Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  The 1944 Education Act was to change all this by raising the school leaving age and making secondary schools freely available for every child in the country. Those who had the ability to benefit from a grammar school education and perhaps university also would be able to do so, regardless of their family’s class or income. The rest would attend either technical schools or secondary moderns, where they would receive a good general education, geared to the practical rather than the academic. It was an inspiring vision of a brave new world of opportunity for the nation’s children and it is this glorious dream which has become fixed in our minds, rather than the way that the new system worked out in practice, that is to say with almost no change at all in the dreadfully unfair situation for ordinary children’s education which existed before the war.

  Obviously, not all children have the intelligence to be able to take advantage of a first-class academic education, or so went the reasoning at the time. It would be necessary to devise a way to sort the sheep from the goats and identify those, regardless of their family background or social class, who would be capable of handling a rigorous education designed to fit them out for university or the professions. To do so, a fair test of intelligence would be needed, so that the bright children could be spotted when young and guided into the fast track to academic success. This project, which became known as the 11 Plus, was doomed from the very beginning. Instead of being the means of opportunity to all children in the country, it became in practice a way of ensuring that the middle classes retained their grip on good schools and universities until the 1970s. Far from identifying bright children with great potential, the 11 Plus was a tool for filtering out the children from working-class homes and ensuring that they were compelled to leave school at the age of 15 with literally no qualifications of any kind. These were the ones who ‘failed’ the 11 Plus, which was taken in the last year of primary school.

  Of course, strictly speaking there should have been no question of anybody ‘failing’ the 11 Plus. Its stated aim was merely to distinguish those children likely to benefit from an academic education and ensure that they received it. From the beginning, the claim was that there would be ‘parity of esteem’ between grammar schools and the new secondary moderns. Unfortunately for those in authority, ordinary people are often very quick to spot humbug and cant, however it is dressed up; nobody, least of all the children, had any doubt that this was an examination which one hoped to pass.

  To appreciate fully what was going on, we need to bear in mind that the claim was made that it was impossible to coach for this sort of intelligence test and that its results had nothing to do with previous education, being designed purely to identify raw intelligence and intellectual potential. All the available evidence, both the recollections of those who took the 11 Plus and later academic research, suggests otherwise. Perhaps it will help if we look at the sort of questions being asked in the 11 Plus. After this, we will discuss the origins of the examination and why it was thought a good idea to separate children in this way at such a young age. Readers might perhaps wish at this point to try a few typical questions from the 1950s. No calculators allowed!

  i. Simplify 7,236 X 5,287

  ii. An aeroplane flies from Glasgow to London in 1 hour 51 minutes at 220 miles per hour. Find the distance in miles.

  iii. Write down the prime factors of 210

  It is immediately apparent that questions like this have little to do with intelligence and everything to do with previous education. In other words, those who were in the top stream of a good primary school would be far more likely to be able to answer them than anybody else. Those who had not received an efficient education or extra help from their parents would be absolutely stumped. The child from an under-performing inner-city school would not even be likely to make it off the starting blocks in a test like this. Whatever it was that was being measured in the 11 Plus, it was certainly not intelligence as such! (For readers who have been racking their brains trying to answer the questions given above, the answers are as follows; i. 38,256,732, ii. 407 miles, iii. 2 X 3 X 5 X 7)

  In retrospect, it seems quite mad that anybody could have believed that this sort of thing was an indicator of intellectual ability. The ability to carry out long multiplication or find prime factors will tell us more about what sort of education a child has received in the past, rather than what he or she might be capable of in the future. It was seriously claimed at the time that the 11 Plus was an examination for which it was impossible to coach a child, but this was plainly and manifestly untrue.

  What else did the 11 Plus consist of apart from mathematics questions? The General Intelligence/Knowledge component of the exam will give us further clues about what was actually being tested and measured and why a disproportionately large number of working-class children did poorly in the 11 Plus. Here are a few more questions from old 11 Plus papers;

  Write a short account (about four or five lines) on any four of the Following;

  (i) Everest

  (ii) Westminster Abbey

  (iii) The Gothic

  (iv) William Shakespeare

  (v) Queen Salote

  (vi) The Maoris

  A glance at these questions really does give the game away. How on earth could an acquaintance with Gothic architecture or information about the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand be thought of as a measure of intelligence? Clearly, the child of middle-class parents from a family living in London would be far more likely to know about Westminster Abbey than the son or daughter of a working-class South Wales mining family. A middle-class child in London might very well have been taken to the Abbey for a visit; he might even have gone to a play by Shakespeare with his parents. There were, in some papers, questions on such things as the proper role of a parlour maid and the correct usage of ‘who’ and ‘whom’. it is worth remarking that an upper-middle class child would have far more chance of knowing about proper grammar and the place of domestic servants than a child from a working-class family. One more example and then we will look at the theoretical basis for selective education as practiced in the years following the end of the war:

