Mass education and Britain's long war against meritocracy

Populism, not pragmatism

Among advocates of selective education, it seems to have become something of a commonplace that grammar schools were abolished by fanatical – and possibly also privately-educated – ideologues, in a decision that was very much against the wishes of the general public. After all, in 1965, Harold Wilson’s first Secretary of State for Education, Anthony Crosland, famously declared that ‘if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England’. And just like that, one man eviscerated one of the main avenues for social mobility in post-war Britain. Crosland himself, the son of a senior civil servant and an academic, was educated at Highgate School (2023/4 fees: £23,520/pa), before obtaining not one but two undergraduate degrees from Oxford. Of course, Crosland may have claimed to have been an ‘egalitarian’, but could he also have had half an eye on the declining fortunes of his alma mater? Hmm…

Or so the story goes. Like most convenient fictions, it does contain some elements of truth, but it is wrong in interpreting grammar schools as being abolished in a plot that began from the top. In fact, grammar schools were much more vulnerable from attack from the bottom: that is to say, by the British public from the grassroots level. Meritocracy, as we will see, is not popular with the majority, and probably never will be. Education policy is always where this becomes most apparent.

R.A. Butler’s celebrated Education Act of 1944, which was responsible for establishing Britain’s tripartite – but in reality, mostly bipartite – education system, quickly obtained widespread, and, crucially, bipartisan support in the Commons. On the Right, those with misgivings – usually on account of grammar school boys allegedly lacking the right sort of ‘character’ to form an elite – normally had the political good sense to remain silent. More importantly, on the Left, too, there were few opponents of Butler’s Act: support for comprehensive education was generally thought to be a marker of eccentricity in the Commons until as late as the mid-1950s.

It would, after all, fall to Labour to implement the 1944 Act. Clement Attlee’s first Secretary of State for Education, Ellen Wilkinson – a former Communist generally considered to have been on the Left of the Labour Party – was dismissive of the (then very small) lobby for comprehensive education in Westminster. She argued that

…there are differences in intelligence among children as well as among adults. There are distinctions of mind and these are imposed by nature. I am afraid that is a fact which we cannot get over. Children will be different in bent, and in intellectual capacity.

One Labour pamphlet, published in 1950, took a similar view:

People are not equal in their capacities. Some are more capable with their hands, other with their brains. The purpose of a socialist society is to make the best use of all the rich variety of gifts which people possess.

As we can see, the ethos of the British Left at this time remained unreconstructedly ‘Fabian’. Both for better and for worse, this was an unashamedly elitist (and productivist) project, dedicated to improving the conditions of the masses, but with little interest in giving them much say. The ‘Morrisonian’ direction of Attlee’s nationalisations reflected this preference: the new publicly-owned companies where to be run by professional managers, and calls for ‘democratic’ control by the workers were rejected. ‘The gentleman in Whitehall’, as the Labour MP (and notorious groper) Douglas Jay put it, ‘really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves’.

What happened? Most importantly, this central government project had collided with the views of the general public at the local level. Grammar schools – or, more precisely, the eleven-plus – had proven to be highly unpopular. This was well-known by 1965, and almost inevitably meant that Tory opposition to Crosland and his allies would be somewhat feeble to say the least. Peter Mandler writes that ‘by the end of 1963, no fewer than 92 of 129 English LEAs had initiated plans to end selection at 11’. In other words, almost three-quarters of English Local Educational Authorities were planning to abolish grammar schools before the election of a Labour Government in 1964, and before Crosland’s infamous Circular 10/65 in 1965. And, almost necessarily, many of the 92 LEAs in question were, in fact, Conservative-controlled.

Butler’s 1944 Act had introduced the framework for a tripartite system, but in education, central government still had surprisingly little power to compel local authorities to follow its guidelines. In most areas, technical schools – which were expensive both to set up and to run – were never established, mainly for financial reasons. This meant that there was usually a binary choice between high-quality education for the minority at grammar schools, and almost invariably low-quality education at secondary moderns. In much of the country, then, the tripartite system never existed, and even the bipartite system was only to exist for fifteen years.           

Conservative-controlled rural authorities, such as Cornwall, Devon, and Gloucestershire, led the way in abolishing their grammar schools. The official reason given for this was financial: running parallel systems of education in rural areas was often impractical and wasteful. This was a perfectly valid point. However, it also gave local authorities to do away with the hated eleven-plus, instead pleasing the public by offering what they often referred to as ‘grammar schools for all’ (an oxymoronic term that many local advocates preferred to that of ‘comprehensive education’). Some other authorities, such as Croydon, pioneered the now-common model of offering comprehensive education to sixteen, followed by transfer to a moderately selective sixth form college. Meanwhile, many rapidly expanding suburban areas refused to build grammar schools for new developments. This (again) was often a decision justified for financial reasons, but (again) was also a decision that generally proved to be popular with the public for rather different reasons.

