Comments & Editorials 06
The Grammar School (1957-58)

FOR rather more than a thousand years the grammar schools have served society by producing men fitted through their studies to discharge those tasks requiring a high degree of education. In the Middle Ages the language of Church and State was Latin and these schools trained future clerics and lawyers in the grammar and literature of the Latin tongue. With the increase in the number and scope of the professions the grammar schools widened their courses far beyond the original Latin; mathematics, modern languages, history, geography and science were added at different times. In 1902 the recently created county councils were permitted to establish grammar schools with the aid of the central government in an effort to meet the rapidly growing demand for highly educated men and women. In this way the present complex pattern of age-old and newly established, state-financed grammar schools has come into being.

The most striking feature of this development is not change but constancy. At all times these schools have fulfilled the same function: they have provided society with men trained to undertake those tasks which require an advanced education. Another constant feature has been their classless nature. The Medieval Church and the pious founder made provision quite as elaborate as that made by the welfare state for the education of the poor scholar alongside his wealthier neighbour—to the mutual benefit of both parties. The present-day grammar school remains the most effective instrument of social cohesion in the English educational system.

Academically the best of these schools compete successfully with the better known public boarding schools. For some years now the pupils of the Manchester Grammar School have gained far more scholarships and exhibitions at the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge than the pupils of any public boarding school. The course of studies offered usually extends over seven or eight years. The first four or five are spent studying six or more subjects in preparation for the ordinary level examination of the General Certificate of Education. There follow two years of specialised study in about three subjects for the advanced level and a final year of preparation for university scholarship examinations. The standard required is such that experience suggests that not more than twenty percent of any age group can undertake even the first part of this course to ordinary level with hope of reasonable success. Any attempt to provide a grammar school education for all can only result either in widespread misery among those pupils not suited to such studies or in a general lowering of standards so that what is now accepted as a grammar school education would cease to exist for even the brightest outside of the exclusive public schools.

The only real justification for the grammar school is that it and it alone can provide for the ablest pupils a sufficiently intense intellectual atmosphere for the full development of their ability. It is in their studies that these boys and young men find the fulfilment of their natural abilities. They are bored by the pastimes and pre-occupations of the majority—a majority which is too often unsympathetic and which sneers at them for not being as other men are. Yet the very standard of living of the majority depends not so much upon its own efforts as on the quality of thought and organisation displayed by the highly-educated few whose function is to manage and to improve industrial processes, to extend commerce and to provide those professional services which the majority demand ever more clamantly as their standard of living rises.

P.H.J.H.G