The answer is that to those, like Ed, who still believe in their hearts that education can be a transformative force in their lives, it must often seem that the whole bureaucratic might of today's ‘system' is devoted to blocking off every avenue of intellectual and imaginative development. I was confidently assured by the head of history at a well-known private school, that it would do a bright and ambitious candidate no harm to spend another two years on Stalin, Hitler and the miners' strike at A level, when he had already studied these subjects ad nauseam at GCSE. All that mattered, the teacher insisted, were the ‘skills' common to the study of all periods and (in the words of Lord Dearing in his official report on teaching history) ‘independent of the body of knowledge taught.' This reductio ad absurdum is now the basis of the entire National Curriculum in history.

Some of its defenders genuinely seem to believe that there is something radical or progressive about the present system. But it is worth stressing how wrong this is. The radical tradition in British politics, as on the continent, was overwhelmingly committed to education as a powerful means of personal empowerment and social improvement, and this attitude persisted well into the sixties. The motivation for replacing grammar schools with comprehensives was not to water down what was taught at the grammars, but on the contrary to ensure, in Hugh Gaitskell's phrase, ‘a grammar school education for all.'