Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

In the previous post, I had a long discussion about the speech “All Men Are Created Equal.” On this, post, I would be focusing more on the equality seen in private and public schools during Post-war Britain.

Today, U.S. is hardly a country where the ‘American Dream’ can be realised due to economic inequality and the unequal opportunities regarding education. Ironically, it might be said that there is more ‘equality’ in Britain than in the U.S. This is mainly due to the introduction of the ‘welfare state’ in the post-war period. However, Britain is hardly a socialist utopia.

Furthermore, during the post-war period, the American Dream was still alive. On the other hand, Britain was still wracked by ‘class differences’. This is something I experienced at first-hand when I attended schools in England in the 1950s and 1960s.  

The Segregation

In England, in the 1950s and later, children at the age of 11 had to take an examination called the 11+ examination. The test’s (and the government’s) purpose is to classify and segregate the students into future white collar and blue-collar workers; that is middle class or working class.

It sorted pupils into two categories: future factory in dirty blue overalls and clean white shirts and suits in an office. The first is blue collar, working class, and low paid. The other is white collar, middle class, and well-paid. This simply meant that these pupils, in the future, would be segregated in terms of where they lived, where they worked and treated unequally with regard to wages.

The main idea behind this sorting tool, the 11+ examination, was not one of education, but to stratify English society into privileged and under-privileged classes. In the process, this created a fully corrupt and unequal system that represented and reflected the interests of the ruling upper classes.

I will be discussing my own experience with the 11+ examination in the next post.

The Intended Outcome

This classification system would decide what would probably happen to pupils when they become an adult. Would they pay rent and live in a slum (working class)? Would they be given the opportunity to buy their own house (middle class)?

The idea was that the middle and upper class government of the period didn’t want to waste money educating working class people. To them, all they do are monotonous tasks operating a machine, or other similar ‘brainless’ jobs. In reality, it’s the working class’ money collected as taxes and profits.

For middle class parents, the thought that their children would fail the examination was absolutely unthinkable. This means their children could be cast into a ‘social dustbin’ called ‘Secondary Modern schools’. There they will be forced to mix with the lower class. If their children were ‘unlucky’ and failed the examination, they would have to fork out money to send their children to private schools just to avoid that outcome. The actual name of these schools came to be stigmatic to an extent that middle class parents hardly dared utter the name.

Corrupt System

The 11+ examination system was corrupt like most education systems. To what extent children passed or didn’t pass the 11+ examination was controlled to a great extent by the teachers. It was observed how little transparency was there in the examination process. Of course, such ‘corruption’ was rarely detected; however, a system that is open to corruption will sooner or later obviously be subjected to corruption.

In other words, teachers in the ‘A’ stream classes would want their pupils to pass the examination. They could help those pupils they especially liked, although perhaps academically weak. They are the ‘socially well-adapted’ pupils. These students are characterized as malleable, silent, fawning, and cow-towed to the foibles of the teacher.

On the other hand, pupils that were academically strong but ‘socially maladapted’ would find themselves in disfavour. They were the pupils who were independent, outspoken, integrious and free, and who didn’t cow-tow to the foibles of the teacher. Unfortunately, I belonged to the latter category of so-called ‘socially-maladapted’ pupils.

Private and Public Schools

Secondary Moderns did not have an academic focus and received less funding than the grammar schools. The teachers were also of a lower standard than grammar school teachers and were not always fully qualified. This did not really matter as the majority of pupils at the Secondary Moderns didn’t need the guidance of highly qualified teachers and high standards of education. They needed mostly just basic reading, writing, and arithmetic for their expected career paths. Most of them would end up working in factories or works such as Irlam Steelworks. Some could also join the low-paid lower ranks of the armed forces where one was not required to ‘think’, but only to follow orders. 

As mentioned above, those parents unwilling to send their children to Secondary Moderns opted to send their children to private schools if they could afford it. The majority of British politicians, especially conservatives have been educated at private (‘Public’) schools.²⁶² I don’t intend to enter into a discussion here of the ‘Public’ and private school system in Britain, as it is too complex and complicated to describe briefly. The mere terminology is confusing, because ‘Public’ schools are not owned by the state, but are actually private schools; however, not all private schools are ‘Public’ schools! 

Quality of Education

‘Public’ schools were attended by the children of the upper classes – schools such as Eton College. Conservative and Labour prime ministers have often gone to such ‘Public’ schools, too.²⁶³ These ‘Public’ schools have high academic standards. In addition, they have difficult entrance examinations. Private schools that are not ‘Public’ schools also have entrance examinations that are not necessarily difficult to pass. These schools are run for profit and need as many pupils as possible in order to survive in the market.

 As long as the state-run Secondary Moderns continued to offer a second-rate education, this provided good market conditions for the private schools. The existence of private schools also meant that various governments could shirk their responsibility of providing a good education for the whole of the population, and not only for a privileged minority. 

The Comprehensives

Eventually, the class-stigmatising Secondary Moderns were abolished. In 1965, a new type of school called ‘Comprehensives’ was introduced. In other words, children were no longer permanently socially classified for the rest of their lives on the basis of a test given to them at the age of 11. However, old habits die hard as they say. It seemed impossible to eradicate the socially divisive class system at the stroke of a politician’s pen.

