Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

136 The Educational Effect The newish local education authorities obeyed the law in letter and spirit. They accepted that the public school was the model to be followed. The sturdy Elizabethan grammar school had fallen into desuetude over the intervening centuries – there were scarcely a hundred such establishments active by the 1830s - but its recrudescence was at hand. By 1925 there were 1616 such institutions with 334,000 pupils, each aping the fashions of the public school. The penitentiary character of the existing state schools fitted well with the cloistered aspect of the boarding school, so that the new secondary schools shut themselves off architecturally as well as curriculum-wise from their local community. In 1914 there were only 12,000 free grammar school scholarships available across the entire country. The new local authority grammar school also followed their public school leaders in persisting in a fee-paying element, sometime structured on a means tested scaling. This continued from 1902 to 1944 when as a result of the famous education act of that year state secondary schooling was made free for everybody. Incidentally, the abolition of fees in state secondary schools in 1944 led to a surprising and little publicised proposal to abolish the non-state fee-paying that is public and allied schools. The Minister of Education, R.A.Butler (Marlborough and Pembroke College, Cambridge) and a high Tory grandee, thought, logically enough, that a free system should prevail across the pale and that this seemed appropriate in terms of the democratic principles of which so much was made as a motivator during the war. He was halted in so doing by the horrified Harrovian Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had seen the educational reform as a pain- free and inexpensive way of showing his wartime Coalition government had a social conscience, and was anxious to avoid such dramas as this proposition would have caused. Apart from a fleeting mention in a Labour Party manifesto in the 1970s, the fee-paying sector, viewed by many as divisive and unfair, has dodged such radical parliamentary attention.