Meritocracy Of Grammar Schools
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2017
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
The government has pledged that a new generation of grammar schools will improve social mobility. One way being proposed to ensure that is to force grammar schools to lower the 11-plus pass mark for poorer children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The idea is already running into opposition. People are asking what's the point of having a selective academic system if you don't select the most able students? It's also said that it risks patronising disadvantaged communities by sending out a message that less is expected of them. At the heart of this debate is the moral value of meritocracy - that you should be rewarded on the basis of your skills and not on your background. Every child should be offered the chance to achieve their maximum educational potential, but what if they can't achieve that because of an accident of birth? Isn't it right to try to balance the scales? Or will that come at the cost of another, perhaps more able child, being denied a place at a grammar, again because of an accident of birth? Does this encourage identity politics and blur the line between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome? Is this treating the symptom and not the cause - creating a state education system that's lost sight of the quest for academic excellence and is more interested in the politics of social mobility, class envy and division? Witnesses are Dr Martin Stephen, Dame Rachel De Souza, Prof Peter Saunders and Conor Ryan.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.8 | Good evening. What's 21.7 times 9.4? Quickly now. |
| 0:08.6 | Getting that and dozens of other verbal and nonverbal reasoning questions right or wrong |
| 0:13.1 | defined the lives of millions of 10-year-olds when I was growing up. |
| 0:17.1 | The 11-plus exam separated the minority who would get an academic education at a grammar school |
| 0:22.2 | from the majority who were consigned to what were then called secondary, modern or technical schools. |
| 0:28.3 | To their proponents, grammar schools gave talented children, regardless of their background, |
| 0:32.3 | the best education and opportunity, ushering in a period of social mobility not seen before or since. To their |
| 0:38.9 | opponents, the exam labelled two-thirds and more of our children failures before they'd even |
| 0:44.3 | reached their teens was divisive by definition, and unfair as no intelligence test can completely |
| 0:50.2 | nullify the advantages conferred by ambitious parents and a home full of books, let alone expensive private tutoring. |
| 0:58.0 | The government wants more grammar schools, and to mollify critics, is proposing to lower the entry standard for poorer children. |
| 1:04.8 | It's not stopped the row, it's widened it. |
| 1:07.2 | What's the point of selection, some say, if you don't pick the most able? |
| 1:10.5 | It's patronising to the poor and unjust to those who will lose out to others who didn't do as well as they did. |
| 1:16.4 | But life is unfair, and disadvantage can slow the development and obscure the abilities of innately talented children. |
| 1:22.7 | There are bigger arguments here about academic excellence, social engineering and identity politics, about equality |
| 1:29.3 | and whether we're blurring the line between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, |
| 1:34.1 | and about the morality of merit, how it's judged, how it's treated, how it's rewarded. |
| 1:39.6 | All examined tonight on the moral maze. |
| 1:42.0 | Our panel, Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, |
| 1:44.7 | Anne McKell-Voy, senior editor of The Economist, who joins us from Snowbound New York, which is a |
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