Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany (Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood) 9783030981556, 9783030981563, 303098155X

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MIGRATION, PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany Gregory Baldi

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

Series Editors George Rousseau, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Laurence Brockliss, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no historical series on children/ childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the identity and attraction of the new discipline. Editorial Board Matthew Grenby (Newcastle) Colin Heywood (Nottingham) Heather Montgomery (Open) Hugh Morrison (Otago) Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany) Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford) Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) Lucy Underwood (Warwick) Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen)

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14586

Gregory Baldi

Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany

Gregory Baldi Western Illinois University Macomb, IL, USA

ISSN 2634-6532 ISSN 2634-6540 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ISBN 978-3-030-98155-6 ISBN 978-3-030-98156-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Tucker, Taylor, Benji, and Vitti.

Acknowledgments

The path to this book’s publication has been a long one. It began with the Master’s program I completed at Georgetown University’s Center for German and European Studies. I started that program with no particular intention of pursuing an academic career, but was inspired to continue after two years of coursework with the Center’s amazing lineup of scholars of European history and politics, including Samuel Barnes, Thomas Banchoff, Roger Chickering, and Kathryn Olesko. Crucial in leading me to that decision were the many conversations I had with Gregory Flynn, professor in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and director of the graduate program during my time in the Center. Although Professor Flynn passed away some years before this book was even conceived, his influence is present across its pages. As a doctoral candidate at Georgetown, I was similarly well served by a supportive and stimulating cadre of comparativists in the faculty, including Daniel Brumberg, Thane Gustafson, Charles King, and Eric Langenbacher. I also had the good fortune at Georgetown to study with Andrew Bennett, whose works on process tracing and case study research have been my constant companions throughout this project. I am also grateful to the members of my dissertation committee. My chair Jeffrey Anderson was patient and supportive and his understanding of the unique challenges posed by a paired comparison of Britain and Germany was of great value as the research design came together. In addition to providing his own insights, Marc M. Howard willingly subjected

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himself to my frequently meandering responses to his questions during extended discussions in his office. Thomas Banchoff was the perfect blend of exacting and encouraging and his work on varieties of path dependence was highly influential in shaping the explanatory framework presented in the study. Early and pivotal funding supporting this project was provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the American Consortium on European Union Studies (ACES). I am deeply appreciative to the numerous individuals who spoke with me during my time in Berlin and for the faculty and staff at the Institut für Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Historisch-politische Bildung at the Technische Universität Berlin. I also owe a debt to the many librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, who managed to fulfill the most obscure requests for British and German sources, and to Andrea Francis of Malpass Library at Western Illinois University for her relentless and ultimately successful pursuit of materials from the Scottish Education Department. Many scholars have provided helpful comments and suggestions at various points on this work’s extended journey to print, including Sotiria Grek, Orfeo Fioretos, Alessia Lefebure, Terry Moe, Vivien Schmidt, Janis Vossiek, and Helga Welsh. An earlier version of the project was presented at the Workshop on the Politics of Education at the University of Konstanz, where Marius Busemeyer, Julian Garritzmann, Charlotte Haberstroh, and Christine Trampusch not only provided detailed and highly useful feedback, but also offered guidance on navigating the challenges of writing in an emerging disciplinary sub-field. My good friends Sara Wallace Goodman and Aspen Brinton provided valuable suggestions at various stages of writing and revision, advice on the publication process, and, crucially, encouragement to see the project through. I would like to thank my Palgrave editor Emily Russell, the editorial team in the Studies in the History of Childhood series, and two manuscript reviewers. Thanks also to my Western Illinois University colleagues Julia Albarracin, Vincent Auger, Keith Boeckelman, Krista Bowers Sharpe, Billy Clow, Peter Cole, Gary Daytner, Katrina Daytner, Susan Martinelli-Fernandez, Daniel Ogbaharya, Betsy Perabo, and Brian Powell for helpful ideas and encouragement and to Borhan, Nofisat Eletu, Brian Johnson, Mohsin Raza, and Roselyn Wright for research assistance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Finally, thanks to my mother Jill Baldi, my wife Victoria Smith, and my children Tucker, Taylor, and Benjamin for their love and support across the years of this project’s formation. Yes, Taylor. The book is finally done. Macomb, IL, USA December 2021

Gregory Baldi

Contents

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1

Introduction

2

Organizing General Education

19

3

Explaining Educational Outcomes

45

4

Britain I: The Tripartite System

89

5

Britain II: Shifting Discourses in Education

133

6

Britain III: Comprehensive Change

157

7

Germany I: The Reconstruction of General Education

187

8

Germany II: Historical Legacies and Frozen Discourses

227

9

Germany III: The Failure of Reform

263

10

The Contemporary Politics of Schooling

305

11

Conclusion: The Ideational Logic of Comparative Education

343

Index

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About the Author

Gregory Baldi is an associate professor of political science at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses on European and comparative politics. His work has been published in West European Politics and The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. In 2018–2019 he was the Fulbright National Library of Scotland Scholar. He earned his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University and was co-winner of the American Political Science Association Ernst. B. Haas award for best dissertation in European politics.

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Abbreviations

AfD BEC BLK CACE CDU CSU DAEB

DBB DBR DES DGB DI DIHT DLV DPhV DUP FBI

Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland) British Employers’ Confederation Federal-State-Commission for Educational Planning (Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung ) Central Advisory Councils for Education Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands ) Christian Social Union in Bavaria (Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern) German Committee for the Education System (Deutscher Ausschuss für das Erziehungs und Bildungswesen) German Civil Service Federation (Deutscher Beamtenbund) German Education Council (Deutscher Bildungsrat ) Department of Education and Science German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) Discursive Institutionalism Congress of German Industry and Commerce (Deutscher Industrie- und Handelstag ) German Teachers’ Association (Deutsche Lehrerverein) German Philological Association (Deutscher Philologenverband) Democratic Unionist Party Federation of British Industry xv

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ABBREVIATIONS

FDP FRG GCE GCSE GDR GEW HCT HI KMK

KPD LEA NFER NPD NUT OECD OMGUS PISA PRT SED (Britain) SED (East Germany) SPD TUC UKIP VBE VDR VoC ZB

Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei) Federal Republic of Germany General Certificate of Education General Certificate of Secondary Education German Democratic Republic Education and Science Workers’ Union (Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft ) Human Capital Theory Historical Institutionalism Standing Conference of Ministers of Culture (Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister or Kultusministerkonferenz) German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands ) Local Education Authority National Foundation for Educational Research National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands ) National Union of Teachers Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Office of Military Government, United States Programme for International Student Assessment Power Resources Theory Scottish Education Department German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands ) Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands ) Trades Union Congress United Kingdom Independence Party Union of Training and Education (Verband Bildung und Erziehung ) Association of German Secondary School Teachers (Verband Deutscher Realschullehrer) Varieties of Capitalism Second Educational Path (Zweiter Bildungsweg )

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 8.1 Table 10.1

Education programs and age of selection in Germany and the United Kingdom School differentiation practices in OECD countries Percentage of state secondary school pupils by school type in Britain 1970–2002 Fixed-ability discourse on education Dynamic ability discourse on education Optimal distribution by occupation and school category in West Germany Percent distribution of students in the FRG by School Type, 1960–1996

21 22 29 72 75 236 320

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Among the institutions of advanced industrialized democracies, few are more directly tied to the lives of citizens than those of education. A significant majority of populations will spend a decade or more in schools financed with state revenues and administered by public officials. For many, educational access and achievement will directly shape their life opportunities, including their occupational attainment, economic status, and social placement. Citizens consistently cite education as a top public policy concern and leaders across the political spectrum regularly call for improving state educational provision. Given this centrality, it is surprising that the study of education systems was historically neglected by political science (Gift & Webbels, 2014; Jakobi et al., 2009). While scholars long conducted cross-national comparisons of education policy, schools, and training systems, this research came largely from other branches of the social sciences, most notably sociology, economics, and education studies. Within political science, education and schooling were frequently considered as causal rather than as dependent variables to be explained themselves. Researchers considered the effects of education across a range of political phenomena, including voter turnout (Nagler, 1991), political sophistication (Luskin, 1990), policy preferences (Page & Shapiro, 2010), democratic citizenship (Milligan et al., 2004; Nie et al., 1996), and political recruitment (Norris, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_1

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1997). Education even remained largely outside of wider debates in the vast comparative research program on social policy, its sectoral “home.” Among scholars of the welfare state, education was frequently viewed as “special,” since its redistributive effects and impact on social cohesion were perceived as different from those of social insurance programs. As a consequence, it was often excluded from comparative investigations of social policy development and variation across nations (Busemeyer & Nikolai, 2010, 494–496; Wilensky, 1975, 3–7). Such exclusions of education seem substantively unmerited. Few would dispute Moe and Wiborg’s claim that “education… is an institutional arena of enormous potential, a shaper of the fundamentals of human society” (2017, 1) or Gift and Wibbels’ statement that “no single policy domain lies more clearly at the heart of the key social, political, and economic dynamics of our age” (2014, 292). Recent years have witnessed a welcome rediscovery of education by political scientists (see Busemeyer & Trampusch, 2011). While the effects of education on other variables remain a concern to these new researchers, their studies have focused largely on outcomes in education itself and sought to address central theoretical and empirical questions in political science by examining educational institutions and practices. This “education turn” in comparative politics has brought renewed focus to issues related to institutions of higher education (Ansell, 2008a; Graf, 2009; Jungblut & Rexe, 2017; Welsh 2004), vocational training systems (Busemeyer, 2009; Busemeyer & Trampusch, 2019; Thelen, 2004; Trampusch, 2010), variation in state education spending (Ansell, 2008b; Busemeyer et al., 2020; Garritzmann & Seng, 2016; Jensen, 2011; Schmidt, 2008), and the relationship between education and economic production (Bosch & Charest, 2008; Culpepper, 2003; Sakamoto, 2018). Much of the new education literature has addressed its topic, either directly or indirectly, in terms of the welfare state, with scholars seeking to identify education’s role and integrate its provision with other social policies.1 Included in this body of research are studies of the relationship between skill acquisition and social insurance (Estévez-Abe et al., 2001; Filippetti & Guy, 2016; Lee, 2007), education and social inclusion (Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006), and efforts to build on established welfare state typologies by distinguishing national systems in terms of various “worlds” or categories of educational welfare states (Willemse & de Beer, 2012), human capital formation (Iversen & Stephens, 2008), and competence production (Allmendinger & Leibfried, 2003).

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Less frequently considered within political science’s education turn have been the primary and secondary stages of general education,2 despite their obvious importance to countries’ overall education and training systems and their remaining topics of clear interest to educationalists and other social scientists (cf. Hofman et al., 2006; Sass, 2018; Wiborg, 2009).3 The current study aims to address this gap by examining the development of these educational stages, referred to here collectively as general education, in Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). While a range of features may serve to distinguish countries’ general education systems, including the length of compulsory education, qualification requirements for teachers, and governance and funding issues related to school and teacher autonomy, the focus in this study is on what is arguably the most consequential feature, namely whether a system separates pupils into different educational pathways on the basis of their perceived ability. It is this practice of differentiation, the study argues, that defines the basic structure of a general education system and shapes its other organizational features in fundamental ways. Pairing the British and German cases allows for the investigation of a central empirical puzzle of the comparative economic and social development of West European states in the postwar era. The contemporary general education systems in Britain and Germany are frequently viewed as reflecting different organizational types that are also observed in other European countries (Entorf & Tatsi, 2009; Hanushek & Wössmann, 2006; OECD, 2013); yet the British and West German systems constituted immediately after the Second World War were structurally quite similar (Dustmann, 2004, 214; Phillips, 2011, 141). As in many European countries at that time, pupils in Britain and the FRG were differentiated after a period of common primary education into separate secondary or upper elementary schools that varied in terms of curricula, length of study, prestige, and advancement possibilities. In both countries support for these differentiated systems could be found in the early postwar years at both ends of the political spectrum. By the 1960s, however, sharp conflicts over their perceived inadequacies emerged. During this period, center-left governments in the FRG and Britain would seek to reform fundamentally the organization of the general education systems, proposing in both countries to eliminate early differentiation practices and collapse the different ability-based school types present in the selective system into a single comprehensive school that would be attended by most students regardless of perceived ability.

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Of the two, however, only the British would achieve significant organizational reform, largely eliminating the “tripartite” secondary school system in England and dismantling the equivalent systems in Wales and Scotland by the end of the 1970s.4 Germany would not only retain its selective and highly differentiated structure through this period but would later extend it to the new Länder of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) following reunification in 1990. Why did countries that faced similar pressures for reform to such similar institutions experience such divergent outcomes?5 Exploring the answer to this empirical puzzle provides insights into two broader sets of questions in comparative politics. The first asks to what extent reigning conceptions of welfare state development and variation apply to outcomes in general education. Can theories that seek to explain national differences in the provision of social security, healthcare, and housing also explain differences in state education systems? Were the factors shaping education different from those shaping other social policies? There are both conceptual and empirical reasons to consider questions related to the national systems of general education in terms of broader explanations for welfare state variation. Hega and Hokenmaier (2002) note the correspondence between education systems and broader welfare state regimes, finding each of the well-known liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare state types in Esping-Andersen’s (1990) classificatory scheme to be associated with a particular education policy profile.6 The expansion and reform of education after World War II in both Britain and the FRG also occurred alongside the expansion and reform of social protection programs. In Britain, the Education Act 1944, which raised the school-leaving age, provided universal secondary education and established the framework for the tripartite system, has commonly been viewed as part of the same policy cluster that realized the Beveridge Report’s plan for social insurance and assistance and the National Health Service in the 1940s.7 In the FRG, the most significant national-level education reform plan, which called for the extension of the mandatory period of schooling and the establishment of an observatory stage prior to student selection for the three-tiered secondary system, was issued in 1959, directly between the 1957 pension reform act (Rentenreformgesetz) and 1961 federal social assistance act (Bundessozialhilfegesetz) that served as the cornerstones of the postwar German welfare state.

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The second set of questions concerns how institutions develop over time. In drawing on the method of historical process-tracing and notions of path dependency, critical junctures, and timing, this study situates itself squarely in the tradition of historical institutionalism (HI), one of the dominant variants within the “new institutional” approach to the study of politics (see Fioretos et al., 2016; Hall & Taylor, 1996; March & Olsen, 1984; Peters, 2005). Many studies in the comparative social science literature on education have adopted a distinctly historical perspective, emphasizing the structural and political antecedents that have shaped the national education systems of the present day (Ansell & Lindvall, 2013; Busemeyer, 2009; Lindert, 2004; Richardson & Powell, 2011; Wiborg, 2009) including some that have located themselves explicitly within the HI tradition (Helgøy & Homme, 2006; Sass, 2018; Thelen, 2004). At the same time, the study also draws on conceptions of discursive institutionalism (DI), a more recent variant of new institutional thought that highlights the role of ideational and communicative variables in patterning continuity and change (see Schmidt, 2008) that scholars have adopted in recent years to examine a range of educational policy features (cf. Wahlström & Sundberg, 2018; Wallenius et al., 2018). In adopting such a “longitudinal” approach, this study considers what the specific puzzle of continuity and change in British and German general education can contribute to more general understandings of historical processes of institutional development in advanced democracies and the relationship between material and ideational factors in the shaping of political outcomes over time.

Contemporary Outcomes and Historical Conflicts In Britain, general education remains among the most politically charged domestic policy areas in the country. Governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown faced a significant backlash from many Labour supporters when they sought to re-inject elements of early differentiation and selection into the structure of state general education, most notably by establishing new privately sponsored academies and expanding the number of so-called “specialist” schools that are permitted to accept a percentage of their students on the basis of aptitude. For the Conservative party in office under David Cameron, the “grammar school debate” remained a source of political friction, with many in the party calling for the creation of new grammar schools and a return to the selective system

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and others—including Cameron himself—insisting that the government should maintain the existing grammars but allow no new selective schools. Under Cameron’s successor Theresa May, who attended a state grammar school, the Tory government would seek to change this policy and, to the pointed opposition of Labour members and some Conservatives, expand the number of state-run schools that select their students on the basis of ability. In the Federal Republic, new objections to the three-tiered general education system that was recreated after the war were voiced following the shockingly poor performance of German students on first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examination administered by the OECD in 2000, in which the country placed twenty-first out of twenty-seven OECD members in an assessment of student reading skills. The same study found the connection between social background and school performance in Germany to be the highest in any industrialized country (OECD, 2001). A renewed debate has emerged since PISA over the merits of the selective system in the FRG and new proposals, including a highly contentious and much publicized effort in 2009 and 2010 by the Christian Democratic/Green coalition in Hamburg to extend the time pupils spent in common schooling, and the introduction of new school types such as Berlin’s Integrated Secondary School (Integrierte Sekundarschule) and Baden-Württemberg’s Community School (Gemeinschaftsschule) have emerged in an effort to limit the negative effects of early selection and create new opportunities for students not initially placed in the academic track.

The Argument in Brief The primary argument advanced in this book is that the institutional trajectories of general education in Britain and the FRG during the postwar period were largely shaped by the effects of legitimizing policy discourses in both countries and the comparative timing of shifts in the each country’s respective discourses. Such an explanation stands in marked contrast to dominant causal conceptions of institutional development in the welfare state and new education literature, which focus largely on factors such as the broader political-economic context and the relative organizational strength of powerful actors, assuming these actors’ preferences to be fixed and oriented around material incentives. Even when

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they are considered, nonmaterial factors tend to be viewed as secondary and static, and unable to account for durable institutional change.8 The case studies support this argument by demonstrating three subpropositions. First, they find that the period immediately following the Second World War was characterized by the softening of the structural constraints that existed around British and German education prior to the war, creating new opportunities for change and allowing for the introduction of new mechanisms to guide future institutional trajectories.9 The selective systems of general education established in both countries during this period, the studies find, were “discourse-driven,” that is, were constructed on the basis of particular sets of ideas. In both cases, these ideas reflected specific visions of the nature of human ability and its relationship to schooling that were communicated via identifiable ideational transmission paths to major policy actors. The second proposition maintains that political movements for change in the organization of general education followed discursive shifts that took place in both Britain and Germany in which prevailing beliefs that ability levels were largely fixed and inherited were supplanted by conceptions of these qualities as dynamic and influenced by life conditions. As in the initial postwar process that established the selective general education systems in both countries, a set of new communicative pathways of ideational transmission also helped bring these new ideas to policy actors. The effect was the delegitimizing of the fixed-ability discourse upon which the selective systems were based, which helped to create a “discursive” critical juncture in which key policy actors redefined their interests and preferences in terms of the new dynamic ability conception and its associated policy prescription of the mixed-ability, comprehensive school model. The final proposition holds that a set of factors related to institutional conditions in postwar Britain and West Germany shaped the path trajectories and temporal sequencing of discursive change in both countries, which, in turn, contributed to the relative success of education reform initiatives. The earlier shift in the British policy discourse contributed to the success of reform initiatives in the 1960s, while a later discursive shift in West Germany inhibited reform efforts that may have succeeded at a different time.

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Research Design, Methodology, and Sources This study employs a comparative research design that broadly adopts the logic of John Stuart Mill’s method of difference, by which researchers seek to establish relationships between independent and dependent variables by identifying differences in factors across a set of cases that can account for variation in outcomes in those cases (see Landman, 2008, 71). Specifically, it employs a model of paired comparison, a design frequently utilized in comparative historical studies involving advanced democratic states (cf. Bleich, 2003; Hall, 1986; Putnam et al., 1994) in which two cases are selected to generate or test propositions that provide generalizable causal explanations (Gisselquist, 2014). As Tarrow (2010) notes, paired comparisons offer some distinctive advantages for researchers. Like experimental designs, paired comparisons permit the researcher to consider the impact of a single variable or mechanism on outcomes of interest. Although paired designs cannot perform random assignments to treatment and control groups of the kind that occur in experiments, they can—unlike in single case studies—eliminate the possibility that an outcome under consideration could have taken place in the absence of a particular independent variable. Paired comparisons further allow for a level of descriptive depth and analysis that becomes harder to achieve in designs with larger numbers of cases, while at the same time being better suited for hypothesis-generation than studies that consider only a single case. The study also adopts qualitative case study and process-tracing methods common to both historical institutional accounts (see Fioretos et al., 2016) and paired comparative designs (Tarrow, 2010). In attributing a significant causal role to nonmaterial factors, the study faces some particular methodological and epistemological challenges that are not present in materialist HI approaches. As Béland and Cox (2011, 13) note, ideas are not visible and may be difficult to ascertain, which in turn makes it difficult to measure their influence. Moreover, by positing a research question that considers continuity and change over time, this study examines these factors longitudinally, requiring that these ideational measurements be assessed and reassessed at multiple points across a set of well-defined historical sequences. To address these challenges, the study utilizes a variation of the process-tracing method tailored specifically for ideational explanations.

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Process-tracing is defined by Bennett and Checkel (2015, 7) as “the analysis of evidence on process, sequences, and conjunctures of events within a case for the purpose of either developing or testing hypotheses about causal mechanisms that might causally explain the case.” It is particularly well suited for explanatory frameworks emphasizing ideational causation, because of its capacity for examining strategic incentives and variation over time in detail (Jacobs, 2015, 48). In conducting this examination, the book draws on a considerable range of historical and contemporary source material, including over one hundred primary sources. These include official government sources such as legislation, records of parliamentary proceedings and state ministries, reports of government-commissioned advisory bodies, the electoral programs, policy statements, and founding charters of British and German political parties, media accounts from magazines and newspapers, and the pronouncements of key actors themselves through their published writings, interview statements, and speeches. The study also utilizes a rich English and German-language secondary literature from an array of academic perspectives, including sociology, history, economics, psychology, and pedagogy, as well as political science.

Plan of the Book The book is organized as follows. The next chapter provides an overview of the variation in the dependent variable of the study, the organization of the contemporary British and German general education systems. This section also includes an organizational sketch of the selective British tripartite system that was established after the Second World War but was reformed in most of the country in the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter then reviews recent literature on the social, economic, and academic impact of school differentiation practices, focusing in particular on their effects on social mobility, labor market placement, and educational opportunity. Chapter 3 begins with an overview of three leading explanatory categories addressing the formation and development of European education systems: macro-sociological, comparative welfare state, and partisan ideology. The chapter then outlines the book’s explanatory framework and empirical strategy, which draws on both historical and discursive institutional approaches in comparative politics.

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Chapters 4 through 9 contain the historical case studies. While these include background discussion of education in Britain and Germany prior to World War II, the emphasis in both cases is on the core period from the 1940s through the 1970s and particularly the immediate postwar period. The case studies begin with a consideration of education in Britain. Chapter 4 provides a brief historical sketch of Britain’s preWorld War II general education system before considering the origins and implementation of the tripartite system established by the Education Act 1944. It argues that the design of the system was shaped by a dominant interwar discourse of fixed ability associated with a set of prominent academics and researchers working primarily in the field of educational psychology and examines how the beliefs and associated policy views of this discourse influenced a powerful coalition of policy actors, which included most notably—and perhaps counterintuitively— the British Labour Party, which helped implement the system’s separate grammar, technical, and secondary modern schools after the war. Chapter 5 analyzes the causes and impact of a shift in the dominant education policy discourse that occurred in Britain in the 1950s. It documents how a new generation of academics primary in the field of education sociology challenged the scientific basis of the psychologists’ prewar assumptions regarding the fixed nature of ability and demonstrated through empirical studies of students and schools that the tripartite system was failing to achieve its objective of leveling access to educational opportunities for young Britons of all social classes. The views of these researchers, the chapter argues, would achieve widespread acceptance via a specific set of ideational transmission pathways, namely a series of government advisory reports issued in the 1950s and early 1960s. The chapter then traces how this shift in policy discourses contributed to a splintering of the coalition of the interwar era and the emergence of a new alliance led by a reoriented Labour Party that would call for the dismantling of the tripartite system and its replacement with a new system comprised of mixed-ability comprehensive schools. Chapter 6 completes the British case study by tracing the institutional effects of the discursive shift. It first examines how by the mid-1960s the central government under Labour, which included individual members who served as mobile carriers of the new ideas, would set into motion a process of institutional transformation in state education in Britain whereby the tripartite system would be largely replaced by a system of comprehensive schools in the 1970s, despite a political backlash during

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that decade against perceived “progressive” thinking in education, particularly in England. This backlash, the chapter argues, would help to prevent the full “comprehensivization” of English schooling, contributing to the preservation of grammar schools in some areas and the introduction of new selective practices, such as choosing students for schools by “aptitude” rather than ability. Chapters 7 through nine examine the evolution of the West German general education system during the same period. Chapter seven first provides a brief historical overview of the “traditional” German system from its creation in the early nineteenth century to its near dismantling during the Nazi era. It then examines how a discourse coalition led by government advisory groups, conservative politicians, and secondary school professionals that shared many of the British interwar coalition’s beliefs about the biological basis of ability helped bring about the reconstruction of the traditional system—over American objections— in the Western areas of occupation in the years immediately following the country’s defeat in World War II. The chapter then analyzes the relationship between the reconstitution of the traditional system during the occupation years and the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949, outlining how key provisions, including cultural federalism and the principle of parental choice, enshrined in the West German Basic Law would contribute to the embedding to the early selection and student differentiation within the institutional fabric of the new country. Chapter 8 examines the West German system during the 1950s and early 1960s and considers how general support for the differentiated school system continued during this period just as similar arrangements were being called into question in Britain and other Western European countries. As the chapter argues, this continuity was rooted in a “freezing” of the German variant of the fixed-ability discourse that had so influenced the reconstruction of the traditional system after the war. Driven by an older generation of academics trained in the 1920s, the fixed-ability view would persist in the first decades of the new Federal Republic for a host of reasons related to the dynamics of party competition, the institutional position of key political actors, and the reconstruction of educational sociology and psychology as disciplines after World War II. The effect was a crucial insulating of policy discussions from the ideational trends present in other countries and a delay in the development of an effective counter-discourse in education. As a consequence,

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while other countries such as Britain had by the early 1960s begun considering and initiating significant structural reforms in general education, the beliefs of key West German policymakers and educationalists continued to reflect the view that separate schools for students of different ability corresponded to the “natural” or “organic” ability distribution in the population and was thus the most appropriate organizational framework. A challenge to the German fixed-ability discourse would, as Chapter 9 documents, eventually come to the FRG. Driven by new thinking about the relationship between education and economics and research conducted largely by a younger generation of social scientists that demonstrated the social biases of the traditional system, this counter-discourse would by the mid-1960s help elevate education policy to the top of the political agenda and allow for the consideration of new arrangements, including the comprehensive Gesamtschule, that had been considered radical—if not outright subversive—just a decade earlier. Under the coalition of Social and Free Democrats led by Chancellor Willy Brandt, the federal government would introduce proposals to change the selective general education system in the early 1970s. But as the chapter outlines these would largely fail as partisan actors and a public reacting to the student movement of the late 1960s, declining economic conditions, and a renewed traditionalism in education would turn against reform ideas and help to ensure the persistence of early selection in a unified Germany in the twenty-first century. Chapter 10 provides with an overview of policy developments in German and British general education in recent years. For Britain, it considers the politics associated with the rise of alternative mechanisms of differentiation, such as school choice and the introduction of new school types, as well as the ongoing debates over the place of grammar schools in the British state system. For Germany, the chapter highlights changes in the distribution of students in the various secondary schools, and new challenges to the traditional structure of the system, particularly in light of shifting demographic and social conditions in the country. The chapter finds that in both countries the postwar discourse and debates examined in the case studies continue strongly to inform politics over the state education system and shape reform initiatives. The book’s conclusion returns to the study’s central questions concerning education and welfare states, ideas, and institutions.

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Notes 1. For an overview, see Busemeyer and Nikolai (2010) and Di Stasio and Solga (2017). 2. For a discussion of this term, see Ainley (2018). 3. Exceptions include Baldi’s (2012) examination of school differentiation practices, Ansell and Lindvall’s (2013) study of the political origins of primary education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Moe and Wiborg’s edited volume (2017) on the political role of teachers’ unions. 4. The changes in general education documented in this study largely bypassed Northern Ireland, where plans for eliminating tripartism were proposed in the early 1970s but were put on hold following the restoration of direct rule from London in 1972 and the suspension of the Northern Irish parliament in 1973 carried out in response to the increased sectarian violence in the region. As a result, the education system continued to operate into the 1980s as it had in the rest of the country in the 1950s, with students selected for placement in different schools on the basis of their performance on the 11-plus exam (Gallagher, 1989). In 1989 a new policy directed grammar schools to accept as many students as facilities could accommodate, resulting in a 15% increase in attendance rates over the next decade (Maurin & McNally, 2007). 5. Other recent studies of education have similarly noted the divergence of various components of national education systems from common institutional starting points after World War II, including systems of higher education finance and provision (Ansell, 2010; Garritzmann, 2016) and post-secondary education (Busemeyer, 2014). 6. Such a correspondence does not always translate into predictable outcomes at the policy level, as Klitgaard’s (2007) findings regarding the absence of correlation between welfare state regimes and school choice reforms in the United States, Sweden, and Germany demonstrate. 7. This view is reflected in the inclusion of education as a separate chapter (situated between healthcare and housing) in Lowe’s (2005) survey of the welfare state in Britain since 1945. 8. For a recent exception to the materialist-orientation among studies of the education turn, see Cino Pagliarello examination of how particular ideas became influential within the construction of the European Commission’s policy on education (2020). 9. In emphasizing this period, the current study differs from recent historical studies examining variation West European general education. Wiborg (2009, 2010) places them well before World War II and even back into the nineteenth century, while Sass (2018) sees the key developments beginning in the 1950s (see Chapter 2 for a further discussion).

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References Ainley, P. (2018). Academic, vocational and pre-vocational education—Origins and development. In B. Bartram (Ed.), International and comparative education (pp. 87–99). Routledge. Allmendinger, J., & Leibfried, S. (2003). Education and the welfare state: The four worlds of competence production. Journal of European Social Policy, 13(1), 63–81. Ansell, B. (2008a). University challenges: Explaining institutional change in higher education. World Politics, 60(2), 189–230. Ansell, B. (2008b). Traders, teachers, and tyrants: Democracy, globalization, and public investment in education. International Organization, 62(2), 289–322. Ansell, B. (2010). From the ballot to the blackboard: The redistributive political economy of education. Cambridge University Press. Ansell, B., & Lindvall, J. (2013). The political origins of primary education systems: Ideology, institutions, and interdenominational conflict in an era of nation-building. American Political Science Review, 107 (3), 505–522. Arnesen, A. L., & Lundahl, L. (2006). Still social and democratic? Inclusive education policies in the Nordic welfare states. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50(3), 285–300. Baldi, G. (2012). Schools with a difference: Policy discourses and education reform in Britain and Germany. West European Politics, 35(5), 999–1023. Béland, D., & Cox, R. H. (Eds.). (2011). Ideas and politics in social science research. Oxford University Press. Bennett, A., & Checkel, J. T. (Eds.). (2015). Process tracing: From metaphor to analytic tool. Cambridge University Press. Bleich, E. (2003). Race politics in Britain and France: Ideas and policymaking since the 1960s. Cambridge University Press. Bosch, G., & Charest, J. (2008). Vocational training and the labour market in liberal and coordinated economies. Industrial Relations Journal, 39(5), 428–447. Busemeyer, M. R. (2009). Asset specificity, institutional complementarities and the variety of skill regimes in coordinated market economies. Socio-Economic Review, 7 (3), 375–406. Busemeyer, M. R. (2014). Skills and inequality: Partisan politics and the political economy of education reforms in Western welfare states. Cambridge University Press. Busemeyer, M. R., Garritzmann, J. L., & Neimanns, E. (2020). A loud but noisy signal? Public opinion and education reform in Western Europe. Cambridge University Press. Busemeyer, M. R., & Nikolai, R. (2010). Education. In F. G. Castles, S. Leibfried, J. Lewis, H. Obinger, & C. Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the welfare state (1st ed., pp. 494–510). Oxford University Press.

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Busemeyer, M. R., & Trampusch, C. (2011). Review article: Comparative political science and the study of education. British Journal of Political Science, 41(2), 413–443. Busemeyer, M. R., & Trampusch, C. (2019). The politics of vocational training: Theories, typologies, and public policies. In D. Guile & L. Unwin (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of vocational education and training (pp. 137–164). Wiley Blackwell. Cino Pagliarello, M. (2020). Aligning policy ideas and power: The roots of the competitiveness frame in European education policy. Comparative Education, 56(4), 441–458. Culpepper, P. D. (2003). Creating cooperation: How states develop human capital in Europe. Cornell University Press. Di Stasio, V., & Solga, H. (2017). Education as social policy: An introduction. Journal of European Social Policy, 27 (4), 313–319. Dustmann, C. (2004). Parental background, secondary school track choice, and wages. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(2), 209–230. Entorf, H., & Eirini, T. (2009). Migrants at school: Educational inequality and social interaction in the UK and Germany. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved February 10, 2015 from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=1409219 Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton University Press. Estevez-Abe, M., Iversen, T., & Soskice, D. (2001). Social protection and the formation of skills: A reinterpretation of the welfare state. In P. Hall & D. Soskice (Eds.), Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage (pp. 145–183). Oxford University Press. Filippetti, A., & Guy, F. (2016). Skills and social insurance: Evidence from the relative persistence of innovation during the financial crisis in Europe. Science and Public Policy, 43(4), 505–517. Fioretos, O., Falleti, T., & Sheingate, A. (2016). Historical institutionalism in political science. In O. Fioretos, T. Falleti, & A. Sheingate (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical institutionalism (pp. 3–28). Oxford University Press. Gallagher, A. M. (1989). Majority Minority Review 1: Education and Religion in Northern Ireland. University of Ulster. Garritzmann, J. L. (2016). The political economy of higher education finance: The politics of tuition fees and subsidies in OECD countries, 1945–2015. Springer. Garritzmann, J. L., & Seng, K. (2016). Party politics and education spending: Challenging some common wisdom. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(4), 510–530. Graf, L. (2009). Applying the varieties of capitalism approach to higher education: Comparing the internationalisation of German and British universities. European Journal of Education, 44(4), 569–585.

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Gift, T., & Wibbels, E. (2014). Reading, writing, and the regrettable status of education research in comparative politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 17 , 291–312. Gisselquist, R. M. (2014). Paired comparison and theory development: Considerations for case selection. PS: Political Science & Politics, 47 (2), 477–484. Hall, P. A. (1986). Governing the economy: The politics of state intervention in Britain and France. Oxford University Press. Hall, P. A., & Taylor, R. (1996). Political science and the three new institutionalisms. Political Studies, 44(4), 936–957. Hanushek, E. A., & Wößmann, L. (2006). Does educational tracking affect performance and inequality? Differences-in-differences evidence across countries. The Economic Journal, 116(510), C63–C76. Hega, G. M., & Hokenmaier, K. G. (2002). The welfare state and education: A comparison of social and educational policy in advanced industrial societies. German Policy Studies, 2(1), 143–173. Helgøy, I., & Homme, A. (2006). Policy tools and institutional change: Comparing education policies in Norway, Sweden and England. Journal of Public Policy, 26(2), 141–165. Hofman, R. H., Hofman, W. H. A., Gray, J. M., & Daly, P. (Eds.). (2006). Institutional context of education systems in Europe: A cross-country comparison on quality and equity. Springer Science & Business Media. Iversen, T., & Stephens, J. D. (2008). Partisan politics, the welfare state, and three worlds of human capital formation. Comparative Political Studies, 41(4– 5), 600–637. Jacobs, A. M. (2015). Process tracing the effects of ideas. In A. Bennett & J. T. Checkel (Eds.), Process tracing: From metaphor to analytic tool (pp. 41–73). Cambridge University Press. Jakobi, A. P., Martens, K., & Wolf, K. D. (2009). Education in political science: Discovering a neglected field. Routledge. Jensen, C. (2011). Capitalist systems, deindustrialization, and the politics of public education. Comparative Political Studies, 44(4), 412–435. Jungblut, J., & Rexe, D. (2017). Higher education policy in Canada and Germany: Assessing multi-level and multi-actor coordination bodies for policy-making in federal systems. Policy and Society, 36(1), 49–66. Klitgaard, M. B. (2007). Do welfare state regimes determine public sector reforms? Choice reforms in American, Swedish and German schools. Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(4), 444–468. Landman, T. (2008). Issues and methods in comparative politics: An introduction. Routledge. Lee, C. S. (2007). Why do some employees support welfare states more than others? Skill profiles and social policy preferences in the United States. Social Science Research, 36(2), 688–718.

