elitist? i don't know. i do know that the vast majority of executives and mps and such are all private school bum chums. there is an elistism in this country.
Were grammar schools elitist? You bet your life they were. At the beginning of each year our Headmaster stood in front of the school and lectured the newcommers as to just how lucky they were to have passed their 11+ and that they now represented less than 5% of the top minds in the country (hence they had a duty.......). Now our scholl was not one of the top 5 state schools in Liverpool but it still identified itself as being superior. The BIG problem with State education was that the Tories refused to fund Technology and Secondary Modern streams of education which were designed to provide high grade skills based education.
I think you know I'm a socialist, which is why I've internally debated the merits of both systems over many years. I just think the old system was the best as it accommodated a range of natural skills, rather than just lumping everyone into one amorphous blob. Many people say that the 11+ was an unfair way to stream people. However, if people flowered later academically, they still had the opportunity of moving to a grammar school to do A levels.
The problem with the grammar school system (& I too was part it) was that the quality of education dished out across the spectrum differed widely, as the best teachers migrated to the grammar schools, which left those who arguably needed the most help, with the wrong end of the stick. The facilities tended to reflect that as well in my experience. We had leafy grounds with playing fields while the comp up the road had bars on the windows & a mass of concrete. The mistake they made, was that when the system merged, the bearded, cardy wearing, real ale drinking, none competitive sport endorsing, liberal tossers, ensured that any form of grading within schools was deemed to be wrong. So there was no streaming & overall standards suffered as a result. With the brightest kids being held back to the pace of the least gifted.
weird how they ended up grading me lol, i dont care for English much as i am a maths person, but i was in bottom English because i misbehaved at school sometimes, mainly. My form tutor happened to be the one of the top english teachers and he moved me in with his class so could keep an eye on me and i ended up getting a b grade, which i would not have got stuck in the bottom group. so i would have lost out if my form tutor hadn't been a good English teacher, so the brightest kids being held back is cobblers, as i have found its the other way round, i just got lucky.
That wasn't the case where I did the bulk of my secondary education. We had decent playing fields, but so did the nearby secondary modern. They also had better facilities. Our school was streamed to a certain extent.
My grammar school was streamed, but it became part of the comp system just before I left & the streaming ceased, apart form the remedials
