The book’s distaste for mass education gives it a ‘golden age’ feel, but it does raise some important questions and urgent issues that we need to address within our educational system. However, while it is full of righteous anger, it is not completely clear what was key to this unparalleled, although largely undefined, educational superiority of the grammar schools of the 1950s. For students of post-war education, Hitchens provides a useful chronology of secondary education, and refers to the tension between idealism and practice. Controversial, arguing that the destruction of the grammar schools, driven by utopian egalitarians, has ultimately failed. There are some extremely valid points, but I am not convinced by their rigour as yet (I need to re-read).

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He has published several books, including The Abolition of Britain and The Rage Against God , also published by Bloomsbury Continuum, mainly on aspects of what he regards as a Cultural Revolution which has transformed Britain for the worse in the last half century.In other places, it seems to be the size of schools that is key, with both grammars and secondary moderns being seen as successful because they were much smaller than comprehensives. Secondly little mention is made of the massive cottage industry of private tuition that is used to sustain selective schools. However, the data presented in support of this model is at best cherry-picked and at worst dishonest.

I am sure that many will find the holes in the various arguments that Hitchens’ makes, but essentially, he pokes and prods at the issues surrounding the education system in, I assume, a valid attempt to provoke the argument. In his new book, Peter Hitchens describes the misjudgements made by politicians over the years that have led to the increase of class distinction and privilege in our education system.Hardly any mention is made of the massive increase in exam results in the first thirty years of comprehensives,, information freely available online. He has been a journalist for nearly 50 years, has reported from 57 countries and was a resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington. If you want a potted history of the changes to the education from victorian times to the present day, chapter two is up your street.

To anyone familiar with the weekly column written by Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday this latest jeremiad will contain no surprises.Despite agreeing with the urgency of some of the educational challenges identified, I fundamentally disagree with the book’s implicit view of humanity and the purposes of education. He is a former revolutionary Marxist who now describes himself as a socially conservative Social Democrat. Hitchens’ work is well referenced and highlights the selection process for free grammar school places, based on academic ability at eleven, and notes, referring to comprehensive schools, how places in popular schools are determined by post codes and parents’ income. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. In any case, Hitchens’s use of Gurney- Dixon fails on its own terms because, even if nearly 65% of their pupils had indeed come from working class homes, this would still have left working class children seriously under- represented in grammar schools as in 1954 they represented between 75% and 80% of the school population overall.