МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ

РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ

Андреева С.А.

«СИСТЕМА ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ В ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИИ И США:

ПРОБЛЕМЫ И ПЕРСПЕКТИВЫ»

(Учебное пособие по устной практике

для студентов IV курса д/о)

Москва 2001

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The book is comprised of 6 units, each covering a relatively wide area of topics related to the problems of education in the UK and the USA. All texts have been taken from modern British and American press and have been selected so as to reflect either various educational issues or different approaches to similar issues in order to stimulate in-class discussions while simultaneously providing students with a broader understanding of modern tendencies and developments in education.

Each unit includes the main text followed by vocabulary assignments and questions, as well as a number of additional texts, which are recommended as auxiliary material for group and individual reports, compositions and group projects. The order in which the units are presented should in no way be considered as set once and for all; on the contrary, it is at the teacher’s discretion to organize the students’ work with the book depending on the students’ interests and linguistic competences.

Since this book sets as one of its tasks to compare the US and the UK educational systems with that of the Russian Federation, a certain attention is paid to translating or finding equivalent expressions for, a number of terms pertaining to education.

In auxiliary texts, vocabulary items are emphasized graphically: those in bold type are cultural terms which should be paid special attention to, while those in italics are words and expressions, recommended for further use.

When selected, the auxiliary texts were intended to be used in the following way:

Unit I – as a basis for individual reports;

Unit II – as a basis for in-class round-table discussion;

Unit III – as a basis for group projects (groups of 2-3 students design and present a private school, looking at such issues as curriculum content, financial issues, uniforms, exams, etc.);

Unit IV – as a basis for a composition or individual reports;

Unit V – as a basis for individual reports;

Unit VI – as a basis for in-class round-table discussion.

However, depending on the level and interest of the groups other types of work are possible. It is also recommended that the students rely on their individual experience and additional material in the course of their presentations and discussions.

CONTENTS:

UNIT I. THE CONTENTS OF EDUCATION School requirements. – Tackling illiteracy and innumeracy. – Arts and sports in the curriculum. Main text Additional texts	4 7
UNIT II. BRITISH EDUCATION REFORM The curriculum. – The teacher. Main text Additional texts	15 18
UNIT III. PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE Private or public? – Boarding schools. – Uniforms. – Exams. – Financing education. Main text Additional texts	28 33
UNIT IV. THE HIGHER EDUCATION UK vs. USA. – Further education / Open University Main text Additional texts	44 47
UNIT V. THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION Controlling bodies. - Female students. – Class division in education. Main text Additional texts	56 59
UNIT VI. EDUCATION AND CULTURE Minorities’ rights. – Gender division in education. Main text Additional texts	67 71

Unit I. The contents of education

Main topic: The contents of education Additional topics: School requirements; Tackling illiteracy and innumeracy; Arts and sports in the curriculum.

A-LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

(Alan Massie, The Times, 1993)

Baroness Blackstone, educated at Ware Grammar School and the LSE, is a woman of formidable academic qualifications (BSc Soc., PhD). Without them, she would not have become Master of Birkbeck College, one of the Great and Good, director and chairman of numerous public bodies and review boards etc.; without them, she would not have been made a life peer and would not now be the higher education minister.

So it should be surprising to find her telling the annual conference of university vice-chancellors that A-levels should be made easier and that universities should relax their entry qualifications, giving credit to students who can communicate, work together and use computers. It is, alas, what we have come to expect. It is part of the dumbing-down of Britain.

Yet it is odd, because, at last, some progress is being made in our schools in raising basic standards and in tackling illiteracy and innumeracy. It is true that this is being achieved at the behest of HM Inspectors of Schools and despite a rearguard action fought by the teaching unions.

So what we see is this. The bottom level is rising, slowly. The top level is being brought down, and will be lowered still further and still more quickly if Lady Blackstone has her way.

Not everything about her redesigned A-levels is bad. It is at least arguable that the traditional curriculum has been too narrow requiring pupils to specialise too soon. Certainly, it is narrower than that followed by French, German or indeed Scottish pupils. So there is something to be said for the proposal that in the first year of an A-level course, pupils should study more than the customary three subjects. Yet there is also the danger that this will encourage dabbling and nothing more.

But it is when one turns to Lady Blackstone's reasons for rejecting what she calls “the traditional model” that the foolishness of her position becomes clear. “We now have a third of our young people entering higher education,” she says. “The jobs they will be applying for demand a far wider range of skills than an understanding of specialist knowledge which may be out of date within months.”