Some parents went as far as to move, just so their children could avoid the eleven-plus. Lord Gardiner, who served as Lord Chancellor under Harold Wilson, recalled attending a meeting on what he assumed were routine boundary changes between Conservative-controlled Leicestershire (an early supporter of comprehensive education) and the Labour-controlled City of Leicester (one of the most dogged defenders of the eleven-plus). To his surprise, he found that

…the vast majority [of the attendees] were parents and they were hopping mad because in the city they had secondary and grammar schools whereas the county had comprehensive schools. Some of them had sold their homes in Leicester in order to get away from the city education system and the 11-plus and give their children the advantages [sic] of a comprehensive school education, and now they were being threatened with being put back into the city again… Of course, I had always known that the 11-plus was not very popular, but I had never known before to what extent it was both hated and feared.

Unsurprisingly, advocates of comprehensive education did have their own supposedly ‘technocratic’ reasons for doing away with selection at eleven, usually in the form of junk social science. The work of social scientists such as Halsey, Floud, and paid-up CPGB member Brian Simon found that, unsurprisingly, the composition of the student body of grammar schools was, well, rather middle class. This shouldn’t have been surprising, but this aspect of selective education was not widely publicised before their work; and, moreover, some socialists (such as R.H. Tawney) assumed that although there were biological differences in intelligence, intelligence was somehow randomly distributed across the population. That this was proving to not be the case came as something of a shock.

However, as should already be clear to the reader, the decision to abolish grammar schools was not an elitist, top-down, technocratic policy; rather, it was an unabashedly populist policy, and the British public moved well before the politicians. That is to say, it was not a policy that was justified by facts and logic. Halsey, Floud, and Simon were influential, but their ‘scientific’ claims were not, in this instance, decisive. They merely provided a ‘technocratic’ alibi for the politicians. Grammar schools were abolished because of real or alleged (in this case, largely real) public sentiment. Did anyone disprove the main principle behind selective education: namely, that children, just like adults, differ in their natural abilities, learn at different speeds, and should therefore be educated separately? Of course not. Politicians just wanted to indulge the British public, who would never be able to accept that not all of their children were generously endowed with that important quality known as ‘intelligence’. The British public liked the idea of ‘meritocracy’, but not its consequences, and politicians were eager to capitalise on their delusions.

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So much for grammar schools. But what about the expansion of higher education? Once again, many critics of the universities, rather than attacking the policy for being wasteful and pointless, often make the bizarre claim that this was somehow an unpopular policy. Of course, it is very easy to find grumpy old bastards who moan about the ‘woke’ and the need for ‘hard graft’ and (as always) how we ‘need more bloody apprenticeships’ and ‘technical education’ (something to do with going into a room to hit pipes with a hammer and stick together bits of wood). Back in their day, they remember, you didn’t even need a degree for that job! Bobbies with degrees? Has the world gone mad?

For the most part, quite sensible sentiments, but few parents – even those who might on occasion express similar views – would agree with the obvious consequences of following through with such ideas. They want their children to attend university – and for them to have the full ‘university experience’, dropping them off at halls, with a graduation to attend at the end – and, moreover, for them to attend the same type of university as everyone else.

Similarly, most teenagers also want to attend university, quite aside from the real (but decreasing) personal financial benefits from doing so. If you did not, you should understand that you are in the minority. For most of this majority (though to be fair, not all), this is not so much because of what they might learn – whether financially valuable or not – but rather because three years of taxpayer-subsidised fun is more appealing than living at home (or suffering from extortionate rents), paying taxes, and working for an obnoxious boss who has become used to servile immigrant labour.

Of course, everyone knows that a ‘first class’ degree from Oxford and a ‘first class’ degree from Oxford Brookes are not really the same, but too openly shoving the distinction between the two in the faces of the public comes across as needlessly mean-spirited: hence why the distinction between polytechnics and universities was eventually done away with.

Into the early post-war period, it was widely assumed by policymakers that the so-called ‘pool of ability’ was limited, and it was not until the Robbins Report of 1963 that this was seriously questioned. From this point onwards, higher education enrolment would ceaselessly increase, and even those who had made noises in opposition to this, such as many of the ministers in the Thatcher Government, found themselves unable or unwilling to cap numbers in any real way. It would not have been good politics to do so.

Naturally, Tony Blair and his allies also came furnished with their own share of junk social science when justifying their policy to expand higher education enrolment even further, to half the cohort. This was, once again, not decisive, though it was probably more important than it was the abolition of grammar schools. Conventional growth accounting – i.e., the Solow-Swan Model – excluded ‘human capital’. But in 1992, Mankiw, Romer, and Weil established their own growth model to replace Solow-Swan. Their central innovation was the decision to include so-called ‘human capital’ in their production function.