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Lindert, P. H. (2004). Growing public: Volume 1, the story: Social spending and economic growth since the eighteenth century. Cambridge University Press. Lowe, R. (2005). The welfare state in Britain since 1945. Palgrave. Luskin, R. C. (1990). Explaining political sophistication. Political Behavior, 12(4), 331–361. March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1984). The new institutionalism: Organizational factors in political life. The American Political Science Review, 78(3), 734–749. Maurin, E., & McNally, S. (2007). Educational effects of widening access to the academic track: A natural experiment. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/ abstract=968955 Milligan, K., Moretti, E., & Oreopoulos, P. (2004). Does education improve citizenship? Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom. Journal of Public Economics, 88(9–10), 1667–1695. Moe, T. M., & Wiborg, S. (Eds.). (2017). The comparative politics of education. Cambridge University Press. Nagler, J. (1991). The effect of registration laws and education on US voter turnout. The American Political Science Review, 85(4), 1393–1405. Nie, N. H., Junn, J., & Stehlik-Barry, K. (1996). Education and democratic citizenship in America. University of Chicago Press. Norris, P. (Ed.). (1997). Passages to power: Legislative recruitment in advanced democracies. Cambridge University Press. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2001). Knowledge and skills for life: First results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000. OECD Publishing. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2013). PISA 2012 Assessment and analytical framework mathematics, reading, science. OECD Publishing. Page, B. I., & Shapiro, R. Y. (2010). The rational public: Fifty years of trends in Americans’ policy preferences. University of Chicago Press. Peters, B. G. (2005). Institutional theory in political science: The new institutionalism’ (2nd ed.). Continuum. Phillips, D. (2011). The German example: English interest in educational provision in Germany since 1800. Continuum. Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. Y. (1994). Making democracy work. Princeton University Press. Richardson, J. G., & Powell, J. J. (2011). Comparing special education. Stanford University Press. Sakamoto, A. (2018). The influence of information and communication technology use on students’ information literacy. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen, & K. W. Lai (Eds.), Second handbook of information technology in primary and secondary education (pp. 271–291). Springer International Publishing.

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Sass, K. (2018). Cleavages and Coalitions: Comprehensive School Reforms in Norway and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany (1954–1979) (Doctoral dissertation). The University of Bergen, Bergen Open Research Archive. Schmidt, V. A. (2008). Discursive institutionalism: The explanatory power of ideas and discourse. Annual Review of Political Science, 11(1), 303–326. Tarrow, S. (2010). The strategy of paired comparison: Toward a theory of practice. Comparative Political Studies, 43(2), 230–259. Thelen, K. (2004). How institutions evolve: The political economy of skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge University Press. Trampusch, C. (2010). Employers, the state, and the politics of institutional change: Vocational education and training in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. European Journal of Political Research, 49(4), 545–573. Wahlström, N., & Sundberg, D. (2018). Discursive institutionalism: Towards a framework for analysing the relation between policy and curriculum. Journal of Education Policy, 33(1), 163–183. Wallenius, T., Juvonen, S., Hansen, P., & Varjo, J. (2018). Schools, accountability and transparency—Approaching the Nordic school evaluation practices through discursive institutionalism. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 4(3), 133–143. Welsh, H. A. (2004). Higher education in Germany: Reform in incremental steps. European Journal of Education, 39(3), 359–375. Wiborg, S. (2009). Education and social integration: Comprehensive schooling in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. Wiborg, S. (2010). Why is there no comprehensive education in Germany? A historical explanation. History of Education, 39(4), 539–556. Wilensky, H. L. (1975). The welfare state and equality: Structural and ideological roots of public expenditures. University of California Press. Willemse, N., & De Beer, P. (2012). Three worlds of educational welfare states? A comparative study of higher education systems across welfare states. Journal of European Social Policy, 22(2), 105–117.

CHAPTER 2

Organizing General Education

Introduction All advanced industrialized societies differentiate their youth populations. Complex modern systems of production predicated on the division of labor require mechanisms to separate new entrants to the workforce into different occupational categories. Such differentiation generally occurs in educational institutions, which serve as “sorting machines” (Spring, 1976) that channel young people toward different locations in the labor market on the basis of their educational attainment. For most young people, this sorting will take place after the upper primary or lower secondary stage of general education, prior to their entrance into more vocationally or more academically oriented upper secondary stages or into the labor market. While many aspects of education have been subjects of debate in Western European countries since World War II, it is arguably the organization of general education—and specifically the degree of stratification it creates—that has proven to be the most politically contentious. In countries with highly stratified systems, pupils are generally sorted in the final year of primary school (around age ten or eleven) into different school types that may vary in terms of curriculum, duration, certification, and prestige on the basis of past performance and perceived ability. In such systems, a student’s future education, occupation, and social position may © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_2

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depend on the results of the initial selection, since specific academic and career pathways are tightly linked to particular secondary school tracks and the transfer to a higher-status pathway after this sorting may be difficult. In countries in which general education is less stratified, by contrast, pupils attend not only mixed-ability primary schools, but generally also non-selective comprehensive secondary schools at least through the lower secondary level (about age sixteen) and in some instances through the upper secondary stage (usually around age eighteen). Differentiation into various upper and post-secondary educational pathways takes place after common secondary schooling, usually on the basis of personal choice, academic achievement, and/or exam performance (see Allmendinger, 1989, 233; Horn, 2009, 6–7; Shavit & Müller, 1998, 6–7). Although it is this system-level stratification that holds the most consequence for students’ life trajectories, differentiation may also occur within individual schools that cater to a range of abilities. Students attending the same school may still be separated through the practice of streaming, which involves splitting students into different ability groups that stay together for all lessons throughout the school day, and setting, where this type of dividing occurs only on a subject-to-subject basis (Gamoran, 2002). Streaming and setting may occur regardless of the system’s overall structure (i.e. within secondary education systems consisting of multiple differentiated school types and those with a single common school type) although school-level differentiation policies have less of an impact when there is already high differentiation at the system-level (OECD, 2009, 65).

General Education in Britain and Germany The contemporary British and German systems of general education demonstrate significant variation in their differentiation practices and levels of stratification, though—as discussed below—this was not the case for the first postwar decades. Germany’s education system is characterized by high levels of what the OECD terms “horizontal” differentiation, with the first age of selection in the FRG generally occurring for pupils at age 10 (the earliest age among OECD members) and four separate education programs available for students at age 15. Britain’s system, by contrast,

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Table 2.1 Education programs and age of selection in Germany and the United Kingdom Number of education programs available for students at age 15 Germany United Kingdom OECD average

4 1 3

First age of selection in the education system 10 16 14

Source OECD (2013, 78)

exhibits a low level of horizontal differentiation, with the first age of selection occurring at age 16 (the latest age among OECD members)—and only one education program available for 15-year-olds (Table 2.1).1 The OECD PISA study provides an overview of the variation in both vertical differentiation (marking the extent to which students of the same age attend the same grade level in a country’s general education system)2 and horizontal differentiation practices across all 34 OECD member states and highlights the placement of the German and British systems on different ends of the stratification spectrum (Table 2.2).

The German General Education System The high level of stratification in the German system stems from the “traditional” structure of state schooling that emerged in the nineteenth century.3 In this structure, primary education takes place in the common Grundschule or elementary school,4 with pupils usually sorted in their final primary year into one of three school types—the Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium—often on the basis of recommendations from elementary school teachers, following parent consultations.5 Grades five and six may constitute an “orientation stage” (Orientierungsstufe) or “support stage” (Förderstufe). The orientation stage is independent of a particular secondary school type and serves effectively as a two-year extension of primary school, with selection delayed until the sixth year. During this stage, students are further observed and assessed to ensure the accuracy of their secondary school placement. The support stage is similar, but unlike the orientation stage is associated with a specific secondary school type and selection continues to be made after the fourth year. Students may have their initial placement reassessed following the

Selective schools: 17%

Selective schools: 42%

Number of First age of school types or selection: 15.8 distinct educ. programs: 1.1

Number of First age of school types or selection: 14.5 distinct educ. programs: 3.0

Medium horizontal differentiation at the system level

Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, United States, United Kingdom Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Slovenia

Mexico, Portugal

Spain

Low horizontal differentiation at the school level Schools that group students by ability in all subjects: 8%

Low horizontal differentiation at the school level

High horizontal differentiation at the school level Schools that Schools that group students group students by ability in all by ability in all subjects: 8% subjects: 38%

High vertical differentiation

Low vertical differentiation

School differentiation practices in OECD countries

Low horizontal differentiation at the system level

Table 2.2

Luxembourg

High horizontal differentiation at the school level Schools that group students by ability in all subjects: 38% Chile

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Number of First age of school types or selection: 11.2 distinct educ. programs: 4.3

Source OECD (2010, Figure IV 3.1)

High horizontal differentiation at the system level Selective schools: 61%

Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic

Low vertical differentiation Turkey

Belgium, Germany

High vertical differentiation Netherlands, Switzerland

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support stage, with the possibility of movement to both a higher and lower school form after the sixth year (Helbig & Nikolai, 2015, 74). While all three of the traditional secondary schools are part of the same state system, they exist largely independent of one another, with each differing in relative level of academic and social prestige and each having its own specific courses of study, administration, faculty, and— significantly—associated alignments of political and economic interests. This separation among schools has been reinforced by the general absence of permeability (Durchlässigkeit ) or the ability to change school type after the initial selection at age ten (Carey, 2008, 26). The most prestigious of the secondary school types is the Gymnasium, which in most instances provides a nine-year classical curriculum centered on traditional liberal subjects such as history and culture as well as language training in Greek and Latin. Successful completion of the Abitur exams administered at the end of the Gymnasium results in the granting of the Allgemeine Hochschulreife, a secondary school-leaving certificate required in most cases for admission to a German university.6 With a university degree needed for entry into the leading professional occupations, such as medicine or law, and higher civil service positions within the German state administration, the Gymnasium has served as a gateway to advanced social and economic standing. The middle school type is the Realschule (or Mittelschule), which provides a course of study comprised of technical and practical subjects such as science, engineering, economics, and modern foreign languages. Students completing the Realschule (usually around age sixteen) receive the Realschulabschluss,7 a certificate that provides access to upper secondary education in a full-time vocational college (Berufsfachschule) or an upper technical school (Fachoberschule), as well as entry into the dual system of apprenticeship and vocational training. Students who pass special qualifying exams following their upper secondary studies can obtain the Fachhochschulreife, a qualification for admission to a polytechnic or college of advanced technology (Fachhochschulen). Realschulabschluss recipients may also, in some cases, continue to a Gymnasium and the Abitur. Young people following this intermediate path have traditionally obtained mid-level management and supervisory positions in the state bureaucracy or service sector of the economy, often within technical or administrative departments. Although Realschulen have existed in Germany since the eighteenth century and became a favored educational

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destination for children of the country’s emerging capitalist classes in the nineteenth century, it was not until the post-World War II era that it would come to assume a significant percentage of the total student population (Ertl & Phillips, 2000, 399; Kuhlmann, 1970, 145). The basic educational school type in the German system is the Hauptschule.8 In this type, attended by a significant majority of young Germans until the 1970s, the curriculum is geared toward instruction in reading, writing, and math skills. Upon completion around age fifteen, students receive a certificate (Hauptschulabschluss or Berufsschulreife) that serves as the minimum qualification needed to enter the dual system but does not itself provide a qualification for entry into a specific career. Hauptschule graduates have historically moved into manual occupations in the industrial or craft sectors of the economy upon completing the three years of in-firm apprentice training and part-time classroom study required under the dual system (Ertl & Phillips, 2000; Nixdorff, 1969). Some Länder also introduced non-selective schools, or Gesamtschulen, which offer mixed-ability classes and provide opportunities for all students to obtain higher qualifications, starting in the 1970s. Although authorities would come officially to recognize the Gesamtschule as an alternative to the three-tiered system, the unwillingness of several large Länder, notably Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, to adopt this school model on even a small scale kept the total percentage of young Germans attending such schools fairly low. Even in those areas where it is most common, the Gesamtschule was viewed as experimental for much of its history (Ertl & Phillips, 2000, 395–396). Despite a significant decline in Hauptschule enrollments since 2000 and an increase in the number of Gesamtschule attendees, a significant majority of German students continued to attend one of the three traditional school types into the 2010s; nearly 70% of Germany’s 4.2 million secondary school students were enrolled in a Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium in the 2014–2015 school year (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2016, 12–13) (Fig. 2.1). While the basic organization of general education in Germany has persisted since the nineteenth century, significant changes within the system have occurred in recent decades. Notable among these has been the marked decline in Hauptschule enrollments since the 1970s and the commensurate rise in attendance at Gymnasien and Realschulen during the same period (Bellenberg, 2012, 6). Many Hauptschulen have closed their doors permanently or merged with Realschulen into a single school with dual educational tracks (see Chapter 10 for a discussion).

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SECONDARY STAGE II Upper Gymnasium Gymnasium (usually grades 10-12) and School Types with Three Educational Tracks (usually grades 11-13) SECONDARY STAGE I Gesamtschule and School Types with Three Educational Tracks (5-10 grade)1

School Types with Two Educational Tracks (510 grade)2 Hauptschule Realschule (grades 5-9/10) (grades 5-10)

Gymnasium (grades 5-9/10)

PRIMARY STAGE Elementary School (grades

1-4)3

PRESCHOOL/ EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION Kindergarten/Day Care (non-obligatory)

Fig. 2.1 The German general education system (Types with three tracks include the Integrated and Cooperative (Integrierte and Kooperative) Gesamtschule and the Community School (Gemeinschaftsschule) in Baden-Württemberg, Saar, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia, the Integrated Secondary School (Integrierte Sekundarschule) in Berlin, the Regional School (Regionale Schule) in Mecklenburg–West Pomerania, the District School (Stadtteilschule) in Hamburg, and the Secondary School (Sekundarschule) in North Rhine-Westphalia; Types with two tracks include the Continuing (Erweiterte) Realschule in the Saar, the Hauptand Realschule in Hamburg, the High School (Oberschule) in Brandenburg, the Realschule plus in Rhineland-Palatinate, the Regular School (Regelschule) in Thuringia, the Regional School (Regionale Schule) in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the Regional School (Regionalschule) in Schleswig-Holstein, the Secondary School (Sekundarschule) in Bremen and Saxony-Anhalt, the Combined (Verbundene) Haupt- und Realschule and Middle Stage School (Mittelstufenschule) in Hesse; Grades 1–6 in Berlin and Brandenburg) (Source Adapted from KMK [2017, 2–3])

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A further development involves the de-linking of particular qualifications and educational pathways from specific school types. By 2006, for example, over one-third of higher education entrance qualifications went to graduates of vocational schools rather than the Gymnasium (Carey, 2008, 26). Although experiencing growth in recent years,9 the independent school sector in Germany has traditionally played a less important role in the overall education system than in other countries. Around nine percent of German students attended an independent school in the 2016– 2017 school year (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2018, 11). Though this figure is roughly equivalent to attendance rates in the better-known independent system in Britain, there are significant differences between private schooling in the two countries. The historical absence of a hierarchy of prestige among postsecondary institutions in Germany10 largely eliminated one of the traditional advantages of private school attendance, namely privileged access to elite higher education institutions. Since successful Abiturienten have been technically eligible to study in any of the traditional universities in the FRG, there could be no German equivalent to the link in England between elite independent schools such as Eton and Harrow and the Oxbridge universities.11 Fees for German private schools are also relatively low compared to their English equivalents. With some 90% of their operating costs publicly subsidized and the system subject to government control and standards, the term “private” is somewhat of a misnomer (Hahn 1998, 115).

The British General Education System The administration of the education system in Britain is distributed across national, regional, and local authorities. In England, the largest of the four primary constitutive regions in the United Kingdom, responsibility for education was divided under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition between the Department for Education, which oversees planning and the monitoring of schools, and the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS), which administered further and higher education. Under Prime Minister Theresa May, BIS was disbanded in 2016 and further and higher education returned to the Department of Education, where it remains in Boris Johnson’s government. As a “devolved” policy sector in the UK, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each maintains administrative departments to oversee its respective educational system.12

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Governance at the local level has also traditionally played an important role in general education, with local authorities responsible for many aspects of school organization, budgeting, and administration. While the structure of general education has remained largely the same in the FRG since the country’s creation in 1949, in Britain the postwar era has been marked by the presence of at least two different organizational structures in England, Wales, and Scotland. In England and Wales was the so-called “tripartite system,” established following the Education Act 1944, served as the first system. Distinctly selective in its organization, the secondary modern, technical, and grammar schools that existed under the tripartite framework roughly approximated the three school types in the traditional German system, with each school distinguished by its curriculum, prestige, and the access to future educational and occupational opportunities it afforded its graduates. Under tripartitism, selection was determined largely by a student’s performance on a special examination given around age eleven, commonly known as the “11-plus.” Grammar schools were the most prestigious of the three types in the system, designed only for students of the highest ability and offering an academic curriculum similar to the German Gymnasium that emphasized literature and languages, as well as higher mathematics. Until the 1960s, only grammar school students were eligible to sit the General Certificate of Education (GCE)13 exams usually required for university admissions. The secondary technical school served as the middle school in the system. Like the German Realschule it provided young people with mechanical, engineering, and scientific skills designed to prepare them for careers in industry and commerce. The final and least prestigious school type under the tripartite system was the secondary modern, which was intended for those students who could demonstrate neither academic nor technical aptitude. Modern students, like their counterparts in the Hauptschule, received only a basic education and received no qualification at all until the Certificate of Secondary Education examinations became available in the mid-1960s as a lower status alternative to GCE exams taken by grammar school students.14 Although the education system in Scotland has historically been separately administered from those in England and Wales, it was generally coordinated with initiatives and legislation south of the border (see McPherson & Raab, 1988, 34). Such was the case with the 1945 Education Act, which was based on the 1944 English and Welsh Act, and helped formalize Scotland’s own system of secondary school selection

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that would last until reforms in the 1960s. Unlike in England and Wales, the selective system in Scotland involved two-tiers, consisting of five-year senior secondary schools, which prepared students for the Scottish Leaving Certificate examinations and university entry, and threeyear junior secondary schools, whose graduates would receive the Junior School Certificate and could be expected to enter a trade. Much as in England and Wales, however, Scottish pupils’ school placement depended significantly on their performance on an assessment test called the “qualifying exam” given to pupils at the end of their primary education around age eleven or twelve. As Chapters 4 through 6 examine, national-level reform of the selective general education systems in Britain began in the 1960s and by the end of the 1970s most of the English and effectively all of the Scottish and Welsh secondary schools had been replaced by mixed-ability comprehensive schools. Although critics claim that the continued operation of grammar schools in some areas, the increase in “internal” differentiation practices such as streaming and setting, and the permitted use of selection for a small percentage of students at the new specialist schools has moved Britain—and specifically England—away from the comprehensive “ideal” (Chitty, 2012; Haydn, 2004), most secondary schools in the the state education system continued to be designated as comprehensive into the 2000s (Table 2.3).15 In England and Wales, compulsory education begins at age five and continues through age sixteen.16 With the introduction of the National Curriculum in the Education Act 1988, general education was divided into four “Key Stages,” with the first two stages covering the period of primary school through age eleven and Stages 3 and 4 encompassing Table 2.3 Percentage of state secondary school pupils by school type in Britain 1970–2002 Year 1970/1971 1980/1981 1990/1991 2001/2002

Comprehensive (%)

Grammar (%)

Secondary modern (%)

Other (%)

37.0 82.1 84.2 85.8

18.9 3.3 4.5 5.3

32.8 5.1 2.7 2.6

11.3 9.5 8.6 6.3

Source Adapted from Office for National Statistics (2003, Table 3.3)

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secondary education. Toward the end of Key Stage 4, students prepare for examinations to obtain the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). GCSE exams are subject-based and students generally sit ten separate exams in core academic areas such as English, maths, science, and modern or classical languages, or in vocational subjects, including applied business, engineering, manufacturing, and applied science. In this system, differentiation usually occurs following the completion of the GCSE around age sixteen, at which time students can select from a set of available options. For students intending to study at a university, the most common pathway involves an additional two years of upper secondary study in the “sixth form,” which may be completed in secondary school or at a special sixth-form college.17 Admission criteria for entry into the sixth form are not standardized and schools can set their own requirements. In the sixth-form students prepare for the General Certificate of Education Advanced-level examinations (A-levels), which like the GCSE exams are offered on a subject-by-subject basis. A-level certification is the most common pathway to higher education admission, with universities considering A-level progress when deciding whether to extend an acceptance offer. In Scotland, differentiation also takes place around age sixteen, when students complete the fourth year of compulsory secondary education they began around age eleven or twelve (years S1–S4) and sit the National 4 and 5 exams that replaced the Standard and Intermediate Grade qualifications. As in England and Wales, students may remain in school to complete two additional years of study (years S5–S6). In the fifth year, students take the subject-based Higher exams, which serve as a qualification for entry into a Scottish university. Students who have passed Highers may also sit the more demanding Advanced Highers exams in their sixth year of secondary schooling. Successful completion of Advanced Highers can offer subject exemptions or direct entry into three-year degree programs at an English university or the second year of a four-year degree program at a Scottish university. British students who choose to leave secondary school upon reaching the minimum-school-leaving age may enter the job market or obtain vocational skills and qualifications in a further education college, government-training scheme, or apprenticeship. Compared to countries that have well-established dual systems of training, such as Germany, vocational education and the in-firm apprentice system in particular have been

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regarded as underdeveloped in Britain (Finegold & Soskice, 1988; House of Lords, 2007). With approximately seven percent of pupils attending private schools in Britain, the independent sector is roughly equivalent in size to Germany’s, but it has historically played a much more important role, with its graduates holding disproportionate access to elite institutions in the country’s higher education sector and positions of political power. According to a Sutton Trust study of the 2019 UK general elections, 29% of all MPs elected that year attended private schools, including 41% of Conservatives, 30% of Liberal Democrats, and 14% of Labour (Montacute, 2019). Despite an overrepresentation of four-fold relative to the general population, the percentage of private school graduates in the 2019 Commons represents a marked decrease since 1979, when nearly half of all MPs had attended private schools, including three of four Conservative MPs (Montacute & Carr, 2017). The role of private schools in cultivating British (and especially English) elites made it a highly contentious political issue in the postwar era. As the case studies discuss, concerns about their disproportionate power would be a major factor driving support for state-funded grammar schools in the early twentieth century and the tripartite system of secondary schools that emerged after the Second World War.

Why Differentiation Matters: The Effects of School Selection Practices A range of studies have highlighted the importance of the organization of general education in countries for students’ academic performance and social and economic outcomes. In her influential study of the FRG, Norway, and the United States, Allmendinger (1989) noted its significance in the transition from education to work in advanced democracies,18 finding that the greater the level of stratification in a country’s secondary education system, the “tighter” the relationship between educational attainment and occupation.19 In highly stratified systems, the school-leaving certificates that students obtain in the differentiated tracks correspond with specific clusters of occupations: employers can thus rely on the selective process to channel and sift young people into appropriate occupational categories, limiting the amount of individual screening that firms themselves must carry out to bring on new employees and reducing the costs associated with developing their own selection processes. For

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workers with such qualifications who are newly entering the labor market, this has the advantage of ensuring that their first jobs will actually require them to use the specific skills they obtained during education. At the same time, however, Allmendinger found that stratification can dramatically limit the range of jobs available to school-leavers in a given ability category and reduce opportunities for career transfers later in life. The degree of stratification can thus exert a powerful influence on a country’s social structure and serve “to regulate entry into the class and status system on almost all levels” (1989, 240). Moreover, students who fail to obtain a qualification are marginalized in stratified systems, since entry into skilled employment generally requires commensurate certification and those who drop out prior to completing a course of study often end up in lower paying, unskilled positions with few of the protections available to their educated counterparts. In unstratified secondary systems, by contrast, Allmendinger argued that individuals and jobs tend to be “unbound.” The absence of early differentiation within secondary education means that curricula and certifications are not as closely tied to specific occupational or future educational pathways. As a consequence, the transition from school to work is far less institutionalized in these countries; school-leavers face a more differentiated labor market than their counterparts in countries with stratified secondary systems and frequently must rely on individual initiative rather than the strength and substance of their educational qualifications in obtaining a job. The absence of a strong link between qualifications and occupations also makes career mobility much higher in these countries; workers regularly transfer not only to new positions but routinely move to entirely new industries. Drawing on Allmendinger, Shavit and Müller (1998) also found that stratification within secondary education is highly correlated with vocational specificity—the more specific the skills provided for in the education system, the earlier students tend to be differentiated into educational tracks. In countries with early selection, the practice serves to reinforce the separation of academic education and vocational training, with the latter being provided largely outside of the general education system through apprenticeship programs conducted within firms and administered by businesses through their organizational representatives. Such conclusions are borne out in Britain and Germany; stratification in the Federal Republic is associated with a high-level vocational specificity, while the opposite holds for the British system (see Müller, 2005, 473).

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Perhaps the most politically contentious issues related to differentiation practices have involved their perceived effects on academic achievement and social mobility. Studies on the academic impact of differentiation have considered whether pupils are more likely to learn in classes comprised of comparably able and interested peers in which instructors are not required to adjust the curriculum or learning pace to accommodate students of varying ability levels. In their analysis of Dutch students, Dobbelsteen et al. (2002) found that reducing class sizes had a negative effect on academic performance and hypothesized that the reason could be found in the commensurate decrease such a reduction brought about in the number of students of comparable IQ. The implication from these findings was that students would be better served by placing them in tracks with similar-ability peers.20 Not all studies find evidence of academic benefits to stratification, however. In examining the performance of 45 countries’ students on various international assessments given between 1995 and 2003 Hanushek and Wößmann concluded that early differentiation failed to provide an academic advantage to any group, writing that “the most striking finding is that in no case do some students gain at the expense of others; both high and low achievers lose” from the practice (2006, C74).21 Research into social mobility and school structure has focused largely on the question of whether stratification perpetuates social inequalities across generations.22 While studies have found that parents’ income and educational attainment are related to those of their children in countries with both high and low levels of stratification (see Feinstein & Symons, 1999), this relationship appears to be enhanced in countries where early selection is prevalent and parents’ influence in selection is stronger. Marks’ (2005) analysis of the data from the 2000 OECD PISA study found that the impact of class background on academic performance was increased by the presence of more school tracks in an education system. The 2012 PISA study similarly found that the effects of students’ socio-economic status on their math skills were significantly heightened in education systems that sorted pupils into different academic programs and grouped them into different tracks at an early age, attributing 39% of the variation in the effect of socio-economic standing on math scores to differences in the age of selection, even when controlling for differences in national wealth (OECD, 2013, 36).

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For the most part, studies focusing on the effects of student differentiation in Germany have noted the high level of inequality produced by the FRG’s selective secondary system (Pfeffer, 2008; Schneider, 2008). Dustmann (2004) found that the socio-economic and educational background of pupils’ parents heavily influenced school placement decisions and that early student differentiation contributed to significant wage differences between the children of parents who attended a more prestigious secondary school and those who attended a lower status school. Schneider and Tieben (2011) argued that despite significant changes in the distribution of the student population across the three secondary school types since 1970 and large increases in Realschule and Gymnasium enrollments, the social inequalities persist in access to upper secondary education. A different study by Dustmann et al. (2012), however, found that one of the key criticisms of early differentiation may be overstated, namely that selection at age ten is simply too early to make a determination and that an incorrect assessment of learning potential at that age may lead to placement in a lower track school, locking a student into a less advanced pathway than his or her ability actually merits. Specifically, they found that the track attended during the middle years of secondary education has no effect on a student’s longer-term prospects, such as the highest degree completed, wage level, and occupational choice. The reasons, they argued, are found in the possibility for students to continue to a higher level school after completing the course of study for a lower level one (such as transferring to a Gymnasium after completing the Realschule), which serves as a built-in “retracking” mechanism that may correct inaccurate initial placements. For Britain, findings about the relationship between the structure of the education system and the social mobility of students are more mixed. A much-discussed 2005 Sutton Trust report by economists at the London School of Economics (Blanden et al., 2005) found that the rates of intergenerational mobility in Britain were lower than in the Nordic Countries, Canada, and possibly even Germany. According to the study, which looked at the cohorts born in 1958 and 1970, a core factor for Britain’s comparatively low mobility rate was attributed to how increased educational opportunities that emerged after the 1960s were disproportionately taken by students from wealthier families. Although the study made no direct reference to the shift to comprehensive schooling that largely took place in the period between the two cohorts’ school years,

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many observers, as Boliver and Swift (2011, 90–91) noted, were quick to make the link, arguing that comprehensivization, which had been offered as a remedy to the social inequities of the selective system, had actually strengthened the relationship among family background, educational attainment, and social mobility. Examining data from the same National Childhood Development Study used in the Sutton Trust study, Boliver and Swift found no overall advantage from the old selective system in terms of social mobility, and maintained that any increase in mobility that grammar schools afforded to less affluent children were “cancelled out” by the disadvantages experienced by those students who attended the lower prestige secondary modern schools. A similar conclusion was reached by Harris and Rose (2013) in their study of the education authority in Buckinghamshire in Southeast England, one of the few authorities to have maintained a fully selective system since the comprehensivization drive in the 1960s and 1970s. They found that the percentage of grammar school students in the authority eligible for free school meals based on their parents’ income was quite low, suggesting that the selective system did not encourage greater social mobility. Moreover, the study found that while grammar pupils were academically more successful than their peers from a neighboring non-selective authority (based on exam performance), those not in the grammar track in Buckinghamshire were less successful. A further study by researchers at the University of Bristol found that the presence of grammar school system widened economic inequality, creating a larger wage gap between the highest and lowest earners in LEAs that retained selection than was observed in those with comprehensive schools (Burgess et al., 2014). Researchers have also considered the effects of variation among LEAs that retained grammar schools after the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Lu’s (2020) analysis of the opportunities to attend grammar school opportunities in the 36 local authorities (from a total of 152) that kept their grammars found considerable variation from one education area to another both in selection criteria and the percentage of pupils accepted for grammar placement. While she found no evidence of bias toward specific groups in the process of selection, she also found pupils from more advantaged backgrounds were more likely to apply in those LEAs with more grammar places, concluding that expanding selective grammar schools would not—as proponents of selection often claim—promote social mobility.

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Conclusion Developments in the organization of general education in postwar Britain and Germany serve as an illustrative and informative paired-case study of continuity and change in social institutions. The general education systems in the two countries would come to follow very different trajectories from roughly comparable starting points. The British case surely provides one of the most significant and large-scale instances of institutional change observed in the UK after 1945. And this transformation did not occur within a narrow policy sector with indirect or diffuse effects on the population, but in a state institution in which the vast majority of all citizens directly participate. For the German case, the continuity of the traditional three-tiered school system with clear ties to a nineteenthcentury authoritarian order across two World Wars, military occupation, democratization, and unification represents, as Green and Wiborg (2004, 233) aptly describe it, “something of a mystery to educational research” that likewise merits examination. Beyond their empirical interest, these cases also provide an opportunity to consider education’s place in wider conceptions of institutional development. Despite varying conclusions regarding the particular effects of differentiation, the studies cited in the previous section share the view that it matters for outcomes ranging from the structure of the labor market to the distribution of life chances to the level of equality in societies. Such issues lie at the heart of discussions over the modern welfare state and the provision of social goods. But if the organization of general education matters for social and economic outcomes, has it been shaped by the same factors we observe with other socio-economic institutions? More specifically, do patterns identified in the institutional trajectories of other features of education systems and other components of welfare states also apply to the structure of primary and secondary schooling? In the next chapter, we turn to an overview of reigning explanations for educational and welfare state development and consider whether these approaches can adequately account for the variation in the British and German education cases that this chapter has highlighted.

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Notes 1. While both the UK and Germany have low levels of horizontal differentiation at the school level, this is less relevant in outlining their overall variation because, as noted above, high systemic differentiators such as Germany have already separated their students before entry into secondary school. 2. For a further discussion see OECD (2010, 35). 3. An additional feature of the traditional system involves the comparatively short duration of the average school day. Historically, German schools met only in the mornings, with classes often ending for the day before noon and no provision made for school lunches or extracurricular activities (Hahn, 1998, 115). Under this system, parents were expected to monitor their children’s completion of homework in the afternoons. Critics maintained that this arrangement served to disadvantage students from families in which both parents worked or were uneducated, limiting the possibilities for intergenerational academic advancement and elevating the importance of parental class and wealth for individual students’ educational achievement. Spurred by such concerns and buoyed by a 2003 capital spending agreement reached by federal and Land authorities, communities have experimented increasingly in with Ganztagsschulen (all day schools) in which students remain in classes through mid-afternoon. The number of these schools nearly doubled from 28 to 54% of all German schools between 2005 and 2010 (Fischer et al., 2013, 6). 4. In Berlin and Brandenburg, primary education encompasses grades one through six but in the other German Länder, which oversee education under the Federal Republic’s Basic Law, includes only grades one through four, or from ages six to ten. 5. For an overview of the different placement practices across the Bund, see KMK (2017, 119–150). 6. While the Abitur grants its holders admissions to German universities, it does not guarantee access to all fields of study. Under the provisions of the numerus clausus system as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, university departments could limit the number of Abiturienten it would admit for specific majors (often medicine or law), accepting only a select number of students based on a specific set of admissions criteria (see Katzenstein, 1987). 7. Also known as the Mittlere Reife or Fachoberschulreife. 8. Prior to the extension of mandatory general education in 1964, this school type was generally referred to as the Volksschule. The Hauptschule usually comprises grades five through nine, though there is significant variation among Länder, depending the duration of the common Grundschule, the presence or absence of a two-year, mixed-ability orientation level, and

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

whether the Land has adopted a tenth year of mandatory schooling (Führ, 1997, 109). Between 1992 and 2008, the total number of independent schools increased by 55% (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2009, 15, 17). The “Excellence Initiative” (Exzellenzinitiative) launched by the federal and state governments in 2005 to create “elite” universities in the FRG by encouraging institutions to promote research represented an attempt to change the long-standing equality of prestige among German higher education institutions (for an overview see Stuchtey, 2008). While both Germany and Britain have seen significant increases in the number of students obtaining tertiary degrees since the 1970s, tertiary attainment levels remain comparatively low in the FRG. In 2019, the percentage of Germans ages 16–54 with tertiary educational attainment was 25.9%, below the EU plus UK average of 29.5% and significantly lower than the UK figure of 40.6% (Statistical Office of the European Communities, 2020). For a discussion of educational devolution and comprehensive schooling from a historical perspective in the UK, see Phillips (2003). Introduced in the early 1950s, GCE exams consisted of Ordinary (O) levels after the completion of lower-secondary schooling and Advanced (A) levels after two additional years of upper secondary study. The two-tiered system of lower secondary qualifications would end in 1988, when the common General Certificate of Secondary Education replaced the Certificate of Secondary Education and O-levels. The question over the extent to which the present general education system in Britain can be called comprehensive remains an issue of debate within British education circles. At a 2011 panel discussion at the University of Leicester entitled Comprehensive School Education—Policy Mistake, Lost Ideal or Model for the Future? supporters of all-ability schooling argued that the present system was far from comprehensive in nature, while grammar school proponents on the panel maintained that the system was in fact a comprehensive one (see Lightfoot, 2011). Since 2015, students in England have been required to remain in some form of education or training until age eighteen, representing the first raising of the school leaving age since 1972. The term “sixth form” is carried over from an earlier period in which individual years within English secondary education were referred to as “forms.” Under the old system, the sixth form generally represented the final year. The designation of school years as “forms” continues in some independent schools. See also Kerckhoff (2000). The other dimension considered by Allmendinger is the level of standardization in the system, or the extent to which there is uniformity

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in the training and certification of teachers, the academic curricula, school-leaving exams, and access to resources (see Allmendinger, 1989, 233). 20. Although Dobblesteen et al. recognized that their findings could be viewed as a “plea for tracking” (2002, 37), they maintained that other benefits may be derived from mixed-ability classes. 21. Others finding that early tracking systems lead both to high levels of educational inequality and lower average academic performance include Entorf and Lauk (2008), Ammermüller (2005), and Schütz and Wössmann (2005). 22. The effects of school organization on the equality of outcomes for migrant populations and young women have also been a focus for researchers. Entorf and Tatsi’s study (2009) of the educational success of students with migrant backgrounds in Britain and Germany found that selective schooling in the FRG served as a “social multiplier” which could “magnify the prevailing inequality between students who enter schools with a low parental socioeconomic background and children from more privileged families” (2009, 4–5). And Pekkarinen (2008) demonstrated that girls in Finland were more likely to enter the academic track after the education system switched from early (age ten) to late differentiation (age sixteen) following structural reforms in the 1970s and that this change contributed to a closing in the wage differential between women and men observed since then.

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Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschlands. (2018). Private Schulen—Fachserie 11 Reihe 1.1—Schuljahr 2017/2018. Retrieved March 3, 2019, from https:// www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildung-ForschungKultur/Schulen/Publikationen/Downloads-Schulen/private-schulen-211011 0187004.html Statistical Office of the European Communities. (2020). Population by educational attainment level, sex and age (%) [Data file]. Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset= edat_lfs_9903&lang=en Stuchtey, T. H. (2008). The Excellence Initiative and its effect on the German university system. AICGS Advisor, 10.