I don't know to which body of “specialist knowledge” she is referring that will be so quickly out of date — The law? The principles of engineering? The French or German language? — but it scarcely matters. The antithesis she has set up is false. Skills are not something distinct from knowledge, but inseparable from it.

So far are skills from existing in the abstract that they are invariably developed in response to the demands of a craft, art or business. The skills of a surgeon depend on his knowledge of anatomy; his manual dexterity would be useless, even dangerous, if he couldn't locate the organ or muscle on which he was operating. The skill of a plumber depends on his acquired knowledge of the principles of plumbing. The skill of a computer programmer requires a knowledge of computing. Certain skills may be easily transferable, but only when the body of knowledge from which they developed is transferable.

The opposition between skills and knowledge is false. The more you know, the more you can do. The converse also holds good. The less you know, the less you can do. So it is futile to devise a course of “History” that will teach children to develop historical skills, if they don't know any history on which to practise these skills. In any serious education skills are developed as knowledge is acquired. This is as true of practical vocational subjects as of academic ones. An apprentice carpenter knows little and can do little; as he acquires knowledge, he can put it to use.

Knowledge is, and always has been the basis of education. It is the raw material from which you fashion your work. To downgrade knowledge is to discard any commitment to serious education. But Lady Blackstone is happy to do so.

One would welcome the news that one-third of our young people now enter higher education if there was any reason to suppose that that was what they were going to receive. But you have only to look at the range of courses offered by the poorer universities to see that many of them are most fairly described as pap. Students may indeed emerge from such institutions with a paper qualification, but they also emerge with precious little knowledge and consequently few skills.

Despite Lady Blackstone’s suggestion that universities need to lower their entrance requirements, it is evident that many are already so low as to defy credibility. It was always likely that the Tories’ decision to turn polytechnics into universities was misguided, it is now certain. The result has been to devalue a university education.

It is not true that in Kingsley Amis’s words, “more means worse”, or it is not necessarily true. More could mean better, if more was demanded of applicants. But more has certainly meant worse since less has been asked of them. It is not, alas, until the likes of Lady Blackstone have been got out of the way that we have any chance of really raising the standard of education, for that will be possible only when we return to the understanding that the basis of all worthwhile education is a zeal for the acquisition of knowledge.

ASSIGNMENTS:

I. Language

1. Explain in English and then translate the following words and expressions into Russian:

A university, a polytechnic, to relax entry qualifications, to encourage dabbling, academic subjects, pap, to emerge with a paper qualification, specialist knowledge, skill, practical vocational subjects, Master of College.

2. Translate the following expressions into Russian:

Public bodies, to give credit to, to tackle illiteracy and innumeracy, manual dexterity, body of knowledge, to downgrade, a misguided decision.

3. Explain what these abbreviations stand for:

B.Sc. Soc.; PhD; A-level.

II. Contents

When carrying out the following assignments, please make use of the previously discussed words and expressions as well as the following ones:

To lower entrance requirements, to specialise, to develop a skill, to acquire knowledge, knowledge acquisition, to discard commitment to serious education, to devalue a university education, to defy credibility, to demand sth of sb.

1. Sum up the main points of Lady Blackstone’s position.

2. Single out and enumerate Allan Massie’s arguments against Lady Blackstone’s stand.

3. Express your opinion of and your attitude towards this debate. Whose side are you on and why?

4. Apply the same criteria to the current situation in the Russian education. Are there any similarities? Please support your answer with examples from your personal experience.

ADDITIONAL TEXTS

COLLEGES NEED HIGHER STANDARDS

(Patrick Welsh, USA Today, January 21, 1999)

The Virginia State Council for Higher Education met Tuesday to discuss a pilot project for its latest plan for school reform: the Virginia Graduate Guarantee. The plan would ask local school districts to guarantee that kids who go on to Virginia's state-supported colleges will be ready to do college work. If not, the local school district will agree to pick up the costs for any remedial courses their graduates will have to take in college.

Similar programs have been discussed in California, Texas, Massachusetts and New Jersey, while Colorado, Georgia, South Carolina and the City University of New York have decided to phase out remedial courses altogether from their four-year institutions.

Indeed, at colleges around the country, there's concern about remedial courses draining funds from other courses. Professors I talk to constantly complain that their students aren't ready to do the kind of work they should be doing. (Of course, first-grade teachers voice the same complaint.)

But what I would like to ask the Virginia State Council, its member colleges and their professors is this: If you are so upset about the number of students who need remedial courses, why did you accept those kids in the first place?