On the face of it, this seemed reasonable enough, but their new model raised an important question: what is ‘human capital’? Most fans of the Pimlico Journal would argue that ‘human capital’ does in some sense exist – certainly, it cannot be right that production is no more than the output of combinations of capital, unimproved and homogenous labour inputs, and so-called ‘ideas’ (technological and otherwise) – but that it is substantially biological, and is by no means entirely (or even mostly) dependent upon expenditures of time and money on education. For their part, Mankiw-Romer-Weil chose as a proxy the enrolment rate of those of working age (defined as 15 to 19) in secondary education. At no point do they seem to have consulted the work of the psychometricians, who had been studying similar problems for close to a century by this point.

Since their contribution, economists have been scrambling to find a way to measured ‘human capital’ that is congruent with the data. Partly in direct response to Mankiw-Romer-Weil, many countries – especially developing countries – decided to invest more in education, but this generally failed to translate into increased economic growth. By 2001, development economist Lant Pritchett found himself forced to ask the question: where had all the education gone?

In attempting to solve Pritchett’s little ‘puzzle’, much recent work in economics on ‘human capital’ has circled back to the conclusions of the psychometricians – above all, the dreaded Richard Lynn – while never engaging with their work in any way whatsoever (Rindermann is an honourable exception). In the process, all sorts of amusing IQ-proxy euphemisms(?) have appeared, such as ‘national basic skills’ and ‘cognitive skills’ (Hanushek and Woessmann), ‘expected human capital’ (Lim et al.), and, most recently, ‘learning-adjusted years of schooling’ (Altinok and Diebolt). Psychologist Emil Kirkegaard recently wrote the following on this phenomenon:

I think the back story of papers like [the above] is roughly as follows. Once economists figured out that human capital is very important, they tried measuring this. Of course, they first turned to the easiest thing they could find in large datasets, educational attainment. Since this is somewhat difficult to compare across various times and places due to changes in categorisation, a smarter approach (maybe) is to use years of education. Later they noted that this is still not quite right because people learn at different speeds, so they don’t get the same out of education. These differences in learning speed are then attributed mostly to educational policy and school factors. Standard stuff. In this paper, they diligently compiled various test scores across countries… as well as years of education. Using these, one can compute a kind of efficacy of the schooling. Thus one gets ‘learning-adjusted years of education’. The causal model assumed is still the same deficient one, namely that differences in test scores can be taken as a measure of educational quality, instead of student body quality.

Some of our readers may still remember that the Tory line on tuition fees – something that came up surprisingly frequently for those of us sad enough to be involved in big-C Conservative politics at university – under Cameron and May was that they were in fact good. Why? Well, partly because they meant that the private benefit of increased personal wages was not entirely paid for by the general public, who mostly were older and did not have the opportunity to attend university. But, probably more importantly, they were also good – as future Bright Blue interns liked to claim – because they expanded university attendance! Unlike in Scotland, where the mean, socialist SNP, who were still (far more directly) picking up most of the bill for their students, seemed to restrict numbers much more zealously than in England. ‘What about freedom of choice?’, they asked. Checkmate, ScotNats.

The main circle to square for British politicians, then, was how to pay for the undoubtedly popular policy of ceaselessly expanding the numbers of the fundamentally unproductive student population, and the ever-increasing cost of the universities that housed them. The clever solution found was to kick the can down the road: by moving the costs onto the individual student, before (eventually) writing off most of these debts at the expense of the taxpayer. Smart politics indeed; Jeremy Heywood would be proud.

The British public don’t like the idea of the taxpayer subsidising Woke Studies at Cambridge Ringroad University, until they hear about their children (or even their friend’s children) being rejected from their fifth choice for being too stupid. And they don’t like the idea of their child having to be in a class with someone who is disruptive, and perhaps borderline subnormal, until their own child is told that these descriptions might actually apply to them. Having real standards is popular, until you hear about them being applied to the people near you.

We should remember that meritocracy is never much liked by the majority, who will by definition be unable to make the cut. Elites must be more willing to zealously defend it against political attack by the masses. Cowardly British politicians, however, were more than willing to indulge the public by ceaselessly expanding education to the quite obviously incapable, and failed to hold to a common-sense line on education. Rational policy, we must remember, is often highly unpopular. The mind-boggling amounts of money and time wasted on this farce cannot possibly be understood as technocratic, or pragmatic, even in a wrong-headed sort of way: it was populism, pure and simple, and opponents of mass education should attack it as such.