Our society is built on a meritocratic system.
The sentence seems laughable; a massive lie if ever there was one. Sure, our education system does seem fair on the surface: good test results mean getting into good high schools and good A level results mean getting into good universities. But skim just below the surface and it’s clear that the way things are run here is completely unjust, and does not give an equal chance of success to everyone.
A big contribution to our broken education is selective schooling. Not many children choose whether to be privately or state educated. It isn’t about talent, or intelligence it’s simply whether one’s parents a) have the vast sums of money required and b) whether they want to spend it on private education. And that’s not fair. One could argue that scholarships and grammar schools provide opportunities to lower class students - however getting a scholarship would most likely require tutoring, which, of course, requires money. In the case of grammar schools, too. Furthermore, statistics show that only 8% of the children who got into grammar schools could not afford to pay for private schools. So no, our system is certainly not meritocratic, nor is it unprejudiced. The only way you can get a high quality education is if your parents have money. Does that seem fair at all?
Only 7% of the population in the UK are privately educated. What happens to the remaining 93%? Just because they failed an examination when they were eleven years old, they are sorted into ‘average ability’ while those going to selected schools are the ‘clever’ ones. These students are not given excessive individual attention, or excellent facilities. They are not pushed to excellence because they are ‘average’ and they will never be one of the ‘clever’ people. These children aren’t told that they can get into Oxford or Cambridge or get any job they want. Why? Because their entire life is defined by one exam they took at the age of eleven.
It also causes a huge division between young people who are pretty much the same. It widens class division – the reason classes still exist is that the rich families send their kids to private schools, and poor families don’t, so the two don’t intermingle until they’ve already formed ideas about what kind of people they are and judgements about the groups they’ve never had to interact with.
And the only way things are going to get better, the only way the cycle of prejudice and classism and growing wealth disparity in this country is ever going to end, is if the current selective school system is changed. Everyone wants the best for their children, but the way to do this isn’t with private education. Children should all have equal learning opportunities, they should have the support of their parents but not just with their money. We live in a deeply elitist society in which only the rich get an excellent education. This is not the way things should be. All children deserve a good education.