Let’s face it; there’s only one reason: money. If these schools didn't take in kids from the bottom of the academic barrel, many would have to fire half their faculty and administrators; a few would have to shut down.

“Colleges are making money off of kids who’ve never been motivated to do school work — or who just aren't very bright — and want to go to college because they couldn't think of what else to do,” says Noah Egge, a student in my senior English class who has been accepted early into the University of Virginia (UVA).

Of course, UVA and the College of William and Mary, the premier institutions in the state, don't have a “remediation” problem because, for the most part, they take only real students. But other Virginia colleges and universities not only accept but also aggressively recruit the most wretched “students” in my school — kids who can’t put two or three sentences together in writing, who hate reading the morning paper much less a poem or novel; kids who try to fake their way through every class and when it doesn’t work, bring in their parents to pressure teachers into raising their grades; and in some cases, kids whose motivation and short-term memory have been destroyed by constant marijuana use.

Take Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Va. Over the years, I’ve seen horrible students waltz into VCU, to the point where the “university” has become a joke among many serious students.

Or consider Clinch Valley College, which is so desperate for students, it has used the University of Virginia’s rejection list to recruit high school seniors as late as April. Of course, VCU and Clinch Valley (along with Norfolk State, which has also taken its share of horrible students) just happen to have the highest rates of remedial courses in the state.

Tulane University freshman Erin Boyer, who was in my class last year, says that for a lot of her high school classmates, going to college had nothing to do with education: “College was the big chance to get out of the house, get away from parents and party with a whole bunch of new people. ... They can shirk the responsibility of having to support themselves for another four years while their parents can brag about their kid being a college student.”

Implicit in the council's “warranty” plan is the assumption that we in the high schools deceive colleges when we grant a diploma to kids who end up needing remedial help to do college work. (I'm not too sure what “college work” means these days. All too often, former students tell me that college is easier than high school.) The truth is that colleges that accept the dregs have every reason to know what they are getting.

“Colleges set their own admissions standards; they can’t hold us liable after we give them a wealth of information to help them judge applicants,” says John Porter, principal of T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., who points out that colleges never make a decision based on a diploma, but on data like the SAT, the College Board’s advanced placement tests, the Stanford Nine and other national standardized tests, not to mention grades and teacher recommendations.

Virginia’s second-rate colleges cannot have it both ways. They can’t continue the charade of taking tuition money from the families of unprepared students and then trying to hustle more money from public school systems to bring these kids up to what they deem is “college level.” The hypocrisy of the plan aside, it would siphon funds needed for programs and equipment for our serious students — the ones who can get into first-rate colleges and universities.

With the states that are often a barometer to future educational policy (California, New York, Texas, Florida and Massachusetts) either floating plans similar to Virginia’s or planning to cut remedial courses, colleges around the country could have some hard choices to make.

One choice is to reconsider their admission standards and start taking only students who are demonstrably qualified, while letting the others go to work or junior college until they are ready for a four-year institution. That would mean closing some schools and consolidating others. It would cost many professors and administrators their jobs. But it would make some of the kids I teach take school a little more seriously.

“If there were fewer spaces in college available,” says senior Ben Webne, “a lot of students who have no motivation now would work harder. Others would just admit that college wasn’t for them… They’d look for other ways to succeed.”

But there's a better choice — both for the country and individual kids wanting a college degree. It’s to stop playing the blame game that is endemic to educators at all levels. When high school teachers like me have students who are not prepared for what we think we should be teaching, we blame the teachers in middle schools, who in turn blame the elementary schools. And, of course, all of us blame the parents.

What teachers need to do (even the Ivy League wannabes in the country’s weaker colleges) is accept their students as they are, roll up their sleeves, and get to work trying to take their charges as far as they can. When 80% of the jobs in the next century will require a college degree, there is no other choice.

READING RIGHTS FOR TEACHERS

(Jennifer Chew, The Times, January 4, 1993)

Publication of GCSE league tables has produced a new tendency on the part of secondary heads to point to literacy standards among children entering their schools as a factor affecting examination results at 16.

The publication of standard assessment test (SAT) results for seven-year-olds has led primary schools, in their turn, to point to socio-economic factors — for example, the recession and the numbers for whom English is not a first language — for their difficulties in turning out children who can read and write at a level which enables them to cope comfortably with the secondary curriculum. What is often overlooked is that good teaching methods can overcome socio-economic factors to a great extent.

