New Statesman this week gives a page and half to Graham Brady, a Conservative MP who wants not just to defend the grammar schools that still exist in England but to open more. He wants to do this in order to get schools back to offering an education 'of the highest academic standards.' I'm just guessing here but since he's an ex-grammar schoolboy himself, these would be the education he got 20 or 30 years ago.
As far as I make out, the new grammar schools would be for the most able young people. Brady talks about a 'selective' education for the rest of the school population but he doesn't give any details of what that would look like.
It's difficult to persuade people that education isn't a fixed idea. Grammar schools - or academies as they were often called in Scotland - were introduced ( in the early 19th century) in order to break free of the rigid classical (Latin, Greek, logic) education that young people had been offered before that and to make sure that the new-fangled studies of science, engineering and technology got their rightful place in schools. I'll bet there were many people in the 1840s who thought grammar schools were turning out a bunch of semi-literates, just as people from the grammar schools and academies in the 1940s were probably dismayed at the changes made by the education acts of that time.
Can you imagine us now trying to turn the clock back to the glory days of the grammar school: kicking out the technology, bringing back Latin, getting kids to learn screeds of the Bible by heart, doing hour upon boring hour of general analysis and parsing in English lessons? The world has moved on!
The trouble is, it's hard to persuade adults that the changes to education since they left school are necessary if young people are to be prepared for working life 20 or 30 years in the future. It's something teachers are always aware of: they are preparing young people for a workplace that doesn't yet exist and will probably look totally different from anything we know now. Well, would you have known 20 years ago about call centres or working from home on your iPad?
What teachers have to do is make sure that learners have good basic skills, that they are adaptable, sociable and confident - and that they leave with qualifications that will take them on to the next stage of their lives, whatever it may be. The 19th century notion that a lot of people wouldn't need an education because they would be field hands, servants and cannon fodder is out once and for all. Everybody needs skills these days - even in Mcjobs.
The other problem I have with Brady's article is that he claims he owes his career as an MP to his grammar school education. I tend to think he owes it to having 2 parents, both in work, one an accountant and one a clerical worker, living in a settled and peaceful community and going to a well-staffed school. Every bit of Brady's life set him up for success. It's a pity he can't see the need to offer that background to people who aren't so lucky.
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