CHAPTER 3

Explaining Educational Outcomes

Introduction How are we best to explain the differential trajectories for the organization of general education in Britain and Germany highlighted in the last chapter? Addressing this question offers the opportunity to consider not only existing perspectives on national educational variation but also a larger set of theoretical and conceptual issues associated with welfare states and institutional development in advanced democracies. This chapter begins with an overview of three influential approaches for explaining educational variation. The macro-sociological perspective is associated largely with an earlier generation of comparative studies by educational sociologists and historians.1 With roots in Marx and Weber, these approaches seek to assess the uneven historical development of national education systems separate from the medieval, largely church-run institutions that existed before them, and place educational outcomes in terms of broader historical processes of modernization, which include the rise of nation states and state institutions, the emergence of capitalism, and the development of modern socio-economic cleavages. Comparative welfare perspectives frequently consider education in terms of other welfare policies and government efforts to address social risk in industrialized market economies. These approaches tend to emphasize, to different degrees, the size and strength of social classes, patterns of class-coalitions, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_3

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and the interests and organizational resources of producer groups in shaping education. The final perspective consists of a more recent set of studies highlighting how partisan ideology has contributed to educational variation. Studies in this category draw on the other two approaches in considering national differences in education practices, while underscoring the role played by the variable ideological commitments to such practices among key national partisan actors. Careful consideration of these perspectives can serve to identify variables to be assessed in the historical case studies. While the studies find that each perspective provides important insights into understanding the differential development of British and German postwar general education, none can provide a full account of the outcomes observed in the cases. They cannot explain, for example, why particular education policy programs were promoted by actors in Britain and the FRG in the postwar period and how these programs achieved—or failed to achieve—broad legitimacy and public acceptance. Accounting for such outcomes requires an explanatory framework oriented around a set of factors less frequently considered in existing comparative studies of education, namely ideational and communicative variables. To the extent that existing perspectives have considered such factors, they have either helped to form what Mark Blyth (2002, 23) refers to as “auxiliary hypotheses” that are secondary to primary material hypotheses, or have been represented in ways that cannot account for changes in actors’ policy preferences. The second part of the chapter outlines a framework in which ideas and discourses are taken to be primary factors in the formation and institutional trajectories of general education systems over time. In this framework, actors are viewed as cognitive agents for whom preferences can become unfixed and reconstructed, particularly during periods of fundamental change and discontinuity, and who can both shape and be shaped by the structures in which they act. To this view, ideas and discourses are not simply reflections of material interests, but viewed as independent causal forces, which in addition to contributing to the formation of interests, can serve as rallying points for new coalitions, shape new policy proposals, promote public legitimation, and effect durable institutional change. While emphasis is placed on nonmaterial factors in this framework, it does not see them as exclusive causes. Drawing on both discursive and historical institutional approaches in comparative politics, the framework highlights the dynamic between ideas and communicative processes,

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on one side, and a mix of structural conditions, path dependence, and temporal sequences, on the other, that drove postwar general education in Britain and the FRG in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Comparative Perspectives on Education Education practices and policies have long been topics of interest to the social sciences, although explicitly comparative research is a fairly recent development. The studies within these categories do not always reach similar conclusions about the causal processes that generated educational outcomes and may even report sharply different findings, but they generally share a methodological orientation, an emphasis on particular clusters of actors and sequences, and a similar disciplinary tradition. Macro-sociological Perspectives The studies in this category share an interest in explaining the origins and early developmental trajectories of national education systems. They frequently emphasize how these systems were birthed by conflicts between opposing forces,2 which came to view education as a crucial site for power and influence, and how they served as venues for the reproduction of social class and status in modern societies.3 Two macro-sociological studies have been particularly significant for conceptions of general education development. The first is Margaret Archer’s highly influential study of Russia, France, England, and Denmark (1984), which stands as one of the first efforts to conduct a genuinely comparative analysis of the origin of national education systems. Rejecting the determinism of functionalist and Marxist accounts, Archer adopts a Weberian perspective that focuses on the conflicts over education between specific groups, with the churches and—depending on the country—the professional, commercial, or industrial classes playing key roles. She argues that the types of strategies different groups adopted in promoting their visions of education systems were shaped by the groups’ relative power and the inherited structural conditions in which they operated. From these conditions and conflicts emerged national systems that were either more centralized, as in France and Russia, where national authorities wielded significant control over a uniformly structured system, or decentralized, as in England and Denmark, where competency over education was assumed by local actors and schooling demonstrated a wide diversity

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of local arrangements. The relative centralization of a country’s system, in turn, conditioned future patterns of education policy and politics. The organization of schooling after World War II figures prominently in Archer’s analysis of the effects of England’s decentralized system. While she finds that direction from the center has been possible in the system at times (such as with the 1944 Education Act), she also argues that local authorities could demonstrate considerable influence over education decision-making. Such was the case with local experiments with comprehensive schools in the 1950s, which she finds took place despite resistance from the Tory national government in London “in a manner inconceivable in the centralized system” (1984, 152). A direct consequence of this decentralized structure was the absence of a single nation-wide model of comprehensive school when comprehensivization was pursued in England at the national level in the mid-1960s and the enduring variety of comprehensive school schemes that emerged at the local level (1984, 184–185). The second study is Green’s (2013) comparative analysis of the development of national education systems in France, England, Prussia, and the United States.4 While he does not directly touch on the organization of general education in this work, his findings have implications for issues related to the structure of primary and secondary schooling and student selection and differentiation.5 In contrast to Archer’s emphasis on patterns of group conflict, Green associates variation in the development of education systems with variation in the development of modern states. Control over education, he finds, provided a means to achieve a range of objectives viewed as crucial by state builders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The major impetus for the creation of national education systems,” he writes, “lay in the need to provide the state with trained administrations, engineers, and military personnel; to spread dominant national cultures and inculcate popular ideologies of nationhood; and so to forge the political and cultural unity of burgeoning nation states and cement the ideological hegemony of their dominant classes” (298). For the European states he considers, the early creation of national systems in France and Prussia was tied to the intensive statebuilding processes experienced in those countries, which themselves were the result of specific political and economic conditions. In England, by contrast, the absence of such conditions led to a much later establishment of a national education system lacking the national cohesion seen in the French and Prussian systems.

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Archer and Green’s studies are landmarks in the comparative study of education; as Wiborg notes, until these studies historical accounts on education had previously been limited to individual countries with little effort to provide systematic explanations for national differences (2009, 20). Both works offer important insights that can be applied to the cases studied here. Archer’s analysis demonstrates how structural conditions produced by historical conflicts, such as the relative centralization of the education system, can endure over time to continue to shape patterns of educational policy development, including policies related to student differentiation and early selection. As the case studies in this book outline, the degree of centralization affected the general education outcomes in Britain and Germany and in particular the relative success or failure of reform initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. Green’s view of the salience of state objectives and developmental patterns for education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries likewise is useful for understanding the postwar cases examined here; education became a pivotal component in British and German state strategies after 1945, as state actors increasingly viewed it as crucial for a range of economic, social, and even geo-strategic goals. The explanatory contributions of these approaches, while significant, cannot be fully realized without incorporating ideas and discourses. In both studies, ideational causes are subordinate to material causes. Archer’s group-oriented framework emphasizes organizational resources, structural factors, and competition among economic and political interests to explain the development of modern education systems. To the degree that ideas play a part in Archer’s framework, actors deploy them in a largely instrumental manner as a mechanism for promoting and legitimating economic and political goals and achieving material ends.6 As such, while it can contribute to knowledge of the background of material factors that shaped education, the framework adds less to understanding the foreground of reformist ideas, policy change, and legitimation. Nonmaterial factors play a more significant part in Green’s work. In addition to emphasizing the role of the state, his framework draws on distinctly Marxist notions of dominant class interest coupled with those of hegemony and ideology formulated by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who maintained that dominant economic classes seek to retain their leading social positions by promoting ideas and beliefs across societies—including those held by subordinate classes—that are consistent with their economic interests. To the extent that the dominant group’s

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views are successfully challenged by those of subordinate groups, it represents strategic compromises and is not the result of a fundamental shift in beliefs or change in ideas. A hegemonic order is thus created that both favors the dominant social class and sets the boundaries for ideological debate in the society, including in the education system.7 “It was the different forms of hegemony operating between the dominant and subordinate classes,” Green writes, “which was ultimately responsible for what the schools did, for who they allowed to go to what type of school and for what they taught when they were there” (2013, 300). The cases examined here, however, demonstrate that ideas are not necessarily reflections of the economic interests of particular social classes, but instead can serve to help actors realize what their interests and institutional preferences are. A reevaluation of the purpose and potential of schooling in Britain and the FRG that stemmed from new ideas and beliefs about the nature of human ability and the relationship between education and economics in the postwar period led core policy actors to reconceptualize their preferences in fundamental ways. In this context, seemingly hard ideological tenets could change and new policy ideas—including those largely at odds with practices similarly positioned actors had previously endorsed—could be promoted and, in some cases, realized. Comparative Welfare State Perspectives The second category consists of comparative welfare state approaches. Although education was frequently ignored in an earlier generation of welfare state studies (for a discussion see Sass, 2015, 241), scholars working within the “educational turn” in comparative politics have regularly drawn on well-established welfare state literatures including, most notably, the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach and power resources theory (PRT).8 These perspectives generally emphasize the material interests of specific producer groups in shaping particular national welfare state arrangements, with outcomes driven largely by relative power, organizational resources, and/or institutional logic. The basic argument of the VoC approach, familiar to scholars since the publication of the edited volume by Hall and Soskice (2001) that launched its vast research program, maintains that political economies of advanced industrialized countries can be broadly categorized into liberal or coordinated market economic types by how firms and their

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representative organizations interact across different spheres or clusters of political-economic institutions. Crucial in understanding the shape of national welfare states and education systems in this framework are the skill demands of employers. As Iversen and Soskice (2006) argue, in coordinated market economies employers prefer extensive vocational education systems that provide specific skills and are more likely to support the provision of greater levels of social protection than those in liberal market economies with weaker vocational training and more extensive higher education systems that provide more general skills.9 Education-turn scholars have examined a range of educational institutions and outcomes from a VoC perspective,10 but the theoretical links among production strategies, national social insurance systems, and the skill demands of firms emphasized in VoC have led researchers to focus on those components of countries’ education systems with the most direct connection to employers and the workforce, namely vocational training and academic higher education systems.11 To the extent that they have been considered, primary and secondary education are frequently viewed as a functional supports that correspond to the postsecondary institutions of particular skill regimes that are the core educational emphasis within the VoC framework.12 PRT represents another comparative welfare state approach utilized by scholars in the educational turn. Most closely associated with the work of Korpi (1974, 1983) Esping-Andersen (1985, 1990), and Stephens (1979), “classical” PRT (see Busemeyer, 2014, 38) maintained that explanations for the diversity in national welfare states’ scope and generosity were to be found in the outcomes of distributional and political conflicts among socio-economic classes. Welfare state development is, from this view, driven by the preferences of the working classes, which face greater social risks than the middle or upper classes but have fewer individual resources to mitigate them. Given their circumstances, workers tend to respond collectively by forming labor or social democratic parties that contest for control of the state and, once in power, pursue policies designed to lessen social inequalities and improve life opportunities.13 Differences in welfare states can thus be explained primarily by the relative size and success of working classes and the left parties that represent them (Myles & Quadagno, 2002, 38) and specific welfare state types likewise correspond to particular working-class mobilization and coalition-building patterns.14

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Classical PRT scholars focused little on education systems in their studies of welfare states, but in recent years observers have drawn on the actors, assumptions, concepts, and typologies from PRT in examining educational outcomes (Iversen & Stephens, 2008; Willemse & de Beer, 2012), sometimes emphasizing particular subgroups, such as teachers’ unions (see Moe & Wiborg, 2017), and in some instances pairing them with a historical institutional approach (Busemeyer, 2014; Sass, 2018; Thelen, 2004). Of specific relevance for questions related to national variation in comprehensive schooling, Sass (2015) argues, are the findings from PRT concerning how the long-term presence of partisan governments affects the generosity and scope of welfare policies. Both VoC and PRT offer a clear set of empirical hypotheses concerning education to investigate. Given the functional relationships the approach envisions across education, welfare, and political-economic institutions, a VoC explanation for variation in general education would anticipate an empirical record of employers decisively promoting primary and secondary school structures that were consistent with the systems of skill provision that supported their production strategies, namely a comprehensive system with little division between general and vocational education for liberal market economies and selective systems in coordinated market economies with clearly differentiated general and vocational educational pathways. PRT, at least in its classical form, would orient researchers to look to the size, organization, and cross-class alliances of working classes in countries as the crucial source of variation in general education. While valuable, the comparative welfare approaches also reveal sharp limits when applied to the outcomes under consideration here. As the cases demonstrate, the politics of schooling are not the same as the politics of skills.15 Employers did play a role in general education in the postwar period, but at key moments of institutional creation, embedding, and reform their preferences were of lesser significance. Indeed, for some critical debates, firms were not there at all. The link between the goals of firms and workers and the perceived function of education institutions was moreover subject to significant shifts during the postwar period. In both Britain and Germany, conceptions of education that viewed its primary purpose in meeting the skill demands of economic producers or mitigating the social risks of workers were accompanied by other ideas and discourses that emphasized the psychological or pedagogical aims of schooling. At points these conceptions were complimentary, but at other

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times they stood in sharp conflict. Representatives of the working classes would, in some periods, argue that the model of non-selective education was entirely at odds with the interests of working-class children, while maintaining in other periods that it was the best way to ensure their advancement. Some of the limits of these approaches are to be found in their shared rationalist orientation. Both VoC and PRT adopt a conception of politics that assumes the presence of rational actors who calculate strategically to maximize their preferences and for whom institutions serve largely as incentive structures. For reasons elaborated upon later, general education’s organizational position and temporal distance from the labor market heightens the uncertainty associated with it, rendering assumptions regarding the fixed interests for actors such as those emphasized in the comparative welfare approaches examined here particularly problematic. Partisan Ideology Perspectives Recent comparative studies focusing on variation in comprehensive schooling in Western Europe have drawn on elements of literatures in the first two categories discussed above. Like the sociological approaches, these studies consider present arrangements in the organization of schooling to be rooted in historical conflicts and processes of state formation that conditioned national institutional trajectories; at the same time, by emphasizing the socio-economic cleavage in the development of nonselective systems of general education, these studies also invoke comparative welfare approaches and specifically the power resources perspective. Of particular significance for this research, however, is the role of partisan ideology in shaping policy preferences, reformist inclinations, and comparative outcomes in comprehensive education. In emphasizing parties, studies in this category fall within the broader partisan politics perspective in comparative politics, which views specific policy outputs to be a function of the partisan composition of government. An extension of PRT,16 this perspective proceeds from the assumption that right-wing parties are more likely to pursue policies that forward the economic interests of their middle- and upper-class electoral constituencies, while left-wing parties will likely do the same for the lower classes (see Hibbs, 1977; Schmidt, 1982).

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The partisan approach has assumed a prominent place in literature on education in recent decades (e.g. Ansell, 2008, 2010; Ansell & Lindvall, 2013; Busemeyer, 2009, 2014; Busemeyer & Seitzl, 2018; Castles, 1989; Garritzmann, 2015; Rauh et al., 2011; Schmidt, 2007; Wolf & Zohlnhöfer, 2009). Earlier partisan-oriented studies on education tended to track PRT conclusions for other welfare policies, finding that left-wing governments would spend more on public education than rightwing governments because it promoted egalitarianism, redistribution, and social mobility. More recent literature, however, has sought to move beyond simple divisions between parties of the left and right and considerations of the effects of partisan government on overall levels of education spending by examining policy outcomes in terms of partisan families, such as social democratic, liberal, Christian democratic, and conservative party groups, and analyzing partisan support for specific educational sectors, including general, vocational, and higher education (see Garritzmann, 2017, 413; Garritzmann & Seng, 2016, 515). More recent studies have also looked to parties’ preferences for education with consideration to the broader political-economic setting. Particularly influential in this regard is Busemeyer’s “partisan politics in context” framework (2014), which blends an extended partisan politics perspective with core notions from Varieties of Capitalism.17 Invoking partisan approaches first, he argues that “cross-national differences in the balance of power between partisan families explain variations in policy output and institutional choices” but also—in line with VoC—maintains that the institutional context affects the policy preferences and choices of partisan actors, with countries that maintain high levels of coordination in their political economies more likely to support vocational education and training as an alternative to academic higher education (10). For studies within the partisan ideology category, more significant than the factors frequently emphasized in the partisan politics literature has been the historical ideological variation within party families, with a particular emphasis on differences among social democratic parties. Foremost within this group is Wiborg’s examination of the uneven development of comprehensive schooling in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and England.18 In her framework, the Scandinavian countries serve as “positive” cases, in which a sweeping comprehensivization of primary and secondary education was achieved by the 1970s, while Germany and England are identified together as “negative” cases in which

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comprehensive schooling remained underdeveloped and ability differentiation persisted.19 Utilizing a comparative method inspired by macro sociologists such as Archer and Green, Wiborg emphasizes a sequence of developments that began in Scandinavia beginning in the late nineteenth century but, crucially, did not occur in Germany or England.20 Wiborg’s explanation is provided across four hypotheses. Consistent with macro-sociological approaches, the first and second hypotheses emphasize structural variables. The first draws on Green’s argument concerning state formation and education. The Scandinavian countries, she argues, underwent intense state-building processes during the nineteenth-century, which included the creation of national education systems consisting of different schools that were connected in a unified organization, while England’s less intense state-building experience, by contrast, was associated with the absence of a unified national system during the same period. The fact that Prussia also underwent an intense formation process during this period but unlike the Scandinavian countries created a unified education system that reinforced stratification and differentiation, leads Wiborg to conclude that intense state formation was a necessary but not sufficient factor for the development of comprehensive education. The second hypothesis argues that the more egalitarian class structure of Scandinavian countries facilitated their educational development sequence, though this finding also has limits in her analysis. In Scandinavia, the relative size and unity of the peasantry and the weakness of the nobles and upper classes in the nineteenth-century contributed to greater enrollments of rural pupils in the then-selective secondary schools than in England, where the sharp social divisions continued to be reflected in class-segregation in schooling into the twentieth century. In Prussia, she finds that disadvantaged students in rural areas also frequently attended selective secondary schools but that the continued dominance of landed nobles limited the extent to which the society—and the schools—moved in an egalitarian direction. The final hypotheses focus on partisan actors and their comparative power, ideology, and alliances. Wiborg examines first the role of liberal parties in educational change. In the Scandinavian countries, she finds liberals were highly influential in establishing middle schools and the “ladder” system of education. By contrast, she argues that the German liberals were too weak politically to influence education, while liberals in England, though politically powerful in the nineteenth century, were concerned

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primarily with promoting economic freedom and limiting the power of the state, including in the area of education, and thus did little to reform the stratified structure of schooling. The fourth and most significant factor for Wiborg in explaining comprehensive school variation, however, concerns the relative strength and ideological bent of social democracy in the five countries. The Scandinavian social democrats, she argues, were open to forging alliances with other blocs such as the peasantry and achieved sufficient political power in the twentieth century to act on their ideological preference for comprehensive schools. In Germany, she argues the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands [SPD]), despite its organizational strength, was unwilling to enter into alliances with farmers or vie for middle-class support because of its more orthodox Marxist ideological orientation. The effect, as she describes it, was to curtail the party’s ability to amass the political power necessary to achieve reforms of the selective school system across Germany’s federal political system. For England, she argues that the British Labour Party differed significantly from the social democratic parties of the continent and was “more of an heir of liberalism than to socialism” (147). Labour never achieved the type of political dominance the left parties experienced in the Scandinavian countries nor, on the occasions they were in power, enacted wide-ranging changes to the elitist character of English education, marked most notably by its reluctance to dismantle the parallel private school system. To the extent that Labour supported comprehensive schools in the 1960s, she finds it was for reasons of political expediency rather than strength of ideological commitment (208). By crafting an endogenous explanation for educational change that demonstrates the key role of partisan actors and alliances and how particular historical sequences narrowed or widened specific educational trajectories, Wiborg’s study has helped to set the research agenda for the comparative study of comprehensive schooling and, more generally, opened new avenues into understanding the educational preferences of political parties. Her work also engages with a key debate among comparativists in the education turn. While partisan politics explanations have generally concluded that the presence of welfare-supporting left-wing parties in government has been associated with education expansion after World War II, the type of expansion preferred by such parties is less clear. As Busemeyer and Nikolai note (2010, 506), the education literature is “still undecided… on the question of whether social

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democrats in government were more interested in expanding opportunities in higher education or general and vocational education,” contrasting Ansell’s (2008) findings that social democrats were not inclined to support higher education expansion since it disproportionally helped upper income classes with those of Busemeyer (2009) who found that social democrats actually increase spending on higher education because they wish to expand voter support from middle classes. By demonstrating the significance of variable ideological commitment within similar partisan families in the case of comprehensive education, Wiborg adds a different perspective for understanding diversity in parties’ education preferences and variation in national education policy outcomes to accompany the conceptions of balance of power among parties and socio-economic institutional context highlighted in the partisan politics literature discussed above. At the same time, Wiborg’s explanatory approach and particularly her emphasis on variation in partisan ideology rests on several assumptions that are open to question. The first is the viability of her assessment of the ideology of a given party. Sass, for example, convincingly refutes Wiborg’s characterization of the German SPD as rigidly Marxist, maintaining that if anything the party was too moderate after the war and willing to adapt to conservative views, thereby calling into question Wiborg’s broader conclusions about the role of SPD ideology in Germany’s education trajectory (2015, 251). Following the 1959 Bad Godesberg conference at which the party shed much of its Marxist orientation, support for the SPD increased significantly, culminating with the party’s 1969 capture of the Chancellorship in Bonn, which it would not relinquish for 13 years. Yet Wiborg maintains that the Bad Godesberg reforms “did not make social democracy powerful anyway” in the FRG (178), despite the clear electoral triumphs for the party that followed. Such downplaying is also evident in her analysis of German and British education reform efforts in the 1960s and 1970s. She characterizes developments that were viewed by contemporary observers as major shifts in parties’ policies and programs, including the acceptance and promotion of comprehensive schools by the SPD in Germany and Labour Party in Britain in the 1960s, as half-measures at best (particularly when compared to changes in Scandinavian countries) that continued to be reflective of an older ideological orientation or political weakness. This issue of adaptation directs us to a further assumption in Wiborg’s framework. She conceives of education as largely driven from above

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by state actors and political leaders, with little consideration of popular dynamics from below.21 Such a top-down perspective may comport with the politics of schooling in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century but as education became a key domestic political and electoral issue after 1945, this one-sided orientation becomes problematic. Without a dynamic conception of education politics that recognizes the importance of the interplay between state actors and publics and the role of ideas and discourses in educational policymaking, it is difficult fully to explain the preferences and behaviors of these actors. It is toward the construction of such an explanation that the chapter now turns.

A Fourth Perspective---Ideas and Institutions in History The three perspectives described above can explain much about the institutional origins and trajectories of education in Western Europe. At the same time, however, there are limits to their capacity to account for the variation in the organization of British and German general education after World War II. This book seeks to build on these perspectives while addressing their explanatory gaps by constructing a framework that draws on historical and discursive institutionalist approaches in comparative politics. Explaining the puzzle of continuity and change in the cases examined here requires an understanding of how a particular set of ideas regarding the nature of human ability and its relationship to the structure of schooling arose, were communicated in the decades after the Second World War, and came to shape the views of policy actors and publics. Institutionalisms: Historical and Discursive Within studies of comparative politics, charting continuity, change, and variation in institutions and public policy sectors22 has been a primary focus of historical institutionalism, a major variant within the “new” institutionalist movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s (Hall & Taylor, 1996; March & Olsen, 1984). As Fioretos et al. (2016, 3) describe it, HI is “a research tradition that examines how temporal processes and events influence the origin and transformation of institutions that govern political and economic relations.” In their empirical studies, historical institutionalists have largely focused on “intermediate” institutions in advanced democracies, including of those associated with

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the welfare state. Indeed, the emphasis by HI on welfare institutions has led Lynch and Rhodes (2016, 418), following Lakatos (1970), to consider these studies to form their own distinctive scientific research program, consisting of “a robust and well-defended theoretical core” as well as “a rich ‘protective belt’ of evolving productive hypotheses.” Included in the HI-welfare state research program are several comparative studies considering educational institutions and outcomes over time (Helgøy & Homme, 2006; Sass, 2018; Thelen, 2004). In considering the structuring power of institutions and the historical basis of institutional variation, HI draws on two related concepts. The first is path dependence. Adopted by political scientists initially from scholarship in economic and technological history,23 path dependence theory held that institutions were not created to carry out some particular societal function at maximum efficiency, but were instead the product of distinct political conflicts, in which the organizational landscape of domestic politics and the power, preferences, and strategies of different actors—more than some ill-defined notion of “optimality”—were responsible for particular national arrangements that developed. The outcomes of these conflicts, in turn, could shape subsequent decisions and outcomes across a historical sequence of events, making shifts from one course of action, or path, to another difficult once the initial steps were taken. Theorists of path dependence such as Krasner (1988), Pierson (2000, 2004), and Mahoney (2000) have sought to account for this institutional stasis in path-dependent processes through the mechanism of increasing returns. Described alternately as “self-reinforcing” or “positive feedback” processes (Pierson, 2000, 251), the concept highlights how “investments” in early institutional arrangements made by actors, such as mobilizing organizational support from those who benefit from the arrangement, raise the costs of switching from a selected path to an alternative one over time, even—crucially—if the arrangement is not necessarily the most efficient one in functional terms. Conceptions of positive feedback have figured prominently in studies within the education turn in comparative politics, where scholars began looking to its effects to explain policy preferences for education (Busemeyer et al., 2011; Mettler, 2002) and the continuity of educational arrangements that were established in the early postwar decades (e.g. Busemeyer, 2014; Garrtizmann, 2015, 2016; Iversen & Stephens, 2008). In his comparative study of higher education finance systems, for example, Garritzmann argues “in line with the feedback literature” that “the

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existing tuition-subsidy institutions generate [positive] feedback-effects… increasing support for the respective paths” that have helped to maintain distinctive “worlds” of tuition and subsidy systems over decades (2016, 30). The second key concept for historical institutionalism is temporality. As Fioretos et al. write, scholars in HI “emphasize how temporally defined phenomena such as the timing and sequencing of events generate formal and informal institutions and how their emergence and change impact public policies and the distribution of political authority” (2016, 4). In comparative welfare and education studies, such phenomena frequently appear within explanations for divergence and variation in institutional trajectories (Graf, 2013; Hacker, 1998; Kuipers, 2009). When an event occurs may be as crucial for the development of path-dependent processes as what occurred, since events that take place “too late” may have a limited effect on a particular outcome, though the same event may have a much more significant impact had it happened earlier (Pierson, 2000, 261). Sequencing—or the temporal order in which events occur—is also crucial to this conception and specifically for causal explanation, because, as Pierson writes, it “becomes a way of identifying the linkages between distinct processes and examining the relative timing of those processes” (2004, 44). Earlier HI accounts emphasized the durability of many institutional arrangements after World War II, but the end of the postwar consensus and dramatic reorientations of the 1980s and 1990s would lead HI scholars to seek new ways to account for institutional change (see Immergut & Anderson, 2008, 354). In earlier HI literature, two types of change were generally identified. The first was associated with transformative large-scale shifts. Captured most influentially by the model of “punctuated equilibrium” (Krasner, 1984) this type of change generally involved powerful “exogenous shocks” or radical reorientations in the basic environment of politics that caused existing arrangements to collapse and provided space for new ones to arise (Thelen, 2002, 99). These processes have often been tied to “critical junctures,” or moments in which the arrangement options available to decision-makers are (often suddenly) widened. The second type involved incremental changes in institutional arrangements. Such shifts occurred as the result of “small” causes and slow-moving processes and often required detailed empirical examinations of events at the micro-level to be identified and evaluated (Immergut & Anderson, 2008; Pierson, 2004).

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For some HI scholars, such understandings, while useful, seemed to encourage the view that institutional change should be seen as either minor and continuous or major and abrupt (Hogan, 2006). In response, Streeck and Thelen (2005) sought to account for endogenous types of change that are both gradual and transformative, emphasizing how institutional arrangements are subject to constant renegotiation and reinterpretation.24 According to Thelen (2004) such a process of gradual transformation characterized the evolution of apprenticeship training in Germany, where a system that first emerged under the authoritarian Imperial regime in the late nineteenth century in opposition to organized labor was redeployed or “converted” over time to become a cornerstone of the social partnership between unions and industry. While many welcomed these more refined conceptions of change within HI, others maintained that they also highlight the limits of historical institutionalism’s materialist orientation and demonstrated the need for a systematic inclusion of a different category of variables into the perspective, namely ideational processes (Béland, 2007). Many HI scholars were reluctant to embrace nonmaterial explanations, reflecting a long-held ambivalence in political science. As Béland and Cox note, ideas were “often derided as imprecise or placed in a lower status as material interests as motives for political and social action” (2011, 6). And while such explanations have become more commonplace in studies of international and European politics25 (Gofas & Hay, 2010, 13), they have figured less prominently in welfare state research. With few exceptions (Vail, 2010), it remains accurate to conclude, with Wilcott, that institutional studies of welfare states have largely been characterized by “ambiguity and silences over the treatment of ideas,” with most “landmark studies” by ideationally oriented scholars such as Blyth (2002) addressing welfare policies only indirectly (2011, 143). Such an absence largely characterizes the historical institutional research program on welfare states; as Lynch and Rhodes write in their overview of the program “It is …clear that ideas and culture remain marginal to the mainstream of this tradition” (2016, 428). As a category of explanatory variable, ideas encompass a wide spectrum, ranging from concrete programmatic ideas to more general ideas central to ideologies like communism and liberalism (Béland & Cox, 2011, 6). Conceptualizing ideas within the new institutionalism has been at the center of what Schmidt (2008) has referred to along with Campbell and Pedersen (2001) as “discursive institutionalism” (DI).26 Defined

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as “an analytic framework concerned with the substantive content of ideas and the interactive process of discourse and policy argumentation in institutional context” (Schmidt, 2012, 85), the DI approach has figured into studies examining a range of economic and political outcomes and relationships.27 The concept of discourse may also be greeted with skepticism by scholars who connect it with interpretivist approaches that dispute the existence of an objective material reality or reject standard notions of causal explanation. In the DI approach, however, discourse “is stripped of post-modernist baggage,” and instead is presented, “as a more generic term that encompasses not only the substantive content of ideas also the interactive processes by which ideas are conveyed” (Schmidt, 2008, 305). Discursive institutionalism consists of two distinct but interlinked components. The first is ideational. The DI approach emphasizes the causal power of ideas and, more specifically, holds that policy actors may define—and redefine—their interests and preferences in terms of cognitive and normative factors. To discursive institutionalists, interests can reflect rational utilitarian concerns common in materialist conceptions of politics, such as the Varieties of Capitalism and power resources perspectives discussed above, and may appear to be fixed and objective. Yet such a view is likely only in conditions in which actors can determine their preferences on the basis of a directly observable world; such conditions, DI maintains, are far less common than those in which the world is not directly observable and interests are therefore structurally underdetermined. Blyth, drawing on an earlier tradition in economics, has described these conditions as characterized by “Knightian” uncertainty,28 in which agents are not simply unsure about how to achieve their interests but unsure of what their interests actually are (2002, 9; see also Schmidt, 2008, 319). Here ideas are crucial, since they can help us conceive of our interests in ways that may reflect far more than just material calculation (Schmidt, 2008, 318). DI practitioners make similar criticisms toward materialist conceptions of institutions. Too often, they maintain, material approaches conceive of institutions as fixed and external to actors, and primarily as constraints to action rather than as targets of contestation. According to this criticism, the causal arrow is unidirectional in many institutional accounts: the material preferences and behavior of actors are influenced by institutions and are therefore subordinate to them. For DI, institutions are simultaneously structure and construct that both rest on the foundation of actors’

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legitimizing discourses and shape actors’ beliefs as to what constitutes an appropriate arrangement and are thus less “embedded” than materialist institutional approaches would maintain. As Schmidt, drawing on Searle (1995), writes, “[i]nstitutions are not material because they do not exist without sentient agents; but, like money, they are real and have causal effects” (Schmidt, 2008, 318). The second component of the discursive institutional approach consists of agents’ “foreground discursive abilities,” which Schmidt contrasts with “background ideational abilities,” and defines as “people’s ability to think and argue outside the institutions in which they continue to act, to talk about such institutions in a critical way, to communicate and deliberate about them, to persuade themselves as well as others to change their minds about their institutions” (Schmidt, 2012, 92–93). In the DI framework, ideas cannot have a causal impact unless they are communicated between and among actors within policymaking circles to construct a particular proposal or program, or what Schmidt calls the “coordinative” dimension of discourse, and then again in processes of public persuasion, which she refers to as the “communicative” dimension. It is by virtue of this communicative emphasis that the discursive approach is distinguished from “just” an ideational one and, in Schmidt’s view, the reason that DI is better equipped to explain institutional continuity and change than other new institutional approaches (Schmidt, 2008, 314). Crucial to this understanding of communicative interaction is the role of social consent and the observation that judgments about the legitimacy of state policies and institutions ultimately rest with publics in democratic systems (see Hay, 1999, 332). Legitimacy is largely absent from conceptions of power that emphasize material resources of institutional position but it forms a crucial part of discursive interaction in the persuasion of policy actors and publics of the appropriateness of particular policy choices (Schmidt, 2020, 17). Investigating of the role of legitimacy moreover allows us, as Seabrooke (2010, 78) notes, to consider the dynamic between elites and non-elites that may shape how institutions change. It also serves as a key distinction between Gramscian conceptions of hegemonic ideology of the type employed in macro-social and partisan ideological perspectives discussed above, which involves a stable bargain based largely on material trade-offs, from a DI conception of hegemonic discourse, which, while also associated with stability, envisions it as derived primarily from legitimacy rather than economic relations.

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Among the areas in which DI differs most fully from the historical institutional perspective is its understanding of institutional change. In general, discursive institutionalists agree with their historical institutional counterparts that politics needs to be brought back in to analyses of institutional change, but DI adherents provide a more expansive conception of the “political” that goes beyond the material conflicts and bargains of political actors. Conceptions of change associated with critical junctures and path-dependent processes are also present in DI analyses, but, as Schmidt writes, “for discursive institutionalists these moments are the objects of explanation through ideas and discourse, which lend insight into how the historically transmitted, path–dependent structures are reconstructed” (Schmidt, 2008, 316). In DI, ideas not only offer institutional blueprints from which actors can draw (Blyth, 2002) but also can change collective actors’ identities, such that they may change their perceptions of conditions, reorient how they interact with existing institutions, or work to build new institutions (Morgan & Hauptmeier, 2014, 208). DI likewise sees limitations in the more gradualist HI notions of institutional change. For DI, the materialist ontology informing much HI scholarship cannot generate endogenous accounts of periods of disequilibria (see Hay, 2006, 60); as a consequence, even with such change conceptions, historical institutionalism, argue, “still struggles to explain endogenous change” and relies on a largely “unacknowledged ideational foundation” to explain change processes (Blyth et al., 2016, 156, 157). As “carriers of ideas,” Schmidt writes, institutions are “changeable over time as actors’ ideas and discourse about them change in tandem with changes in their performance” (2010, 9).

Explaining General Education in Britain and Germany Despite the differences between the DI and HI perspectives, observers have noted their shared origins and integrative possibilities (Blyth et al., 2016; Hay, 2006). As Schmidt (2010, 10) writes, the limits of HI “have left an opening for DI” and several studies have built comparative explanations around both approaches (see Béland, 2009; Lieberman, 2005). Such a synthesis characterizes the explanatory framework in this book’s study of continuity and change in British and German general education. It is constructed across two related dimensions. Consistent with DI,

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the first dimension identifies nonmaterial factors as key explanatory variables in the cases. Specifically, it highlights the mechanism of discursive change and the role of discourse coalitions in the construction and reform of new systems of primary and secondary schooling after World War II. Underpinning this explanation is a larger conception of general education as a “discourse-driven” institution, which was constructed—somewhat uniquely among welfare state sectors—on an ideational foundation. The second dimension draws on historical institutionalism. The book finds a set of factors related to institutional conditions in postwar Britain and West Germany shaped the path dependence and temporal sequencing of education policy discourses and general educational institutions in both countries. Education Policy Discourses In the decades after World War II, two distinct policy discourses associated with the organization of general education that were rooted in the ideas of academic social scientists emerged in both Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. These discourses operated at the level of programs or paradigms in the DI framework, existing in a space between the broad worldviews of philosophies and the specific instruments and solutions that characterize policies. The first is referred to in the case studies as the “fixed ability” policy discourse. At the center of this discourse was a belief that human ability was set at a relatively early age and largely unaffected by environmental factors. This discourse shaped the construction of selective schooling systems in which pupils were differentiated on the basis of ability at age ten or eleven in both Britain and the FRG. The second discourse consists of a “dynamic” view of ability, which held at its foundation a conception of ability as a changing quality that could be influenced by the social and economic conditions in which a young person lived and could continue to evolve after childhood. Political movements for change in the organization of the selective systems in both countries paralleled change in the hegemonic standing of these discourses, whose key assumptions were challenged in the 1950s in Britain and the 1960s in Germany by counter-discourses in the two countries characterized by dynamic views of ability. In the course of these discursive shifts, the ideas of the fixed-ability discourses were delegitimized and deep uncertainties emerged over how best to organize general education. The effect was the creation of “discursive” critical

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junctures in British and German educational policymaking, which, much like shocks such as war, economic crisis, and sudden technological change frequently invoked in HI punctuated equilibrium models, served to relax the constraints around general education institutions and opened new possibilities for reform. These junctures differ from those discussed by ideational scholars such as Blyth, who view doubt in existing arrangements to be a function of exogenous factors. The uncertainty associated with general education, by contrast, was largely the result of endogenous sources, most notably processes of learning by actors as they came to assess the performance of the selective system through the frames of the dynamic ability conception. Compared to gradualist conceptions of endogenous change in HI, the impact of this learning in both Britain and Germany was remarkably swift: within just a few years of each country’s respective shift, the assumptions, beliefs, and preferences of key actors would be reoriented, coalitions that had supported early selection in the immediate postwar period would be shaken, traditional adherents of the practice would find themselves on the political defensive, and reform initiatives oriented around the comprehensive school proposed by counter-discourse agents, would move to the top of public debates and the fore of the policy agenda. As Busemeyer (2014, 38) notes, a frequent criticism of early HI was that it lacked a theory of action and should therefore “be combined with actor-centered theories.” A similar criticism has been leveled at discursive approaches, which have tended to emphasize discursive structures more than agency (see for example, Leipold & Winkel, 2013). In considering the discursive foundations of general education, the framework here highlights a distinct set of actors who comprised coalitions that promoted both the fixed and dynamic ability discourses. The coalitions associated with the ability discourses and education policymaking were organized formally at times, but more loosely configured at others, occasionally focusing on broad systemic initiatives at the national level but more frequently addressing local or regional issues. Coalition memberships were broad and varied and included churches, parent, student, and teacher organizations, and producer groups. Two members, however, played particularly pivotal roles within these coalitions: government advisory bodies and political parties. These groups served as key “ideational transmitters” that communicated and legitimated the ideas of the respective education discourses both to policy actors responsible for general education and publics (see below).

