Raging Against Reform

Since World War II, England has tried to tear down the educational barriers that have long divided the country into what Disraeli called two nations of the privileged and the people. Many children in England and Wales still take a rigorous exam around the age of eleven that funnels the gifted minority into grammar schools, which prepare them for universities. The academic chaff is relegated to so-called secondary modern schools that tend to brand their graduates as lifetime "duds." Reform has centered on the establishment of comprehensive schools, their version of U.S. public high schools, which teach all things to all children.

Thin Red Line. Progress has been slow: comprehensive schools still enroll only 21% of all students in the tax-supported secondary schools of England and Wales. One reason is that the elite grammar schools attract middle-class parents who yearn to give their children upper-class accents and the university aura that separates gentlemen from others. Now the Labor Party wants to send all children to comprehensive schools--and many middle-class parents are aghast. If grammar schools go, they charge, their children will have to mix with academic and social inferiors. Seizing the issue, the Conservative Party has vowed to block the Labor plan, especially if the Tories win Britain's forthcoming national elections.

Anti-egalitarians mounted a chorus of outrage against democratized education in England seven months ago with a collection of essays entitled Fight for Education: A Black Paper. The latest barrage came this month with the publication of Black Paper Two: The Crisis in Education. Both were written by a group of traditionally minded novelists, politicians and educators. As they see it, England's thin red line of intellectual royalists is being overrun by "progressive" reformers who deliberately sabotage old-fashioned academic virtues.

Verging on Hysteria. The essays' editors charge that the reformers fatally gear their standards to "the unlucky, the ungifted, the indolent or the otherwise lame." This shrill voice is echoed in every essay. Tory M.P. Angus Maud writes: "We must reject the chimera of equality and proclaim the ideal of quality." Novelist Kingsley Amis encapsulates mass education with the slogan, "more means worse," and blames student unrest at universities on the presence of the academically unfit. Psychologist Sir Cyril Burt offers statistics purporting to prove that skills in reading, spelling and arithmetic have dropped in the past 55 years. Underlying the invective is a pervasive fear that educational reform is the cutting edge of a Labor Party plan to break down Britain's social structure.

Reaction to the essays was loud and expected. The Times Literary Supplement accused the authors of "prejudices that verged on the hysterical." The Manchester Guardian called them a "tightly knit bunch of righties." Many indignant teachers pointed to a 1967 government report showing that over the past two decades, eleven-year-olds have increased the rate at which they learn to read by more than 24%. Meanwhile, a new stress on writing and new math has livened up teaching throughout the country. The loudest reaction, perhaps, came from Education Secretary Edward Short who declared: "The publication of the Black Paper was one of the blackest days for education in the last 100 years."

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