REVIEW: A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System by Peter Hitchens
Does Peter Hitchens understand quantitative social science?
‘And I will not be lectured to by a jumped-up public schoolgirl like you. I came from the bottom and I will not have it’ —Kendal Grammar School alumnus
In A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System, conservative patriarch Peter Hitchens argues that the shuttering of Britain’s grammar schools during the 1960s and 1970s was an educational catastrophe. The comprehensive system which replaced it was designed to create a level playing field for students of different social classes and an holistic form of education. Hitchens claims that the new system instead destroyed standards, reinforced the privileges of public school graduates, and created an opaque state sector in which quality education is distributed on the basis of parental wealth rather than natural ability.
The book’s focus on the harms suffered by talented working class pupils in the comprehensive system has meant that it has been warmly received by conservative pundits, who now offer a reactionary fusion of traditional merit-based conservatism and the identity politics of the white working class. However, Hitchens omits any mention of heredity, makes basic statistical and evidentiary errors, and ultimately fails to make a compelling case for the idea that social mobility has declined as a consequence of the comprehensive system.
The arguments made by this book — and by others in the right-wing press — serve as an alibi for cash-strapped middle-class parents who want a better education for their children. I argue that they should wear their prejudices openly, and demand the reintroduction of grammar schools for their own self-interest.
The Case for Grammar Schools
Hitchens’s primary argument in favour of grammar schools is that they maximise the potential of talented pupils who do not have access to private education or a well-regarded comprehensive, and particularly those who come ‘from desperately poor homes, whose parents may have been indifferent or hostile to education’ (p. 112).
Grammar schools decrease the salience of the home environment and provide a level playing field between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. The examination grades of different social classes converge, and working-class hostility to education is eradicated through the leadership of enthusiastic teachers and cultural spillover from middle-class schoolmates.
This creates a more meritocratic society where professional, educational and economic success more closely correlate with real ability, rather than inherited privilege. This is not just more fair, but also benefits society as a whole, as the economic potential of the country is maximised.
Hitchens points to the declining share of Oxbridge entrants from independent schools after the introduction of the tripartite system: 62% percent before the Education Act 1944, falling to 45% on the eve of comprehensivisation in the mid-1960s. The representation of state (nearly entirely grammar) schools more than doubled in this period, from 19% to 34% (pp. 89-91), with the remaining places filled by overseas students and students from direct grant schools.
This appears to be compelling evidence that grammar schools improve the opportunities of children from ordinary backgrounds (at least on the right tail). However, the share of Oxbridge entrants from state schools increased slightly over the following 50 years, even as the share of pupils attending private schools varied over the same time (p. 72) and the share attending grammar schools fell significantly, which suggests that grammar schools were not responsible for the decline of independent school domination at Oxbridge. The politicisation of Oxbridge admissions that Hitchens mentions did not occur until the 2010s, when the female share of Oxford students rose from 46.5% in 2014 to 55.2% in 2021, state school admissions rose by ten percentage points at both institutions, while the BAME share of Oxford students rose from 18.3% in 2018 to 27.8% in 2022, and the same share at Cambridge rose from 19.7% in 2014 to 29.3% in 2020 (note that these figures are for domestically domiciled undergraduates, so are not a consequence of international student visa liberalisation).
He also references the 1983 Standards in English Schools report by Caroline Cox and John Marks which, according to Hitchens, ‘shows pupils at secondary modern and grammar schools obtained more GCE O-level results than pupils at comprehensive schools – both nationally and in the same social group’ (p. 86). It compares achievement between comprehensives and a weighted average of grammar schools and secondary moderns, and finds that this reconstructed sample outperforms comprehensive by roughly 15% of the gap between grammar schools and secondary moderns.1
But grammar schools (and by extension secondary moderns) were (and are) more numerous in wealthier areas of England, and the 25% weighting placed on grammar schools is an overweighting, as grammar schools outside of LEAs retaining the tripartite system draw from a much smaller percentage of the population.
