As grammar schools come under scrutiny yet again – this time for creating an “unequal society” – one alumna of the state-school system argues that the answer is really to create more of them
The latest row to embroil the Education Secretary, Michael Gove – whether he did or didn’t want Of Mice and Men taken off the GCSE syllabus – took me juddering back to my schooldays.
That slender volume was a standard text at my comprehensive. I’d always had the suspicion that, being a novella, it was chosen because it was easier to read than, say, a weighty Dickens tome. And far easier to teach, too, when it was common for staff to spend up to two-thirds of a 50-minute lesson performing crowd control.