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

137 The Educational Effect As it was, the 1944 Act, in spite of its progressive nature apropos fees, concretised the basically bipartite scheme with its avowal of the eleven-plus selection process, with the minority of sheep shepherded into the secondary grammar and the majority of goats herded into the secondary modern or the very, very few technical schools. Moreover, there was no criticism, parliamentary or otherwise, of the curricular or social styling of the grammar schools which continued as to the manner born. Why did the British public fall hook, line and sinker for this flagrantly out-moded and irrelevant scheme, one that bore no resemblance to nor offered any concrete assistance in the present or future lives of the great majority of their children? There is strong evidence that a major contributing factor was the propagandist success of generations of reading school-based story papers and novels. It would be wrong to underestimate the beneficial impact of such literature. For the most part, it was lucidly and eloquently written and many of the standards it espoused were generally sound. The downside was that it imprinted on the national mind a false image of the possibilities of secondary education, The wide testimony to its influence is very conclusive. Just to cite one of many, many examples, Robert Roberts, in his eloquent text, Classic Slum (1971), has written at length of the power of Greyfriars in darkest impoverished Salford: ‘with nothing in our own (elementary) school that called for love or allegiance, Greyfriars became for some of us our true Alma Mater , to whom we felt bound by a dreamlike loyalty..over the years these simple tales conditioned the thought of whole generations of boys (and) set ideals and standards. In the final estimate it may be found that Frank Richards..had more influence on the mind and outlook of young working class England than any single person not excluding Baden-Powell.’ The irony was that the vast majority of boys, such as Robert Roberts of Salford (who recorded that he, like many, could not afford the uniform and accoutrements of scouting) started work at the very age