Selection Matters Not
There is much further data to support the idea that grammar schools and independent education have little to no effect on examination performance, and that the disparities between pupils at each type of school are nearly entirely due to differences between the ability of the pupils who attend them. A 2018 study found that ‘exam differences between school types are primarily due to the heritable characteristics involved in pupil admission’. A 2020 study showed that expansions in free education in the UK did not raise wealth or income among their beneficiaries, which suggests that the positive relationship we observe between education and socio-economic outcomes within birth cohorts is due to signalling rather than skill acquisition, as Bryan Caplan has argued in The Case Against Education. And in The Son Also Rises, economic historian Gregory Clark argues that social mobility did not rise as a consequence of the same expansions in schooling (or many other social changes, such as mass literacy).
This evidence should make one extremely doubtful that reorganising the comprehensive system into grammar and secondary schools is going to close achievement gaps between different social classes. And if this was the case, we would expect the extant systems in Kent, Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire to produce such evidence. But Hitchens does not offer any in his book. The only empirical evidence Hitchens can muster are Oxbridge admission rates (in themselves problematic, as explained above) and the background of our prime ministers (an extremely limited data set).
Imperfect Peter
These are not the only faults with the book. Readers are treated to Hitchens’s tedious inverted snobbery and numerous charges of ‘hypocrisy’ levelled against politicians who send their children to private schools. He quotes a passage from a novel where an MP visiting officer cadets in the Raj asks who won the Battle of Plassey, and a grammar school boy amongst public school toffs is the only one who can answer ‘Clive, sir’ (p. 81) as evidence of the positive and deserved reputations of grammar schools.
He also reveals himself to be incapable of making basic statistical arguments to support his thesis, even if we were to accept his blank slate view of class differences. Hitchens says ‘almost 80%’ of those attending direct grammar schools on local authority scholarships came from state primary schools (p. 79), which sounds impressive until you realise that over 95% of primary school aged children are in state schools, so children at private schools are over four times as likely to win a free place at a direct grant grammar school. He accuses Michael Gove and Sarah Vine of sending their daughter to an exclusionary comprehensive (p. 94) because the uniform supplier is in Chelsea and the admissions policies ‘would take a combination of Albert Einstein and Thomas Aquinas to grasp their full meaning’. His slam-dunk data point is that ‘just 14 per cent of its pupils are eligible for free school meals’, which is only slightly below the national average, hardly indicative of social apartheid. Hitchens does not understand base rates.
There are too many examples to list, but his finest instance of misuse of statistics is when Hitchens argues ‘grammar schools greatly outdistance both comprehensive and private secondary schools’ and ‘the difference between comprehensives as a whole and private schools as a whole’ is ‘slight’ and cites figures that the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades including English and Maths at GCSE are 96.7%, 56.7% and 58.1% for grammar, comprehensive, and private schools respectively. Hitchens’s conclusion is that ‘selection by ability produces results far better than covert selection by parental wealth or religion’ (p. 95).
Hitchens doesn’t appear to recognise that most private schools are also academically selective and parental income is just an additional selection factor, nor that these figures undermine the idea that private schools provide an unfair advantage to the children of the wealthy. They are also prima facie implausible. The citation directs the reader to the Department for Education report Revised GCSE and Equivalent Results in England: 2014 to 2015. The summary document cites slightly different figures to Hitchens, so we’re left to search through the nine Excel files for the statistics he’s referencing. In Main National Tables, Table 3b, we find the relevant figures for grammar, comprehensive, and all mainstream state schools. The figure for independent schools does not appear anywhere here, but it does appear in a HoC briefing paper which quotes the same source, so I will grant Hitchens the benefit of the doubt.
However, this figure ignores the number of independent school pupils who sit ineligible iGCSE exams, which suppresses private school’s scores. The same summary document cautions that
…in independent schools, pupils have continued to be entered for unregulated iGCSEs that do not count in performance measures and they have not been moved across to the regulated certificate versions.
Similarly, a UK Statistics Authority report notes:
In presentational terms, the most noticeable effect of not reporting unregulated international GCSEs in the measures of attainment is seen in DfE’s headline performance measure of the percentage of eligible pupils achieving five or more A* to C GCSE or equivalent qualifications including English and maths; the reported performance of affected schools is 0% on this headline measure. The absence of unregulated international GCSEs from the headline measure almost exclusively affects the published results of independent schools. We estimate that this issue might have affected the reported performance of up to around one-third of independent schools and the reported performance of up to around two-thirds of pupils in independent schools.