Eric Bolton, the retired chief of Her Majesty's Schools Inspectorate, wrote recently: “Many factors affect standards of learning but, without doubt, the characteristic most closely associated with high standards of learning is high-quality teaching.” This has been demonstrated at the school which won the 1992 Jerwood Award for contributions to education, St Clare’s, in Handsworth, Birmingham.

St Clare’s has large numbers of children from precisely the backgrounds often blamed for poor progress, but the school ensures, by using methods such as phonics, that all its pupils are reading by the age of seven.

St Clare’s succeeds where many schools in much more privileged areas fail. However, its methods continue, unaccountably, to be derided by many experts who set more store by attractive books than by systematic instruction.

As a teacher of youngsters aged 16-plus, I have always been uneasy about the idea that when younger children encounter words which they cannot read, they should guess at them using the context as a guide. Theorists justify this on the ground that it is what experienced readers do. But surely, experienced readers can read any word, however unfamiliar.

Take “eukanduit”, which I have made up to prove the point, and which you have just read. The experts suggest that you may use sound, context, etymology, or, as a last resort, informed guesswork as a guide to the possible meaning of an unfamiliar word. But this is different from trying to understand meaning without being able to read what is printed.

The theorists applaud guesses such as “pony” for “horse”, or “goblin” for “gnome”, but this shows that they are not encouraging close attention to the actual letters in the words and that they accept approximation rather than accuracy. This bodes ill for more advanced reading, and for spelling.

Another worrying misconception is that a wide range of attractive books is essential in the early stages. Behind this view lies the theory that books and authors are the real teachers of reading, a theory which ignores the fact that teachers taught reading perfectly well long before attractive children’s books were plentiful, and continue to do so in developing countries, where the only resources may be a blackboard and a piece of chalk.

It is true that books are great teachers once children can read. Precisely because books can teach so much once children can read, the rudiments need to be learned quickly and effectively.

Fashionable theory condones slow progress provided that children enjoy looking at books and, in a frequently-used phase, “behave like readers” but this is not the same as reading.

It does matter if children do not learn to read at an early age: the fewer years of fluent reading they have behind them at 11 or 12, the smaller will be their fund of general knowledge, the less they will be able to cope with secondary-school reading, and the more justification there will be for blaming poor GCSE results on poor basic literacy.

The National Curriculum English Order is now being revised. Professor Brian Cox, who led the team which drew up the original order, has accepted that changes are necessary. If the revision gets this right, the beneficial consequences at secondary level could be very great.

GIVE OUR CHILDREN WHAT WE RECEIVED

(Simon Tait, The Times, January 5, 1999)

Music, says the opera singer Lesley Garrett, is an expression of the community. “It’s where I got my music from, in the heavy industry communities of South Yorkshire. But school as a community is the essence of a child’s life, so music must happen there.” These days, however, it mostly doesn’t. And with arts teaching taking an increasingly peripheral place in the curriculum and the number of specialist teachers dwindling, it is unlikely to.

The Education Secretary David Blunkett was accused of betraying our creative talent when he announced a year ago that education would be centred on numeracy and literacy. He responded by setting up a committee for creative and cultural education and commissioning Professor Kenneth Robinson to write a report on the place of the arts in the curriculum, which is expected later this month.

Artists themselves are rarely asked for an opinion, though, and many owe their careers - careers which contribute substantially to the £5 billion a year earned by the creative industries in Britain — to the influence of enlightened teachers. Today, according to a new report by the Royal Society of Arts, the chances of finding a cultural Mr Chips are becoming slimmer by the year.

It’s a point the Arts Council’s education director Pauline Tambling has been trying to get across as she works with curriculum planners and with Robinson. “Young children rarely say they can’t paint or dance or sing, but many older people who have not been encouraged to be creative are negative about their own abilities,” she says.

Garrett was lucky: there were professional musicians in her family, and she went to a school specialising in creative teaching, so that German and French lessons were peppered with music and art as well as language. “I would not be doing what I am if it wasn’t for that school,” she says.

For her own children, Jeremy, five, and Chloe, four, at nursery school in North London, she had to find and pay for education with the creative input she wants for them. “In my day creative work often happened out of school hours. I couldn’t wait for 4 o’clock when there would be rehearsals for the play or the choir. Now teachers have such a struggle with paperwork that they don’t have time.”

The composer Howard Skempton’s Birkenhead choir school taught him music, and his 13-year-old son Sam goes to a comprehensive where the arts are an important part of the curriculum. “But emphasis on the arts is entirely dependent on the enthusiasm of the head teacher,” he says. “It is ridiculous that he has to sacrifice something else in order to include something which should be fundamental.”

