'The working-class child who does win entry to the grammar school must accommodate himself to the prevailing middle-class values, or rub up against them. If this survey is any pointer, it seems likely that most of those who remain embedded in working-class family and neighbourhood life leave school before the sixth form. Those who cling to the world of their family and yet survive do so with difficulty and move often into a disturbed adulthood. This does not mean that the quality of their living is less fine than that of their more accommodating and successful class mates. We do not know; but we can scarcely justify a schooling on the grounds that it prepares an early entry into the more troubling dimensions of life. And yet if this conflict between school and neighbourhood at so many tiny, frictional points is perpetuating, the situation of the orthodox child is even more so. There is something infinitely pathetic in these former working-class children who lost their roots young, and who now with their rigid middle-class accent preserve 'the stability of all our institutions, temporal and spiritual' by avariciously reading the lives of Top People, or covet the public schools and glancing back at the society from which they came see no more there than 'the dim', or the 'specimens'. Can we wish that our schools offer longer education in exchange for this worship of the conformist spirit? For it seems to us that despite all the formal talk about 'individuals' and 'characters', grammar schools are so socially imprisoned that they are most remarkable for the conformity of the minds they train. Highly-inbred institutions, they respond with the talismatic words when challenged - and here and there a gifted and unorthodox teacher lives out that older language - but is this, in fact, what happens? Schools born out of middle-class needs, schools based on social selection, further refined with each year after 11; schools offering a complex training in approved images of dominance and deference - are these the bases for general 'individualism', for 'democratic living'? Or would not the individual when really present be more likely to be non-conformist (and a candidate for slow expulsion) in the way that some of the working-class children were?'
Brian Jackson & Dennis Marsden