  The following incidents occur in well-known books you may have read:

  (i) Tom comes down the wrong chimney

  (ii) Jim discovers the chart of Treasure Island

  (iii) Crusoe discovers a footprint in the sand

  (iv) Jo visits Laurie for the first time

  (v) Alice drinks from the little bottle

  (vi) Black Beauty hears the hounds

  Describe briefly two of these incidents.

  Here, the connection between intelligence, class and education is even starker. What sort of 10- and 11-year-olds are likely to be familiar with the plots of Robinson Crusoe and Little Women? A working-class child from the slums of Liverpool or a boy or girl with university-educated parents, living in a comfortable, middle-class home in a well-to-do London suburb such as Richmond?

  We must remind ourselves that, as in so many other areas of modern childhood from diet to personal lifestyle, education at the time when the baby boomers were children is often held up as being a shining example of what we should now be aiming for. If our children could just learn to shout out the answer at once to eight times twelve or learn to read fluently as quickly as their grandparents did by learning their ABCs, then Britain could once more hold up her head when international educational league tables are published. Perhaps if our schools were more like those that we had in the 1950s, then our children wouldn’t be lagging behind those of South Korea and Japan, when it comes to mathematical ability! This, at least, is what ministers in charge of the Department of Education seem to believe. To see what was so terribly wrong with schools and the whole educational system at that time, we must look at the architect of the 11 Plus, in a sense the man who designed the whole post-war British educational system, based as it was on selection at the age of 10 or 11.

  The problem with the educational system through which the baby boomer child
ren passed in this country was that it was officially founded upon a form of biological determinism, which is to say, the belief that children inherit most of their intelligence from their parents and that there is only a strictly limited amount that education can do to develop this fixed quantity of brainpower. If your parents are slow witted, then there is very little point in your trying to get to Oxford: you might as well resign yourself to life in a less challenging environment; such as a factory or coal mine.

  One man was really at the back of the whole idea that children were possessed of a fixed quantity of innate intelligence which they inherited from their parents and which could be measured. This was Cyril Burt, for almost twenty years an educational psychologist for the old London County Council. Burt was later appointed Chair of Psychology at the University of London. His influence was immense. He acted as consultant to the various committees which developed the 11 Plus and his ideas are clearly discernible in the nature and purpose of the examination.

  Cyril Burt believed that around 80 per cent of our intelligence is inherited and that there is therefore a limit on the effect that education can have. He also thought that it was possible to measure this intelligence accurately and scientifically. Both these idea are to be found in the structure and use of the 11 Plus. What those who consulted the eminent psychologist could not have known at the time was that Sir Cyril, as he became in 1946, was in fact a fraud who simply invented the evidence which he claimed to have found for the heritability of intelligence. He cited ‘degree theses of the investigators mentioned in the text’ to support some of his more controversial ideas about intelligence. Researchers later established that many of these documents simply did not exist. Worse still, in his most crucial work Burt named two research assistants as having carried performed a vital role. These two women, Margaret Howard and J. Conway, were mentioned again and again. Nobody had ever met or even seen these two people and after Burt’s death it became increasingly obvious that he had simply invented them. It was upon such shaky foundations that the whole edifice of selective education in post-war Britain was raised.

  If the children who passed the 11 Plus were not being selected on the basis of their intelligence, then what on earth were the factors which caused one child to gain a grammar school place by this means and another to end up in a secondary modern? Perhaps we should follow the old question asked when investigating a crime! Cui Bono?: who benefits from this thing? It is not necessary to search very hard or far to uncover the answer to this question. The immediate and direct beneficiaries of the new examination were, in many cases, the same children who would already have been going to the grammar schools before they had thrown open their doors and stopped charging fees. In the 1950s, over half the children going to grammar schools were from middle-class homes. In the secondary moderns, only 20 per cent of the pupils were from this background. Whereas before, many middle-class parents had had to pay school fees for children at the local grammar school, they now acquired the places for nothing. There are tales of some fathers literally rubbing their hands together with glee when they realized what a huge saving they would make as the provisions of the 1944 Education Act came into force!

