Be honest, wouldn't you have wanted to be one of the privileged few that went to Grammar school, if so, could you imagine where you'd be today?

I can honestly say that it has never entered my head to wonder if someone, anyone, went to a grammar school. For a start, they'd have to be from the UK and few people I meet are.

Someone having attended, or not attended, university might be of interest in the case of someone under 30 but, after that, the person has likely done something in life making that education largely irrelevant; except in terms of exploiting connections made there.

That said, I mildly care about the idea of bringing back grammar schools. I think abolishing grammar schools was a good thing for education, it should be possible for pupils to move up and down between classes as they develop or decline. People are not defined at eleven years of age. Bringing back grammar schools is not, IMO, about education at all. It's about pandering to the unrealistic hopes of a constituency of people who want the world to be as they imagine it once was.

with post Brexit in mind

People who have attended university are more likely to have higher incomes, own their own homes and are less likely to commit crime.

I'm not being critical, but my wife taught at a comprehensive and there were those who achieved and I, for one, was really impressed with them. For too many however, the time at school was considered a waste of time and they impacted the education of both themselves and others by their poor behaviour.

I have to ask why you left school at 15 with no qualifications. Having achieved an HND is impressive. I witnessed the extra curricular work put in by HND students. If you're brutally honest, did you make the best of your time at both primary and secondary schools, and did any of your friends stay on past 15?

If your sample is a recent one from Canada then, yes of course, the only people not eligible for university are already in jail. I was thinking, however, of people who are 40+ now, I might know someone as a farmer, as a member of the yacht club, from the end of the bar, who they are now is not a function of what, if anything, they studied then.

That's just down to the poor classroom management of the teacher. When situations like this occur the teacher or teachers should take further training or be ushered out of the profession.


That must have been a long time ago as I believe ROSLA was introduced in the early 1970s.

To be honest I didn't take school that seriously, I just wanted to get out and get a job, it's what most did at that time the 1950s
I went secondary school in the days before comprehensive schools existed. If you didn't get into a Grammar School your only options were, some sort of private education or a Secondary Modern School. Secondary Moderns taught the basics, and at 15 you were sent out into the world of work, state education didn't go beyond age 15 for those children. Someone had to do the work immigrants now do.

I went from a tool making apprenticeship to a draughtsman to mechanical Engineer. Working for Leyland, BAE, Boeing, Caterpillar and IBM. I went about as far as I wanted to, and possible as far as my abilities could take me.
Fifty years continuous working never unemployed. Nothing remarkable, family was always more important than career.

If they put the time in, they yes. Unless, you think there's a "piano skills" gene that some people are born with - like it was just sat there in our DNA during 1000's of years of human evolution waiting for it to be invented.

I see no reason to introduce state grammar schools, although the present system where the ability for parents to access good state schools for their children is largely determined by their ability to buy more expensive houses , is also highly dependent on their level of education and income. Various pundits have mentioned that Germany has state academic secondary schools with selection by ability at about age 11. Is that the case out of interest?

and see, you came out at the end of it all just fine, well done

Its the Grammar school kids that I despise the most 'I just do', not so much the Uni-educated

..or is it that they mostly commit the sort of crimes which are less easily detected, and even if detected often won't be prosecuted?

Nicely put.

Germany is like Canada in one respect: the education system in different in each of the "states" or Lande (read provinces). When I lived in Rheinland-Pfalz the system for secondary education involved four types of school after Primary School (Grundschule).

The "academic" school (Gymnasium) designed to prepare future University students, the Realschule, the Hauptschule and the Gesamtschule, which houses all three type of programmes from the first three (i.e. a comprehensive)...

I was about to start typing a lot of detail but I found that the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany describes it all very well and is more up to date than my direct experience of it all as a parent.

One crucial detail is that which of the first three types school a child attends is dependent very largely on the Hochschulempfelung (High School Recommendation) issued by the Grundschule at the end of child's time there (normally age 11).

At first blush this seems as bad as the 11+ but at least it's based on the teachers' collective opinion after 5 years of contact rather than a single examination. This also has the perhaps unintended consequence of making the primary school teachers highly respected professional members of the community.

Parents who are unhappy with the Empfelung can always of course choose the Comprehensive.