This system has existed in England for more than 1000 years since the French king ‘William the Bastard’ invaded and conquered England in 1066.²⁶⁴ We now know that nothing that threatens the status quo of the wealthy is executed merely by the signing of a new law. The old divisive ‘class’ system of grammar schools and Secondary Moderns was continued in many Comprehensive schools by using ‘streaming’.²⁶⁵ That meant the same divisive class system now existed under one roof. 

John Lennon’s song “Working Class Hero” seems to be appropriate here:

“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
‘Til you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be.”

I also talked about this song on this post: Classic Cars in the Neighborhood

Scandinavian Educational System

As mentioned, I don’t intend to give a full historic description of the English school system; but it should be mentioned that the English post-war class-divisive education system differed from education systems in other Northern European countries. One great example are the Scandinavian countries. 

On the whole, the education systems in Scandinavia favour a socially unifying principle rather than a socially divisive principle. During the post-war period, the Norwegian school system was based on a so-called ‘enhets’ (unified) principle.²⁶⁶ The ‘unified school’ (enhetsskolen) is the term used for the Norwegian school system. It is also used in general for school types that emphasise high quality of education and equal opportunities for everyone. This is in stark contrast to the divisive English system whose only aim is to maintain high quality for selected groups rather than giving everyone equal rights. 

Unified Schools

The term ‘unified school’ is particularly associated with the social democratic school policy in Norway from the 1950s onwards. Of interest here is the term ‘unified school’; this is the standardized term for the translation of the Norwegian ‘enhetskolen’.

Most people who have English as their mother tongue would find the term ‘unified school’ to be non-understandable or alien. This is due to the fact that the Norwegian term ‘enhetskolen’ is culturally untranslatable; that is, there is no such thing as a ‘unified school’ in English speaking countries such as Britain and the USA. The idea of equality and equal opportunities for all within the educational sphere is a totally alien idea for people in Britain and the USA.  

Segregation Post-Education

Of course, I don’t want to enter into the discussion of class segregation practised at race courses in the post-war period. However, it is obvious the queen and other ‘toffs’ would be segregated into different ‘enclosures’ from miners and other ‘scum’. Readers can make their own internet searches. It is perhaps easier to consider how the segregated class system functioned in the post-war as practiced by the state-run national railways. Ironically, it was also practiced during the periods of so-called ‘socialist’ Labour governments.²⁸⁹

In fact, when I started working for an insurance company in London in the late 1960s, I got into trouble with the company bookkeeper because I had borrowed company money to travel first class. If you travelled ‘second class’ you often had to stand up for the whole of the 35 minute train journey from Billericay, Essex, to Liverpool Street in East London.    

Sources

²⁶² A ‘Public’ school in England and Wales (but not Scotland) is a fee-charging endowed school originally for older boys that was ‘public’. They are open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession. The term ‘public school’ was formalised by the Public Schools Act 1868. This put into law most recommendations of the 1864 Clarendon Report. Nine prestigious schools were investigated by Clarendon, and seven subsequently reformed by the Act: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, and Charterhouse.

Public schools have had a strong association with the British ruling classes. In 2019, two-thirds of the Cabinet Ministers had been educated at such fee-charging schools. However, a slim minority of cabinet ministers since 1964 were educated at state schools. Edited from:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom) Accessed: 12 October 2021.

²⁶³ Refer to the following website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom_by_education

²⁶⁴ Unlike the historical propaganda we read in school history books about ‘English’ history, it seems to have been conveniently ‘forgotten’ that ‘French’ monarchs ruled England for about 350 years. That is, French was the mother tongue of every English king from William the Conqueror (1066) until Henry IV (1413). This is of interest here, because the ‘class’ system pervaded the evolution of the English language to some extent.

Thus food eaten by the upper classes, such as meat, for example ‘mutton’, had a French root (mouton), whereas, the word ‘sheep’ is of Germanic origin (because it was the commoners who looked after the sheep, but the sheep were eaten by the French nobles ruling England). The commoners couldn’t afford to eat much meat as it was too expensive.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dual_French_and_Anglo-Saxon_variations . Read: 24 November 2021.

Source

²⁶⁵ ‘Streaming’: Streaming refers to the grouping of students by ability. Students within a certain ability range are grouped together as a class. In other words, class ‘A’ (Alpha), class ‘B’ (Beta), class ‘C’ (Gamma), class ‘D’ (Delta) and class ‘E’ Epsilon. Class ‘E’ usually does not receive any ‘teaching’ at all, but are ‘contained’ (to use a military term); the ‘E’ classes are usually populated by children from poor backgrounds with ‘social’ problems. The A-E streaming in British schools reflects the social system in Huxley’s dystopia, Brave New World.

²⁶⁶ https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhetsskole The English translation doesn’t due justification to the idea of the Norwegian system, because it uses the term ‘comprehensive’. As mentioned many English comprehensive schools use ‘streaming’ which is opposed to the fundamental idea behind ‘enhetsskolen’ (unitary school) providing equal education without ‘streaming’ separating children into ‘classes’.

²⁸⁹ https://www.1900s.org.uk/1940s-trains-class.htm Read: 13 May 2022.