A key data point Hitchens relies upon, then, is based on corrupted data. Looking again at Table 3a of the same Excel file, we see that of the 71.7% of independent school pupils entered for GCSEs 64.2% achieve 5 A*-C grades (not necessarily including English and Maths) which equates to 89.5% of eligible pupils and exceeds the same statistic for comprehensive schools by 16.2% (69.3% of 97.2% is 67.4%).2 A similar gap existed in 2006/07 when fewer independent schools used iGCSEs. And students from private schools dominate universities with high UCAS entry tariffs.
An Unfair Broker
Perhaps Hitchens’s greatest intellectual misdeed is his omission of all of the major arguments against academic selection in the chapter ‘The Case Against Grammar Schools’. He focuses on socialists opposed to grammar schools because they prevent the creation of a community without distinctions of class or ability. He fails to mention the success of grammar schools being largely or entirely a selection bias; the psychological effect on children not selected; the effect of ‘hot-housing’ on those who are; or its lack of flexibility in subjects offered to grammar and secondary pupils.
But Hitchens is clearly aware of these arguments. Earlier in the book Hitchens quotes from the Gurney-Dixon Report (1954) that ‘64.6 per cent of grammar school pupils come from working-class backgrounds’ (p. 61), but neglects to mention any of the other evidence the report contains which is often marshalled against grammar schools. 81% of children came from working class backgrounds, meaning middle class children were 2.3 times as likely to attend grammar school, rising to 3.5 times when comparing children from professional and managerial to unskilled backgrounds. Inter-class participation gaps widened as children progressed through grammar school. These factors rise to 5.4 and 23.3 times respectively when limiting the sample to grammar school sixth forms.
Table K of the Gurney-Dixon report shows that even after controlling for academic ability aged eleven, achievement and academic background are still highly correlated. This is not an artefact of truncation — pupils from a professional and managerial background who scored in the bottom third of the eleven-plus outperform pupils from an unskilled background who scored in the top third. An hereditarian may be able to explain this by the growing influence of heritability over the course of one’s life, but Hitchens omits these facts in their entirety because he’s uninterested in giving a fair testimony to his opponents.
History
Where Hitchens does excel is in his history of the rise and fall of grammar schools. In the first chapter he covers remembered or researched history on ‘The Nature and History of the Dispute’. Hitchens explains that the proportion of children attending grammar schools fell from 1956 onwards due to the postwar baby boom, which made the system less popular. Academic selection also created conflict within socialism between different conceptions of egalitarianism. English Fabians of humble origins supported grammar schools as tools of social mobility and intellectual liberation for the working class, while communists from middle or even upper class backgrounds viewed them as barriers to creating a brotherhood of man.
He lists a working class hero who supported grammar schools (Eric James) and public school villains who closed them down (Anthony Crossland, John Vaizey, Brian Simon). For Hitchens, this is evidence grammar schools are in the material self-interest of the working class. I’m sceptical that support for academic selection splits along class lines as strongly as Hitchens does. The polling suggests that class does not correlate with support for grammar schools,3 and Hitchens describes a Rugby educated Fabian, R.H. Tawney, as having ‘dealt beautifully and movingly’ with academic selection (p. 30) and Robert Pidley, son of a bus driver stonemason, as a ‘utopian comprehensive campaigner’ (p. 30) who provided ‘what many comprehensive supporters have seen as the clearest statement of their desire and belief’ (p. 31).
But recognising this ideological tension is important for understanding the reasons why grammar schools were abolished. As well as being unfair to less able or less privileged children, they were seen as barriers to the social engineering of a homogeneous community. The Pidley statement Hitchens references is
Comprehensive education does more than open the doors of opportunity to all children. It represents a different, a larger and more generous attitude of mind […] the forging of a communal culture by the pursuit of quality with equality, by the education of their pupils in and for democracy, and by the creation of happy and vigorous local communities in which the school is the focus of social and educational life. [pp. 31-32]
The chapter ‘A Chronology of Grammar School Education’ contains a meticulously detailed timeline of the main developments, debates and laws relating to secondary education, beginning even before the Education Act of 1944. The number of free grammar school places rose from about 100,000 in 1920 to 209,000 in 1932 (about one-fifteenth of the age cohort). There was large heterogeneity in provision in the post-war era - about 50% of children in Carmarthenshire and 40% in Merthyr Tydfil attended grammar school compared with 20% in North West Kent and 12% in Ipswich.