Tony Haygarth, the actor familiar from many television series including the current Where The Heart Is, left school at 15 to become a fruit-porter, but he had had the benefit of an enlightened head teacher who introduced him to Shakespeare and organised theatre outings. His children are Becky, 12, and Katie, 14. Recently he joined them on an outing from their Tunbridge Wells school to see a travelling theatre company known for education work. “It was a Hungarian play, inappropriate for kids; we couldn’t follow the plot, and the teachers weren’t properly prepared,” he says.

“The importance of creative teaching in school is simple. All animals have five senses, but we have a sixth sense that recognises beauty. If you don’t teach children how to use that ability you’re shutting them out of a natural entitlement.”

The sculptor Antony Gormley says Blunkett's move had “seriously disillusioned arts and music teachers”. But the RSA report, The Disappearing Arts?, shows that they were already disillusioned: last year recruitment for teaching art is down 12 per cent, and for music 23 per cent.

“All education should always have creativity integrated as a leading force because it teaches people who they are, and helps them in getting to know how they can explore themselves visually,” he says. “It could be in dance, performance, music, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t painting, but creativity is at the core of learning.”

He sends his children, Ivo, 16, Guy, 13, and Paloma, 11, to a progressive fee-paying school in Golders Green. “Its arts teaching leaves much to be desired,” he says. “If I knew of a school that took it seriously I might move them, but do you know of one? It’s not enough to have teachers who can teach the arts. We should have artists who can teach.”

Gormley's fellow Royal Academician, the painter and engraver Christopher Le Brun, also sends his children, Luke, 14, Lily, 12, and Edmund, 8, to a Dulwich fee-paying school which has a reputation for design teaching.

“Lily is a good artist,” he says “But there’s very little painting or drawing. It’s been a huge disappointment. The value of design is demonstrable, but you can’t demonstrate the value of fine art so it is seen as secondary to design. But fine art is the primary art, not definable by words. The cultural industries in this country have never been bigger, while the standards of drawing have never been weaker.”

The novelist Jim Grace’s two children, Tom, 17, and Lauren, 12, are at Birmingham comprehensives. He went to Enfield Grammar School where the most up-to-date literature for study was Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whereas Tom is currently reading Attwood and Heaney. But narrative is not taught.

Grace believes that learning narrative is vital. “The human being is the only animal that can recall the past and imagine the future, and you become socially successful if you have a narrative sense, because then you are able to talk. You can get through life without mental arithmetic, but not without a narrative sense. To ignore these chambers of children’s minds and hearts is a huge mistake.”

“THREE Rs IS KILLING OFF SCHOOL SPORT”

(Judith Judd, The Independent, March 5, 1999)

Homework clubs promoted by Ministers and the Government’s obsession with the three Rs are killing sport in schools, heads said yesterday. They warned of a “generation of couch potatoes” and said sports facilities in most schools were little better than “those in a Banana republic”.

A survey of 2,126 primary and secondary schools carried out by the National Association of Head Teachers found that 94 per cent of primary schools have no gym and more than half have to share a playing field. More than 100 primary schools and 55 secondaries had no access to a playground.

Though virtually every school has a hall, it is used in the vast majority of cases for assemblies, drama, teaching, meals and tests as well as PE.

Primary heads said that both sport and PE are in decline as schools struggle to meet new Government literacy and numeracy targets for 11-year-olds. Ministers have relaxed detailed requirements for subjects such as history, music, art and PE to allow primary schools to concentrate on literacy and numeracy.

Secondary heads point out that inter-school sports competitions and clubs are now in direct competition with homework clubs, promoted by the Government as part of its drive to raise standards.

More pupils are also taking jobs after school and teachers are too busy keeping up with Government initiatives to coach teams.

Roger Hewins, head of Holliers Walk primary school in Hinckley, Leicestershire, said: “You let children out for an hour to play sport and you think we have gone down a point from our literacy target.”

Heads say they are worried about the fitness and sedentary life style of children who are taken everywhere by car. David Hart, the association's general secretary, said the Government must put more emphasis on PE in the curriculum and give schools more resources for better facilities: “There is enormous yearning among the great British public for us to win the World Cup, for us to win at cricket. We will never achieve that if we skew the whole of PE and sports provision towards specialist sports colleges and Premier League football academies. There must be an investment which benefits all children.