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Examining the development of the British and German systems reveals a set of institutional characteristics in general education that identify the sector as a “discourse-driven” issue area. Such issue areas are distinguished here from “interest-driven” areas, or those in which developments are shaped by actors assumed to be pursuing material advantages under conditions set by institutional constraints and/or cross-interest alliances.29 The perspectives on education considered earlier in this chapter largely view educational arrangements in interest-driven terms, emphasizing the material preferences and relative power of particular social, economic, and/or political actors within specific institutional or structural contexts in explaining social policy outcomes and cross-national variation. In the discourse-driven issue conception, by contrast, the question as to what defines “material advantage” for actors cannot be assumed on the basis of factors identified by materialist understandings of institutional change, because the definition is itself shaped by perceptions and beliefs about causal relationships in the social world that have been disseminated and legitimized through processes of communicative interaction. In the case of postwar general education, such perceptions and beliefs helped to determine whether actors accepted (and in some cases promoted) a particular organizational framework for schooling; absent the discursive context, it is difficult to “assume” these actors’ preferences. The Structuring Power of Institutions: Path Dependence, and Temporality While nonmaterial factors can explain much of the developmental patterns in British and German general education, understanding the ultimate variation in the cases requires us to consider these factors in comparative context. As discussed above, the education policy discourses in both countries followed similar trajectories, with the fixed-ability discourse associated with postwar selective schooling challenged by a dynamic ability discourse that promoted mixed-ability comprehensive education. So why were the outcomes different? Here the framework turns to historical institutionalism and its conceptions of path dependency and temporality. The view that not only material factors exhibit path constraining and shaping effects is one that has been articulated previously by discursive institutionalists. As Hay writes, “it is not just institutions but the very

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ideas on which they are predicated and which inform their design and development that exert constraints on political autonomy. Institutions are built on ideational foundations that exert an independent path-dependent effect on their subsequent development” (2011, 68–69). The cases in this study reaffirm and expand on this finding. Under certain conditions, the foundational ideas of discourse-driven issues may receive a type of embedding that renders them and their institutional correlates particularly impervious to change and that shapes subsequent debates over policy trajectories. As the case studies detail, factors in the FRG such as cultural federalism, the effects of the “economic miracle” of the 1950s, the constitutionally enshrined principal of parental choice, and structural legacies from the Nazi era that served to retard the application of modern social science techniques to education and to insulate policy actors from the new ideas developing elsewhere, all contributed to creating a “frozen discourse” in educational policymaking that helped delay developments in the structure of schooling in new country’s crucial early decades. The frozen discourse was characterized most notably by the continuing dominance of fixed notions of ability in the FRG well into the 1960s and proved to be a powerful mechanism for ensuring path dependence in the structure of German general education as it was reconstructed after World War II. In the British system, by contrast, no similar “embedding” occurred with the tripartite system, which facilitated later reforms around the comprehensive school. The structure of educational governance and the conditions of path dependence in Britain and Germany influenced the temporal sequencing of educational reform, with significant consequences for the outcome of reform initiatives. In both countries, education was largely decentralized, with substantial administrative and policy competence provided to the regional Länder and local Gemeinde in the FRG, local authorities in England and Wales, and a regional authority in Scotland. Whether decentralization helped or hindered education reform in the causal process was dependent, however, on when a country’s respective counter-discourse emerged. The discursive shift from the fixed to the dynamic ability conceptions began in Britain in the first half of the 1950s, as educational sociologists and others challenged the reigning fixed-ability view largely on the basis of new empirical studies; in the FRG, by contrast, this discursive shift began a decade later in the 1960s. The case studies reveal how an “early” shift in the British policy discourse created opportunities

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and incentives that otherwise may not have been present for policymakers at the local level to begin the process of comprehensive reorganization under the facilitating conditions of relative economic prosperity and growing social policy consensus of the period. By contrast, a “later” shift in discourses in West Germany inhibited reform efforts that may have succeeded at an earlier time by delaying the elevation of education policy on the political and public agenda and the introduction of policy reform measures until the 1970s when then broader political context had radically altered and the opportunities for change had reduced. The ultimate failure of the reforms proposed during this period would serve to reembed practices of early differentiation in general education in the FRG and ensure its persistence into the unified German era.

Operationalizing the Explanation: Ideas and Historical Process-Tracing Unlike other political science approaches in which hard ontological assumptions drive methodological and explanatory frameworks, discursive institutionalism does not hold that a nonmaterial factor will always serve as the primary independent cause for any institutional or policy outcome and recognizes that in many instances, a material factor emphasized by other perspectives such as the economic interests of actors may play that role. Determining, as Schmidt (2002, 252) writes, when one could call “policy discourse transformative rather than merely instrumental” is a thus a key challenge for discourse-based explanations requiring scholars to carry out detailed investigations in order to measure the importance of ideational and communicative factors. The method of process-tracing, which involves a mapping of the links between potential causes and acknowledged outcomes through detailed reconstruction and analysis of relevant sequences of empirical developments,30 is tailored for such investigations and Jacobs (2015) has developed an approach crafted specifically for ideational arguments to allow researchers empirically to gauge the influence of ideas while also weighing alternative materialist explanations. A key feature of ideational theories, he notes, is that actor goals and beliefs can vary independently of objective material conditions, but assessing the degree to which this variation occurs by detecting ideational mechanisms directly (i.e. within the cognitive structures of actors themselves) presents obvious difficulties.

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In view of this fact, Jacobs outlines a set of tests designed to assess the influence of ideas in “the observable pathways along which ideas travel through a political system” (2015, 65). First, he argues, researchers need to identify the origin of a hypothesized causal idea by demonstrating that it existed prior to actors’ decision-making. These ideas should be “prominent and credible” and not simply invoked by actors in order to suit their material interests. Second, ideational accounts should demonstrate that particular ideas were made available to influential actors before they reached a particular decision. For this test, a specific transmission path, such as an organizational structure, through which ideas could reach policy actors should be identified. The final test involves the identification of “mobile carriers” or specific individuals known to hold particular ideas who enter into decision-making positions (2015, 65–68). Conducting these tests of ideational transmission, Jacobs maintains, can demonstrate “that a given idea was ‘on the scene’ when congruent policy change occurred, the absence of policy change prior to the idea’s arrival, and the fragility of policy change after a mobile carrier’s exit.” He writes that “[s]uch over-time patterns can significantly undermine the sufficiency of non-ideational alternatives, suggesting that the availability of the relevant idea was necessary for the outcome to occur” (2015, 69). To assess the roles of ideas and discourses in shaping institutional continuity and change in postwar British and German general education, the case studies that follow are organized around an application of these tests both for the fixed-ability discourse and the dynamic ability counter-discourse described above. The studies find in both instances confirmation of their necessity for the outcomes considered. For the fixed-ability discourse, the studies begin with the first test, identifying the origins of a particular set of ideas in Britain and the FRG associated with academic social scientists in the interwar and immediate postwar periods who held human ability to be largely fixed, hereditary, and identifiable at an early age. Hardly on the fringe, these ideational agents were leaders in their fields, holding positions at major universities and research centers and regularly publishing findings in prominent academic journals. For the second test, the case studies highlight three organizational structures that served—in varying capacities and sequences—as pathways of transmission for the fixed-ability ideas of the academics identified in the first test. These transmitters, as referenced earlier, included government advisory bodies and political parties, which not only elevated the

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fixed-ability ideas to decision-making levels in the governments of both countries, but also helped to spread and legitimate them among publics. In Britain, among the key advisory bodies was the interwar Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, which in its reports to the government drew directly on the views of the academic social scientists noted above. In the FRG, the primary body was the German Committee for the Education System (Deutscher Ausschuss für das Erziehungs und Bildungswesen [DAEB]), established in 1953, which likewise conveyed in its reports the fixed-ability rationale for the traditional three-tiered school system. For political parties, the critical transmitter of the fixed-ability discourse was—perhaps unexpectedly—the Labour Party, whose educational theorists saw in its ideas as early as the 1920s an opportunity for talented working-class pupils to obtain access to educational opportunities that had hitherto been reserved largely for young people of wealth and status. In West Germany, by contrast, it was the conservative Christian Democrats who most actively endorsed fixed-ability conceptions during the occupation period in the late 1940s, when education systems were reconstructed at the Länder-level across the western occupation zones. Among educational interest groups, a central transmitting organization in Germany included the representatives of the secondary schools. For Germany, a third transmission organization was significant. In the early postwar decades, powerful groups representing the Gymnasien promoted a particularly rigid variant of the fixed-ability view, and vigorously sought to counter those who expressed alternative perspectives. While secondary school teachers in Britain generally supported the selective system and opposed comprehensive school reform at the local and national levels, they also displayed skepticism concerning some of the assumptions of educational psychology and its belief that mental ability could be accurately measured by means of examination. As such their role as transmission paths for the fixed-ability ideas was never as significant as among their German counterparts. The mobile carriers identified in Jacobs’ third test also played roles as ideational transmitters in the British and German cases. In Britain, these figures were largely associated with ministers in the wartime coalition government and the postwar Labour government led by Clement Attlee. For Germany, the key mobile carriers of the fixed-ability discourse included culture ministers from the Christian Democratic parties who oversaw education at the Land-level during the period of Allied occupation and the early years of the Federal Republic (Table 3.1).

Academic social scientists (prewar)

Academic social scientists (postwar)

Federal Republic of Germany

Ideational origins

Fixed-ability discourse on education

Britain

Table 3.1

1. Government advisory bodies 2. Christian Democratic parties 3. Secondary school representatives

1. Government advisory bodies 2. Labour party

Ideational transmission paths

1. Wartime coalition government ministers 2. Postwar Labour government ministers 1. Christian Democratic Länder culture ministers

Mobile carriers

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For the counter-discourse that arose in the 1950s in Britain and the 1960s in the FRG, the same tests of ideational influence are applied and assessed. For the ideational origins test, the case studies identify a later generation of academic social scientists who promoted views— based largely on empirical research—that held ability to be a dynamic attribute that could not only change during adolescence, but could also be influenced by environmental factors. Such a perspective stood in sharp opposition to views of ability as fixed and hereditary and served to undercut the ideational rationale for early selection in education while reinforcing it for the comprehensive school. Significantly, the case studies find that many of the ideas of dynamic ability were transmitted through the similar pathways as the earlier fixedability education discourse. In Britain, the Central Advisory Councils for Education (CACE), established for England and Wales in the 1944 Education Act as successors to the interwar Consultative Committee, served as the primary advisory vehicles for the new ideas, as did the German Education Council (Deutscher Bildungsrat [DBR]) in the FRG, which succeeded the Committee for the Education System in the 1960s. Among political parties, the critical transmitter of the new dynamic ability discourse in Britain was the same Labour Party that played such a decisive role in institutionally realizing the ideas of the fixed-ability discourse in the postwar tripartite system of education. The party’s ideational reorientation in the 1950s and 1960s around the new conception would help shape its policy orientation away from the selective organization it had helped create after the war and toward the comprehensive model. In the FRG, the Social and Free Democrats, which had—to varying degrees— come to accept the fixed ability discourse in the immediate postwar period, would embrace the dynamic ability ideas by the 1960s, proposing a range of major reforms to the traditional three-tiered education system following the formation of a coalition government between the SPD and the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei [FDP]) after the 1969 general election. Finally, a new cast of mobile carriers would serve to bring dynamic ability conceptions directly into the halls of government. Foremost among these figures in Britain were ministers in Harold Wilson’s governments in the 1960s that launched the national drive for comprehensive schools. In Germany, carriers included a new set of Social and Free Democratic leaders both at the Land and federal level who helped conceived of new

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educational models such as the Gesamtschule in the 1960s and proposed far-reaching educational reforms in the 1970s (Table 3.2).

Conclusion The preceding discussion has highlighted some of the strengths and limits of leading comparative perspectives of education in explaining the postwar systems of general education in Britain and Germany. These perspectives view the comparative development in state educational institutions as driven by (1) macro-social processes associated with modernization, such as state formation and the emergence of modern social cleavages; (2) social risk mitigation strategies, which emphasize the preferences of key social classes and producer groups and are common in comparative explanations of social insurance in advanced welfare states; and (3) variation in partisan ideology, which highlights the significance of differences in parties’ ideologies for the comparative educational trajectories of countries, not just across national party systems but within party families. Each of these perspectives illuminates critical elements in the cases studied here and serves as an important guide for their empirical investigation. Yet as this chapter has noted many of the most salient dimensions of the cases, such as changes in core actor preferences, shifting public acceptance of policy ideas, and the success or failure of specific general education reform initiatives, fall outside the explanatory purview of these perspectives. Instead it has been argued that explaining these features requires a framework that is open to nonmaterial factors. Drawing on the discursive institutional approach in comparative politics, it identifies a set of education policy discourses in the postwar period. These discourses reflected differing conceptions of human ability and its relationship to specific organizational arrangements in general education, including the length of primary education, the degree and type of differentiation in secondary education, and the mechanism for selecting pupils for alternative educational pathways. It further finds that each was associated with a specific set of promotive actors who advocated for policies that instituted those arrangements. In both Britain and Germany, the immediate postwar period witnessed the construction of highly selective general education systems, ideationally anchored in a dominant policy discourse in which human ability was seen as largely hereditary and fixed at a young age. In these systems pupils were

Academic social scientists (1950s) Academic social scientists (1960s)

Ideational origins

Dynamic ability discourse on education

Federal Republic of Germany

Britain

Table 3.2

1. Government advisory bodies 2. Labour party 1. Government advisory bodies 2. Social and Free Democratic parties

Ideational transmission paths

Labour party government leadership Social and Free Democratic party leadership

Mobile carriers

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placed in one of three school types at age ten or eleven with few opportunities to change education tracks later. Movements for reform in the selective systems in both countries, the chapter argues, followed discursive shifts from the fixed conception of ability to a dynamic one that envisioned ability as a potential capable of evolving beyond childhood and acknowledged a role for environmental factors in its determination. Key drivers of reform in both countries were the same left-wing parties that earlier had either actively implemented the selective system (the British Labour Party) or tacitly supported it (the German SPD), but would later lead national efforts to establish comprehensive general education systems in which students would attend common mixed-ability secondary schools. The comparative success of these efforts was associated with institutional conditions in both countries. Invoking conceptions of path dependence and timing from historical institutionalism, the chapter maintains that an earlier discursive shift in the British policy discourse facilitated comprehensive reform initiatives, while a later discursive shift in the FRG curtailed similar efforts. As the chapter has noted, operationalizing this explanatory framework requires detailed historical case narratives and process-tracing methods that help to identify causal linkages involving nonmaterial variables over time. The case studies that follow adopt such strategies, analyzing the development of systems of general education in Britain and Germany in the immediate postwar period, detailing their evolution through the crucial periods of reform in the 1960s and 1970s, and tracing more recent developments in both countries through to the present day.

Notes 1. For a discussion, see Busemeyer and Trampusch (2011, 415). 2. Soysal and Strang (1989) emphasize such oppositional dynamics in considering the initial construction of mass education systems in Europe and the United States. Employing “a framework of conflict and competition” (285), they argue that patterns of interaction between and among state, church, and other societal groups helped to determine the particular form taken by national education systems as they emerged in the nineteenth century. 3. The focus on social effects was particularly prominent in the work of Ringer (1979, 1987) and Müller (1987). Rejecting economic functionalist arguments that maintained that the dramatic transformations in education

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in the nineteenth century were driven by the technical and commercial demands of industrializing Europe, these authors considered how the different national processes by which education systems were created produced hierarchical organizations across countries which reproduced and strengthened the existing social structures, despite their particular differences. In the second edition of Green’s book, he also considers the development of education in East Asian countries, including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and China (2013, 305–385). While the book’s focus is on initial periods of state formation, he also argues that his framework can apply “periods of political reconstruction after crises” citing the example of Japan after World War II (2013, 4). For a discussion, see Sass (2015). Consider, for example, her description of how elites on both ends of the political spectrum employ ideology in debates over the financing of education: “Most political elites will strategically promote ideologies favouring political intervention… The left usually seeks to identify state intervention with eliminating social discrimination; the right generally associates it with guaranteeing value for taxpayers’ money” (1984, 125–126). In England, Green sees the hegemonic order promoted by the ruling classes to be evident in the articulation of political traditions oppose to state intervention and expansion, which manifested themselves in the education sector in a general resistance to the establishment of a consolidated state education system (2013, 113–114). Some works on education, such as Heidenheimer’s analysis of education and social security in Europe and the United States (1981) straddle the categories presented here. Consistent with the comparative welfare state approaches, he considers education in terms of broader development of the welfare state, presenting education and social insurance as “alternative strategies” for addressing goals of equality and security (269). In line with macro-sociological approaches, he sees the variation as rooted in state formation patterns, and specifically whether states were more “bureaucratic,” with state administrative apparatuses developing earlier or “pluralist,” with strong state bureaucracies developing later (270–272). Because firms in coordinated market economies rely on workers with specific skills for their production strategies, VoC adherents have argued that employers in these countries will support the provision of generous social insurance benefits (Estévez-Abe et al., 2001; see also Mares, 2003). Among these are studies of public education spending (Jensen, 2011), the internationalization of higher education (Graf, 2009), the standardization of undergraduate education (van Santen, 2014), the relationship between education and political participation (Busemeyer & Goerres, 2014) and education and income inequality (Österman, 2018), and cross national

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15.

16.

variation in vocational education and training systems (Culpepper, 2003, 2007; Estevez-Abe et al., 2001; Rueda & Pontusson, 2000). In contrast to much of the educationalist literature examined in Chapter 2, VoC-inspired scholars have argued that segmented education systems with separate vocational and academic tracks common to coordinated market economies (such as Germany) actually increase social equality by providing opportunities for young people to obtain the specialized skills that command high wages in the workforce (see Busemeyer & Jensen, 2012). A general relationship is apparent between VoC political-economic type and the organization of general education, indicating an affinity between skill regimes and school organization. Most of the liberal economies first identified in the VoC framework, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom, are latedifferentiators, maintaining largely comprehensive secondary education systems in which students enter into occupational or educational tracks around age sixteen. By contrast, the majority of Western European coordinated economies, including Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, differentiate significantly earlier, with most young people selected for placement by teachers and parents between the ages of ten and twelve. The primary outliers among Western European coordinated economies are the Nordic countries, all of which differentiate around age sixteen. There is evidence, however, that these countries reflect a different skill system among the coordinated economies of the region (see Busemeyer, 2009). For their part, employers are expected to hold weak or negative first order preferences for welfare state expansion but will consent in instances where workers’ strength effectively leaves them no choice (Korpi, 2006, 171). While much literature has viewed the political conflict and social classoriented PRT and the firm-centered VoC as opposing approaches (Korpi, 2006; Mares, 2003), some welfare state scholars have sought to integrate the two perspectives, including in comparative studies of education (see Busemeyer, 2014; Iversen & Stephens, 2008). As Esping-Andersen (1990) argues, however, it is not merely the strength of working classes that produces different welfare state outcomes, but the types of class coalitions that are built, a point highlighted by Wiborg with respect to education (see below). A similar point is made by Moe and Wiborg (2017, 11), who write that “the study of skill formation… important though it is to a larger understanding of the origins of the welfare state, is about vocational education, on-the-job training, and other institutions of worker skill formation, not the politics of elementary and secondary education.” See Busemeyer (2014, 40).

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17. Other recent studies highlighting partisan politics in context include Jungblut (2016) and Michelsen and Stenström (2018). 18. Also broadly within this category is Sass’s study (2018) of comprehensive school reforms in Norway and the German Land of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW). Sass draws on PRT and adopts a historical perspective to explain why Norway established comprehensive schools, while NRW, like nearly all other German federal states, did not. Her complex argument, which draws on multiple theoretical traditions, maintains that Norway’s relative success in comprehensive reform was a function of three factors: the relative resources available to reform proponents in each country, including partisan actors, the achievement of a hegemonic ideological argument concerning the unacceptability of the reproduction of inequalities as the result of selective schooling (Gramscian theory); and a cleavage structure that facilitated educational reform (Rokkanian theory). 19. One could question whether Wiborg’s decision to categorize Germany and England jointly as negative cases significantly overstates the similarities in their systems and understates their differences. As she notes, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden “share an unusually radical type of comprehensive school system” (2009, 4). As discussed in last chapter, however, the OECD groups Britain (85% of whose population resides in England) in the low systemic differentiation category along with the Scandinavian countries, while it places Germany in the high differentiation cluster (OECD, 2010, Figure IV.3.1). Even if one were to take the view that practices such as setting and streaming along with the rise of “specialist schools” that admit a percentage of their pupils on the basis of ability have diluted the comprehensive model in recent years, the dismantling of the tripartite system in the 1960s and 1970s clearly represented a major institutional shift away from selective education (see Kerckhoff, 1995). Would Wiborg’s historically based explanation for the evolution of differentiation in England somehow not apply if the end reference year were 1979? Her conclusions also appear to be influenced by limiting her study to England rather than to all of Great Britain. Wales and Scotland, whose pre-1945 politics far more resemble England’s than the Scandinavian countries’, also had selective general education systems in the first postwar decades but much more easily transitioned to comprehensive schools than England (Phillips, 2003). 20. This sequence includes the formation of a middle school linking elementary and secondary education (which had previously been socially separated), the subsequent abolition of this middle school type (where selection and overlap with the elementary school still occurred) in favor of a comprehensive school model, and finally the ending of streaming and

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setting, which extended the mixed-ability principle in general education to individual classes as well as schools. 21. For a discussion, see Maurer (2011, 165). 22. For a discussion of the conditions under which specific policies and policy sectors can be considered “institutions,” see Streeck and Thelen (2005, 11). 23. For a review of this literature and the associated arguments, see Pierson (1996). 24. For a discussion of the various conceptions of gradual change in HI, see Mahoney and Thelen (2009). 25. Prominent examples include McNamara (1998), Bleich (2003), and Matthijs (2011). 26. Other theorists have used alternate terms to describe similar approaches, including ideational institutionalism (Hay, 2001), constructivist institutionalism (Hay, 2006) or strategic constructivism (Jabko, 2006), though Schmidt (2008, 304) argues that her approach is distinct in emphasizing the communicative aspect of policy discourses rather than only the ideational dimension. 27. Among these are referendums (Sternberg, 2018) migration policy and economic competitiveness (Menz, 2015), globalization and industrial relocation (Piotti, 2009), and industrial democracy (Frege, 2005), as well as welfare state and labor market reforms (Schmidt, 2002; Seelieb-Kaiser, 2002; Seelieb-Kaiser & Fleckenstein, 2007). Within education studies, scholars have examined skill formation (Wentzel, 2011), curriculum reform (Walhström & Sundberg, 2018), and school evaluation practices (Wallenius et al., 2018) from a DI perspective. 28. Named for Frank Knight, an economist at the University of Chicago who introduced this conception in his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. 29. In making this distinction, I draw on the work of Banchoff (2005). 30. For an overview of the method and its use in case-design research, see George and Bennett (2005).

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CHAPTER 4

Britain I: The Tripartite System

Introduction Spurred by the experiences of the Second World War, the Education Act 1944 carried out what was seen by many as a long overdue expansion of general education in Britain. Passed by a wartime coalition government that included representatives of both the Labour and Conservative parties and garnering wide public support, the Act reorganized general education by creating a universal system of secondary education in England and Wales, integrating church-run schools into the state system, raising the minimum school-leaving age, and eliminating the tuition fees that had served to limit much of post-elementary schooling to the wealthier social classes. It also led to the introduction of a new “tripartite” secondary system in which pupils were separated at age eleven into one of three different schools on the basis of their perceived ability. Constructed on the belief that the system would benefit all young people and that its constituent grammar, technical, and secondary modern schools would enjoy a “parity of esteem,” tripartitism was designed to channel pupils at a young age into the most appropriate educational and occupational pathways. Although passed under the Conservative-led wartime coalition government, it would be the Labour government of Clement Attlee responsible for creating the modern British welfare state that would implement the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_4

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Act after the war. The expansion of education formed a crucial part of Labour’s social vision; as the party’s Shadow Secretary for Education Tristan Hunt would reflect on commemorating the seventieth anniversary of its passage in the House of Commons, the 1944 Education Act stood along with the National Health Service at “the centre point of the post-war new Jerusalem” (HC Deb, July 9, 2014). The explanatory approaches examined in the previous chapter can provide insights into the expansion and consolidation of the state system of general education produced by the Act. Yet when considering the core drivers behind what would become the most politically contentious feature of the new system—the organization of schooling—the power of these approaches is limited. In contrast to the emphasis on material factors promoted by these views, this chapter argues that the actors responsible for the system created by the 1944 Act were guided largely by the assumptions of a specific policy discourse that served to limit the range of organizational options that they would consider. Originating in the interwar years among a relatively small set of academics working in the field of educational psychology, the core beliefs of this discourse held that human beings demonstrated significant differences in innate intelligence levels, which revealed themselves at a fairly young age and could be accurately determined by specially designed mental tests. Given such views, which were presented as scientific findings rather than conjecture, the discourse maintained that practices of early selection within a differentiated structure of separate schools were the most appropriate arrangements for the country’s general education system. A counter model of the mixed-ability multilateral school did have advocates at the time, but it was considered by most educationalists and policy actors to be experimental and lacking the legitimating ideational foundation of tripartitism. The views of this fixed-ability discourse would be relayed to policy actors and the general public in part by the originators themselves via a variety of communicative channels, including academic research, writings in the popular press and media appearances, and the psychologists’ direct work with school officials at the local level. The key transmission routes, however, came by way of a set of broader organizational pathways, through which these ideas entered into national policy discussions, obtaining widespread legitimation that elevated their associated discourse to a hegemonic standing in Britain. The first pathway consisted of a set of government advisory reports to the Board of Education, then the national agency overseeing the state education system. These widely read and cited

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reports cast practices of early selection and differentiation in education as scientifically substantiated by fixed-ability ideas and recommended their adoption by policymakers within a reconfigured state system of general education. A second transmission pathway involved the British Labour party itself. Labour had been an early member of the discourse coalition that formed around the educational psychologists’ fixed-ability ideas in the interwar period. Although organized labor and some elements in the party would express concerns with selective schooling, to many Labour members, a differentiated system in which pupils were placed in schools based on perceived ability held the promise of advancing gifted working-class youth educationally, occupationally, and socially by providing them with the access to the academic schooling that had been denied to many under the old system. In addition to these organizational pathways, individual mobile carriers also served as transmission sources for fixed-ability ideas. Among the most important of these were the ministers of education in the Attlee governments, who used their privileged positions within the increasingly centralized British state in order to realize these ideas within the new institutions of postwar education, while limiting opportunities for opponents of tripartitism to advance alternative models of schooling. This chapter begins by providing a historical overview of the pre-World War II system of general education in England and Wales, highlighting the role played by social class and wealth in determining pupils’ educational opportunities. The next section examines the ideational origins of the selective general education established after World War II. It focuses on the views of educational psychologists in the 1910s and 1920s, outlining the evolution of and inspiration for their ideas on the nature of human ability and its relationship to education. The influence of the educational psychologists on the policy program for educational expansion developed by the Labour party in the interwar years is examined next, followed by a discussion of the two key government advisory reports of the period, the Hadow and Spens reports on secondary education. The chapter then turns to an overview of the political process associated with the passage of the 1944 Education Act and considers developments in the separate Scottish education system before turning in the final section to an examination of the influence of the fixed-ability discourse on Labour’s educational leadership during its years in government in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

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The Evolution of General Education, 1870–1939 The decades between the creation of universal education system in Britain and the start of the Second World War would be among the most transformative in the country’s history. Enfranchized by the great reform legislation of the 1860s and 1870s, working-class Britons, represented in trade unions and—after 1900—the Labour party, would see their political power grow markedly in the years between 1870 and 1939. Yet for most children of working-class parents, access to advanced education and the opportunities it afforded would remain highly circumscribed; despite calls for change, British schooling on the eve of World War II would be marked by many of the rigid class divisions born of the industrialization and urbanization of the previous century. The era of universal schooling began in England and Wales1 in 1870,when the Education Act passed that year established the basis for a state system of elementary education.2 As it was consolidated in the 1902 Education Act, this system would be essentially two-tiered in structure. The first tier consisted of universal, compulsory, and free elementary schools for young people between the ages of five and thirteen. The second tier included voluntary, fee-charging secondary schools into which pupils transferred around age eleven. These latter schools provided advanced instruction in liberal arts for students until age sixteen and were intended to serve as preparation for university study and a professional career. The development of a state system of general education along such divided organizational lines would influence the shape of associated arrangements and interests. Key among these were the teacher unions, which operated in a fractured structure in which divisions related to class, gender, geography, religion, and, significantly, school type helped to produce a set of frequently opposing and competing representative bodies. The largest of these was the National Union of Teachers (NUT), which primarily (though not exclusively) represented elementary school teachers, many of whom were of working-class origins.3 The more middle-class secondary school teachers, by contrast, tended to be represented within the four associated members of the Federal Council of Secondary School Associations, commonly known as the Joint Four4 as well as several smaller unions, including the exclusively male National Association of Schoolmasters and the exclusively female Union of Women

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Teachers5 (Wiborg, 2017, 59–64). The split among teacher representatives already evident by the 1920s would serve, Wiborg writes, “to stiffen the elementary and secondary divide” that existed in the state system (2017, 64). With pupils separated into different classes of schools around age eleven, this system was organized on the basis of early selection, though it was pupils’ familial wealth or social standing that generally determined if they would ascend to the academic track. The new grammar schools of the secondary sector were dominated by the middle classes, while the overwhelming majority of working-class pupils completed their entire education in a single elementary school before leaving at the minimum school-leaving age to enter the labor market (Chitty, 2004, 19). Although the Board of Education would make provisions for state authorities to pay the fees for one-quarter of all students in the secondary schools in an effort to increase attendance levels for poorer children, workingclass parents were often reluctant to allow their children to enroll, since increased time in school generally meant fewer weekly wages for the family (Parkinson, 1970, 7). Amplifying the divisions in this system was the private or independent school sector, where an even smaller percentage of students from the wealthiest classes received secondary education. The graduates of these institutions, which included the so-called “public” schools in England such as Eton and Harrow,6 frequently continued the “ancient” universities of Oxford or Cambridge and to the top tiers of business, government, and the military, all of which would be dominated by private school alumni (Nicholas, 1999). Far from serving as a mechanism of class mobility, education in England at the start of the twentieth century, historian Brian Simon writes “both reflected, and fed back into and also perpetuated, the existing social structure” (1987, 105–106). In the decades prior to World War II, several attempts would be made to reform the system, but few significant changes would actually be realized. The Fisher Education Act of 1918 raised the school-leaving age to fourteen, but its other key provision requiring all fourteen to eighteenyear-olds to attend compulsory part-time further education (already a requirement in Germany) was never implemented, primarily due to budgetary pressures brought on by the 1921 recession (Sanderson, 1999, 60). Although governmental advisory bodies7 in the 1920s and 1930s would advocate the extension of general education for most young people beyond the elementary stage, these recommendations would remain unimplemented or rejected by government officials (Barber, 1994, 2–4).

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Structural change efforts would also be hampered by the limited funds available during the Depression years and the effects of the gathering crisis on the continent; provisions to raise the minimum school-leaving age to fifteen for most students were included in the Education Act 1936 but had the unfortunate implementation date of September 1, 1939, and were later suspended (Akenson, 1971, 151). With no significant changes to the system during this period, access to extended general education remained open only to a minority of young people, mostly from the wealthier classes; on the eve of the war, 80 percent of all students in England and Wales were leaving school at the minimum age permitted (Barber, 1994, 1). The early period of universal schooling in Britain would also see the development of a governance structure for primary and secondary education that would persist with few dramatic changes until late in the twentieth century.8 Under the 1870 system, state schools were administered by over 2,500 local school boards, which the 1902 Education Act consolidated into 318 local education authorities (LEAs). Created as committees by the county councils and county borough councils that themselves were the recent products of government legislation,9 the LEAs were responsible for the administration and maintenance of schools within their jurisdiction, as well as for designing academic curriculums. The flexibility and autonomy provided by locally based decisionmaking authority in education allowed considerable room for policy experimentation, an institutional feature that would play an important role in later outcomes. This early partial devolution of competence in state education also stood in marked contrast to the more centralizing tendencies evident in the French system established in the 1880s under the Ferry laws.10

Educational Psychology and the Fixed-Ability Discourse Although the organization of general education would undergo few fundamental changes before World War II, a range of actors would begin to challenge the assumptions that guided the practices of educational selection under the old system. Among these, the most influential would come from the relatively new academic field of educational psychology. First emerging in the late nineteenth century, educational psychology had established itself as a distinct academic discipline in Britain by the

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1910s. Under the influence of the Eugenics movement11 and Francis Galton’s late-nineteenth-century theories of heredity,12 research in British educational psychology would develop a particular focus around questions concerning the nature of individual differences within student populations. On the basis of this research, a view would emerge among the field’s early practitioners that the structure of the education system should reflect the manifest differences in pupils’ intelligence, which the psychologists believed could accurately be measured through testing. Between 1920 and 1939, these ideas would gain widespread acceptance among political and policy actors and within British society. “At this time,” Simon would later reflect, “the doctrines of psychometrists tended to be accepted as the tables of the law” (1974, 246). Cyril Burt: Ideational Originator Number One Among educational psychologists,13 Professor Cyril Burt stood as particularly influential during the interwar years. Trained at Oxford and the University of Würzburg in Germany, where he briefly studied with Oswald Külpe, a leading German structural psychologist, Burt would serve as a lecturer at the London Day Training College14 and later as Professor and Chair of Psychology at University College, London. Burt also became the first educational psychologist to serve in a local education authority when he was appointed to the London County Council in 1913 and in 1946 became the first British psychologist to be knighted for his contributions to the field (Miller & Hersen, 1992, 100).15 Influenced by fellow educational psychologist Charles Spearman’s concept of “general intelligence,”16 Burt, as Wooldridge (1994, 94) notes, would spend his career seeking to demonstrate three psychological propositions: “that general intelligence exists; that it can be isolated and measured; and that it is inherited rather than acquired.” These basic findings were first outlined in two early works. In his 1917 book The Distribution and Relations of Educational Abilities, Burt argued that that a young person’s ability was determined by his or her innate intelligence, while environmental factors played little role. Ability, however, was not randomly spread out across the pupil population, but had small high and low ability groups at either end of the distribution, with the majority of pupils in the middle range. A later work, Mental and Scholastic Tests, published in 1921 made the case for the use of mental tests to determine pupils’ innate levels of general intelligence.