The number of pupils in the state system rose from 5 million in 1946 to 7 million in 1960, causing the share of state pupils nationally to fall from 38% to below 30%, which strained public support. Labour endorsed comprehensive schools as early as 1951, when the tripartite era was in its infancy and the Gurney-Dixon Report had not yet been published. Hitchens reminds us that Thatcher was Education Secretary during much of the period of comprehensive reforms, though she was not a principal protagonist like those named above.
Reading the first two chapters, one gets a sense of the depth of knowledge or research Hitchens can draw on. Any Zoomer or Millennial reading this is likely to learn a great deal about the history of the British left and the debate on academic selection which took place long before we were born.
The Changing of the Guard
The merits and failings of this book reveal a deeper paradigmatic shift on the Right. Hitchens received his culturally conservative ideas from traditional institutions, like the Church and the public schools that he attended. He’s unusual only in the sense that he never abandoned his once conventional beliefs due to the winds of change (apart from his interregnum as a ‘revolutionary communist’). He has since done more to transmit the knowledge and culture of Britain than probably any other public intellectual of his generation, and deserves credit for being an important link between his world and ours.
But however familiar Hitchens’s cultural conservatism is with the Book of Common Prayer, Clive of India, or the poetry of Housman, he’s not equipped for policy debates which require an understanding of social science. He doesn’t mention the terms ‘selection effect’ or ‘heritability’ once in the book, nor does he employ the same concepts implicitly. He didn’t grow up viewing /pol/ infographics, reading Lynn or Murray, or watching ‘race realism’ lectures on YouTube. To Hitchens, 1360 is just the beginning of the first peace of the Hundred Years’ War.
The Alternative Case for Grammar Schools
Despite many of the poor arguments in the book, I actually support the reintroduction of the eleven-plus and grammar schools, albeit for different reasons.
Academic selection is a necessary tool to correct the market failure of independent schools. Parents spend large sums of money to send their children to independent schools in the belief that they will improve their children’s grades, university destinations, and lifetime earnings. As shown above, such beliefs are for the most part irrational. The reason independent schools outperform their state counterparts is because the children who attend such schools are more talented, and will do just as well in a state school.
Providing a high-quality state alternative with quality control of pupils will induce many stretched parents to abandon private education, and save more than £100k for every child they have. Doing so will actually cause Britain to become more unequal, not less, as Gregory Clark’s research shows that while intergenerational persistence in occupational status, education and income are mediated through genetics, wealth is an exception to this rule.4 As Charlie Peters argues, most private school graduates would have benefited more from being given a house deposit than a negligible increase in exam performance.
Introducing grammar schools reduced the percentage of pupils attending private schools to 5.3% in 1960. The reintroduction of grammar schools today would likely have an even larger effect given the dramatic increase in the unaffordability of private school fees. Simultaneously applying VAT to school fees would be the final nail in the coffin for the private school business model, and most would apply to become state grammar schools.
The availability of grammar schools would provide a fertility boost to families who would ordinarily spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on school fees, or on an expensive home in the catchment area of a high-performing comprehensive. This would have the greatest effect on the number of offspring of the most intelligent and capable families — a clear advantage over most pronatal policies, which have a neutral or even dysgenic effect.
Selective education is also a more enjoyable experience for the children themselves, and middle class parents have an interest in securing this for their children, which is why they’ll fork out £15,000+ per year, post-tax, for a school with an entrance exam. In primary and comprehensive schools, intelligent children are expected to learn at the pace of someone in the bottom half of the class and to play ‘second teacher’ for slow kids, not to mention all the other ‘negative externalities’ which stupid kids bring. The value of a pleasant childhood is ignored when education is seen purely as an investment to improve quality of life in adulthood.