  The idea when the 11 Plus started was that the most intelligent 20 per cent of children would be identified and given places at grammar schools, but it became obvious very quickly that this wasn’t what was happening. For one thing, although between 20 per cent and 25 per cent overall were going to grammar schools, there were very wide regional differences in the numbers passing. In the rural county of Westmoreland, 40 per cent of children passed the 11 Plus, but seventy miles away in Sunderland only 10 per cent were getting to grammar schools. Could it really be true that there were four times as many clever children in the Lake District as there were in a city in the North East?

  Of course, if the 11 Plus really was distinguishing the clever children from the dullards, then none of this should have been happening. Why should children living in nice houses be any brighter than those who were in tenement blocks? Why the dramatic difference in the percentages passing the exam based upon geographical location? It was not until the early 1950s that academic researchers provided the evidence which proved what ordinary people had known almost from the beginning; that the 11 Plus was geared towards the needs of well-educated middle-class children and was heavily weighted against working-class children.

  In 1952 Philip Vernon, Professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education, published an article in the Times Educational Supplement. He demonstrated clearly that far from being an objective measure of intelligence, scores in the 11 Plus could be greatly increased by systematic coaching. It is probable that few people outside the academic world were surprised to hear this! In the same year, F. M. Martin conducted a survey of 1,446 parents of children taking the 11 Plus that year. He discovered a strong correlation between class and attitudes to secondary education. Only 6.7 per cent of clerical workers had not thought much about their child’s secondary education; 33.9 per cent of unskilled workers had not thought about it. 82.7 per cent of professionals had thought a lot about child’s secondary education; only 35.3 per cent of unskilled workers had. This concern or lack of it was expressed in coaching and getting child to practice sums and compositions, which made all the difference to the test when it was taken. When added to the culturally-enriched background of such children, which gave them the edge in some of the kind of questions which we saw above, this was enough to give children whose parents had a professional or managerial background a distinct advantage when sitting the 11 Plus.

  It has been necessary to go into the background to the British educational system at it was between 1945 and 1965 in order to show that it was deeply flawed, to say the least of it. It could hardly have been otherwise, when the man upon whose work and ideas so much of the schooling in this country was based was a cheat and a fraud. Everything about the system at that time was based upon phoney data and false notions about intelligence. That anybody in the world today, least of all those now in charge of British education, should feel that here was a way of schooling which could be profitably emulated is more than a little staggering!

  Before looking more closely at one or two of the strongly-held myths about the way that educational standards in Britain have fallen since the end of the Second World War, we might spare a thought for the thousands of children who did not even get the opportunity to attend the ordinary schools of post-war Britain. These days, we are so used to children who are blind or in wheelchairs, even those with learning difficulties, attending mainstream schools, that we might recall for a moment that this was not at all how things were during the time of the baby boomers. It was routine in the 1950s and 1960s for children who were blind, deaf, suffered from cerebral palsy or had even slight learning difficulties to be sent away from home to boarding schools and long-term institutions. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett is a good example of what could happen to a child who had the misfortune to be born blind.

  In 1947 David Blunkett was born into a working-class family in the northern English city of Sheffield. He was born blind. We hear so many jolly tales about the happy life of healthy and able-bodied baby boomers born at this time, that it is sobering to reflect upon the experiences of a blind child in those days. There was no provision in ordinary schools in the 1950s for children who were unable to see and so the only available option for young David was to be sent to a school for the blind. This meant residential accommodation: a boarding school. At the age of just four, the little blind boy was sent away to a boarding school where his parents could only visit him once a month. While he was at school when older, Blunkett was told that the only career open to a working-class blind youth like him was that of lathe operator.

  This experience of being sent off to a boarding school and kept there for years was not an uncommon one for disabled baby boomer children. There were schools for ‘cripples’, for ‘the deaf’, ‘the blind’ and also ‘the me
ntally handicapped’. In the case of children with learning difficulties, parents were often persuaded that it would be for the best if their child were to be sent off to an institution for good. Such places were all too often bleak and uncaring, and sometimes cruel. Residential, long-stay hospitals catered for all ages from toddlers to adults. Once they had been put away in institutions like these, which were frequently in remote and difficult-to-get-to rural areas, many parents visited infrequently and sometimes not at all. When large, residential hospitals and homes were being dismantled in the 1980s, as part of the ‘care in the community’ initiative, adults were found living there who had arrived as three or four-year-olds and were still there thirty or even forty years later. When baby boomers today talk lyrically about the wonderful schools which they attended, the establishments which taught them so much and which were so much more effective than modern schools, we may take it for granted that they are not referring to the schools for the blind or otherwise disabled, to which little boys and girls were shipped off and forgotten.