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In Burt’s view, the traditional types of examination used to award scholarships to underprivileged pupils to attend secondary schools were of faulty design, since they focused on how much pupils knew rather than how capable they were of comprehending complex ideas and associations. Intelligence tests, by contrast, could not only more successfully identify pupils of higher potential ability than traditional scholastic exams, Burt argued, but could do so at an earlier age. Under the scholarship examination system for secondary schools as it was currently structured … the cleverest genius, destitute of a certain minimum of academic knowledge, could hardly be admitted. Occasionally, it is true, an able child is found whose gifts have a technical bias, rather than an academic; and whose intelligence, therefore, may be grossly underrated in school, unless it is judged by tests of manual construction rather than of scholastic knowledge. But too often it is through the neglect to discover three or four years ago the richness of his real capacity that the poverty of a child’s attainments is observable to-day. A test of intelligence, applied at the age of seven or eight, would avert much unmerited failure at the age of ten or eleven. Among the brightest children in our schools not a few miss scholarships because at an earlier age their ignorance of scholastic rudiments has relegated them to a class below their actual merits. They have remained, like sundials in the shade, with their available powers unused, because their presence has been left unilluminated… First consideration should always be accorded to the child’s innate intelligence. (Burt & London County Council, 1921, 2)

The view of intelligence as innate, measurable, and unchanging had significant implications for how education systems should be structured and governed. Along with other educational psychologists of the era, Burt believed that occupation and ability were closely linked—people of greater intelligence tended to ascend to the more important positions in society while those of normal or lower intelligence generally found employment in the middle and lower rungs of the occupational ladder. Given such correspondences, the core task for society should be, Burt argued, “to discover what ration of intelligence nature has given to each individual at birth, then to provide him with the appropriate education, and finally to guide him into the career for which he seems to have been marked out” (quoted in Simon, 1974, 242). Psychologists themselves played a crucial role in Burt’s vision, since it would be their task to measure and classify

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“citizens and then [allocate] them to their positions in the educational and occupational hierarchy” (Wooldridge, 1994, 86). Burt likely did more than any other figure in the interwar era to spread such views. His ideas not only had a significant influence on successive generations of academic psychologists but also—through his frequently published articles in newspapers and magazines and appearances on radio (and later television)—on popular opinion. By the 1930s, Burt was, as his biographer Hearnshaw (1979, 44) writes, “no longer an expert, but a public figure” who had, in Wooldridge’s estimation, become the bestknown psychologist in Britain (1994, 106). Labour and the Fixed-Ability Discourse In the 1920s and 1930s, the ideas Burt and his colleagues promoted would find a seemingly unlikely reception among members of the British Left. From a present-day perspective, the pairing of a political movement founded on principles of egalitarianism and social leveling and a school of thought that viewed human beings as distinctly and permanently unequal in their mental endowments would seem a case of strange bedfellows. In the context of the period, however, the affinity between the two sides is more understandable. A “meritocratic” interpretation of the educational psychologists’ findings would see in them an argument calling for access to opportunities for educational, occupational, and social advancement to be determined by natural ability, rather than familial wealth.17 Such a view comported with thinking in interwar British social democracy that maintained that the disregarding of ability in deference to wealth and social rank was precisely why aristocrats and professional classes continued to exert a stranglehold over British society. While left-wing positions on education generally argued in favor of universal expansion of opportunity, there also existed simultaneously the view among some socialists and others that there was a need for an elite corps specially trained to lead the masses of workers.18 Among this group, Wooldridge (1994, 187–189) notes, were many leading interwar politicians and intellectuals, including Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, future Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and J. B. S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist who was also a member of the Communist party and editor of the London edition of the Daily Worker. Haldane was also a strong advocate for early selection in education, writing in a 1932 essay “when children of all grades of

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ability are combined in one class, the intelligent merely learn to be lazy while the stupid are hopelessly discouraged” (1932, 12). R. H. Tawney, the leading interwar socialist theorist of education, shared many of the views of his meritocratic Labour colleagues and would be significantly influenced by the educational psychologists, particularly Percy Nunn, who helped establish the field within the London Day Training College and served a member of the Labour party’s advisory committee on education (Wooldridge, 1994, 65). Labour politicians had long advocated for structural reforms of the school system and the expansion of educational opportunities for working-class youth, but a detailed policy statement on secondary education would not be articulated until 1922 and the publication of Tawney’s pamphlet Secondary Education for All . The pamphlet argued that the traditional practice of segregating pupils on the basis of wealth in the two-tiered system of elementary and secondary schools was not only “socially obnoxious” but “educationally unsound” since it resulted in “(a) a grave waste of talent, (b) the exclusion from the secondary schools of children who ought to enter them, (c) the imposition on the primary schools of the task of educating children between twelve and fourteen, for which they may not be specially fitted, (d) waste and inefficiency arising from overlapping.” (Tawney & Labour Party, 1922, 11). Tawney called for a system consisting of successive primary and secondary stages, in which all children would be transferred at age eleven to some type of secondary school where they would remain at least until they reached the proposed new school-leaving age of sixteen. In Secondary Education for All , Tawney drew heavily on the educational psychologists’ fixed-ability arguments to counter the conservative claim that expanding education would serve no purpose since most young people would gain little from longer schooling and more advanced study. Tawney noted how educational psychology—and Burt’s studies specifically—had provided evidence “resulting from the development of more exact measurements of intelligence than could be applied till recently” that demonstrated how many youth could benefit from additional education. It is sometimes objected by persons without practical experience of educational questions that a wide extension of secondary education up to sixteen is not desirable, because all but a small minority of children … are not, as it is said, “worth educating.”… In reality, however, absurd as this view is on other grounds, the whole tendency of recent educational investigation

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has been still further to discredit it by emphasising the immense mass, not only of average talent—and average talent is worth cultivating—but of exceptional talent, which is sterilised for lack of educational opportunities. …[I]t is evident that not only are we failing to cultivate the intelligence of all the children described as normal, but we are actually failing to provide higher education for almost two-thirds of those who are of exceptional intelligence! The evidence on this point is overwhelming. “The results of nine years’ experience in examining elementary school candidates for scholarships to secondary schools,” states the Director of Education of a county borough, “has led me to the conclusion that between forty and fifty per cent, of the candidates would undoubtedly profit well by a course of secondary school education.” Greater precision has been given to these estimates by the investigations of Mr. Burt, the distinguished psychologist employed by the London County Council, who recently made a survey of the educational abilities of the children—in number 31,965—in the schools of a single London borough. (Tawney & Labour Party, 1922, 66–67)

For Tawney as well as for many other socialist thinkers of the period, expanding education did not necessarily mean the same as providing everyone with the same education. Separate schools for different ability categories would be necessary in any system of universal secondary education. It is true, of course, that not all children respond equally to the same methods and curriculum. Equality of educational provision is not identity of educational provision, and it is important that there should be the greatest possible diversity of type among secondary schools. (Tawney & Labour Party, 1922, 66)

Despite the adoption of the proposals in Secondary Education for All as party policy, Labour would have little success realizing them during its two periods in power in the interwar period. The parliamentary weaknesses and brief duration of both the 1924 and 1929–1931 governments,19 coupled with fierce resistance from the churches to greater state control over confessional schools dramatically limited the ability of the party to carry out its policy program for educational expansion (see Parkinson, 1970, 17–21, 23–27). It would not be until the wartime coalition of the early 1940s that the party would be able to revisit these proposals again.

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For the Conservatives who would rule Britain for most of the interwar period,20 education policy in the decades prior to World War II was decidedly non-reformist. The party tended to view the school system primarily as a source for the basic skills needed for work in the industrial sector and rejected arguments in favor of expanding education on pedagogical and social grounds (Parkinson, 1970, 30). It also wished, in deference to its middle-class constituents, to maintain the elite position of the feecharging secondary schools (Sutherland, 1984, 173). In this context, the views on innate intelligence and wasted ability advocated by educational psychology could be interpreted as a direct challenge to Conservatives’ interest in protecting privilege (Wooldridge, 1994, 198). The Consultative Committee Beyond the Labour party, the ideas of fixed-ability discourse would enter policy debates through another crucial transmission path—the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education. Created in 1900 to provide expert advice to the President of the Board of Education,21 the Committee would come to rely on many of the leading educational psychologists of the interwar period, including Burt, Spearman, and Nunn, all of whom served directly as members of the Committee or provided testimony before it. During the interwar years, the Committee would publish a series of reports that would lay a foundation for the selective school system established after World War II. These reports, which would largely reflect the psychologists’ assumptions regarding the measurability of intelligence and the hereditary nature of mental ability, would influence not only the senior Board officials who commissioned them but a wider net of politicians, civil servants, educators, and the public (Wooldridge, 1994, 249). The Committee would author nearly a dozen reports between 1919 and 1939, covering a range of issues associated with the administration and organization of the entire system of general education. It would be, however, its two major studies on the structure of secondary education, the 1926 report, The Education of the Adolescent and the 1938 report Secondary Education, that would have the most enduring impact on postwar differentiation practices (Chitty, 2007, 74; Hearnshaw, 1979, 111). Commissioned in 1924 by the first Labour government to study the relationship between the primary and secondary school sectors, the Committee under the chairmanship of William Henry Hadow22 would

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issue six reports between 1923 and 1933. Its 1926 report would include many of the recommendations contained in the 1922 Labour policy statement, most notably the proposal that secondary education should be made available to all young people regardless of their economic background, and that the minimum school-leaving age should be raised, though only to fifteen. On the issue of how any new secondary system should be organized, the report shared Tawney’s view that it should consist of different school types into which pupils would be placed around age eleven on the basis of their aptitudes and abilities, stressing however that all schools in the system should be of equal prestige. Burt and Nunn would play a prominent role in formulating the recommendations of the report. In his evidence to the Committee, Burt argued that psychological research had proven that young people exhibited vastly different abilities and that any system of education should be organized with this fundamental understanding in mind. Pupils of high ability (which in Burt’s view constituted only about 2% of any age group) should be removed from the larger student population at age eleven and placed in smaller classes. Nunn, who sat on the special drafting subcommittee for the report, made a similar appeal for pupils to be placed in one of three separate school types: the grammar school, the technical school, and a third school for those who demonstrated neither academic nor technical aptitudes (Wooldridge, 1994, 225). These views clearly resonated with the authors of Education of the Adolescent , who accepted the educational psychologist argument that the level of intellectual ability a person would exhibit for his or her entire life could be identified before the age of thirteen and moreover viewed them as compatible with the existing organizational division between primary and secondary schooling. At the risk of overloading our Report, we have ventured to quote these expressions of opinion at some length, because the general agreement of administrators and teachers that primary education should be regarded as ending, and post-primary education as beginning, at the age of 11+ seems to us important... The principal reasons for this consensus of opinion are, we think, two. In the first place there is the argument of the psychologist. Educational organisation is likely to be effective in proportion as it is based on the actual facts of the development of children and young persons. By the time that the age of 11 or 12 has been reached children have given some indication of differences in interests and abilities sufficient to make

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it possible and desirable to cater for them by means of schools of varying types, but which have, nevertheless, a broad common foundation … The arguments derived from educational theory are reinforced by practical considerations. For, in the second place, the tendency of educational organisation during recent years has been to mark the years 11 to 12 as the natural turning point up to which primary education leads, and from which post-primary education starts. (Hadow Report, 1926, 74–75)

Although the Conservatives, who had returned to government before the 1926 report was released, would not implement its major recommendations, its effects were nonetheless considerable. Hadow would play a significant role in generating public momentum for change and legitimizing a general education system with an expanded secondary structure based on the principles of differentiation and early selection that relied on psychological measures of ability to determine a student’s proper educational pathway (Wooldridge, 1994, 244). Such conclusions would be reinforced in the years following Hadow by supplementary memoranda from the inspectorate of schools which, while acknowledging the limitations of intelligence tests, provided guidance on their use in selection decisions. Across the 1930s, LEAs would increasingly, although not uniformly, begin using intelligence tests as part of the “11-plus examinations” (so termed for the age at which pupils generally sat for them) for the allocation of secondary school places under the prewar system (Sutherland, 1984, 157–163, 187–190).23 Although it would appear over a decade after Hadow, the Spens report would address many of the same issues as the earlier report.24 As in Hadow, Spens made the case for the expansion of secondary education, advocating the abolishment of fees for state secondary schools and the raising of the minimum school-leaving age, though now by two years to age sixteen.It also recommended that the new expanded secondary system be organized around selective lines, suggesting, as Nunn had in the 1920s, the establishment of a tripartite system comprised of three different school types of grammar, technical, and modern, into which pupils could be placed on the basis of their perceived potential. The stamp of educational psychology can be seen throughout Spens even more thoroughly than in the earlier studies produced under Hadow. The psychologists’ conceptions of innate and measurable ability, carried directly to the Committee in a memorandum written for it by Burt on adolescent intellectual development, served as the guiding ideas for

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discussions in the report on both curricular and structural questions (for an overview, see Chitty, 2007, 74). As Kogan and Packwood (1974, 38) write, “the historical importance of the Spens report cannot be exaggerated … it provided the scientific backdrop to the tripartite system. The Committee was professored up to the hilt and so able to legitimize the assumption that the soft concept of equality was right, that schools can be equal though separate, that life chances can be distributed at eleven years without injustice… The 1944 Act philosophy found its philosophers in the Spens Committee.” In a chapter entitled “Physical and mental development of 11– 16 year olds,” the report’s authors made clear their debt to educational psychology. Intellectual development during childhood appears to progress as if were governed by a single central factor, usually know as ‘general intelligence’, which may be broadly described as innate all-round intellectual ability. It appears to enter everything which the child attempt to think, or say, or do, and seems on the whole to be the most important factor in determining his work in the classroom. Our psychological witnesses assured us that it can be measured approximately by means of administering intelligence tests…Psychologists are confident that there are, in fact, wide individual differences in the development of general intelligence…We were informed that, with few exceptions it is possible at a very early age to predict with some degree of accuracy the ultimate level of a child’s intellectual powers.25 …Modern psychology insists on the wide individual differences that are noticeable in intellectual and emotional characteristics. One child differs from another far more than is generally supposed, and the notion that every normal child follows the same general course of development is mistaken. Since the ratio of each child’s mental age to his chronological age remains approximately the same while his chronological age increases, the mental differences between one child and another will grow larger and larger and will reach a maximum during adolescence. Thus a child who is a year backward at the age of 4 is more likely than not to be two years backward at the age of 8 and still more backward at the age of 15. In general, minor differences, which were hardly noticeable in the infant school, will be distinctly observable in the primary school, and by the age of 11 will have increased so much that it will no longer be sufficient to sort out different children into different classes. Different children from the age of 11, if justice is to be done to their varying capacities, require

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types of education varying in certain important respects. (emphasis in the original. Spens Report, 1938, 123–125)

The Spens report represents the peak of the psychologists’ influence in the interwar years. By the time of its publication, the belief that an education system should fundamentally reflect an understanding of human ability as innate, unchanging, and measurable had moved through a range of communicative channels from the writings of a relatively small group of researchers in a rather obscure academic sub-field to the highest levels of policymaking. On the eve of the Second World War, the fixed-ability ideas had achieved a hegemonic standing in the educational policy discourse of Britain and would, by war’s end, achieve institutionalization in a new system of education.

The Education Act 1944 and the Tripartite System Among victors and vanquished alike, the experiences of the Second World War would generate a reconsideration of basic social and political arrangements and create new possibilities for institutional change. In the case of education policy, the war would dramatically accelerate the demands for greater access to schooling that the interwar period had witnessed. More than anything, the war would make clear to Britons the manifold gaps in the basic education of the country’s young people26 and usher in what Barber (1994, 4) refers to as a “social sea change” that would bring together disparate actors to reform the system of general education. The most vocal advocates for change were on the Left. Led by Tawney and including representatives from the NUT, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the Workers’ Educational Association, and the Co-operative Union, the Campaign for Educational Advance was formed in 1942 to promote the expansion of educational opportunities (Barber, 1994, 7– 8). At the same time, however, more traditionally conservative groups and media outlets, included the military, the Church of England, the BBC, and The Times, would also begin making clear their support for fundamental changes to the structure of the general education system. Although Labour would be represented in the wartime coalition government, it would be Tory R. A. Butler27 who would oversee the Education Act from his appointment as President of the Board of Education by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in July 1941 through its passage in the summer of 1944.28

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Consideration of the new legislation among Board officials began in 1940 and led to the issuance of a Green Book entitled Education After the War in the spring of 1941, which outlined the basic framework of a new general education system (Gosden, 1976, 248). In accordance with the recommendations in Hadow and Spens, the proposed system was decidedly structured around early selection. Following six years in common primary education, pupils would transfer to one of two school types at age eleven: modern schools, with a leaving age of fifteen, and grammar schools with leaving ages of sixteen to eighteen. Pupils who demonstrated technical abilities would also be able to transfer at age thirteen to technical schools,29 which would provide a course of study through age fifteen or sixteen (Barber, 1994, 51). The differentiated system proposed in the Green Book would receive further confirmation in 1943 from the Norwood report,30 Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools . Commissioned by Butler in 1941 to advise the Board on programs of study for the new secondary schools under consideration, the new report would be written not by the Consultative Committee that had produced the Hadow and Spens reports but by the Secondary Schools Examinations Council, an advisory body to the Board that also coordinated the administration of university entrance exams between the schools and university examination authorities (Kogan & Packwood, 1974, 19). Norwood would in many ways be even more explicit than Hadow and Spens in its advocacy for a selective tripartite system of secondary education. Under the heading “Variety of Capacity,” the report’s authors outlined the reasons why a differentiated structure with early selection was the most appropriate for the new system then under consideration by the Board. One of the major problems of educational theory and organisation has always been, and always will be, to reconcile diversity of human endowment with practical schemes of administration and instruction … The evolution of education has in fact thrown up certain groups, each of which can and must be treated in a way appropriate to itself. Whether such groupings are distinct on strictly psychological grounds, whether they represent types of mind, whether the differences are differences in kind or in degree, these are questions which it is not necessary to pursue. Our point is that rough groupings, whatever may be their ground, have in fact established themselves in general educational experience, and the recognition of such groupings in educational practice has been justified both during the period

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of education and in the after-careers of the pupils. (Norwood Report, 1943, 2)

The report described the various “groupings” in terms of their aptitudes and occupational trajectories, emphasizing how pupils in each group should be provided with a curricular design appropriate to their particular ability type. The first group, according to the report, included: the pupil who is interested in learning for its own sake, who can grasp an argument or follow a piece of connected reasoning, who is interested in causes, whether on the level of human volition or in the material world, who cares to know how things came to be as well as how they are, who is sensitive to language as expression of thought, to a proof as a precise demonstration, to a series of experiments justifying a principle… He may be good with his hands or he may not; he may or may not be a good ‘mixer’ or a leader or a prominent figure in activities, athletic or other. … Such pupils, educated by the curriculum commonly associated with the Grammar School, have entered the learned professions or have taken up higher administrative or business posts.

While less capable of abstraction and rhetoric than his counterparts in the first group, a member of the second group, by contrast: often has an uncanny insight into the intricacies of mechanism whereas the subtleties of language construction are too delicate for him... He may have unusual or moderate intelligence: where intelligence is not great, a feeling of purpose and relevance may enable him to make the most of it. … The various kinds of technical school were not instituted to satisfy the intellectual needs of an arbitrarily assumed group of children, but to prepare boys and girls for taking up certain crafts ... Nevertheless it is usual to think of the engineer or other craftsman as possessing a particular set of interests or aptitudes by virtue of which he becomes a successful engineer or whatever he may become.

The final group identified by Norwood was comprised of the practical student, who, though lacking academic or technical gifts, could comprehend:

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concrete things [rather] than … ideas. He may have much ability, but it will be in the realm of facts. He is interested in things as they are; he finds little attraction in the past or in the slow disentanglement of causes or movements. His mind must turn its knowledge or its curiosity to immediate test; and his test is essentially practical…Because he is interested only in the moment he may be incapable of a long series of connected steps; relevance to present concerns is the only way of awakening interest, abstractions mean little to him. … Within this group fall pupils whose mental make-up does not show at an early stage pronounced leanings in a way comparable with the other groups which we indicated. (Norwood Report, 1943, 2–4)

While supportive of early selection on the basis of ability, Norwood de-emphasized the use of intelligence tests that were at the center of the educational psychologists’ discourse, advocating their use more as supplements to other methods of placement considered by the Committee to be more reliable, notably teacher recommendations (Norwood Report, 1943, 17). Not surprisingly Burt took issue with this aspect of the report, arguing that age eleven was, in effect, too late for selection, since intelligence tests could accurately assess individual differences in young people well before then. He also rejected the “types of mind” framework that Norwood had invoked as justification for the three-tiered system of grammar, technical, and modern schools, maintaining that ability was not distributed in the fixed “capacity” categories outlined but continuously distributed across a wide spectrum. To Burt, Norwood represented a clear turn away from modern psychological understanding of ability and a return to unscientific educational traditionalism (Fenwick, 1976, 32; Wooldridge, 1994, 239–243). Wooldridge makes much of Burt’s criticism of the Norwood report, implying that the commonly held but mistaken belief that Norwood’s views were the result of the influence of educational psychology has served to cast Burt and others in an undeserved bad light (Wooldridge, 1994, 243–244). As Torrance (1981, 52) points out, however, Burt’s criticism of Norwood was more about ensuring that the ideational rationale for early selection and differentiation in education remains firmly rooted in the theories of educational psychology, rather than in some more fundamental objection to the principles espoused in the report. Burt, he writes, thought “administrative convenience the main force behind selection at eleven [in Norwood], but he endorsed selection as such, in effect saying the right policy had been adopted but not for the right (i.e. his) reasons.”

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During this period, supporters of mixed-ability schools represented a distinct minority in policymaking circles. The view that a selective system might simply reproduce existing class division or that poorer pupils might have more opportunities in schools commonly attended by young people of all ranges of ability had been limited to a few progressive educationalists prior to the 1930s. By the middle part of that decade, however, interest in such schools had arisen in leftist political circles. Some members of the Labour party’s Advisory Committee on Education, which was dominated by members of the Labour teachers’ association, came out in favor of “multilateral” schools in which pupils of all-ability types would be educated in a common facility but still be placed in different academic streams31 and in 1938 the party adopted a policy that called for local experimentation with such schools (Barber, 1994, 23; Parkinson, 1970, 32).32 The representatives of both British business and organized labor would participate in the process leading to the 1944 Act. Neither, however, would play a crucial role in influencing the organization of the new general education system that would emerge following the Act’s passage. For business, the major organizational representatives were the Federation of British Industry (FBI) and the British Employers’ Confederation (BEC).33 While actively engaged in other aspects of government policy, both groups viewed the state education system in this period as, at most, a secondary issue for their members, and their involvement with education matters tended to be limited only to those issues that were seen as having a direct effect on employers and industry (Sneddon, 1999, 140). As one Board of Education member claimed around the time of the Spens report, “Industry, speaking generally and subject to a few notable exceptions, takes no interest in the educational system” (quoted in McCulloch, 1989, 94). One exception concerned leadership recruitment. Industry had long focused its recruitment efforts on graduates of the independents in hopes of attracting what McCulloch describes as the “right kind of boy” to become a future “[captain] of industry” (1989, 86). Frequently, however, business leaders would find the graduates of such schools to be reluctant to enter certain occupational categories in industry, which they deemed less prestigious. As a consequence, business groups supported the differentiated tripartite organization recommended in Spens under the hope that employers would be able to recruit the top pupils from each of the three school types to fill those positions. Such a strategy assumed that

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the new system actually achieved the “parity of esteem” among the three types that the report had called for. As Burgess writes: The FBI attached particular value to the ‘training and development of character’, which in the past, it argued, had benefited from the existence of a large number of independent public schools, and it urged that their facilities should be made more widely available. It deplored, however, the tendency of leavers from the public and secondary schools to shun careers ‘in the production departments of industry’, in favour of finance, distribution and general administration. It was felt that an equalisation in the status of grammar, modern and technical schools would help to rectify this bias, and industry would stand to gain from the consequent ‘even spread of talent as between the three types of schools’. (1994, 52)

Many academic observers shared the notion that each school type in the tripartite system could channel pupils with certain abilities to corresponding positions in business. Reflecting the “types of mind” arguments reflected in the Norwood report, a group of educationalists and business scholars (including Norwood himself) who held a conference at Nuffield College, Oxford, in September 1942 maintained that “the problems of education in its relation to industry need to be considered in relation to the three main streams of recruits who at present flow out from the education system to productive occupations” (Nuffield College, 1943, 31). For its part, British business, while not wholly indifferent to the reform process, was largely disengaged from the issue of educational change in the 1930s and 1940s and by most accounts a sideline player in the debates over the passage of the 1944 Act and its implementation. Sneddon observes that “the BEC and FBI were more conspicuous by their absence” than their involvement in shaping the new Act, particularly in early policy discussions (1999, 142). She notes how both groups not only failed to contribute to the proposals outlined in the Green Book issued by the Board of Education in 1941 that led to the Act but did not even receive copies of it from the Board upon its release (1999, 140). Organized labor, by contrast, was deeply involved in the discussions leading up to the 1944 Act, which was viewed by many as the triumphant culmination of a decades-long campaign to provide free secondary education to working-class pupils who had mostly seen their education end with elementary school at age 14. The TUC, the peak British labor association, had been active in providing comments to both the Spens and Norwood

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committees and had with the NUT joined Tawney’s campaign to promote educational expansion during the war years. The TUC had expressed a preference for multilateral schools since the 1930s and had been critical of Spens for failing to promote them over the tripartite framework. Consistent with this position, the TUC had called on the Board of Education in the discussions leading up to the 1944 Act to carry out substantial experiments with multilaterals in the new education system (Griggs, 2002, 36–37; TUC, 1942, 4).34 Yet the issues of early selection and separate schools were clearly not critical for the TUC, either during the debates over the Act or in the immediate postwar years, and its support of multilaterals coexisted with an acceptance of the tripartite system provided that it offered parity of esteem among its three school types. As the Congress stated in its 1946 annual report, the “public education system should provide equally (but not identically) for all children” (quoted in Sneddon, 1999, 141). Of greater significance for the TUC than the organization of schooling was the raising of the minimum leaving age, which it believed would help mitigate any disproportional effects of the differentiated tripartite framework. Among teacher unions, there was also a general openness to multilaterals, though also on a provisional basis. At its 1943 conference, the NUT expressed support for significant experiments with multilateral schools in any new secondary system. This view was echoed by the Joint Four secondary associations, which expressed support for the creation of some experimental multilaterals, provided that “it is recognized that such schools do not present the only solution to many of the problems associated with the secondary stage” (quoted in Fenwick, 1976, 36).35 Whatever support for multilaterals existed within the TUC and the teacher unions, the groups had limited effects on the outcome of the 1944 legislation or the position of the Labour party, whose members were for the most part reluctant to offer support for multilateral schools. Fenwick estimates that no more than six Labour MPs advocated for such schools in the first Labour government (1976, 58). Baron GoronwyRoberts, a Welsh Labour MP first elected in 1945, would later recall that “to most new MPs eager to build socialism, it seemed important to create secondary education for all. The idea of multilateral schools was remote and esoteric and familiar only to a few educational experts” (quoted in Vernon, 1982, 218). Multilaterals, Parkinson writes, “ran very much counter to the official philosophy in this period. The three major reports on English education in the inter-war period, the Hadow, Spens,

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and Norwood Reports, all stressed the need for a variety of schools which would cater for the educational needs of different children in different institutions, as had, of course, the party’s own programme in Secondary Education for All ” (1970, 31). While the Attlee government would use its overwhelming victory in the 1945 general election to carry out an unprecedented expansion of the British welfare state in the immediate postwar years with the enthusiastic support of the trades unions (see Whiteside, 1996, 87), it would reject their calls to locate the new system of education in commonly attended schools. The Board’s final plans for the new system were made public in a June 1943 White Paper entitled Educational Reconstruction, which accepted the tripartite structure proposed in Spens. Some, such as the Labour MP Thomas Sexton, raised concerns that only multilateral schools could “prevent the evil of competing grades and the abbreviated labels—“gram,” “tec,” and “mod—being attached to them” (HC Deb July 29, 1943) and in a nod to these “idealists” Butler kept open the possibility of experimentation with multilaterals (cc1829). Overall, however, the White Paper was greeted with significant approval from political parties, trade unions, teachers, educationalists, and press outlets from both ends of the political spectrum, setting the stage for parliamentary consideration of the Bill in the winter and spring of 1943–1944 (Barber, 1994, 57–58). Over the course of the debates in the Commons and Lords over the White Paper and subsequent legislation, there would be passionate arguments over a range of issues associated with the Bill,36 yet a review of the parliamentary record shows that the selective system adopted in the White Paper was not an overly contentious topic among MPs and government officials.37 As Barber (1994, 23) writes, “In the country there was growing agitation for education reform and for secondary education for all, but only a minority of those involved were determined advocates of multilateral schools. Many, even on the Left, were happy to settle for universal secondary education, regardless of the form it should take.” The Act, which received the Royal Assent on August 3, 1944, was a wide-ranging piece of legislation that made several key changes to the structure of educational policymaking as well as to the school system. It created a new Ministry of Education led by a Cabinet Minister to replace the old Board of Education and Board President38 and new advisory boards for England and Wales, the Central Advisory Councils for Education (CACE), to examine various issues at the request of the Minister. It also consolidated the system of local education authorities, cutting in

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half the total number of LEAs by eliminating those responsible solely for elementary education (Education Act, 1944). Most importantly for advocates of education expansion, however, was the new general education system established under the Act, which consisted of successive stages of elementary schools for ages five to eleven and free secondary schools for ages eleven to at least fifteen. Two decades after the publication of Labour’s policy proposal, Britain would finally have secondary education for all.39

Labour and the Implementation of the Tripartite System, 1945–1951 It is an irony of twentieth-century British political history that the tripartite system of early selection and differentiation that come to be seen by many in the British Left as an institutional embodiment of classprejudice and pedagogical backwardness would not only be implemented by a Labour government but by a Labour government that by most measures was among the most progressive governments the country had known since at least the 1860s. The landslide election victory of Labour in June 1945 under Clement Attlee would result in a range of left-oriented policies characterized by nationalization, regulation, Keynesian demand management, and welfare expansion. Significantly, the Attlee government was not bound by the 1944 Act to implement early selection or a differentiated education organization. The Act made no specific reference to the tripartite system or the school types in the Spens and Norwood reports, nor did it specially prohibit mixedability schools, but instead called on LEAs to “afford for all pupils… such variety of instruction and training as may be desirable in view of their different ages, abilities, and aptitudes, and of the different periods for which they may be expected to remain in school, including practical instruction and training appropriate to their respective needs” (Education Act, 1944, 5).40 In addition to allowing LEAs to decide on the structure of the new compulsory secondary education system—subject to Ministry approval—the 1944 Act had also left it to them to decide the method used to allocate pupils to whatever “variety of instruction” they selected. As discussed above, local authorities had begun using intelligence tests in the 1920s to help award scholarship places for pupils in the old two-tier elementary and secondary system. With LEAs now needing to sort the entire school populations at age eleven for secondary placement after the

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1944 Act, the use of such tests expanded significantly. A survey conducted by the NUT in 1947 revealed that some 78 of 106 authorities responded that they were already using some type of standardized intelligence tests to help place pupils into different school types and by 1952 the figure had risen to encompass essentially all LEAs in the sample (National Union of Teachers, 1949, 93; Thom, 1986, 118, 123). To be sure, the IQ test was only part of the overall eleven-plus exam—attainment tests, teacher assessments, and, on rare occasions, interviews were also used. But intelligence tests uniquely offered a method of determining school placement that was administratively straightforward and appeared to be, unlike recommendations, objective in nature. The IQ cut point for acceptance to the grammar schools was generally expected to fall between 114 and 120 points, above which it was assumed that only about twenty percent of the population would place (Montague, 1959, 375). The specific implementation measures for the schools in the tripartite system would be issued in two policy pamphlets published by the Ministry of Education after the war. The first, entitled The Nation’s Schools , had been drafted under the caretaker government led by the Conservatives following Labour’s withdrawal from the wartime coalition government in May 1945. While the 1944 legislation had been vague on the specifics of organization, this guidance from the Ministry advised LEAs to adopt the proposed secondary structure contained in the Spens and Norwood reports and the 1943 White Paper, namely a selective system in which all pupils would be placed in either a grammar school or secondary modern school at age eleven—with those demonstrating technical aptitudes further placed in technical schools at age thirteen—and discouraged the general adoption of mixed-ability schools. The Ministry pamphlet also maintained that there was little need to expand the number of grammar school places currently available, a view that seemed to be firmly at odds with the belief that more working-class pupils would enter the academic schools under the new system (Parkinson, 1970, 38). The Nation’s Schools was received with considerable hostility by members of Labour’s pro-multilateral faction, who called on the new Minister of Education Ellen Wilkinson to renounce the pamphlet. Wilkinson, who herself was of working class origins and had won a scholarship to a local grammar school and Manchester University under the old system rejected this call, maintaining that that tripartite system was a marked improvement from the previous system and one that promised to allocate pupils to the appropriate educational pathway on the basis of

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objective and rational educational considerations rather than social criteria (Parkinson, 1970, 40; Vernon, 1982, 6). In this way, Wilkinson would play the role as a mobile carrier of the fixed-ability ideas into policymaking choices of the government. Buoyed by pro-tripartite civil servants, she would continue to adhere to the Ministry’s earlier guidance that local authorities adopt the tripartite framework (Lawton, 2005, 49). A second pamphlet, The New Secondary Education, issued after Wilkinson’s death in February 1947, outlined in detail the new system of secondary modern, technical, and grammar schools. While it went to lengths to emphasize the shared features of all the secondary school types (which included a common code of building regulations, similar class sizes, libraries, and physical education), it also reiterated the findings (and directly referenced) the advisory studies on the need for different schools. In a chapter entitled “Different Types of Secondary Education,” the pamphlet made the following claim. Everyone knows that no two children are alike. Schools must be different, too, or the Education Act of 1944 will not achieve success. They must different in what they teach and how they teach it, just as pupils differ in tastes and abilities. The secondary school system must consequently offer variety in the curriculum and variety in the approach, suited to the differing aptitudes and abilities and stages of development of the children concerned. (Ministry of Education, 1947, 22)

Wilkinson was succeeded by another skeptic of multilaterals, George Tomlinson, who like his predecessor would reject appeals for more multilateral experimentation from party members and the TUC, even turning down the plan of a Labour-led LEA in Middlesex to establish mixed-ability schools in its district in 1948 (Chitty, 2007, 80). Crucial to understanding the support for tripartitism by Labour leaders such as Wilkinson and Tomlinson was the view that grammar schools could serve as a free state sector counterweight to the private schools for working-class youth. It is hard to overstate the antipathy held by many on the English Left for the independent schools during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing support from a wave of writings in the 1930s and 1940s decrying the English private education culture of the “the old school tie,” 41 many in the Labour party would advocate for the formal legal abolition of the independents, arguing that the presence of institutions that conferred such dramatic advantages to its narrow circle

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of wealthy members was contrary to the values of democracy, particularly as they were being defined for the new postwar era.42 The schools’ entrenched position in the country’s elite fabric rendered politically impossible any attempt to close them down completely.43 But many critics of the existing private system saw, in the grammar schools established under the 1944 reorganization, an opportunity to do the next best thing, namely to create a high-quality state system of universal and free state secondary education that would end any advantage conferred by access to exclusive fee-charging private schools and reduce the still dominant role played by family class and wealth in determining young people’s life chances. In Green’s estimation: The solution lies in the State providing educational opportunities of such wide variety … to such high standards of teaching and amenities that no parent, however rich or however snobbish, could gain any advantage either in prestige or social opportunity by paying £315 per year to maintain his son at Eton. (Green, 1948, 161)

The idea that mixed-ability schools could genuinely compete with the elite private schools seemed unlikely, even to ardent believers of the overall pedagogical benefits of multilateralism. To many, a selective state system of free education provided talented working-class pupils with the best possible chance of obtaining the advantages of wealthier pupils and gaining access to higher education and the opportunities it created. The fixed-ability education discourse was crucial in shaping this view, as it offered a seemingly progressive mechanism for achieving this access. As Griggs writes: Initially the prospect of selection to a secondary grammar school by what was believed to be an accurate measure of a pupil’s intelligence, regardless of any ability by parents to pay fees, was seen as a great step forward. To think that just as access to such schooling had been won it would be in effect be removed by a system which ended grammar schools seemed to significant numbers in the labour movement and among ambitious parents within the working class like snatching away at the last minute a prize they had just one. (2002, 168)

In the immediate postwar years, this discourse continued to shape the preferences of Labour party leaders, with belief in human intelligence

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as innate and measurable and ability as fixed at an early age still dominating much thinking within the Ministry of Education under Attlee. In such a discursive climate, the option of reorganizing the education system around mixed-ability schools was, as Parkinson (1970, 51) writes, “at best superfluous and at worst educationally retrograde. That these assumptions in many ways have since been rejected … does not alter their importance as one of the conditioning factors operating upon administrators and the Ministers at this time. They clear formed part of the climate of opinion by which the Ministers were consciously or unconsciously influenced into accepting the validity of the tripartite system and rejecting the comprehensive alternative.” Few statements validated this assessment more thoroughly than one made by Ellen Wilkinson while serving as Minister of Education in 1946 and demonstrated the extent to which the ideas of interwar educational psychology still held sway over the newly created Ministry and shaped the new school system it was tasked with implementing. There are differences in intelligence among children as well as among adults. There are distinctions of mind and these are imposed by nature. I am afraid that this is a fact which we cannot get over. Children will be different in bent, and in intellectual capacity. There is a purpose in education and that is to draw out and develop the best in every child. Because children differ in their intellectual makeup, it seems to me that different provisions must be made by the Ministry of Education. (quoted in Vernon, 1982, 59)44

While such words from Labour officials may seem puzzling in hindsight, in the discursive context of the period they are perfectly consistent with a clear thread of educational thought within the party. As educationalist and early comprehensive school supporter Robin Pedley (1966, 38) would write of the Attlee governments’ approach to education from the significantly altered discursive climate of the 1960s: One might have supposed that an avowedly socialist party would look askance at plans for separate types of secondary school which offered courses of different length and scope to children judged superior or inferior in mental ability; schools which were, therefore, likely to vary greatly in social prestige. But … few of the leading figures had the knowledge which would have enabled them to effectively to answer the [pro-tripartite] arguments … Still more important, most saw no need to do so. (1966, 38)