“Sports facilities in too many schools are not much better than those of a Banana republic. Nothing illustrates the yawning gap between the affluent independent sector and the state sector quite so starkly as the state of PE and sports facilities.”

But Charles Clarke, the schools minister, said: “We attach the highest priority to sport and PE in schools. It remains a compulsory subject for all pupils. A significant proportion of £180 million from the New Opportunities Fund will be used to enhance school sport out of hours.”

A total of 34 specialist sports colleges have been set up and more will follow. They not only benefit their own pupils but those in the area, providing high quality facilities and training, said the minister. The Government is protecting the disposal of school playing fields and providing £1.1 bn for capital works in schools, including improvements in sports facilities, he added.

HOW BRITAIN’S SCHOOLS WENT WRONG

A review of Michael Sanderson’s book “Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s”

(Denis MacShane, The Independent, April 20, 1999)

Between 1980 and 1997, Britain dropped from 13th to 18th in the world economic league table. Margaret Thatcher and John Major left the country stuck in the bottom third of EU nations, in terms of wealth per capita. This confirmed a seemingly inexorable 20th century trend. One unspoken challenge for New Labour and Tony Blair’s Third Way is whether Britain can start to move up, instead of down, the rankings of world wealth-creation.

The “declinist” debate is not new. It has been going on for more than a century. So has the hunt for something easy or someone obvious to blame. Both left and right think they have found a scapegoat: our schools. The left blame public schools, the 11-plus, and universities reserved for the middle and wealthy classes. The right blame comprehensives, the 1968 generation of teachers, and multiculturalism. What can’t be blamed is lack of money. Britain spends as much as other countries on education, but we get far less bang for each buck.

This crisply written book clears away much of the myth but, alas, confirms one central message. Getting education wrong is the surest indicator of future economic decline. And, boy, how our policy makers have messed up education in the past 150 years.

Admittedly, they have had an impossible job. At no stage has there been a sufficient sense of urgency to overcome the vested interests that control British education. The 19th century was awash with reports lamenting that levels of numeracy and literacy were falling behind those of our competitors. Yet, under pressure of war, British scientists and technologists could outperform anyone. They produced a chemical industry revolution after 1914 and similar marvels in electronics and nuclear energy after 1939. But once peace arrived, there was a baffling refusal to take the decisions needed to endow all British citizens with an education necessary for their and the country's needs.

It was OK for the upper and middle classes, who are pampered by education policy makers. What is bizarre is the failure of Labour governments to defend the interests of the bottom 50 per cent. The other week, David Blunkett took an immense risk when he claimed a government initiative that may lead to reintroducing Latin and even Greek in inner city schools. Dennis Skinner interjected to start chanting “Amo, amas, amat…” Conservative MPs followed him but dried up as he completed the conjugation: “Amamus, amatis, amant”.

Skinner, of course, had a grammar school education in the Fifties, but what would have been of more use to all the other Skinners would have been a proper technical education, such as his equivalents on the Continent receive.

The single core failure has been the hostility to technical, vocational and commercial education from all sectors of the political firmament. We have no Massachusetts Institute of Technology churning out engineer-businessmen like Bill Gates. To be a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique in France or a Technische Hochschule in Germany or Switzerland is a matter of pride. Britain’s polytechnics could not wait to change their names to universities.

RH Tawney railed against technical schools in the Twenties. Trade unions opposed these schools which might, they feared, produce skilled workers who could undercut the cosy closed shops and craft demarcations that so undermined British industry.

The 1944 Butler Act was based on three pillars: grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary moderns. The second pillar was never allowed to develop. For budget planners it was far cheaper to teach a child an arts subject or pure science than invest in the equipment to train an engineer or technologist. Labour ministers of the Sixties and Seventies “completed the destruction of the technical school sector”, writes Sanderson laconically.

Today, business leaders bemoan the quality of British education and stall training, but fight any financial obligation to train effectively. Britain has fewer managers with a degree or any technical qualification than comparable countries. Stupid is as stupid gets. The price of stupidity is paid daily in incompetent work or the need to seek foreign technology, investment and managers to make more and more of the British economy work efficiently.

Sanderson does see some hope in the University of Industry, the ideas about lifelong learning and the making of headteachers into knights and dames. A better pay system based on qualification, as in France, or on incentives and performance, will also help to lift the morale of teachers.

But the answer today is as it was 100 years ago. Education cannot grow from the treetops down. The real work needs to be done in further education and vocational training - the Cinderella ghettos of British education. Making the British smarter is the best way to make us all richer.