The real target of the book seems to be the move to a mass education system in which, according to the author, the essential values of rigour and respect for academic authority have been lost. The book’s distaste for mass education gives it a ‘golden age’ feel, but it does raise some important questions and urgent issues that we need to address within our educational system. There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children.

For students of post-war education, Hitchens provides a useful chronology of secondary education, and refers to the tension between idealism and practice. Controversial, arguing that the destruction of the grammar schools, driven by utopian egalitarians, has ultimately failed. He doesn't attbeot to tease out, for example, to what extent grammars produced better results because they were better vs better results because they selected the best pupils. Solid and extensive polemic by Hitchens, though fans will find little surprise in the arguments he has espoused for many years, and enemies will no doubt continue to turn a blind eye. It is striking that the book sees how hard individuals work at age 11 as a just way of determining their future, and views measuring academic potential as so straightforward that there is absolutely no reason to worry about the validity of such judgements.Mail on Sunday columnist Hitchens ( The Abolition of Britain) contends in this cranky screed that efforts to level the playing field in British education have backfired. The book equally appears to have little time for anyone who wants an open education system in which people have chances to engage with knowledge at different points in their lives and find out how they can use it to contribute to society.

In 1966, coming from a working class background, to my surprise, as I was never coached for the 11+, having recently changed schools, I, unwittingly, sat, and passed the test, so went to Enfield Grammar School, whereas many of my friends who didn't "pass," nor expected to, were content to go, as I would have been, "across the road" to Winchmore Hill Secondary Modern, where some were pleased, if not to say proud, to be selected for the 'X' and 'Y,' grammar school, streams of that Secondary School, where they went on to take and pass GCE O' Levels and CSE's, alongside the fun of metal work and car maintenance; experiences denied to us Grammar School boys. There is quite a good section about the dilution of academic standards that has taken place since the qualifications on offer were altered to fit the new system. The book is written in angry tone, it could be argued that this a righteous anger, but it seems more like an anger written from a point of nostalgia.His overall point is probably the right one: that you can have better education I'd you target it at those who need it, not at those who can't, and that trying to create a fully comprehensive, fully egalitarian system tends to produce the second outcome, not the first.

Of course, you can never include everyone, and I was disappointed in the absence of Baroness Hale, former President of the Supreme Court, who attended Richmond Girls’ High School, a county grammar school, in North Yorkshire.Based on my experience, it's been a long held falsehood that those who weren't selected for grammar school were devastated by the decision, and, as a consequence, had their lives blighted by this early "failure," and were condemned to having their schooling conducted in Secondary Moderns. Finally, he failed to acknowledge the extensive academic literature supporting the opposition and in doing so fails to properly address the obvious counterpoint. However, the data presented in support of this model is at best cherry-picked and at worst dishonest.