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Scotland To a large degree, the fixed-ability discourse examined in this chapter played a role in the development of general education in Scotland similar to the one it played in other parts of Britain, with comparable ideational origins and transmission routes to policymakers. The Scottish systems of general, vocational, and higher education differed significantly from those in England and Wales and were rooted in practices that predated the 1707 Acts of Union and shaped by a separate governing structure that evolved as schooling expanded across Britain in the nineteenthcentury. Elementary education had become compulsory in Scotland with the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, with the school system overseen by a new Scottish Education Department (SED) that would later fall under the administration of the Secretary for Scotland when that post was reestablished in 1885. Although there were advocates for common post-primary schooling as the state system consolidated in the early twentieth century,45 SED authorities would reject such an approach in favor of a differentiated and selective structure. Circular 44 issued by the SED in 1921 called for what McPherson and Raab (1988, 350) term an “uncompromising bipartism” in Scottish general education, with Scottish pupils differentiated on the basis of a qualifying exam given in the final year of primary school around age twelve into either a two-to-three year “postprimary” or “non-secondary” school or in a secondary school lasting five or six years that could lead to university study.46 Such a division was justified, the Department maintained in the circular, since only a small number of pupils were “endowed by nature with the mental equipment” needed to be successful in higher education (quoted in Stocks, 1995, 49). Crucially, the interwar system in Scotland would—as in England and Wales—also come to utilize intelligence tests to help differentiate pupils in post-primary education. The attainment qualifying exams that had generally been used before the 1930s had been the subject of considerable criticism from teachers and school officials, who believed they rewarded “cunning” and “cramming” over “mental activity” (quoted in Stocks, 2000, 228). Under Circular 44, elected local authorities were given discretion to choose the mechanism for selection at age twelve47 and by the 1930s were increasingly turning to intelligence testing as a method of selection. By 1933, nearly forty percent of Scottish authorities were using intelligence tests at least as part of their promotion systems,

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with the share growing as the decade progressed (Paterson, 1975, 64; Stocks, 2000, 233). As in England and Wales, educational psychologists played a major role in legitimizing and promoting mental testing in schools. A key development in this regard was the appointment of the English psychologist Godfrey Thomson as Professor of Education at Edinburgh University and the Principalship at Moray House Training College in 1925. In the early 1920s, Thomson had created the Northumberland Mental Test, which was among the first intelligence tests to be used to help award secondary school scholarships for eleven-year-olds, and the tests he devised at Moray House would be increasingly adopted by British educational authorities to help make selection decisions (Paterson, 1975, 63; Wooldridge, 1994, 161–162). As in the rest of Britain, there was a growing convergence of views between policymakers and educational psychologists in Scotland on the possibilities of mental testing in education in the interwar period. In general, Scottish policymakers, like their English counterparts, saw in intelligence testing a mechanism that appeared to address the criticisms of the old examination system while at the same time offering a practical way to divide pupils. As Paterson (1975, 64) writes, “Thomson’s attitudes … correspond closely to the official policies of the administrative bloc on Scottish education. They all shared a belief in selection as a necessary means of producing an educational elite; and they agreed that the need was for ‘scientific’ instruments which would differentiate the abilities of children so as to properly guide these children into secondary courses suited to those abilities.” Another significant academic contributor to the Scottish variant of the interwar education discourse was William McClelland, a professor of education at St. Andrews University, whose 1942 Selection for Secondary Education helped convince education policy actors that intelligence testing could be used to separate pupils accurately and fairly (see McPherson and Raab, 1988, 353–355). As Osborne (1967, 216) writes in his comparison of education in England and Scotland between the wars “intelligence testing had as big a vogue in Scotland as in England. The names of Thomson and McClelland rank among those who did most to spread the use of these and other objective tests in selection for secondary education.” Scotland would precede England and Wales in creating a universal secondary system with the 1936 Education (Scotland) Act, which elevated

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all post-primary education to the secondary level (Paterson, 2004, 49). The 1945 Education Act in Scotland—the equivalent legislation to the 1944 Act in England and Wales—would consolidate this system for the postwar period. Significantly, the new system retained the selective nature of the old one and divided pupils into either “junior secondary” schools, which provided three years of secondary education and award pupils a Junior School Certificate upon completion, and “senior secondary” schools, which would offer five to six years of courses of study and culminate in the Senior Leaving Certificate, commonly referred to as “Highers.”48 Demonstration of proficiency in a certain set of subjects in the senior certificate examination qualified a student for entry to a Scottish University. As in England, there was a group of Scottish advocates for multilateral—termed “omnibus” in Scotland—schools whose influence was most visibly represented in the Scottish Advisory Council on Education’s 1947 report Secondary Education, which called for all pupils to attend common schools with a common curriculum before sitting a leaving exam at age sixteen that would result in the awarding of a national School Certificate (Paterson, 2004, 130). In making its case for omnibus schools, the report argued that early selection, regardless of the method, was likely to be problematic, given the environmental factors that might influence a student’s exam performance and the volatility of the adolescence period itself. Recent advances in psychology and mental testing have undoubtedly given the educationalist valuable instruments for the assessing of native ability and scholastic attainment and when these instruments combine with the estimate of the primary teacher… a high degree of reliability can be secured. But where a child’s future is in question, a high degree of reliability is not enough … Teachers and administrators are becoming more and more conscious of the uncertainty attaching to all prognosis at this stage. The distorting effect of strain or health-upset at the time of testing; the compensatory factor of character and ambition; the plus or minus of home environment; the possibility of late-development; the unpredictable changes that come with adolescence—all these together make it certain that, once we have drawn the line, there will be above and below it a considerable marginal area containing some destined for success and some for failure but … for which we cannot say, save by putting the matter to the proof. (Scottish Education Department, 1947a, 33–34)

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Paterson characterizes the SED’s response to the 1947 report as “cautious,” noting that the Department did not formally address the report’s finding until 1951 and at that time said nothing about the Council’s recommendations on organizational changes. As in England and Wales, however, education officials in Scotland issued advisory guidelines after the war to local authorities outlining methods to be used for the placement of pupils in the bipartite system at the end of primary school. In Circular 108, published in 1947, the SED noted that authorities could consider several factors in making placement decisions, including teachers’ reports and pupils’ scores on English and mathematics attainment exams, but the Department placed particular emphasis on the predictive value of group intelligence tests. Indeed, it considered these tests to be of such reliability that local authorities could ignore the attainment results completely in making their decisions. Investigation has shown that in the grading of pupils for promotion the most reliable results are obtained by combining (a) scaled teachers’ estimates with the results of (b) group intelligence tests and of (c) attainments test or examinations. At the same time, the combination of (a) with the results of (b) has by itself a high prognostic value, and some Authorities may prefer to base the grading of their pupils on such a combination. (Scottish Education Department, 1947b, 4)

The wishes of parents were also to be taken into account by education authorities according to the SED, though it made clear that the final say would remain with school officials if they felt that parents had selected a course of study for which “the pupil shows no reasonable promise of profiting” (Scottish Education Department, 1947b, 4). The attitudes of the Scottish Labour party during this period largely resembled those of the party south of the border. McPherson and Raab found little evidence of support for the 1947 Advisory Council’s recommendations among ministers in the Scottish Office during the Attlee governments and noted that Scottish Labour had “strong attachments” to the bipartite organization in places like Aberdeen, Fife, and Lanarkshire, where the selective systems were viewed as providing an “equality of access to privileged courses” (1988, 367). Indeed, Scottish party members were generally not well represented in those factions of Labour that later pushed the leadership to accept comprehensive education reforms as a goal in the 1950s (see MacKenzie, 1967).

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The discourse that shaped the new general education in Scotland exhibited many of the same core characteristics as those in England and Wales. Among these were a belief that only a minority of the population would benefit from advanced education, the need for a differentiated system of post-primary schools, and a faith in intelligence testing as a mechanism for accurately placing young people on the appropriate educational and occupational pathway. At the same time, however, mixed-ability schooling also had its supporters in Scotland, who viewed it as reflecting what Osborne (1967, 209–215) and others have characterized as the “democratic tradition” in Scottish education.

Conclusion The 1944 Education Act resulted from a decades-long fight for the expansion of education in Britain. Since the early 1920s, the British Labour party had called for the creation of a system of free secondary education open to all pupils, reflecting a view that greater access to schooling for working-class youth could help break the stranglehold of the middle and upper classes on British society. Due to the sharp political constraints imposed on its two interwar governments, Labour would be unable to realize such a policy before 1939. It would find success, however, during the Second World War, when it would be joined by a number of traditional opponents of educational expansion, including members of the Conservative party, for whom the war had revealed the shortcomings of the British education system and who recognized the need for an educated workforce to rebuild the country at the conflict’s end. A powerful explanation for the expansion of secondary education carried out by the 1944 Education Act can be found in conceptions of welfare state development and in particular the role of leftwing parties. Labour had experienced significant electoral growth and increased its political influence during the interwar years, replacing the Liberals as one of the two major parties in the British political system. Through decades of active campaigning and resource mobilization that would be aided by shifting climates of opinion during the Second World War, the party achieved a clear advancement in the material interests of its working-class constituency with the 1944 legislation by significantly expanding access to schooling within the state-maintained system of general education. While an explanation that emphasizes the interests of left parties in extending education may explain the expansionary dimension of the 1944

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Act, it cannot account for the specific preference of Labour party leaders for a differentiated organizational model of schooling based on early selection. As this chapter has argued, such an accounting requires an understanding of the influence on actors of the interwar discourse of educational psychology. The discourse defined the problem of expanding education not merely in terms of offering more schooling but in offering the most appropriate type of schooling given the innate and fixed nature of human ability. Under such a definition, the tripartite system that was built on practices of early selection and differentiation served as the institutional solution that best addressed the psychologists’ conception of the problem of expansion. Critically, this framing of the problem would be promoted and communicated in the interwar and immediate postwar period by education advisory groups commissioned by the government and by the Labour party, which viewed the discourse’s suggested solution of the tripartite system as an institutional vehicle to remedy the manifest inequalities of the old system’s practice of selecting by social class and which the party sought to realize by supporting the 1944 Act and later by implementing the tripartite system. Significantly, it would be Labour actors who had most fully embraced the psychologists’ view who would hold the most powerful positions as mobile carriers in the Attlee governments to shape the new education system. Continuity in the organizational design of the secondary system created after the 1944 Act thus depended more on a fixed set of beliefs than on a fixed set of interests. As a consequence, ideas that undercut those beliefs would also challenge the system’s design. As the next chapter examines, such an ideational challenge would arise within a remarkably short time after the creation of the tripartite system; this counterdiscourse would hasten the collapse of coalition that had supported tripartitism by helping to generate marked uncertainty about the practices of early selection where firm belief had existed only a few years before.

Notes 1. See below for a discussion of the Scottish system. 2. While organized labor generally supported the expansion of the state education system during this period, most of the still unorganized majority of workers opposed universal schooling prior to the 1870 Act, fearing the economic consequences that would result from the loss of children’s wages (see Davies, 1986, 21).

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3. Despite a broadly left-of-center political orientation, the NUT did not formally affiliate itself with the Labour party and only joined the national peak Trades Union Congress in 1970 (Lawn & Whitty, 1992, 82–83). 4. At the time of its founding in 1906, the Joint Four consisted of the Association of Assistant Mistresses, the Assistant Masters Association, the Association of Head Mistresses, and the Incorporated Association of Head Masters (Beauvallet, 2014, 14). The Assistant Mistresses and Masters’ associations merged in 1978 and voted in 2017 to combine with the NUT, forming the new National Education Union. 5. These two unions merged in the 1970s after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 banned single-sex unions (Beauvallet, 2014, 2). 6. The term “public school” is reserved for independent boarding schools in the English system, and not all fee-charging institutions. The name is the source of frequent confusion to outside observers. As Labour MP and Secretary of State for Education and Science Anthony Crosland dryly noted “foreign readers should note the quaint solecism whereby public schools mean exclusive private schools” (Crosland, 1957, 261). 7. Namely the Board of Education advisory committees that produced the Hadow (1926) and Spens (1938) reports (for a further discussion see below). 8. Notably with the establishment of the national curriculum in the 1988 Education Reform Act. The most significant prewar change to the framework involved the role of religious authorities. Under the 1870 Act, responsibility for the provision of education in England and Wales was shared between the state and the Anglican and Catholic churches in a “dual system.” The 1902 Education Act would shift the balance of power in the system towards state control by increasing the amount of public funding church schools received, beginning a long process in which religious authority over education in England and Wales would gradually decline. 9. Specifically, the Local Government Act 1888. 10. By the 1980s the trends would be reversed, as the Thatcher administration would pursue a recentralization of educational policymaking while France would experiment with delegating greater competence to the local areas (Daun, 2004, 331–334). See also Archer (1984). 11. For detailed discussion of the origins and influence of Eugenicist thinking in education in Britain, see Chitty (2007, 25–64). 12. Based on an analysis of the lineages of nearly 1,000 members of the English upper class, Galton’s most influential work, Hereditary Genius (1870), concluded that mental ability was transmitted hereditarily to offspring. 13. In addition to Burt, Wooldridge lists John Adams, P. B. Ballard, Susan Isaacs, Thomas Percy Nunn, Charles Spearman, Godfrey Thomson, C.

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

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W. Valentine, and W. H. Winch as the founders of British educational psychology (1994, 60). Later to become the Institute of Education at the University of London. Burt’s influence on policy debates over education would continue up until the end of his long life in 1971, when his writings appeared in the influential Black Papers on Education (see Chapter 6). A good deal of his research was controversially alleged in the 1970s to be based on falsified findings. For a review of the debates associated with Burt, see Mackintosh (1995). For a defense of Burt, see Fletcher (1991). Spearman’s measurement, known as G-factor, or general intelligence factor, is purported to identify a single common factor in individuals that allows them to score highly on tests measuring a range of different cognitive skills (see Spearman, 1927). This is clearly Wooldridge’s reading of the educational psychology movement, which is forcefully rejected by Chitty. Labeling Wooldridge a “Burt apologist,” Chitty claims that Burt, like his intellectual mentor Galton, used conceptions of innate and fixed intelligence to justify social immobility and the privileges of the higher social classes (2007, 76). The present book takes no position on the question of the educational psychologists’ “true intentions,” but does argue with Wooldridge that the “meritocratic interpretation” of the findings of Burt clearly influenced political actors, most notably on the political left, as evidenced by the writings cited below. For an overview of the socialist conception of leadership in early twentieth-century Britain and its relationship to left-wing views on education, see McCulloch (1991, 98–118). Both were minority governments. Conservatives would hold power during this period both in single majority governments and as the largest party in the coalition National governments. For a discussion of the origins of the Committee, see Kogan and Packwood (1974, 10–13). The reports would be commonly referred to by the names of the Committee chairs who oversaw their publication: Hadow, a musicologist who served as Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield University who served as chair from 1923 to 1933, and Sir William Spens, a theologian and Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who would chair the Committee from 1933 to 1939. Sutherland’s detailed research on the adoption of mental testing in England before 1940 documents how the reception to such testing was, in her words, “patchy and uneven” across the 146 LEAs in England and Wales, owing to a range of factors, including, most notably, elite resistance to the tests (1984, 283). Yet even by her assessment, somewhere between

4

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

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fifty and seventy-five percent of all English and Welsh LEAs with responsibility for secondary education used mental tests between 1919 and 1939 (1984, 189). The major structural reform in general education during this period was the so-called “Hadow reorganization” of elementary schools, under which elementary students were to be transferred to separate senior schools or departments at age eleven for their final three years of schooling. Like other reforms of the era, however, the reorganization would be inconsistently implemented in the 1930s and ultimately stopped completely with the outbreak of war in 1939 (see Barber, 1994, 12). This sentence would later referred to by Committee member Lady Simon as the report’s most “celebrated and ill-founded assertion” (Simon, 1977, 174). As Barber (1994, 4) notes, the British army would report that one in four of its sixteen and seventeen-year-old conscripts during the war years was functionally illiterate. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1950s, Butler would convince many in his party to accept the basic features of the welfare state created during Labour’s first postwar governments (Hall, 1986, 76). Although the 1944 legislation would later be referred to as “the Butler Act,” some historians have questioned Butler’s personal contribution to its drafting, arguing that his primary role was one of an advocate for existing plans drawn up prior to his appointment by civil servants in the Board of Education in late 1940 and early 1941 (see Gosden, 1976). For a discussion of technical education before World War II and particularly the (non-secondary) junior technical schools, see McCulloch (1989, 31–42). The report was written under the direction of Sir Cyril Norwood, a former headmaster at Harrow and president of St. John’s College at Oxford. The multilateral school model thus differed from the “comprehensive” model, in which all students would attend the same classes and not simply the same facilities, that would come to be advocated and adopted by reformers beginning in the 1950s. As Osborne (1967, 197) describes the differences, “a multilateral school is supposed to be one in which the three ‘sides’, though within one school and with freedom of transfer from one to another, are separately organized. A comprehensive school will usually divide its children according to their ability, either into streams or into sets, but may be regarded as having more of a common core of studies leading to a diversity of courses in the later years, yet without such a marked distinction between the ‘sides’.” The multilateral school is thus similar to the “additive” version of the Gesamtschule endorsed primarily by the Christian Democrats in West Germany during the 1960s (see Chapter 9).

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32. McCulloch (2007, 145) notes Norwood’s personal antipathy towards multilateral schools, highlighting in particular his dislike of the multilateral American system of education and his belief that such schools had been failures in other countries. 33. The FBI and BEC would merge with the National Association of British Manufacturers to form the Confederation of British Industries in 1965. 34. Spens had rejected multilateral schools as a general policy, but it did allow for their construction in areas in which grammar schools would be too small to be maintained alone (Spens Report, 1938, xx–xxii; see also Chitty, 2007, 75). 35. Fenwick writes that “this was the period of greatest enthusiasm among [Joint Four groups] for the multilateral school,” suggesting that although these groups would later become critics of the mixed-ability concept of schooling, “it is certainly necessary to remember this short-lived but widespread enthusiasm” (1976, 36). 36. Consistent with the concerns of the TUC, a key issue cited by Labour MPs during the parliamentary debate on the Bill focused on the raising of the minimum school leaving age to sixteen. Under the Bill, the minimum age was to be raised immediately from fourteen to fifteen. Despite attempts by Labour MPs to obtain a firm timetable from Butler, the Bill stated that the age would be raised again to sixteen when “practicable.” History would demonstrate that the MPs’ concern was warranted—the minimum leaving age would not reach sixteen until the early 1970s. 37. See HC Deb (January–April 1944, Vols. 396–397). 38. In Germany, such a ministerial position would not be created until 1969 (see Chapter 9). 39. Although the Education Act 1944 applied only to England and Wales, similar provisions were reflected in the Education Act 1945 for Scotland (for a discussion see below) and in the Education Act 1947 for Northern Ireland. For Wales, the Act marked an end to what Jones and Roderick call (2003, 147) “the distinctive Welsh system of secondary education” and represented its “coalesc[ing]” with the English system. 40. Archer refers to this absence of direct organizational prescription in the Bill as a “masterly piece of political manipulation,” which—coupled with the creation of a minister-level position to oversee national education policy—created “the necessary conditions for imposing tripartism or any other kind of organizational uniformity” in the education system (1984, 147). 41. See Worsely (1941). 42. Although the Conservatives were far more likely to be graduates of independents, many significant Labour party leaders attended private schools, including Prime Minister Attlee (Haileybury) and future Secretary for

4

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

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Education and Science and architect of comprehensive education reform Anthony Crosland (Highgate). Independent schools were also the subject of a wartime study, the 1944 Fleming Report (The Public Schools and the General Educational System), which advocated greater state involvement in their administration and recommended that one-quarter of their students be drawn from the state primary schools and financially supported by state funds. Interestingly, this recommendation was rejected by the a Conservative government in the 1950s on the grounds that increased standards in state schools had obviated the need for such a scheme, despite support for the idea from many Independents themselves (Dancy, 1963, 28–32; also Anderson, 2006, 131–132). For a summary of the range of obstacles facing those who sought the abolishment of private schools, see Crosland (1982, 149). In recent years Wilkinson’s quote has been invoked by a number of political actors and educationalists, mostly on the right of the political spectrum, who advocate a return to the postwar tripartite system. Among these are the UK Independence Party, which cited the quote in the party’s 2005 education policy program (UKIP, 2005, 15). Among these was the Advisory Council on Scottish Education, which recommended in a 1921 report that general education be organized in Scotland in progressive—rather than separate—stages (see Paterson, 2004, 48). In some authorities, students from both the junior and the senior tracks were housed in common “omnibus” schools, though such schools generally owed their existence to practical rather than ideological considerations, since they were usually in rural areas that lacked the populations to support separate junior and senior facilities (Stocks, 2002). As Stocks notes (2000, 226), the task of selection made somewhat easier in Scotland rather than England by the fact that more students were selected for the secondary tracks, which was itself largely the result of the proportionally greater number of free and inexpensive secondary schools in the country. Unlike in England and Wales under tripartitism, there was no separate technical school in the postwar “bipartite” Scottish system, with vocational training customarily offered in the junior schools or in supplementary courses. Critics of the bipartite framework, such as the Advisory Council, rejected the idea of a separate technical school but called for greater status and prestige awarded to technical education in the existing schools and particularly in the senior secondaries, which had tended to favor literary courses of study (Scottish Education Department, 1947a, 126).

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References Akenson, D. H. (1971). Patterns of English educational change: The Fisher and the Butler acts. History of Education Quarterly, 11(2), 143–156. Anderson, R. D. (2006). British universities: Past and present. Hambledon Continuum. Archer, M. S. (1984). Social origins of educational systems. Routledge. Barber, M. (1994). The making of the 1944 Education Act. Cassell. Beauvallet, A. (2014). English teachers’ unions in the early 21st century: What role in a fragmented world? Revue LISA/LISA e-journal. Littératures, Histoire des Idées, Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone–Literature, History of Ideas, Images and Societies of the English-Speaking World, 12(8). https://doi.org/ 10.4000/lisa.7108 Burgess, K. (1994). British employers and education policy, 1935–45: A decade of ‘missed opportunities’? Business History, 36(3), 29–61. Burt, C. L., & London County Council. (1921). Mental and scholastic tests; Report by the education officer submitting three memoranda. P.S. King and Son Limited. Chitty, C. (2004). Education policy in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Chitty, C. (2007). Eugenics, race and intelligence in education. Continuum. Crosland, A. (1957). The future of socialism. Macmillan. Crosland, S. (1982). Tony Crosland. Cape. Dancy, J. (1963). The public schools and the future. Faber. Daun, H. (2004). Privatisation, decentralisation and governance in education in the Czech Republic, England, France, Germany and Sweden. International Review of Education/Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft/Revue internationale l‘éducation, 50(3), 325–346. Davies, B. (1986). Threatening youth: Towards a national youth policy. Open University Press. Education Act 1944. (1944). HMSO. Fenwick, I. G. K. (1976). The comprehensive school, 1944–1970: The politics of secondary school reorganization. Methuen. Fletcher, R. (1991). Science, ideology, and the media. Transaction Publishers. Galton, F. (1870). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and sonsequences. D. Appleton and Co. Gosden, P. H. J. H. (1976). Education in the Second World War: A study in policy and administration. Routledge. Green, E. (1948). Education for citizenship. In H. Tracey (Ed.), The British Labour party, Its history, growth, policy, and leaders (pp. 154–169). Caxton Pub. Co. Griggs, C. (2002). The TUC and education reform, 1926–1970. Routledge. Hadow Report. (1926). Report of the Consultative Committee on the Education of the Adolescent. HMSO.

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Hall, P.A. (1986). Governing the economy: The politics of state intervention in Britain and France. Oxford University Press. Haldane, J. B. S. (1932). The inequality of man, and other essays. Chatto & Windus. Hansard (Great Britain). (1943). Educational Reconstruction (Vol. 391). The Parliamentary Debates, Official Report. HMSO. Hansard (Great Britain). (1944). Education Bill (Vols. 396–397). The Parliamentary Debates, Official Report. HMSO. Hansard (Great Britain). (2014). Technical and Vocational Education (Vol. 584). The Parliamentary Debates, Official Report. HMSO. Hearnshaw, L. S. (1979). Cyril Burt. Cornell University Press. Jones, G. E., & Roderick, G. W. (2003). A history of education in Wales. University of Wales Press. Kogan, M., & Packwood, T. (1974). Advisory councils and committees in education. Routledge and K. Paul. Lawn, M., & Whitty, G. (1992). The re-formation of teacher unionism. Education Review, 6, 4–12. Lawton, D. (2005). Education and Labour party ideologies, 1900–2001 and beyond. Routledge. Mackintosh, N. J. E. (1995). Cyril Burt: Fraud or framed? Oxford University Press. MacKenzie, M. (1967). The road to the circulars: A study of the evolution of Labour party policy with regard to the comprehensive school. Scottish Educational Studies, 1(1), 25–33. McPherson, A., & Raab, C. D. (1988). Governing education: A sociology of policy since 1945. Edinburgh University Press. McCulloch, G. (1989). The secondary technical school: A usable past? Falmer Press. McCulloch, G. (1991). Philosophers and kings: Education for leadership in modern England. Cambridge University Press. McCulloch, G. (2007). Cyril Norwood and the ideal of secondary education. Springer. Miller, D. J., & Hersen, M. (1992). Research fraud in the behavioral and biomedical sciences. Wiley. Ministry of Education (Great Britain). (1947). The new secondary education. HMSO. Montague, J. B. (1959). Some problems of selection for secondary schools in England. Implications for the U. S. Journal of Educational Sociology, 32(8), 374–378. Montague, J. B., Jr. (1971). The fear of Americanization? Comprehensive school under fire in Britain. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 46(1), 44–47.

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National Union of Teachers (NUT). (1949). Transfer from primary to secondary schools: Report of a consultative committee. Evans. Nicholas, T. (1999). The myth of meritocracy: An inquiry into the social origins of Britain’s business leaders since 1850 (Economic History Working Papers). London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved August 18, 2011, from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22385/1/wp53.pdf Norwood Report. (1943). Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council Appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941. HMSO. Nuffield College. (1943). Industry and education, a statement. Oxford University Press, H. Milford. Osborne, G. S. (1967). Scottish and English schools: A comparative survey of the past fifty years. University of Pittsburgh Press. Parkinson, M. (1970). The Labour party and the organization of secondary education, 1918–1965. Routledge. Paterson, H. M. (1975). Godfrey Thomson and the development of psychometrics in Scotland, 1925–1950. Research Intelligence, 1(2), 63–65. Paterson, L. (2004). Scottish education in the twentieth century. Edinburgh University Press. Pedley, R. (1966). The comprehensive school. Penguin. Sanderson, M. (1999). Education and economic decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s. Cambridge University Press. Scottish Education Department (SED). (1947a). Secondary education: A report of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland. HMSO. Scottish Education Department (SED). (1947b). Circular 108. HMSO Simon, B. (1974). The politics of educational reform 1920–1940. Lawrence and Wishart. Simon, B. (1987). Systematization and segmentation in education: The case of England. Cambridge University Press. Simon, J. (1977). The shaping of the Spens report on secondary education 1933–38: An inside view: Part II. British Journal of Educational Studies, 25(2), 170–185. Sneddon, N. M. (1999). Interest groups and policy-making: The welfare state, 1942–1964 (Doctoral dissertation). University of Glasgow, Thesis Repository. Spearman, C. (1927). The abilities of man; Their nature and measurement. Macmillan. Spens Report. (1938). Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Education with Special Reference to Grammar Schools and Technical High Schools. HMSO. Stocks, J. C. (1995). The people versus the department: The case of circular 44. Scottish Educational Review, 27 (1), 48–60.

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Stocks, J. C. (2000). Objective bees in psychological bonnets: Intelligence testing and selection for secondary education in Scotland between the wars. History of Education, 29(3), 225–238. Stocks, J. (2002). Social class and the secondary school in 1930s Scotland. Scottish Educational Review, 34(1), 26–39. Sutherland, G. (1984). Ability, merit, and measurement: Mental testing and English education, 1880–1940. Clarendon Press. Tawney, R. H., & Labour Party. (1922). Secondary education for all; A policy for Labour. The Labour Party. Thom, D. (1986). The 1944 Education Act: The ‘art of the possible’? In H Smith (Ed.), War and social change—British society in the Second World War (pp. 101–128). Manchester University Press. Torrance, H. (1981). The origins and development of mental testing in England and the United States. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2(1), 45–59. Trades Union Congress (TUC). (1942). The General Council’s Report to the 74th Annual Congress. Trades Union Congress. UK Independence Party (UKIP). (2005). Education: Time to come clean. UKIP. Vernon, B. (1982). Ellen Wilkinson, 1891–1947 . Croom Helm. Whiteside, N. (1996). Creating the welfare state in Britain, 1945–1960. Journal of Social Policy, 25(1), 83–103. Wiborg, S. (2017). Teacher unions in England: The end is nigh?” In T. Moe & S. Wiborg (Eds.), The comparative politics of education: Teachers unions and education systems around the world (pp. 56–86). Cambridge University Press. Wooldridge, A. (1994). Measuring the mind: Education and psychology in England, c. 1860–c. 1990. Cambridge University Press. Worsley, T. C. (1941). The end of the “old school tie”. Secker & Warburg.

CHAPTER 5

Britain II: Shifting Discourses in Education

To a remarkable degree, contemporary observers of the new tripartite system of education created by the Education Act 1944 recognized the extent to which its existence rested on an ideational framework. As the social psychologist Charlotte Mary Fleming wrote in 1948 while the system was still being set up: If there is any reason to doubt the early fixity of the intelligence quotient, the abruptness of other changes during adolescence, the clear delimitations of specific aptitudes, and the absolute necessity for class instruction, the foundation of the much of the present structure of educational organization will have been shaken. (Fleming, 1948, 120)

As discussed in the previous chapter, it was the Labour party leadership that served as both a key transmission source for the fixed-ability ideas formulated by educational psychologists in the prewar years and as their mobile carriers, who, as policymakers within government, promoted the practices of early selection and differentiation in the new system following the victory of the party in the 1945 general election. As the current chapter documents, however, the party would soon drop out of the fixedability discourse coalition, becoming by the late 1950s a sharp critic of the selective system and an advocate of its dismantling.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_5

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This chapter argues that much of the explanation for this policy shift can be found in the rise of a counter-discourse in the 1950s to the fixedability view that would both shape and be shaped by actors in the Labour party and would inject new doubt and uncertainty about the tripartite system. Rooted in the research of educational sociologists and other academics and transmitted into policy debates through advisory studies commissioned by the Ministry of Education, the ideas of this counterdiscourse would challenge the core assumptions of the psychologists’ view that intelligence was innate, fixed, and measurable and that a differentiated school organization based on practices of early selection could eliminate the socially biases of the old system by advancing pupils on the basis of merit rather than wealth. Such assumptions had been at the foundation of Labour’s support for tripartitism in the inter- and immediate postwar periods; once empirical appraisals of these assumptions revealed them to be flawed, Labour’s support would fade. The ideas of the sociologists also comported with shifting conceptions of equality within the party itself. In the interwar period, the party had defined egalitarianism largely in terms of “soft” notions of equal opportunity and access reflected in practices such as early selection; by the 1950s, however, the party had reoriented its views around “hard” notions of equality that emphasized commonly shared experiences and outcomes. It was precisely this latter view that would be represented in an alternate model for secondary education—the comprehensive school. The chapter begins by examining some of the problems the tripartite system encountered during the 1950s, most notably how the commonly administered IQ tests given to help determine placement at age eleven under the system proved to be problematic in practice, creating significant questions and concerns among parents, teachers, and pupils, as well as education policymakers. The next section discusses the core findings and ideas of the educational sociologists’ counter-discourse. Sociologists would play a key role in both assessing the performance of the tripartite system but also the psychological foundations on which it was based, elevating their new dynamic conception of ability into policy debates through the transmission path of advisory reports to the Education Ministry, much as the psychologists had done with the Consultative Committee to the Board of Education a generation earlier. This discussion is followed by an examination of the changing outlook of Labour in the 1950s and early 1960s. Influenced by the sociologists’ findings and its own internal ideological reorientation, the party would renounce its support of tripartitism and come to advocate the creation of a mixed-ability system of comprehensive education.

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Equality and Allocation in the Tripartite System Within a just few years of its creation in the 1944 Education Act, the new education system in England and Wales would encounter significant challenges. First, the three-school structure that had been suggested in the interwar advisory reports, the 1943 White Paper and the 1945 Ministry of Education guidance to LEAs, would not be realized fully. Instead, what emerged by the early 1950s was more of a two-school system comprised of, on the one hand, grammar schools that accepted roughly 20% of all eleven-year-olds, and on the other, the secondary moderns, which took the bulk of those remaining.1 Only 3.7% of all state secondary students attended technical schools by the late 1950s (McCulloch, 1989, 3; Sneddon, 1999, 164). Local authorities had been reluctant to build technical schools and generally opted to provide science classes or technical courses of study in grammar and secondary modern schools. The technical schools had moreover found no strong advocate within government or producer groups. Ministry of Education officials preferred to promote grammar schools, while the trade unions, reflecting a long-standing suspicion, believed that technical schools represented a return to the “detested prewar notion of vocational education, aimed at providing a stream of low skilled workers for industry” (Parkinson, 1970, 39). Industry, for its part, showed little interest in supporting technical schools in the 1950s, even in the face of evidence showing a shortage of engineering students at universities. As they had in the prewar years, business groups such as the FBI continued in the early postwar period to focus on the grammar and particularly the independent schools as the key source of recruits for industry. As McCulloch writes, “while the secondary technical schools were stagnating and in many cases dying for lack of attention and resources, the industrial sector to which they were committed refused to recognize or encourage them in any active way” (1989, 90). Second, questions would emerge about the fairness and reliability of the selection process itself. Although most LEAs were using purportedly objective intelligence tests as part of the 11-plus exams used to make school placement decisions, individual areas were demonstrating striking variation in the percentage of students selected for places in grammar schools. In Gateshead in Northeast England, for example, only 8% of elementary students were selected for the academic track, while Merioneth in Wales, the figure was as high as 60% (Wooldridge, 1994, 261).

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Moreover, a number of secondary modern students who had fared poorly on the 11-plus exams began performing well at age fifteen on the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (O-Level) exams that had been introduced in the early 1950s, leading many to question the capacity of the selection tests to identify a pupil’s true ability (Chitty, 2004, 25–28; 2007, 85). The particular school type into which one might be placed under a system of early selection would always matter for one’s future educational and occupational opportunities. In the context of 1950s Britain, however, it would matter more. Unsurprisingly, areas in which more students attended grammar schools also demonstrated greater levels of higher education attendance and advanced educational qualifications.And it was precisely these students who would begin filling the ranks of salaried managers and skilled workers that the country’s economy increasingly demanded in the 1950s (Halsey & Gardner, 1953, 60; see also Wooldridge, 1994, 261). Pupils selected for secondary modern schools, by contrast, would be effectively shut out at the age of eleven from many of the fastest growing parts of Britain’s postwar occupational structure. The deep consequences associated with the 11-plus would render the exam an enormously stressful experience, and not just for pupils. Agencies charging fees in return for promises of higher 11-plus scores emerged in the 1950s to cater to anxious parents and pressure to improve exam scores and increase class percentages selected for the grammar school track led primary school teachers to reorganize their lessons around the 11-plus in the hopes of boosting performance (Simon, 1978, 56). The life prospects of a young person at this time would largely depend on his or her ability correctly to answer questions such as the following, taken from an 11-plus exam administered in the 1950s (reprinted in Dunk, 2008). Select and write down one of the answers below which makes the best answer to the following: A woman who had fallen into the water was dragged out in a drowning condition by a man, but she did not thank him because: (a) She (b) She (c) She (d) She

never felt thankful for small things. did not know the man well enough. was feeling better. was still unconscious.2

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Discursive Collapse: The Delegitimizing of Early Selection The emergence of problems with the tripartite system of education would coincide with the rise of a new discourse that would challenge the very foundations of the system. It would consist of two related dimensions. The first involved ideas advanced by academics working largely in the field of educational sociology. Research conducted by sociologists and others would find that many of the conclusions promoted by the educational psychologists during the interwar years about the nature of intelligence and its relationship to the structure of schooling had been overstated or were simply inaccurate. In a process of ideational transmission that largely paralleled the way in which the psychologists themselves had come to influence policymakers in the years before World War II, the views of the educational psychologists would be transmitted into the policy discourse by way of consultative committees to the Ministry of Education, namely the Central Advisory Councils for Education that had been established by the 1944 Education Act. The second dimension involved changes in the education policy orientation of the Labour party. Between the late 1930s and late 1950s, progressive elements in the party would successfully reframe Labour’s understanding of equality of opportunity in education from one associated with the tripartite system and its psychological foundations, to one that viewed early differentiation as inherently unequal, inimical to socialist ideals, and scientifically unjustifiable. Realizing the reframed vision of social equality in the party would require the dismantling of the selective structure established by the Education Act 1944 and its replacement with a new system, characterized by the widespread establishment of non-selective comprehensive schools. Challenging the Psychologists: The Dynamic Ability Discourse The tripartite system of education generated significant attention from academic researchers in the immediate years following its implementation. Interested in the social consequences of the new education system in a country still riven by class divisions and spurred by the widely reported problems with the selection process, a new generation of academics largely based in the field of educational sociology would begin investigating how pupils were faring under the new system.