Much would depend on the proportion of children attending grammar schools. If 25% of children were admitted to grammar schools (as in Kent, Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire), only children with an IQ above 110 would qualify, which includes every child capable of serious learning and only a small number of moderately intelligent or clever-but-unmotivated children. This figure is the median between the percentage of university and Russell Group graduates, meaning grammar school completion could become a sufficient signal of intelligence and work ethic to qualify one for white collar employment.
This would be particularly true if accompanied by educational austerity or the adoption of one of Hitchens’s good ideas from the book — a more intellectually rigorous KS3-4 curriculum for grammar school pupils only (currently impossible with universal education). New exams with a greater g-loading would allow employers to better judge intelligence and allow 16 year-olds to enter the lower rungs of the professional class and avoid two or five years of further study. The economic benefits of this would be enormous, as argued in J’accuse.
Public debate usually frames education as an investment, and questions how to improve the quality of schooling so that today’s children earn more as tomorrow’s adults, or how best spread the investment between social classes so that everyone has the same shot in life. Hitchens’s book continues in that tradition, but I have presented enough information to show that education likely has little effect on earnings and that reorganising secondary education into grammar schools will likely not spread opportunity or boost the earnings of pupils who attend.
But Hitchens also hints at the greater purposes of education — cultural transmission and the pursuit of academic excellence — as ends in themselves. He is on stronger footing when arguing that these goals can be better achieved by segregating kids by ability. How can one be taught the English canon when slower children take weeks to grapple with Shakespearean English, or be trained to compare theories of history when ignorant pupils need to be taught the basic facts of the Tudor Dynasty and the Second World War over and over again?
Grammar schools could more easily create a truly educated upper-crust of society than is currently possible with comprehensives. But the cultural transmission of our literature and history would require a national progressive government which is interested in using grammar schools as a nation building tool. Under a hostile government an academic grammar school could just as easily be used to inculcate Wokeness.
I believe Hitchens instinctively supports grammar schools because he is both reactionary and right-wing, but he instead uses egalitarianism to advocate for grammar schools because of two taboos which act as a political straitjacket: firstly, that no policy can benefit the talented or privileged; and secondly, that there are no genetic differences in intellectual ability between social classes (or any other groups). The combination of a natural favouritism towards selective, hierarchical and elitist institutions and egalitarian moral and scientific assumptions creates an incoherent and inadequate defence of grammar schools. Britain’s stultifying intellectual environment has twisted Hitchens' natural right-leaning instincts into a deeply confused support for selective education. He is probably better described as a Trotskyist who adopted Fabianism than a Trotskyist who became right-wing.
He doesn’t have the numeracy to think critically about social science and is hamstrung by a blank slatism which, although acknowledging inter-individual variation, denies inherited differences between classes. The most revealing expression of this contradiction is when Hitchens claims that ‘the industrial working class . . . were just as capable of the middle class as flowering into cultured and fully educated beings’ (pp. 104-105), before then asking ‘who could rationally regret it, if good schools enabled clever boys and girls to flourish in a wider world than that of their parents?’ (p. 105).
The progressive nationalist right is open minded and numerate, so shouldn’t adopt Hitchens’s position in its entirety in the way many conservatives and post-liberals have.5 We should support the reintroduction as a way of making school more pleasant for clever children through soft segregation, aiding cuts to university and post-sixteen education, boosting middle class fertility, and starving wasteful and expensive private schools of massive amounts of cash.
Mr. Hitchens if you are reading this, this article is an affectionate parody and I am a tremendous fan.
Image credits: Nigel Luckhurst, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
This article was written by Angleson Walter, a regular Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?
Table I Data from Standards on page 6 shows a 19.6 point difference between G and M and a 2.4 difference between CF and S1. There is also a 7-10 percentage point gap in the likelihood of passing English and Maths between CF and S1
The same argument doesn’t hold for the proportion of pupils achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs including English and Maths because Maths and English iGCSEs are more common. Over 20% of English GCSEs entries in 2014 were iGCSE entries.
The research shows 36% of AB voters favour the reintroduction of grammar schools compared to 20% of DE voters