I always suspected that the way that schools were set up was borrowed heavily from the old establishments for training the children of the lower ranks of the aristocracy in how to be military officers.
The regimentation and rote of your average maths classroom was obviously never designed for teaching the subject, yet is the main memory of the experience for most people, rather than what is supposedly being taught.
Ironically, schools that were set up like that produced more literate and numerate kids, i.e. Grammar schools. In fact these were a key route to social mobility for bright but poor kids. They were killed off by politicians who relied on the lower classes for their votes...
Except many exist today, and there mostly populated by the middle class with ridiculously low levels of poor people. Like 1% on free school meals and majority were tutored for the entry test? Most poor people can't afford tutors.
With stats like that, they REINFORCE class structure, not break it.
And do poor people want to pay for the education of the elites? Which is what current grammars effectivly do.
That is only because there are so few grammar schools left. When they were all over the country, anyone who passed the 11-plus, regardless of their family's wealth, could go.
These days they are intended to reinforce class structure. You don't need a left-wing, if you don't have a poor working class...
Even in the past they had relatively little working class people in them. Even then they had tutors for people getting in, my dad went to grammar school(We're not working class, his parents were business owners) and he was tutored. His 63 now. Even I was tutored for the 11+(My county has them).
The only reason for populist support for them at the moment(Daily Mail, Telegraph, UKIP, BNP and other populist parties all support them), is most people THINK their kids will get in although most won't(By definition). When they come realise
that, populist support will disappear again, and they will go out favour once again.
More literate and numerate kids got selected for grammar school, that was the point.
Pointing out that those who leave grammar school have high literacy and numeracy hardly demonstrates that it is a good way of teaching, when the intake for grammar schools is those with high levels of numeracy and literacy already.
If you want to look at a true education revolution look to Finland, which is about as far from the grammar school systems as you can get, but also has an astoundingly high level of educational excellence.
I thought one of the things we'd learned over the last decades was that when the hippies took over the education department and took all the regimentation and repetition out of the classroom, the result was a bunch of students who didn't understand the material.
Meanwhile, Asian schools were cranking out kids who had actually understood the material. How 'bout that?
If you think hippies have removed all the regimentation and repetition from schools, can you please explain the existence of repetition and regimentation in schools. Or am I imagining it?
The regimentation and rote of your average maths classroom was obviously never designed for teaching the subject, yet is the main memory of the experience for most people, rather than what is supposedly being taught.