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Two general conclusions mark the sociologists’ research during this period: first, working-class pupils were not benefiting from the tripartite system as early selection advocates had anticipated; and second, intelligence appeared not to be innate and determined by heredity—as the interwar psychologists had claimed—but a dynamic characteristic that was acquired over time and affected by a range of environmental factors. Scores on intelligence tests such as the 11-plus were thus not unbiased indicators of basic mental ability but could reflect the social conditions in which one lived. Far from opening the doors of opportunity for a new class-blind meritocracy, the tripartite system was reproducing the prewar social structure but now under a legitimating guise of science. One of the earliest studies was conducted by Albert Halsey and L. Gardner through the Department of Sociological and Demographic Research at the London School of Economics. Published in the British Journal of Sociology in 1953, Halsey and Gardner’s study examined the relationship between social class and opportunities for educational advancement among pupils in grammar and secondary modern schools in Greater London under the new system. Their conclusion was that little had changed since prewar days. Despite the changes introduced into secondary education by the Education Act of 1944, it remains the case that a boy has a greater chance of entering a grammar school if he comes from a middle-class rather than a working class home. The difference in social composition between Grammar and Modern Schools cannot be completely explained by reference to the crucial role played by intelligence tests in the selection procedure, for at the borderline range of intelligence, the chances of allocation to a Grammar School are closely related to social class. Nor can the distribution of intelligence explain the greater proportion of boys from small families found in the Grammar Schools since only in the working-class group is this a distinguishing characteristic of Grammar as opposed to Modern School boys. It would seem that some of the factors which were known to reduce the chances of entry to a grammar school as the holder of a free or special place still continue to exercise their effect. (Halsey & Gardner, 1953, 74–75)

These findings would be confirmed by a larger study by Halsey and his collaborators Jean Floud and F. M. Martin three years later published in their book Social Class and Educational Opportunity (1956). Analyzing pupil school placement outcomes in a wealthy southeastern district in Hertfordshire and a northern working-class district in Yorkshire, the

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researchers found that while the tripartite system was clearly providing access to grammar schools and higher education to more young people of higher ability, it also was the case that working-class pupils were not sharing in this access, despite the fact that grammar schools were now free. Middle-class children continued to outperform their working-class counterparts, even when common measures of intelligence assessment were used.3 Social Class and Educational Opportunity also sought to counter the notion that intelligence was a fixed, innate, and measurable quantity. The relative success of middle-class children on the 11-plus exams and their subsequent overrepresentation in grammar schools was not the result of deliberate class bias on the part of administrators but was reflective of fundamental flaws in assumptions of the system’s designers. The basic problem, the researchers found, was that intelligence could be shaped by a range of environmental factors, including a child’s socio-economic background. It was no surprise that working-class children would perform more poorly on the exams than their middle-class counterparts, given cultural differences and differing social and familial expectations for performance, success, and achievement (Parkinson, 1970, 67). The objectivity and accuracy of intelligence tests had been increasingly disputed by academics since the end of the Second World War. In Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School (1953), Brian Simon, a lecturer (and later professor) at the University of Leicester4 who had served on Labour’s educational advisory committee in the late 1930s, would argue that intelligence tests failed to measure other factors associated with ability, such as emotional responses and social environment. Far from reflecting a subject’s innate intelligence, Simon maintained that 11-plus scores reflected acquired knowledge and were thus culturally and socially biased towards the middle and upper classes. In a series of reports first published in the late 1940s, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), an influential research group that had developed close ties with Ministry of Education, the teacher and university unions, and the LEAs, found that environmental factors, such as pre-test coaching, clearly influenced pupils’ performance on IQ tests, concluding that the allocation of young people into the new schools of the tripartite system was being distorted (see Wooldridge, 1994, 281–284). In the 1957 NFER report on selection for secondary schools, researchers Douglas Pidgeon and Alfred Yates estimated that nearly 10% of pupils were placed in a school type either above or below their abilities by the 11-plus and that

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it was unlikely for most pupils that this misallocation would be corrected later, particularly for pupils wrongly sent to grammar schools. They also found that the selective process demonstrated a gender-bias: girls who achieved “borderline” scores on their exams that placed them just under the grammar school cutoff were significantly more likely to be placed in the academic route than boys with similar scores (Yates & Pidgeon, 1957, 144–145). Such conclusions were not confined to sociologists and educationalists. In the 1950s, a new generation of British psychologists were also challenging beliefs that had stood as disciplinary orthodoxy just a decade earlier. Several psychologist-led studies during the decade demonstrated that intelligence changed frequently in accordance with the length and type of education one received. In one long-term study begun shortly after the war, the IQ scores of nearly 60% of a group of 150 children changed by more than fifteen points between the ages of six and eighteen and 35% of the group demonstrated changes of twenty or more points. By contrast, the number of pupils whose IQ changed by fewer than ten points was only 15% of the total sample (Wooldridge, 1994, 285–287). Many supporters of tripartitism in the 1950s acknowledged the inadequacies of the system but maintained that the problems associated with early selection could be corrected.5 In a study commissioned by the British Psychological Society in 1957, Professor Philip Vernon rejected such a view, arguing that refining the selection process or improving the accuracy of intelligence tests could not rectify the system’s shortcomings. To Vernon, tripartitism’s clear bias towards academic education and subsequent diminution of the non-academic schools had little to do with the specific implementation or operation of the system, but were the unavoidable consequences of any arrangement that differentiated pupils at such a young age. Vernon suggested in his report that disillusionment with intelligence testing was growing among psychologists as a result of tripartitism. Even with the selection process operating at peak efficiency, he maintained that about one in four pupils selected for grammar schools would fail, while 6% of those initially rejected for the academic track would likely have succeeded in it (Husén, 1966, 252–253). Such findings led Vernon to conclude that the selective system was unjustifiable and that “on psychological grounds, there would seem to be more to be said in favor of comprehensive schools than against them” (Vernon, 1957, 50).

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By the early 1960s, the combined views of these researchers had come to represent a more or less coherent critique against the practice of early selection. A 1963 National Foundation for Educational Research pamphlet sought to summarize what it termed “certain criticisms made on education and psychological grounds of the present system of allocation and most of its varieties.” Primary among these was the argument that “the age of eleven is too early definitively to force what amounts to a pre-vocational choice,” a point made clear by the fact that “some ‘rejected’ children show that they are able to follow academic courses, while some ‘accepted’ children fail either to stay at school or to pass the G.C.E. [O-level] examinations.” Furthermore, critics of tripartitism had concluded that one’s intelligence level as represented by an IQ test may change with age, or in the words of the pamphlet, that “the rhythms of physical and psychological development may be associated with intellectual growth” (National Foundation for Educational Research, 1963, 6). Ideas and the Central Advisory Council for Education Crucially, the discursive shift among academics towards the dynamic ability conception would be transmitted both to the public and policymakers via a series of advisory reports on secondary and higher education produced by the English Central Advisory Council for Education in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Much as their educational psychology counterparts had done with the Board of Education’s consultative committee a generation earlier, educational sociologists and other academics frequently provided expert testimony to the CACE, publicly questioning the scientific assumptions behind educational selection based on perceived ability and suggesting that other factors, including social conditions and public policy, might also have an impact on a young person’s academic—and by extension, occupational—potential (Ainley, 1988, 48–50). In Early Leaving , the first comprehensive review of the new system published in 1954, the Council found early selection was already demonstrating significant problems. While more working-class students were entering grammar schools under the new system, it was clear that many were not benefitting from their attendance. Grammar schools’ failure rates were extremely high; well over one-half of all working-class students were not obtaining even three passes on the newly created O-level

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subject exams given at the end of the fifth school year6 and nearly onethird were dropping out before they reached age sixteen. Much as the educational sociologists’ studies had found, the report concluded that social factors, such as over-crowding at home and a lack of support for academic endeavors, were discouraging working-class students from achieving success. As a predictor of future academic success, the 11-plus exam was clearly falling short and, as a result, the talents of young Britons were being wasted (Ministry of Education, 1954, para. 90–91). Concerns over failure rates for working-class students would also be the focus of two additional English CACE reports. The first, the Crowther report,7 or 15 to 18, published in 1959 maintained that under the tripartite system, social class continued largely to determine access to educational opportunities. The report found that even when controls for measured ability were put in place, children whose fathers had higher occupational standings were more likely to attend grammar schools than working-class students. Over 40% of students classified in the highest ability range had left school by age sixteen, failing to continue to the sixth form where they could sit for A-level exams generally required for university admission (Ministry of Education, 1959, para. 102). As the Early Leaving study had found five years earlier, Crowther cited the differences in environmental conditions between middle and workingclass children as reasons for the variation in the two group’ performance but also suggested that intelligent working-class students might be more likely to perform up to their true abilities in comprehensive schools, away from the highly competitive atmosphere of the grammar schools (para. 302). By emphasizing the need for greater flexibility in secondary school arrangements, the Crowther report, Archer (1984, 152) writes, “encouraged a snowballing of anti-tripartism among local authorities” that helped produce a flurry of local initiatives in the early 1960s to reorient the organization of general education along comprehensive lines (see Chapter 6). While much of Crowther focused on grammar schools, the CACE’s 1963 Newsom report8 Half Our Future was commissioned by the Conservative government to examine secondary schooling for average and underperforming thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds. Citing data again demonstrating the weak performance of many high-ability working-class students on O-level exams, Newsom, much like its predecessors, concluded that environmental factors were serving to hinder their educational advancement. More than the previous reports, however, Newsom directly invoked

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the sociologists’ criticism of the psychologists’ conceptions of innate and immutable intelligence as a basis for early selection. As the report’s introduction maintained: Intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches. The crude and simple answer was given by Macaulay 139 years ago (1): ’Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses. The supply adjusts itself to the demand. The quantity may be diminished by restrictions and multiplied by bounties.’ A more subtle investigation into what constitutes the ’restrictions’ and the ’bounties’ in our society is of far more recent growth. The results of such investigations increasingly indicate that the kind of intelligence which is measured by the tests so far applied is largely an acquired characteristic. This is not to deny the existence of a basic genetic endowment; but whereas that endowment, so far, has proved impossible to isolate, other factors can be identified. Particularly significant among them are the influences of social and physical environment; and, since these are susceptible to modification, they may well prove educationally more important. (Newsom Report, 1963, 6; italics in the original)

The CACE reports would do much to publicize the deficiencies of the new education system, but by the late 1950s early selection and the 11plus tests would also become targets for criticism in popular circles. In a bestselling book that would be credited with coining the term, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) would lampoon the notion of using intelligence to create a new society. Written as a satirical “history” of Britain from 1870 to 2033, the book described a modern school system in which people were divided on the basis of IQ instead of wealth. In Young’s future Britain, a merit-based education system had indeed succeeded in establishing a new social hierarchy but it would be one that was ultimately even more divisive than the old class system it had replaced. Discursive Change and Partisan Actors As discussed in the previous chapter, Britain in the 1950s and 1960s was noted for its consensus. Broad agreement would emerge on the desirability of a range of institutional arrangements and policy positions, including the welfare state, Keynesian demand management for the economy, and Britain’s membership in the Western Alliance. While such

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consensus was made possible by the weakening of the sharp ideological conflicts that characterized politics in the prewar era, it was also clearly enabled by the state of economic prosperity that the country would rather suddenly find itself in by the mid-1950s after two decades of material hardship. As Dean notes: In 1951, the Conservatives had returned to power to face a population which, despite reservations, accepted shortages and expected little immediate improvement in long-term prospects. Society remained preoccupied by the issues of the interwar period, such as high unemployment, social distress, and inadequately funded welfare services. By early 1955, as Churchill prepared to depart, a different language talked of affluence, consumerism, and materialism. This new perspective was attributed to steady employment, a leveling of incomes, and the emergence of more skilled, white-collar occupations. (Dean, 1992, 6)

The general education system of postwar Britain had been founded on consensual grounds; the Education Act 1944 had enjoyed wide support among the political parties and population. Yet unlike other features of the postwar settlement, which would remain largely in place until Margaret Thatcher’s government began dismantling them in the 1980s, the education system would become the object of profound partisan conflict by the first postwar decade. For the Labour party, the support for the tripartite system that characterized the Attlee period would fade within a few years following its 1951 general election defeat. Crucial in this process of policy reformulation was the effective collapse of the ideational foundation of the selective system. The delegitimizing of the fixed-ability discourse provided by the educational sociologists would render untenable the belief in tripartitism as a source of working-class advancement that many in Labour had held and removed the party as a vehicle by which fixed-ability ideas were transmitted. As Bilski writes, “Once there was doubt whether children can be classified at the age of eleven and whether it is possible to establish parity of esteem between the three types of schools, it became impossible to regard the tripartite system as an implement for achieving equality of educational opportunity” (1973, 202). A key development in the evolution of Labour’s position on selection came in 1953 with the issuing of a policy statement by the party’s National Executive Committee issued entitled Challenge to Britain. In

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the statement, the Committee called on the next Labour government to end the 11-plus exam, dismantle the selective system, and create a single comprehensive lower secondary school for all students to attend.9 The entrance examination, taken at the age of eleven, is the dread of child and parent alike. In most areas it is the accepted method of deciding whether a child should go to a grammar, a technical, or a modern school, and a mistake made in this examination may well prejudice the child for the rest of its life. It may be possible at this age to pick out the exceptionally bright or exceptionally backward child, but the vast majority are not in either of these categories… Labour will abolish the eleven-plus examination, because it is convinced that all children would benefit if, between the ages of eleven and fifteen, they shared the facilities, both social and academic, of one secondary school. (Labour Party, 1953, 21)

Outside of the formal organs of the party, a new generation of Labour intellectuals would also begin advocating for reforms to the selective system in the 1950s, just as Tawney and other party theorists had provided ideational support for early selection and differentiation in the interwar years. Chief among these was Anthony Crosland, a Labour MP and Oxford professor who crucially later served as Secretary of State for Education and Science under Harold Wilson’s government in the mid-1960s. As both an originator of new ideas about education and an ideational carrier who would act on them in government, Crosland played a role of particular significance in Labour education policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Crosland maintained in his 1956 work The Future of Socialism that the issues of industrial ownership that had long dominated social-democratic debates and formed the foundation of the Labour party platform were losing their saliency as determinants of social and economic relations and that the further nationalization of industry and expansion of state control over production more generally had become less important to reducing class stratification in Britain than conventional socialist wisdom held.10 He argued that the focus of future Labour governments should instead be on establishing a truly egalitarian system of education that would serve to level British society by providing all young people equal access to life chances.

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To that end, Crosland advocated dismantling the tripartite and 11-plus systems and establishing in their place locally administered, non-selective comprehensive secondary schools for all students enrolled in the state sector. Although he acknowledged it was possible that the tripartite system might have some effect on reducing class divisions if given enough time, it was clear to him by the mid-1950s that any change was happening at far too slow a pace (Crosland, 1957, 232). Crosland furthermore did not doubt that middle-class youth generally had higher IQs than their counterparts in the working class. Citing figures from the 1953 Halsey and Gardner study, he maintained however that the genetic endowment of intelligence could not explain the vast disproportion observed in the class distribution in the grammar schools; given their much larger absolute numbers, the percentage of working-class students attending such schools should be considerably higher. Against the psychologist proponents of the fixed-ability discourse and following the views of Floud and other educational sociologists, Crosland believed that explanations for the comparatively poor performance of working-class youth were not to be found in genetics, but instead in a combination of social factors, such as parents’ education levels and the relatively smaller number opportunities for extra-curricular learning in working-class homes, and financial conditions, specifically the burden imposed on working-class families by a child’s continuation at school (Crosland, 1957, 259). Beyond the specific issue of selection, Crosland argued that state education policy in Britain was fundamentally misdirected. In his view, the education system’s traditional focus on fostering elites in separate institutions such as public and grammar schools was based on outmoded and anti-democratic conceptions on the relationship among leadership, youth, and national prosperity. Any modern school system, he argued, should be concerned primarily with educating students of so-called “average” ability or attainment, not with cultivating a class of elites. The elite view may have been appropriate for the economic and political conditions extant in the nineteenth century, but modern systems of production relied primarily on workers with mid-range skill levels. The economic success of the United States, he argued, was not the result of the superiority of America’s elites, but instead of the skill levels of its middle tier. Most of this class, he pointed out, attended non-selective state high schools and were far more likely than their British counterparts to be educated in universities (despite the fact that the American institutions were, in his words, “second-rate”). The emphasis on cultivating the skills of the typical

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American youngster, according to Crosland, was the source of a massive comparative advantage for the United States and demonstrated, in opposition to the assumptions of tripartitism’s proponents, that comprehensive schools were not incompatible with economic competitiveness but could be essential for it (Crosland, 1957, 270). Although Crosland’s call for an end to the selective system had increasing support within the party in the 1950s, the question of what to replace it with was less settled. Many in the Labour leadership had been reluctant fully and publicly to embrace the comprehensive school in the 1950s, particularly in its “all through” form in which students would attend a common school for ages eleven through eighteen with no distinction made between lower and upper secondary stages (Parkinson, 1970, 84). McCulloch (2016, 13) characterizes the divisions within the party over selection and comprehensive schooling as reflecting the wider split between followers of the left-wing Aneurin Bevan and the more conservative Hugh Gaitskell, who became party leader following Attlee’s resignation in 1955. Gaitskell’s cautious approach to education would seek in effect to have it both ways, embracing the comprehensive school principle on one hand while continuing to express support for grammar schools on the other out of fear of losing the middle-class votes Labour needed to unseat the Tories (Lawton, 2005, 56). Such a balance was reflected in the party’s 1958 policy statement Learning to Live: Labour’s Policy for Education. Instead of providing a detailed plan for structural reorganization, Learning to Live emphasized the injustices of early selection and tripartitism, while describing only in general terms the advantages of the comprehensive “principle.” The main feature and defect of this system is that it labels children at this early age as belonging to different ‘types’ and segregates them into different kinds of school, each with curriculum supposedly suitable for one type of child. This segregation is generally permanent, since only a tiny minority of children get, at age 13, the chance of moving to a different type of school … In the modern school, children whose latent gifts appear after age 11 have not the chance even to become aware of the branches of knowledge they may well be fitted to attain … We can deliver ourselves from this evil by adopting the principle of comprehensive secondary education. Then, the 11 year old children are not segregated and sent to separate types of schools; schools are available for them, all of which offer a wide range of studies. (Labour Party, 1958, 26, 29)

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Gaitskell and other Labour leaders were clearly concerned that middleclass voters would view Learning to Live as an attack on the grammar schools. While claiming that the placement of pupils into different school types at age eleven amounted to a “permanent segregation” that the national party would implore LEAs to end, Gaitskell maintained in a speech given in Surrey given shortly after its publication that the idea that Labour wanted to abolish grammars was “complete nonsense.” Rhetorically framing the newly proposed comprehensive system as one that offered “a grammar school education for all,” he maintained instead that the policy’s objective was “greatly to widen the opportunities for all children to receive what is now called a grammar school education, and we also want to see grammar school standards—in the sense of higher quality education—extended far more generally” (“A grammar school”, 1958, July 7). Labour, of course, was only one-half of Britain’s two-party system, and for most of the 1950s was the one out of power. For its part, the Conservative party remained publicly committed to the selective system for most of the decade, despite the growing concerns over the 11-plus. For many in the party, there remained an unquestionable need for some form of differentiated educational structure, whatever the specific method of selection. As the party’s parliamentary education committee wrote in a 1952 report, “the quicker brain, the greater ability, cannot be given its opportunity if it is grouped with children of all grades of intelligence” (quoted in Fenwick, 1976, 80). The party opposed comprehensive schools in principle, believing them to be suitable only in special circumstances, such as in rural areas with very small grammar school populations, and even then only on an experimental basis. The Conservatives sought to restrict Labour-controlled LEA plans to merge grammar schools into comprehensives in urban areas in the early 1950s, including an effort by the London County Council in 1953 that was rebuffed by Education Minister Florence Horsbrugh (Lawton, 2005, 56). By the late 1950s, however, Conservative governments found it increasingly difficult to maintain the party’s strict early position on selection in the face of growing public disenchantment with the tripartite system. Led by David Eccles, who replaced Horsbrugh in 1954 and would serve twice as education minister during the party’s thirteen consecutive years in office,11 the Conservatives would adopt policies designed to address the perceived deficiencies of the tripartite system without

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fundamentally reforming its structure. Under the party’s rather contradictory 1955 election slogan of “selection for everybody,” the Tories would emphasize the need to improve technical and vocational courses at the secondary moderns, while leaving the grammar schools largely untouched. Such a policy was based on a belief that improving the standing of the modern schools would lessen the pressures associated with the 11-plus. As The Economist reported “Sir David’s hope is that the examination will be shore of most of its terrors if ‘failure’ means, not an educational dead-end and a working-class job, but a schooling that lead to various kinds of further education and offers good career prospects of a technical kind” (“New deal”, 1955, April 16). Eccles also sought to reduce the stigma of secondary modern schools by advocating the expansion of opportunities for its graduates to continue to further education, commenting in a 1960 debate in Parliament over government education priorities that, “[i]t must be the glory of British education that we always give a second chance” (HC Deb, November 7, 1960). Notably absent from the Conservative education policy during this period were appeals to the psychological basis of early selection. Members of the Tory government instead defended the selective system with a different set of arguments, which held that the postwar economic expansion had so widely reduced income disparities and raised youth wages as to elicit a general leveling of class divisions in British society and had rendered it impossible to distinguish the parents of children in grammar schools from those in secondary moderns, or the graduates of one school type from another (Parkinson, 1970, 79). Indeed, real and growing doubts had emerged in Tory circles over the psychological assumptions behind the early selection process. According to Edward Boyle, the Conservative Minister of Education from 1962 to 1964 and later the Shadow Minister in opposition, the work of educational sociologists through the CACE reports in particular had a real impact on policymakers by demonstrating that there was a larger pool of talented youngsters than earlier thinking had realized. In terms that reflected a differentiated understanding of “weak” and “strong” equality that had been made by Crosland and others, Boyle maintained that the selective system created by the 1944 Act was rooted in a prewar conception of equality that had become untenable just a few years later. The 11-plus system, and the emphasis on the G-factor and the intelligence were the egalitarianism of the 1920s and 1930s—a way of selecting the

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‘able poor.’ It was really the educational sociologists who showed that as measured in terms of people who got the benefits from the system, this could not be true… So by the 1950s there were already arguments showing that the “weak” concept of equality was not good enough if one really wanted equality. (quoted in Kogan, 1971, 92)

While many Conservatives would continue to oppose comprehensivization and support separate grammar schools, by the early 1960s it was clear that the psychologists’ ideas that had both shaped and legitimated the tripartite system could no longer be maintained by actors as part of a system-justifying discourse. Boyle admitted so much in a party education pamphlet published in 1963: None of us believe in pre-war terms that children can be sharply differentiated into various types or levels of ability; and I certainly would not wish to advance the view that the Tripartite System, as it is often called, should be regarded as the right and normal way of organising secondary education, compared with which everything else must be stigmatized as experimental. (quoted in Fenwick, 1976, 118)

Interest Groups and the Organization of General Education Despite some openness to experiments with multilateral schools in the discussions over the 1944 Act,12 the unions had become fearful that their expansion would threaten the positions to which they had acclimated under tripartitism (Wiborg, 2017, 67). This view, however, would change across the 1950s, as increased experimentation with comprehensives translated into rising numbers of comprehensive school teachers represented within the unions, pressure for groups like the NUT to support the model also increased (Fenwick, 1976, 113). In this way, the unions’ positions on comprehensive schooling broadly evolved to reflect, rather than shape, the changing environment as the decade progressed. Among secondary school representatives, support for retaining grammar schools generally remained strong across the 1950s, but there were also signs of a softening by the decade’s end and an openness to further research on comprehensive schools. Significantly, the secondary school representatives in Britain—unlike in Germany—had never been particularly prominent and public promoters of the fixed-ability discourse in the postwar era. As Fenwick notes even at the height of the educational psychologists influence in the early 1940s, grammar school teachers and

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administrators had questioned some of the psychologists’ conclusions, and in particular the belief that more traditional methods of determining grammar school entry, such as attainment tests but also personal character assessments, were somehow inadequate and inferior to mental testing (Fenwick, 1976, 49–50). As discussed earlier, the TUC had reluctantly accepted tripartitism in the 1940s, despite a preference for multilateral schools. While questions of selection and differentiation were actively being discussed in the Labour party as it moved towards its acceptance of the comprehensive school model in the 1950s, the organization of general education was, as discussed in the previous chapter, a non-priority for the TUC, which continued to direct its efforts towards what it viewed as the core problem in education, namely raising the school-leaving age to sixteen. By the end of the decade, however, recognition of the significance of the issue would grow within the TUC and by the 1960s the Congress would be engaged in promoting the end of selection and the establishment of comprehensive schools as a national policy goal. A clear indicator of this changing perspective was seen in the TUC’s written testimony to the committee that produced the Crowther report in 1959, in which the Congress sharply criticized the selective system, claiming that it was “educationally and socially undesirable that young people should be unduly segregated on the basis of their possession or otherwise of certain specific abilities, especially if such segregation is related also to different fields of future employment” (quoted in Griggs, 2002, 234). By the start of the 1960s the TUC position had moved from advocating experiments with comprehensive schools to supporting the complete comprehensivization of the state education system. As the Congress expressed its position in its 1964 annual report: The problems of the transition from primary to secondary education cannot be satisfactorily resolved … within the context of selective system of secondary education. As long as different types of secondary schools, enjoying different degrees of education and social status, and equipping children for different occupational categories, are maintained the later years of primary education will inevitably be preoccupied to a greater or lesser extent with the procedures of selection, and there will be uncertainty as to the types of secondary courses to while many pupils will proceed...The General Council [of the TUC] believe, therefore, that a radical re-organisation of secondary education upon a more comprehensive basis would greatly assist in freeing the later years of primary education

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from pressures tending to diminish their value and distort their purpose, and would enable primary schools to contribute more constructively to resolving the problems of transition to secondary education. (TUC, 1964, 214)

The studies of the educational sociologists, and particularly those highlighting the importance of social factors in influencing 11-plus performance and the unequal status of the grammar and secondary modern schools, were crucial for the TUC. As Sneddon notes (1999, 169), the Congress’s arguments against early selection and the tripartite system in its testimony to the Newsom Committee were made “on the basis of contemporary research findings,” with the TUC emphasizing how studies had demonstrated that a significant percentage of pupils believed to be of average or less than average ability on the basis of assessments given at age eleven would later and demonstrate high levels of intellectual capacity and educational performance (Griggs, 2002, 278). During this period, business groups maintained their rather narrow focus on educational issues that had a direct impact on their members. Much as with the technical schools (see above), business was largely disengaged on issues associated with the secondary modern schools that had developed out of the 1944 Act.13 Spurred by larger concerns about economic decline, firms would, on occasion, demonstrate in the 1950s an appreciation of the importance of state education for industrial performance that would lead in time to a more active role in policy debates (Sneddon, 1999, 169–170). In the debates over education that would emerge in the 1960s, however, business largely remained on the sidelines.

Conclusion The concept of the critical juncture figures prominently in certain models of change in historical institutional analysis. Often associated with moments of large-scale “shocks” such as revolution, war, and economic crisis, junctures, Capoccia and Keleman write, “are characterized by a situation in which the ‘structural’ (that is, economic, cultural, ideological, organizational) influences on political action are significantly relaxed for a relatively short period” (2007, 343). According to this conception, the easing of these influences can lead to conditions under which actors may redefine their interests and institutional preferences and policymakers may

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pursue new arrangements. Changes that seemed unlikely when the prejuncture set of structural constraints were in place may happen once they are suspended. The rather sudden discursive delegitimation of fixed-ability discourse served as the ideational equivalent of critical juncture in the institutional development of education in the country. The research of educational sociologists in the 1950s helped to generate significant uncertainty among British political actors—including members of the Conservative governments in power—and the public over the selective organization of a general education system that had been viewed by many at the time of its creation as firmly grounded in scientifically objective assumptions. In this climate of uncertainty, educational reforms and institutional changes that only a few years earlier had been viewed as socially radical and politically unfeasible would become possible. The politics associated with the process by which that once unlikely outcome was achieved is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1. In Scotland acceptance rates for the senior secondary schools had historically been higher than grammar school rates in England and Wales, with a 75–25 ratio suggested by McClelland and largely accepted in the early postwar period by authorities. By the late 1950s, however, the proportion of students in the academic path had grown to nearly forty percent (McPherson & Raab, 1988, 251). 2. The correct answer is d. 3. Two notable grammar school students with working class backgrounds were Liverpool natives George Harrison and Paul McCartney, both of whom placed into the academic Liverpool Institute on the basis of their 11-plus scores. John Lennon, whose parents were working class but who was raised in the middle class home of his aunt and uncle, also placed into a grammar school following his exam. Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) missed years of primary school due to illness and proceeded directly to a secondary modern, having never taken the 11-plus (see Gould, 2007). A notable 11-plus failure was Declan McManus, better known by the stage name Elvis Costello, who would later write about the experience of taking “second place in the human race” in his 1980 song “Secondary Modern” (Crook, 2007, 157). 4. University staff had helped the Leicestershire LEA in the early 1950s to develop one of the earliest versions of a comprehensive system that would

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

later be highlighted by Anthony Crosland in advocating for a national comprehensive policy in 1965. Among this group would be members of the Conservative party (for a discussion, see below). Five O-level passes was the norm for admission to the university preparatory sixth form. The report was named after then-CACE England chair Geoffrey (later Baron) Crowther, who had been the long-time editor of The Economist magazine. John Newsom, a business executive and former County Education Officer of Hertfordshire, served as chair of the English Council in the early 1960s. The statement made no mention of the organization of the upper secondary stage to the disappointment of teachers within the party membership (McCulloch, 2016, 14). Crosland’s views on nationalization would lead to his being labeled “revisionist” by more traditionalist elements in the British socialist movement (see Archer et al., 2003, 35). Eccles would serve as Minister from 1954–1957 to 1959–1962, with the period 1957–1959 spent as the President of the Board of Trade. See Chapter 4. From a policy perspective, the primary development during this period was the dropping of the BEC’s long-standing opposition to the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen, which was much welcomed by the TUC.

References A grammar school education for all. (1958, July 7). The Times, 5. Ainley, P. (1988). From school to YTS: Education and training in England and Wales, 1944–1987 . Open University Press. Archer, M. S. (1984). Social origins of educational systems. Routledge. Archer, L., Hutchings, M., & Ross, A. (2003). Higher education and social class. Routledge. Bilski, R. (1973). Ideology and the comprehensive schools. The Political Quarterly, 44(2), 197–211. Capoccia, G., & Keleman, D. (2007). The study of critical junctures: Theory, narrative, and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism. World Politics, 59(3), 341–369. Chitty, C. (2004). Education policy in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Chitty, C. (2007). Eugenics, race and intelligence in education. Continuum International Pub. Group.

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Crosland, A. (1957). The future of socialism. Macmillan. Crook, D. (2007). Missing, presumed dead? In B. M. Franklin & G. McCulloch (Eds.), The death of the comprehensive high school?: Historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan. Dean, D. W. (1992). Conservative governments and the restriction of Commonwealth immigration in the 1950s: The problems of constraint. The Historical Journal, 35(1), 171–194. Dunk, M. (Ed.). (2008). The eleven-plus book: Genuine exam questions from yesteryear. Michael O’Mara Books. Education Act 1944. (1944). HMSO. Fenwick, I. G. K. (1976). The comprehensive school, 1944–1970: The politics of secondary school reorganization. Methuen. Fleming, C. M. (1948). Adolescence, its social psychology. Routledge & K. Paul. Floud, J. E., Halsey, A. H., & Martin, F. M. (1956). Social class and educational opportunity. Greenwood Press. Gould, J. (2007). Can’t buy me love: The Beatles, Britain, and America. Harmony Books. Griggs, C. (2002). The TUC and education reform, 1926–1970. Routledge. Halsey, A. H., & Gardner, L. (1953). Selection for secondary education and achievement in four grammar schools. The British Journal of Sociology, 4(1), 60–75. Hansard (Great Britain). (1960). Education (Vol. 629). The Parliamentary Debates, Official Report. HMSO. Husén, T. (1966). The contribution of research to the reform of secondary education. Paedagogica Europaea, 2, 250–260. Kogan, M. (1971). The politics of education: Edward Boyle and Anthony Crosland in conversation with Maurice Kogan. Penguin. Labour Party (Great Britain). (1953). Challenge to Britain. Labour Party. Labour Party (Great Britain). (1958). Learning to live: Labour’s policy for education. Labour Party. Lawton, D. (2005). Education and Labour party ideologies, 1900–2001 and beyond. Routledge. McCulloch, G. (1989). The secondary technical school: A usable past? Falmer Press. McCulloch, G. (2016). British Labour party education policy and comprehensive education: From Learning to Live to circular 10/65. History of Education, 45(2), 225–245. McPherson, A., & Raab, C. D. (1988). Governing education: A sociology of policy since 1945. Edinburgh University Press. Ministry of Education (Great Britain). (1954). Early leaving: a report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England). HMSO.

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Ministry of Education (Great Britain). (1959). 15 to 18: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) [The Crowther Report]. HMSO. National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales. (1963). Procedures for the allocation of pupils in secondary education. National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales. New deal for modern schools. (1955, April 16). The Economist, 186–187. The Newsom Report. (1963). Half our future. HMSO. Parkinson, M. (1970). The Labour party and the organization of secondary education, 1918–1965. Routledge. Simon, B. (1953). Intelligence testing and the comprehensive school. Lawrence & Wishart. Simon, B. (1978). Intelligence, psychology and education: A Marxist critique. (Rev. ed.). Lawrence and Wishart. Trades Union Congress (TUC). (1964). Report of proceedings at the annual Trades Union Congress. Trades Union Congress. Sneddon, N. M. (1999). Interest groups and policy-making: The welfare state, 1942–1964 (Doctoral dissertation). University of Glasgow, Thesis Repository. Vernon, P. E. (Ed.). (1957). Secondary school selection: A British Psychological Society inquiry. Methuen. Wiborg, S. (2017). Teacher unions in England: The end is nigh? In T. Moe & S. Wiborg (Eds.), The comparative politics of education: Teachers unions and education systems around the world (pp. 56–86). Cambridge University Press. Wooldridge, A. (1994). Measuring the mind: Education and psychology in England, c. 1860–c. 1990. Cambridge University Press. Yates, A., & Pidgeon, D. A. (1957). Admission to grammar schools. Newnes Educational Pub. Co. Young, M. D. (1958). The rise of the meritocracy, 1870–2033; An essay on education and equality. Thames and Hudson.

CHAPTER 6

Britain III: Comprehensive Change

Introduction By the early 1960s, the fixed-ability discourse upon which the tripartite system of education had been founded in the 1944 Education Act had largely been delegitimized. As the previous chapter outlined, once the psychological assumptions of the discourse were effectively countered, even longstanding supporters of the grammar schools would find the practice of selecting pupils for different schools at age eleven difficult to justify. By the 1970s, the 11-plus exam and the selective system that had been established with such shared support after World War II would be vanishing from the institutional landscape of Britain, replaced largely by a new system of mixed-ability comprehensive schools. Changes to the fixed-ability discourse were crucial for this development, but other factors played roles as well. Consistent with historical institutional conceptions of the “structuring” power of institutions, the current chapter maintains that particular features of British educational governance and administration would influence the “comprehensivization” of education. Specifically, the traditional decentralization of competence to LEAs in England and Wales that had been reasserted in the 1944 Education Act would provide local actors with the capacity to initiate reforms in the organization of their general education systems well before any systemic policy change would be initiated at the national level. This © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_6

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chapter begins with an examination of how these early local reorganizations served to legitimate the comprehensive school model, facilitating the national drive to dismantle the selective system that Labour would begin in 1965 with an Education Ministry directive calling on LEAs to submit reform plans to the central government issued after the party took power from the Conservatives. It also reviews a largely parallel process of change that took place at the same time in Scotland. The chapter then turns to the higher education sector and considers how the movement to reform general education coincided with pressures to expand access to higher education. While the initial opening of this space would be driven by material factors, including demographic pressures and increased public demand for higher education, the outcome that would emerge for the university sector would be shaped by the same dynamic ability discourse that had so strongly influenced the organization of secondary schooling. Yet the same Labour government that would act to end differentiation in secondary education would reassert it for the university system, ensuring that educational selection would not so much be eliminated in Britain as shifted from an earlier to a later age. The chapter then returns to general education, examining how most of the remaining local educational authorities would by the mid-1970s follow through with their own comprehensive reorganizations despite the Labour directive’s revoking in 1970 by Margaret Thatcher, the Education Minister of the newly elected Conservative government, and the rise of a new traditionalism in education policy debates that blamed the problems of British schooling in the 1970s on “progressive” education ideas, such as those that had launched the school reforms in the 1950s and 1960s. The timing and sequence of these developments would be crucial for this outcome; the reform process that would establish the comprehensive school would be nearly complete by the time the ideas of the traditionalist movement would come to dominate thinking in the Conservative party, now led by Thatcher, who would attempt—unsuccessfully—to persuade LEAs to readopt the system of early selection following her party’s reassumption of power in 1979.

