Grammar schools

Michael Rosen has written some excellent short posts about this on his blog. He writes about how feelings of elitism are cultivated within grammar schools and I'd say, are cultivated industrially within any school, grammar or not.

Every day at primary school we were told who would pass and fail, we were 'placed' in class according to our positions in the tests, 

we were told that the 'other' class would all fail, 

we developed a sub-culture that feared local famous kids we knew as 'dangerous' (on no basis whatsoever), 

we knew that many families had a reward/no reward system (usually a bike) for kids who passed/failed, 

and a hundred other signs and gestures and attitudes and rumours.

From this passage, you can see how the class divisions within British society are marked into people's minds from a very early age. It's a system which penetrates through to every facet of social life in Britain, where the tone of a conversation between two strangers is set by the answers to the question: 'what do you do?', and the indications of personal wealth that emerge from these answers.

There were no mechanisms within the system that I went through to pay even token respect to the idea that the human race is made up of people with different kinds of abilities, or even that, every person has a range of abilities and capabilities, or that these can change over time. 

It was all very binary - 

success/fail; 

heads people/hands people; 

good/bad. 

All very handy for the system. 

Not good for people.

We live in a country where one's intelligence is measured in tokens of career status and school grades, tokens which are in fact more dependent upon luck and social context than the individualistic notions of cognitive ability, IQ, memory, or any of the other bullshit concepts trumpeted by modern psychology.

And while the King was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown

The role art must play (and has played: Shakespeare's fool) here is to remind us that it is in fact those without wealth, those without prestigious social status are the ones who are open to truth, open to gazing into the inner workings of the human heart, free from the blinding towers of power and desire.   

Some of us'll wind up in St Cloud prison
And some of us'll wind up to be lawyers and things
And some of us'll wind up to meet you on your crossroads
Inside the grounds, of Walls of Red Wing

The magic of Dylan's lyrics here is to shine light on the chaotic journey of any human life. Some us, by some chance, like a ball of spinning string or a senseless rolling stone, will wind up in prison. Others will wind up to be lawyers and things. The thrice time repetition of 'some us'll' reveals the key point of the passage: that no matter where we end, or what we do, we are all in one sense the same, 'grovelling roots' of energy, vessels of enaction and reaction to forces that are far more powerful than anything we could muster in the inside of our own brains.