Curios of the week #16

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week was the last week of the school term in Victoria and saw me board a plane back to England. I am an anxious traveler, forever convinced I will miss my connecting flight, have the wrong size baggage or fall foul of some arcane rule or restriction.

My anxiety was only heightened when, coming it to land at Singapore, the pilot aborted the landing at the last minute and we rose back into the air. The passengers looked at each other as if to acknowledge this wasn’t supposed to happen and the captain explained that the previous aircraft had been too slow vacating the runway. Due the resulting delayed landing, I had to rush to make my London flight which then sat on the tarmac for an hour as they repaired the plane. The captain of the London plane put a positive spin on the situation — the fact they were making these repairs demonstrated their commitment to safety. It didn’t feel particularly reassuring.

Delayed flights have been followed by a delayed set of curios. Apologies.

Today’s curios include a study on social mobility, writing research, a scare story about ‘commercial’ teaching programmes and more.

Social mobility of the week

From 1945 to the 1970s, England and Wales had a selective education system. Students were given an aptitude test at the age of 11 and if they passed, they went to a ‘Grammar School’. Those who failed the test attended a ‘Secondary Modern’ or technical school. My working class father made it to Grammar school and his story is perhaps typical. Although his teachers would have liked him to stay until the age of 18 and study for university entrance, he did not consider this an option and left to join a drawing office. Ten or so years later, his younger brother took the opportunity my father missed.

My dad’s story is relevant to an article about the effect of selection on social mobility. The authors are researchers who discovered that the replacement of the selective system with nonselective ‘Comprehensive’ schools in the 1970s-80s had no discernible positive or negative effect on overall social mobility. Perhaps the comprehensive movement may have been more beneficial if the original pledge of, ‘Grammar schools for all,’ had been enacted. Instead, comprehensive schools, including the one I attended, became laboratories of progressivist educational ideas mixed with casual violence, while the sharp elbowed middle-classes sought out the gentler, leafier, more academic versions, erecting barriers to entry by inflating house prices in these schools’ catchment areas.