The Olympics and selective schooling

 

With justification, the whole country is enthusiastic about Team GB’s success in the Olympics and the Paralympics.  This success has been achieved through a policy of selecting the most talented young athletes and allowing them full-time training in the company of their peers and with the best available coaches.  No-one seems to worry that this process may be unfair to the somewhat less talented athletes who are not recruited into this process and who may be made to feel rejected as a result. 

This contrasts starkly with the arguments rejecting selective schooling, one important aim of which should be selecting the most academically gifted children and educating them as a group with the best possible teachers as a way of creating an intellectual elite capable of a comparable performance in the “Intellectual Olympics” if there were such a thing. 

There is really only one conclusion that can be drawn from this contrast - that the country does not esteem intellectual success at the highest level in anything like the way it regards success in the Olympics or indeed in football.  This is a pity since the cultural and even economic success of the country really depends on producing a cadre of those who by endowment, education and training, are able to produce success comparable to that of Team GB at the Olympic Games.

This argument should not be taken to imply an uncritical attitude to all forms of academic selection.  In particular, it is clearly unwise to do this selection at one single point in time, at the age of 11.  There should always be the opportunity for those who develop later to join the elite training programs; and those who fail to do well at the highest levels may be more comfortable in returning to a less challenging training environment.

Nor does the argument favour “between-school” selection over “within-school” selection. But it does imply that schooling is primarily about promoting educational excellence and only secondarily about other, also highly desirable, ends such as promoting social equality; and that it should aim to achieve both.