2 - Breaking Out of Ignorance, 1945–80

Summary

The prizes offered (for passing the 11-plus) in one class included sixteen new bicycles, three watches, three puppies, a bedroom clock, a portable radio, a tennis racket, a perm, a pair of roller skates.

Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order 1940–1990, 153

The essential point is that all children should have an equal opportunity of acquiring intelligence, and developing their talents and abilities to the full.

Edward Boyle, Half our Future, foreword

I passed the 11-plus after extra coaching and was pushed up a year into the alpha stream of my girls grammar school. We did Latin. The “C” stream did domestic science and girls left at 15. Out of some 90 girls who started grammar school with me, six ended up going to a university. Several others who stayed for A-levels went to teacher-training colleges. The girl who did best married a builder who ended up a millionaire. My parents, like other lower-middle-class families, were desperate to take advantage of the now free but selective secondary schooling. After school I helped out at the private nursing home where my mother, a qualified nurse and midwife, was now able to work, having had to give up her job pre-war when she married. One evening I helped her bath baby Simon Hughes whom she had just delivered, which is probably the most political thing she ever did as he later became an MP and deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party. I began to learn the realities of social class, how “private” meant “more money”, and went to university to study sociology and boys. Married straight from university as girls did in those days, I had a brief career in Canada as a social worker and trained as a teacher. Then three children by age 26 and a struggle to get back into higher education. Just in time for it to be “Downhill all the way: the 1970s” (Simon 1991: 405).

SELECTING THE POSH AND THE DIM: THE 1950S

This chapter discusses the various ignorances incorporated in selective schooling, the regeneration of private schooling in the 1950s, the breakout from much ignorance in the 1960s (which, contrary to right-wing propaganda, was actually a decade of progress and innovation) and the ignorances of the 1970s.