to them, suffered. The better the education, the noisier the rage. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, went to a grammar, and so did his son (although Corbyn left his wife because she insisted on it and he objected). So did Labour’s chief strategist, Seumas Milne, whose far-left views didn’t prevent him from sending both children to one. So did three other members of Labour’s shadow cabinet.
But just as vociferous, and far more threatening to May’s program, are many Tory cabinet members and MPs, who are described as being “in open revolt.” May’s majority is only 20. But even if she gets it through Parliament, precisely because her proposal is an innovation (not in the party platform), the House of Lords has the constitutional right to vote it down. And that august chamber is, as you might guess, the national home for explainers to those who don’t have something why they shouldn’t want it.
That parents of British schoolchildren want grammar schools is not in doubt. In August, a YouGov poll showed a widespread belief that “grammar schools provide a better education.” Indeed, “nearly two thirds of people . . . would send their child to a grammar school should they have passed an entrance exam, whilst just 10% would not.” Almost as large a proportion of parents (62 percent) would have their child at least take an entrance exam.
There is no need to go into the arguments for or against the educational efficacy of school selection; they are complicated, and even their proponents are not satisfied that the case is proven. Never mind. Neither friends nor enemies of the new grammars bother much with education; instead, everyone prefers to argue social mobility. I find this curious. Children can be taught well or badly, they can be inspired, or held back, or bored, or their talents wasted, and we watch and judge the quality of instruction, of facilities, of the atmosphere and leadership at a school, and how spending money can, or can’t, alter these things. Child by child we can test achievement at definite intervals and measure, to some degree, “education.”
“Social mobility” is different in every way. Even if we agree it is the number-one goal, we can’t agree on how to measure it and what will increase or decrease it. The old grammar school system was destroyed in order to increase social mobility. But this had the opposite effect (or something did): fewer working-class students in university and the professions now than under the 1960s height of the grammar system. Yet Lord Willetts, former Tory universities minister and a key opponent of May’s program in the House of Lords, feels certain that “the entire education system should be reshaped to better assist social mobility.” Parents who want social mobility for their own specific children are willing to take a chance that grammars will serve them better. Simon Heffer is one of their rare media spokespeople: “School must be about developing each child to the limits of his or her potential, and anyone who thinks the present system does this properly is living in a dream world.”
The well-educated opponents of grammar schools, who have themselves risen from the lower or middle classes to the ruling classes, are even more certain they can solve social mobility. To many, it is the very middle-class nature of grammar schools that is the enemy of working-class achievement. The chairman of Ofsted (the government body that inspects and regulates schools), Sir Michael Wilshaw, believes the terrible truth is that “Grammar schools are stuffed full of middle-class kids,” after quoting which declaration the New Statesman‘s Tim Wigmore adds, “That is terrible news for the most deprived pupils.”
Of course, it’s good news not bad news. Middle-classness is not a race or an inheritance or a system of oppression, but a culture, invented rather recently, by those who don’t want to be poor any more, or revert to poverty. Most children in grammar school are middle class because their “middle-classness” gave them the tools and habits one needs if one is to master knowledge, save oneself from distraction, sort out the significant from the insignificant, and delay gratification—exactly the means by which individuals achieve “social mobility” in the present state of human development. Peter Wilby’s fellow pupils all seemed middle class, but may well not have been. The existing grammar schools that survived have a disproportionate number of Chinese and South Asian students, according to the Financial Times: Some are 95 percent stuffed with poor kids of Indian and Pakistani origin.
The skills of self-mastery and articulation taught in grammar schools reside in an even more concentrated form in the well-educated ranks of May’s opponents in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, where a small number of determined individuals, motivated by that strongest of human desires—not to be deplorable—are in a position to stop her. So what will happen to her reforms?
Toby Young makes some interesting suggestions. Theresa May might be reaching out with her schools policy to the Brexiteers in her party, who still distrust her on that subject, by throwing them some red meat on an unrelated subject. In return, she may get more cooperation from them on the Brexit compromises that are inevitable. In the House of Lords, there is a Europhile faction that menaces the Brexit project: It is relatively coterminous with the antigrammar faction, and May could be looking forward to draining its stamina over grammar schools, leaving an exhausted force to battle Brexit.
And then there is the great British public, who, if polls are any indication, are firmly on the side of May in wanting schools that work for everyone. A major redrawing of parliamentary constituency boundaries is taking place, and a large number of Tory MPs will have to be readopted by new constituencies. As Quentin Letts wrote in the Daily Mail, “Tory activists—who will help choose the MPs for the new seats—may be a great deal more keen on grammar schools than some of these Commons handwringers.”
And finally, there is always the possibility of calling a snap election, particularly if the House of Lords torpedoes May’s grammar school legislation. She may calculate that it is better for her to fight an election on grammars than on Brexit. And in that case, her boldness on grammars, and her boldness in general, may well pay off.
Sam Schulman is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