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Change at the Local Level: LEAs and Comprehensive Reorganization While the discursive shift outlined in the last chapter was taking place at the center, change that would prove highly significant for the development of future policy was also occurring at the periphery. The institutional design of the state education system that had been established in Britain in the early twentieth century provided local authorities with wide-ranging decision-making competence over curricular issues and the administration of schools. Under the 1944 Act, LEAs had significant, though—as the cases of Middlesex and London noted earlier demonstrate—not unlimited, freedom in determining the precise organization of the new universal secondary system implemented within their districts.1 For reasons outlined earlier, the postwar Labour governments had been reluctant to allow local experimentation with comprehensive schools in the late 1940s, though few authorities had expressed interest in them; by 1953, only 23 out of 146 LEAs had submitted plans to the Ministry even to establish experimental comprehensives and those were intended to operate alongside existing selective schools. Only six had presented designs for the full comprehensivization of their systems (Parkinson, 1970, 76).2 As serious doubts emerged about the tripartite system in the 1950s, however, the Labour party grew increasingly united behind comprehensive school reform and local Labour officials would—after initial reluctance—seek to eliminate selection and restructure schools along more comprehensive lines. As noted in the last chapter, Labour’s education committee had been an early supporter of mixed-ability schooling and in the 1950s continued to call for reforms to the tripartite system. Initially, the committee faced resistance from Labour-controlled LEAs, which were hesitant to carry out local reforms given the costs associated with reorganizing a school system that had just been established (Bilski, 1973, 204). Moreover, since all reorganizations had to be submitted for approval to the now Conservative-controlled Ministry in London, local authorities would have few assurances that they would be able to carry their plans out. By the late 1950s, however, the Ministry had become less rigidly opposed to comprehensive reorganization schemes and Labour-led LEAs had become more open to comprehensive schools. Following a Labour sweep in local elections in May 1963, LEA-led comprehensivization accelerated, with schemes for reorganization introduced in Bristol, Liverpool, and

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Manchester. As Fenwick notes, “the efforts of committee comprehensive supporters… the drift of party policy and non-political educational thought, and, above all, the favourable publicity given to comprehensive experiments such as in London, Coventry, and Leicestershire, led to a more positive attitude on the part of Labour-controlled education committees” (1976, 127). Even some Conservative-led LEAs would begin to view change as both inevitable and appropriate, including in Devon, Dorset, and Shropshire, all of which indicated their intention in 1963 to go comprehensive (Crook, 2002, 251). On the eve of Labour’s victory in the October 1964 general elections, an article in the Times Education Supplement claimed that “[i]t is already being assumed that an LEA which has no new plan [for comprehensive schools] up its sleeve must be a backward type” (quoted in Parkinson, 1970, 69). By then roughly one in ten British secondary students was enrolled in a comprehensive school (Trowler, 2003, 4) and some 250 such schools were operating in England across 23 counties and 16 county boroughs3 (Fenwick, 1976, 94). The rise in the number of LEAs reorganizing their secondary systems around comprehensive schools would be significant in initiating what Brian Simon would refer to as the “breakout” of comprehensives and the national drive to end the selective system that would begin after Labour assumed power in 1964 (Simon, 1991, 203). By demonstrating that such schools could be created and maintained without massive upheaval to parents, students, and teachers or a decline in standards that many opponents of reforms had warned would occur, the local introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1950s and early 1960s largely demystified what had until then been viewed as an “experimental” education model. Local reorganization also made it clear to national Labour leaders that the LEAs could carry out reforms on their own without “command and control”-style legislation from the central government in London, while at the same time making any future national comprehensivization drive more politically palatable by leaving the management of the reorganization in the hands of local authorities.

The National Drive for Comprehensive Schooling Despite the increased number of comprehensive schools and the growing consensus on the fallibility of the 11-plus, widespread political support for a national policy on comprehensivization would not develop in Britain

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until the early 1960s. As noted in the last chapter, calls for comprehensive reorganization of secondary schooling and the abolition of the 11-plus had appeared in the Labour party’s official policy platform by the late 1950s, but many higher officials in Labour, including future party leader and prime minister Harold Wilson,4 were not enthusiastic supporters of comprehensives and expressed concerns that such schools were “vote losers.” This view had been confirmed by a 1957 survey commissioned by the party that found reform of the tripartite system had little saliency among voters as a political issue and that working-class parents in particular expressed little interest in seeing comprehensive schools established (McCulloch, 2016, 20–21; Parkinson, 1970, 81). By the 1964 general election, however, the critical mass of public opinion had shifted on the issue, paralleling the discursive changes discussed in the previous chapter. Polls found increasing interest in education policy generally and sympathy for the Labour’s position on education specifically (Fenwick, 1976, 128). A survey that year of mothers in Essex whose children had recently taken the 11-plus found twice as many respondents to be in favor of comprehensive schools than not, with working-class mothers more likely than their middle-class counterparts to support their introduction (Preston, 1964, 18 June). In the run-up to the election, Labour moved towards fully embracing the comprehensive school. Wilson’s famous “Science and Socialism” speech delivered at the 1963 party conference made clear the party’s opposition to selective schooling in terms that not only condemned the perceived social injustices of the 11-plus system but highlighted how the system inhibited the advancement of scientific and technological advancement in the country and thus threatened its long-term economic competitiveness and security. As a nation, we cannot afford to force segregation on our children at the 11-plus stage. As Socialists, as democrats we oppose this system of educational apartheid, because we believe in equality of opportunity. But that is not all. We simply cannot as a nation afford to neglect the educational development of a single boy or girl. We cannot afford to cut off three-quarters or more of our children from virtually any chance of higher education. (Wilson, 1964, 19)

In its 1964 election manifesto, the party called for the selective system to be dismantled, framing the policy—in accordance with the rhetorical strategy the party had adopted at least since the publication of Learning

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to Live in 1958—not as the elimination of the grammar school but its expansion to all students. Labour will get rid of the segregation of children into separate schools caused by 11-plus selection: secondary education will be reorganized on comprehensive lines. Within the new system, grammar school education will be extended: in future no child will he denied the opportunity of benefiting from it through arbitrary selection at the age of 11. (Labour Party, 1964, Part B[ii])

As examined in Chapter 5, the Conservative party had adopted a policy in the early 1960s that sought to place it somewhere between the poles of supporting comprehensives and adhering to the rigid practices of early selection, resulting in a policy position characterized largely by its ambiguity. While criticizing what it termed Labour’s “doctrinaire” reorganization plans for the secondary sector, the Tories’ 1964 electoral platform offered to provide “opportunities for all children to go forward to the limits of their capacity in good schools of every description” (quoted in Dale, 2000, 154). The difficulty of the position in which the Tories found themselves by 1964 was largely their own doing. As Fenwick notes, “The Conservative government had unintentionally contributed to its own defeat by acknowledging and fostering the increasing importance of education, by tolerating the comprehensive schools until they were too important to ignore, and by failing to convince the interested public that it had an alternative answer to the ‘bogey of the eleven plus’” (Fenwick, 1976, 130). Labour’s narrow victory in the election and slim parliamentary majority of only four seats tempered the reformist enthusiasm of a party that had spent some thirteen years in opposition, and ministers were reluctant to push for major policy changes upon first taking office. Comprehensive reorganization failed even to make it into the Queen’s first speech opening Parliament in 1964 and announcing the government’s legislative priorities. Significantly, it was pressure from local authorities that forced the issue; the submission to the national government of a plan for full-scale comprehensivization by the Labour-led Bristol LEA pushed the new Secretary of State for Education and Science5 Michael Stewart to address the subject shortly after the election. Stewart reaffirmed the

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party’s basic policy of restructuring the secondary system along comprehensive lines, drawing on the principles laid out in the party’s 1958 policy report Learning to Live,6 including its conclusion that the comprehensive principle could be implemented in different organizational arrangements at the local level (McCulloch, 2016, 26). The Conservatives, sensing a potential vulnerability in the new government, called for an early parliamentary debate on Labour’s education policy in January 1965. Advocating a general policy of “no experiments in education,” Boyle and former Education Secretary Quintin Hogg urged the government in the debate to limit LEA comprehensive reorganization, preserve the grammar schools, and establish any new national policy based on the advice of nonpartisan educational experts (Fenwick, 1976, 132). In his response, Stewart attempted to characterize the government’s policy as recognizing a process that had already begun at the local level, emphasizing how even Conservative-controlled LEAs had also submitted plans for comprehensive reorganization (Lawton, 2005, 68). This emphasis on local precedent for a national plan was reflected in the motion passed on January 21 in the Commons in support of reorganization. That this House, conscious of the need to raise educational standards at all levels, and regretting that the realisation of this objective is impeded by the separation of children into different types of secondary schools, notes with approval the efforts of local authorities to reorganise secondary education on comprehensive lines which will preserve all that is valuable in grammar school education for those children who now receive it and make it available to more children; recognises that the method and timing of such reorganisation should vary to meet local needs; and believes that the time is now ripe for a declaration of national policy. (quoted in Montague, 1971, 46)

In the House of Lords, Conservative criticism of the government’s policy was sharper still. Lord Newton, who had briefly served as a Tory Minister for Education and Science, argued that the very principle of comprehensive schooling was fundamentally at odds with the purpose of the grammar education and that Labour’s attempts to portray the ending of selection as the expansion of the grammar school to all were disingenuous.

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… such intellectual integrity as I possess had been affronted by the statement in the Labour Party Election Manifesto that, as a result of reorganising secondary education on comprehensive lines, grammar school education would be extended. I am doing my best not to tread on any corns, or at any rate to do so only lightly, but I cannot refrain from saying that that phrase was naughty. It was naughty because it is capable of suggesting to the ordinary man and woman that within a completely comprehensive system you can still have grammar schools. My Lords, you cannot. Grammar school education is education in one school of able children, who are in it because, and only because, they are demonstrably able... however much you may compensate children for the inequalities bestowed by background, environment and similar social factors, the intellectual inequalities bestowed by nature will always remain, at least to some extent. (HL Deb 10 February 1965a)

In his response on behalf of the government, Minister of Technology, Charles (Baron) Snow reiterated the educational sociologist critique of intelligence testing, emphasizing the importance of the tests in selection decisions and their manifest unreliability. It is flogging a dead horse to attack [the 11-plus exam], but I will perhaps flog this dead horse for the last time. To select anybody by competitive examination at 11 means a faith in examinational procedures which even the English or the Imperial Chinese would find very hard to accept in their more lucid moments. It was based on a delightful piece of optimism: that a method called the I.Q., or Intelligence Quotient, could be really helpful. This was perfectly sensible; everybody was trying to find some device which would eliminate environment, eliminate what the child was taught, and was trying to get nearer to a representation of the actual mental machinery. It was not a stupid concept; in some ways it is still quite valuable. But it has the faint disadvantage that it does not work. ...my Lords, I really think that this 11-plus examination must be taken off the shoulders of our children. It has created great strain and has produced immense bitterness and a sense of injustice... For any such 11plus examination probably can be trusted to select the 10 per cent or so best academic children; that is, it is probably accurate to that extent. I would guess it would eliminate—and it is always easier for these devices to eliminate—the 20 per cent less fitted for academic training. But between those two there is an enormous area where often you might as well spin a coin. (HL Deb 10 February 1965a)

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Snow maintained in the debate that at issue was not simply ending the widespread reliance on the 11-plus exam as a mechanism for sorting students into different school types; in his view, any type of method used to select children for something of such importance would be fraught with problems. Given this, he concluded that the only possible alternative for the state system of education was to scrap the tripartite system and replace it with some form of comprehensive school. We cannot possibly, as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, rightly said, eliminate all these inequalities in the human condition; but it is the task of good government at least not to add to the inequalities of the human condition. In fact, this method of selection undoubtedly has helped to add to these inequalities. I would go further: I would say that any of the methods I have seen devised, not by examination but by taking account of course teaching, of parents’ intentions or of interview ... are in some respects likely to be more socially unjust, rather than less. ...My Lords, if this is so, if we cannot select without inefficiency and injustice at this age, then we are automatically forced into another form of education. There is no possible way of getting out of this new course of action. Once you believe selection is unjust at 11, then you must have a non-selective education, for a time at least. There is no other way. (HL Deb 10 February 1965a)

The dynamics of the comprehensive initiative intensified when Anthony Crosland himself was appointed Secretary at DES following Stewart’s promotion to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in January 1965. Continuing the process initiated by his predecessor, Crosland moved forward with formulating a national directive on comprehensive reorganization in negotiations with the LEAs. Significantly, the formulation of the directive was largely driven by actors in the Ministry and non-state groups played a limited role, including the teacher unions, whose power at this time in other policy areas related to administration, curriculum, and wages was considerable. Although DES officials had held meetings with representatives from the NUT and Joint Four in the months in the months preceding the Circular 10/65’s issuance (see McCulloch, 2016, 26), there was no effort to obtain direct comments from the teachers about the directive itself, but only on matters of implementation. For the Labour government, as Morris, notes, the question of selection for schools was of a different nature than other education policies. “Segregation of children at age 11 into schools of different

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status,” he writes, “is regarded as a social question, which the community, acting through Parliament, must resolve for itself. Once the principle has been established, there are a number of consequential matters on which teachers have much to say that is relevant” (1969, 71). In time, the NUT would come to defend comprehensive schools, helping (and perhaps hoping) to generate the belief that they had been instrumental in their creation, but as Wiborg (2017, 67) notes, into the 1960s the unions’ members were largely opposed to comprehensive schools for “the simple reason that the reorganization would threaten their professional interests” as they had developed within the separate schools of the tripartite system. On July 12, 1965, Circular 10/65 requesting that LEAs in England and Wales provide to the DES plans to transition from a tripartite to a comprehensive system was published. The circular indicated “the Government’s declared objective to end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education” (DES, 1965, Para 1), but also made clear that the ultimate responsibility for the timing and structure of comprehensive reform lay with the local authorities, noting that while the DES preferred an “all-through” form of comprehensive for students from ages 11 to 18, “the most appropriate system will depend on local circumstances and an authority may well decide to adopt more than one form of organisation in the area for which it is responsible” (DES, 1965, para. 4). These alternate forms included: a two-tier system in which all pupils would transfer at age eleven to a junior comprehensive school and at thirteen or fourteen to a senior comprehensive school; a two-tier systems in which all pupils transfer at eleven to a junior comprehensive school with a choice of senior school at thirteen or fourteen; and a system in which schools with an age range of 11–16 combined with a sixth form college for pupils age 16 to 18 (DES, 1965, Para. 3). The language of the circular sought to convey to local authorities that DES was truly committed to seeing comprehensivization through as a “bottom up” initiative that would be planned and carried out by the LEAs themselves. The circular contained no timetable for authorities to submit their plans, but did highlight how many local actors had already quickly and successfully accomplished reforms, implying that the Department would not tolerate claims of administrative obstacles to reorganization from any future local laggards.

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The Government are aware that the complete elimination of selection and separatism in secondary education will take time to achieve. They do not seek to impose destructive or precipitate change on existing schools; they recognise that the evolution of separate schools into a comprehensive system must be a constructive process requiring careful planning by local education authorities in consultation with all those concerned. But the spontaneous and exciting progress which has been made in this direction by so many authorities in recent years demonstrates that the objective is not only practicable; it is also now widely accepted. (DES, 1965, para. 46)

Much has been made over Labour’s choice to issue a non-statuary circular rather than binding legislation and to include the six alternate types rather than a single model that covered both the lower and upper secondary levels. Under the circular, Ball writes, “it was left to LEAs to decide to move decisively, half-heartedly or not at all to local comprehensive systems” (2008, 70). To some observers, much of the perceived weaknesses of the comprehensive education system that developed after the Circular 10/65 can be traced back to these decisions (see McCulloch, 2016). While scholars have provided different explanations for these choices (Wiborg, 2017, 67), Benn and Simon’s early explanation remains in many ways the most convincing, namely that with no past experience with comprehensive schooling at the national level, the central government and DES relied on what had already been practiced at the local level when crafting the circular, writing that “the ‘central guidance’ that 10/65 claimed to give in effect amounted to passing around to all authorities what the DES had found in its suggestion box in 1965” (1972, 56). Also significant for this decision was the political situation at the time; Labour members sympathetic to comprehensives controlled most of the local authorities in the country and the national government could thus be fairly certain the request for secondary reform could be achieved voluntarily (Kogan, 1971, 191). In Scotland, comprehensive reorganization was influenced by developments in England and followed a similar legislative pattern (see MacKenzie, 1967, 25). Circulars 600 and 614, issued after Crosland’s circular, called for an end to separate junior and senior secondary schools and for all pupils to attend the same local secondary school following the completion of primary school, with no attempt made by school officials to assign labels regarding appropriate courses of study at that time

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(Watt, 1989, 55). Owing to factors discussed in Chapter 4, more mixedability “omnibus” schools were already in operation in Scotland by the 1960s than in England or Wales, which facilitated comprehensive reform. Nonetheless, the circulars helped to see through a very significant change to the Scottish system of general education. As Bruce Millan, a junior Minister in the Scottish Office at the time of the circulars and later Secretary of State for Scotland described it: People seem to think that before Circular 600… we had a pretty-well comprehensive system in Scotland anyway. That is just utterly untrue. We had a selective system in Scotland, as they did south of the Border, and the arguments about the ending of selection and the rest were exactly the same in Scotland as they were in England. (quoted in McPherson & Raab, 1988, 374)

Asserting Late Differentiation: The Expansion of Higher Education British policymakers involved with the secondary school reforms of the 1960s were keenly aware that by eliminating the tripartite system they were not so much ending selection as postponing it. The same Labour party that fought to stop the practice for secondary education at age eleven would see no contradiction in reaffirming selective mechanisms for higher education. Concurrent to the national comprehensivization drive led by Labour in the mid-1960s would be a movement radically to expand access to higher education in Britain. Spurred by many of the same structural and ideational factors that moved the party to pursue the reorganization of secondary schooling and influenced by the momentum generated by earlier policy decisions, Labour would significantly increase the size of its university sector through the creation of the so-called “binary system” of higher education in 1965. Yet where the party would reject stratification in the secondary sector, it would reassert it for higher education, ensuring that its universities and their graduates would maintain a clear hierarchy of prestige. Prior to the Second World War, access to university study, much like secondary education, was limited to a small segment of British youth: in 1938, only two percent of eighteen-year-olds in Britain attended university (Trowler, 2003, 48). Unsurprisingly, most university students were from the middle and upper classes—sociological studies of the period

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between 1928 and 1947 found that 8.9% of all boys whose fathers worked in non-manual labor professions attended universities, while only 1.4% of all boys from the manual labor category had the opportunity to attend (figures cited in Archer et al., 2003, 27). Long dominated by Oxford and Cambridge, the university system in Britain had a tradition of independent governance, with admissions, planning, and curriculum decisions made at the level of individual institutions. In marked contrast to the state-funded (and directed) systems on the continent, only about one-third of university finances in Britain came from the government (Shattock & Berdahl, 1984, 472). Moreover, unlike other private institutional recipients of state funds, universities were not obligated to account to Parliament for their spending, a tradition rooted in the principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy (Godwin, 1998, 175). Universities were only one part of the British higher education sector, which included an array of further education institutions, such as technical and regional colleges, offering vocational and practical learning courses, and teacher training colleges to supply educators to local primary and secondary schools. Significantly, these institutions were administered and funded by local authorities and were not permitted to confer degrees or diplomas to students; this privilege was reserved exclusively for the universities. In the postwar period, the British higher education system would face several sources of expansionary pressure. First were the demographic pressures driven by the spike in births immediately following the war. Based on the increase in births registered in the mid to late 1940s, policymakers anticipated that the number of Britons aged fifteen to nineteen would grow significantly by the mid-1960s, rising by nearly 30% between 1955 and 1965. Simply maintaining the existing enrollment percentages would thus require a considerable expansion in the number of university places (Annual Abstract of Statistics, quoted in Deakin, 1996, 62). The “Baby Bulge” was not the only factor driving the rise in projected enrollments: the percentage of students achieving qualifications for university admission by successfully completing the newly introduced O- and A-level examinations was also increasing dramatically. Whereas students staying on at school after completing the minimum requirements and seeking university admissions qualification comprised only 6.6% of the population in 1950, by 1962 it had almost doubled to 12% (Perkin, 1972, 113), with the total number of sixth formers obtaining two or more A-Levels required for university admission leaping from 27,000

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in 1956 to over 60,000 by 1964 (Lowe, 1988, 152). The result was a decline in the percentage of qualified students successfully obtaining university places, from 80% in 1956 to 65% in 1964 (Laylard et al., 1969, 18–19). The termination of postwar national service, due to take effect in 1960, was also expected to cause a spike in university applications, as male sixth formers who previously would have begun their eighteen months in the armed services could expect to apply directly for university entry.7 Under these conditions, some type of expansion was inevitable: the existing system simply lacked the physical and administrative capacity to accommodate the projected influx of new students. Another factor driving changes in the British higher education system was tied to the growth of the British economy in the 1950s and early 1960s and the spike in demand for university education by both British industry and families. While Britain’s average growth rate of 2.8% during this period may not have been as impressive as some of the figures registered on the continent, it nevertheless fueled one of the largest economic expansions in the country’s history (Matthews et al., 1982). Filling the skilled occupations of the growing and increasingly specialized postwar labor market number required better-educated employees and thus heightened the requirements of industry for more highly trained university graduates. Of specific concern was the state of technical and scientific education in the country and perceived shortages of graduates in those disciplines; a common view among postwar planners held that the country would need significantly to improve the development and use of science and technology for both its economy and national defense. While other European countries shared this concern, it was particularly acute in Britain; technological education had long been relegated to second-class status in the country, while liberal and classical studies had traditionally been emphasized in universities over the applied sciences (Deakin, 1996). Beyond the demands of industry, however, were the rising aspirations of the new postwar consumer class that saw expanded access to higher forms of education for their children as another postwar good to which they desired access and, for the first time in the Industrial era, could realistically hope to obtain. Although it would still be some years before university education would become, in Anderson’s words, “the essential badge of middle-class status itself,” the social appeal of a university degree was clearly growing alongside its attraction on purely economic or educational grounds (Anderson, 2006, 144; Archer et al., 2003, 34).

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While demographic and economic pressures were significant, a third factor shaped the reorientation in higher education during the 1960s, namely new ideas about equality and “hidden talent” that had shaped general education policymaking in the immediate postwar era. As with the general system, this concern was reflected for higher education in a number of government advisory studies, beginning in the 1940s. In making the argument for a renewal of science in British universities, the 1946 Barlow Report drew on the view that wasted or underutilized intellectual ability among young people constituted a major impediment to the realization of economic success in the postwar era. To make this point, the report reiterated the educational psychologists’ assumption that there existed a fixed store of intelligence in the nation’s youth population, maintaining the present university system was not providing all intellectually gifted young people the chance to live up to their own—and thus the nation’s—potential. At present rather less than 2 per cent of the population reach the Universities. About 5 per cent of the whole population show, on test, an intelligence as great as the upper half of the students, who amount to 1 per cent of the population. We conclude, therefore, that only about one in five of the boys and girls, who have intelligence equal to that of the best half of the University students, actually reach the Universities. (Barlow Report, 1946, par. 26)

Clearly there existed a large reservoir of untapped intelligence in the British population, but where precisely were these bright students to be found? Working from the assumption that intelligence was evenly distributed across the general population and not the dominion of a single economic class or social group, the report’s authors concluded that this reserve of intelligent but underutilized youngsters must be those shut out of higher learning opportunities by the old two-tier system of elementary and secondary schools. There is also evidence that the great majority of the intelligent persons, who do not reach the Universities, are ex-pupils of the elementary schools. If university education were open to all on the basis of measured intelligence alone, about 80 per cent would be expected to come from those children who started their education in the public elementary school and only 20 per cent from those whose education had been in independent schools. (Barlow Report, 1946, par. 27)

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While the report does not refer to the specific social standing of these “ex-pupils,” it is reasonable to infer that the majority of them would be of working-class origins, given class distributions in the wider population. Including talented young people in higher education regardless of their social origin was necessary for achieving the broader objectives for youth conceived by the country’s postwar planners and a natural complement to the meritocracy being established in the new secondary system. The failure of the tripartite system, however, successfully to advance working-class children necessarily limited their university participation as well, and thus while the overall number of undergraduates increased significantly from prewar levels in the first postwar decade, the social imbalances in recruiting that characterized the system before the war remained and the percentage of university students from working-class backgrounds in the 1950s continued to be low (Ainley, 1988, 37).8 Early selection, it appeared, was problematic as a sorting strategy for higher education.9 The Ideology of Expansion: The Robbins Report Under the weight of these accumulated pressures, the Conservative government under Harold MacMillan established a Royal Commission in 1961 led by London School of Economics Professor Lionel Robbins to examine the higher education system. The report, issued in October 1963, included some 178 specific recommendations on a raft of subjects ranging from improving teacher education to establishing stronger links between universities and secondary schools to developing broader-based first-year courses (see Robbins Report, 1963, 277–291). Ultimately, the government would reject most of its recommendations, but the report would have arguably a more significant effect by serving to provide the economic, social, and educational rationale justifying the rapid and permanent expansion of British higher education later in the decade. By maintaining that growth in the sector should be carried out in response to the population’s demand for places, rather than the anticipated needs of the state or industry, the report opened up post-secondary education in the country and particularly its university sector to whole swathes of British society for whom higher education had heretofore been a decidedly unrealistic aspiration.10 In a statement that captured the philosophy that would guide government policy for successive generations of young people in Britain, the report declared “courses of higher education should

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be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so” (Robbins Report, 1963, 8). In helping to set this expansion into motion, Robbins would draw on many of the same ideas on the relationship among class, merit, and wasted talent that formed the core of the counter-discourse in education. In great detail, the report examined the differential educational trajectories of men and women and of young people of various social classes and found that both gender and social origin were highly significant in determining who in Britain was likely to obtain a university education. Analyzing data on grammar school students in England and Wales and senior secondary school students in Scotland, Robbins noted that children from families in which the father had a manual employment background were less than half as likely to attend university as those whose fathers had nonmanual occupations, despite both groups studying in the same schools and having similar-ability levels (as measured by the 11-plus, among other assessments). Despite the promises of tripartitism and the “classneutral” method of selection by examination, it appeared that little had changed since the 1930s and 1940s—the working class was still underrepresented in higher education. A similar disparity in university attendance was demonstrated between male and female students: while the number of female students achieving O-level passes at age 16 was equal to the male figure, the report found that far fewer girls were sitting the A-level exams two years later and thus were not continuing to university study. The impact of the new dynamic ability ideas was clear in the report. In providing estimates for the number of future higher education places that would be needed, Robbins extended the ideas of the educational sociologists to higher education policy and explicitly rejected the fixed pool of ability arguments of the prewar psychologists. It is sometimes argued that growth in the number of those able to benefit from higher education is something that is likely to be limited in the foreseeable future by biological factors. But we believe that it is highly misleading to suppose that one can determine an upper limit to the number of people who could benefit from higher education, given favorable circumstances. It is, of course, unquestionable that human beings vary considerably in native capacity for all sorts of tasks…But while it would be wrong to deny fundamental differences of nature, it is equally wrong to deny that performance in examinations or tests—or indeed any measurable ability—is affected by nurture in the widest sense of the word. Moreover, the belief that there exists some easy method of ascertaining an

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intelligence factor unaffected by education or background is outmoded. (Robbins Report, 1963, 49)

Expansion in higher education would coincide with a consolidation of university admission procedures. Prior to the 1950s, university admission standards and criteria varied widely from institution to institution, but this changed in 1951 with the introduction of A-levels. Grammar school students who had elected to continue studies beyond the minimum school-leaving age of sixteen and complete two additional years of study in the non-compulsory sixth form were eligible to sit for the new exams, which provided universities with a common evaluative mechanism to use as the basis for selection decisions. Achieving Expansion: The Binary System Upon the publication of the Robbins report in October 1963, the Conservative government quickly accepted most of the general targets for higher education expansion, though no decisions were made regarding whether to accept or reject the report’s specific policy proposals. The Conservatives’ defeat in the 1964 general election meant that the question of how precisely to carry out Robbins’ recommendations would be left up to the incoming Labour government, which had called for the expansion of post-secondary education in its 1964 electoral manifesto and had accepted the Committee’s expansion targets at the time of the report’s publication. Instead of building more universities to meet the targeted expansion, Labour chose to elevate the status of a set of existing higher education institutions. The result of this decision was the creation of the so-called binary system. Announced by Crosland in a speech at Woolwich Polytechnic on April 28, 1965, the new policy called for a system of higher education consisting of two separate sectors. The first was the autonomous sector, which included the traditional universities, as well as the leading Colleges of Advanced Technology, which were raised to university level in 1966. The second half of the binary system would be comprised of a non-autonomous state sector that included some thirty technical schools, renamed polytechnics,11 and teacher training colleges, which were to be known as colleges of education. Although these institutions would continue to lack formal degree-granting authority, under the new arrangement, students could now obtain degrees for coursework

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completed in them, with the authority to confer degrees and diplomas for specific courses of study resting with the newly created Council for National Academic Awards, a government body whose staff consisted of academics but was not necessarily identified with university interests (Driver, 1972, 328). By managing to meet the expansionary calls of Robbins (though not in the precise form that Robbins advocated) with limited government investment while maintaining traditional university autonomy, the creation of the binary system transformed British higher education nearly overnight at little cost or disruption. The effects were quickly visible: in 1960– 1961, roughly 5% of eighteen- to nineteen-year-olds were pursuing higher education in the country but by 1972–1973, the figure had increased to 14%, and across the 1960s, the number of full-time students in higher education increased more than two-fold, from roughly 200,000 at the beginning of the decade to 430,000 at its end, with university enrollments jumping from 108,000 in 1960 to 228,000 in 1970 (Perkin, 1972, 111). The British university system would emerge from this process with a selective system of admissions that served to retain and reinforce the distinct hierarchy of prestige among its institutions, eschewing the more open practices that characterized many of the continental systems. Selection by exam, the introduction of which had served to generate such contention when applied to eleven-year-olds under the tripartite secondary system, became the norm for 18-year-olds seeking entry to university. That the Labour government failed to see this as a contradiction was made clear by Education Secretary Michael Stewart during the January 1965 House of Commons debate on Labour’s education policy. Responding to a question from Alan Hopkins, a Conservative MP for Bristol Northeast, about the government’s policy towards selection at all stages of education, Stewart distinguished between general and higher education. My policy is to retain the comprehensive principle at the primary stage and to promote its development at the secondary stage because I believe it is better on educational grounds than separatism. Quite different considerations apply to institutions for higher and further education, many of which are training their students for particular courses and professions… everybody goes to a primary and a secondary school but not everybody pursues courses of further education. There must, therefore, be some separation

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between those who do and those who do not. Perhaps the hon. Member will consider this. If separatism is in his view right at the secondary stage, does he also advocate it at the primary stage. (HC Deb 21 January 1965b)

Crosland, Stewart’s successor at DES and the architect of the national comprehensivization drive also expressed this perspective in a 1971 interview conducted while Labour was in opposition. The binary system and the retention of late differentiation in higher education, he maintained, did not violate the principles upon which the comprehensive secondary school was based. Egalitarians who attacked the [binary] policy were wrong … they drew on a false analogy. They said that if you were against the 11-plus, you should be against an 18-plus. But at 11-plus an entire age group is moving up into a different stage of education, and the question is whether it does so in a selective or a non-selective fashion. At 18-plus nothing of the sort is happening. Most of the age group is not going on to higher education anyway, and also will not do so for a long time to come. (quoted in Kogan, 1971, 194)

The 1970s: Institutional Change and Critical Responses By 1970, over one-quarter of all secondary students in Britain were attending comprehensive schools and the majority of LEAs in England and Wales had submitted plans to the DES in London for comprehensivizing their systems. The reluctance of some twenty local authorities to submit plans for reorganization led the new Education Minister Edward Short,12 who had been appointed in 1968, to consider replacing the voluntary approach in Circular 10/65 with legislation in 1969 requiring local comprehensivization, before such a move was ultimately rejected by Wilson (Crook, 2002, 253). While ambiguity on the question of early selection and even “soft” support for comprehensive schooling among some party leaders (including Edmund Boyle) characterized the Tories’ education policy stance for much of the 1960s, by the end of the decade there would be a resurgence of traditionalist views, led by Boyle’s replacement as Shadow Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, who backed a policy allowing both comprehensives and grammar schools to operate within

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LEAs, with students’ placed in one or the other on the basis of parental choice. In their 1970 election manifesto, the Conservatives promised to repeal Circular 10/65 and promote a policy of greater voluntarism within individual LEAs. Shortly after the Tories’ return to power following the party’s victory in the general election, Thatcher carried through on the promise to revoke Crosland’s circular, replacing it with a new Circular 10/70 that canceled the request for LEAs to submit to the DES their comprehensive reorganization plans. The new directive elicited a strong reaction among some education stakeholders, who viewed it as an attempt to weaken the comprehensive drive. Among these was the NUT, which had called for a fully comprehensive system a year earlier. As Benn and Simon write, such responses served to underline the degree to which past ambivalence about comprehensive schools had been replaced by full-throated support. All sorts of individuals, organisations, leader writers and professional bodies quickly discovered that they were, and had always been, procomprehensive… Spokesmen for the NUT kindly overlooked enough about the Union’s own internal disagreements on this issue to come out and declare that it been pro-comprehensive and resolutely pursuing such polices from 1943 onward. (1972, 89–90)

Whatever the intentions of its drafters, Circular 10/70 did not represent an attempt to reinstate the tripartite system and 11-plus. Following a contentious meeting between Thatcher and the NUT after the issuance of the new circular, the DES sought to clarify its meaning in a press statement that is noteworthy for its clear renunciation of the strict practice of early selection. Authorities are free to proceed with approved schemes of non-selective secondary education on comprehensive lines if they wish to do so. Indeed, [Secretary Thatcher] will be pleased to consider any new plans which may be submitted. In the Secretary of State’s view the age of eleven is too early to make final decisions about a child’s future. Provision should be made for the late developer and there are a number of ways of doing this. (DES, July 13, 1970)

As an Economist article pointed out just prior to the 1970 elections, “it is important to be clear how limited the disagreement on this really is. It is now clearly accepted that 11 is too early to divide children up

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into different schools on the basis of ability. There are few defenders of the 11-plus. Apart from the unfairness of this, one result has been that Britain is very near the bottom of the pool for advanced countries in the number of 16- and 17-year-olds in school and this is a serious national defect that is being remedied by comprehensive reorganization” (“It’s half-term”, 1970, March 28). The article’s claim that the 11-plus had few remaining supporters left in Britain would prove to be premature. The 1970s would be marked by the worst economic downturn since the Second World War. After decades of steady growth and full employment, Britain, like other Western countries, would be forced to grapple with the twin challenges of high unemployment and inflation, only to find that Keynesian interventionist prescriptions would be ineffective. In this context of economic crisis, a new educationalist movement centered around traditionalist notions of schooling would begin to challenge the education policy ideas of the 1960s, viewing them as causes of declining standards in British schools, the rising rate of youth unemployment in the country, and a more general breakdown in law and order (Chitty, 2004). Many of the members of the traditionalist movement would be affiliated with the new conservative think tanks of the period that would play a key role in shaping the ideological parameters of what would later become known as Thatcherism, including the Centre for Policy Studies, the Education Research Group, and the Conservative Philosophy Group.13 Arguably, however, the most influential contributions to the movement would come in the form of a set of populist-style pamphlets the Black Papers on Education. Edited by English professors Brian Cox and A. E. Dyson, the Black Papers consisted of entries from a range of academics, educationalists, and politicians decrying progressive educational ideals, such as “child-centered” teaching and egalitarianism in education reflected in the comprehensive school (Lawton, 2005, 85). Refusing to accept the dynamic ability arguments on the role played by social and environmental factors in shaping intelligence, many of the Black Paper contributors14 continued to maintain that the individual differences were rooted in fixed and innate inequalities that should be recognized in the organization of education systems (Wooldridge, 1994, 387). Across the decade, the arguments of the Black Paper authors would be increasingly adopted by leading figures in the Conservative party, which by the mid-1970s had begun emphasizing more traditional themes in its

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education policy program, including the desirability of a return to a differentiated secondary school structure (Wooldridge, 1994, 392). Sensing that public opinion was turning against progressive education policies,15 Labour PM James Callaghan called for a national “Great Debate” over the future of education in a speech at Oxford in 1976 and greater alignment between the British education system and the needs of British industry (Lawton, 2005, 91). Crucially, however, comprehensivization would continue more or less unfettered at the local level despite the shifting climate in education policy in the 1970s. Set in motion by local reorganization in the 1950s and early 1960s and boosted under Crosland’s DES circular, increasing numbers of LEAs would dismantle their postwar systems of early selection and differentiated secondary schools. Indeed, the pace of comprehensivization accelerated dramatically under the Conservatives in the early 1970s, with the total number of secondary students attending some form of comprehensive school in the state sector doubling between 1970 and 1973, rising to 60% of total population by the time the Conservatives were defeated by Labour in the 1974 general elections (Bellaby, 1977, 11). As Lawton notes, “one of the best known ironies about education at this time was that Margaret Thatcher, however unwillingly, approved more comprehensive schemes that any other Education Secretary” (2005, 78). Despite the acceleration of reorganization in the early 1970s, some in Labour continued to be concerned that some LEAs would refuse to dismantle their selective systems. Two years after Labour’s return to power in the 1974 general election, a new Education Act was passed, which, unlike the approach in Crosland’s 1965 circular, required local councils to submit school reorganization plans and establish secondary schools in which “the arrangements for the admission of pupils are not based (wholly or partly) on selection by reference to ability or aptitude” (Section 1[1]). As Benn and Chitty note, however, because the Act contained no mechanism to enforce compliance, its effect was limited (1996, 11). An attempt to stem comprehensivization would come in 1979 when Thatcher’s new government proposed legislation to permit local authorities to reestablish the 11-plus and selective system. The legislation would ultimately have little effect on the process of comprehensive reorganization already well underway; attempts to return to early selection in Berkshire, Wiltshire, Redbridge, and Solihull all failed as a result of

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strong local opposition and support for comprehensive schooling (Gillard, 2007). But the Thatcher proposal is notable for demonstrating the extent to which the parameters of the debate continued to be dominated by the legacies of the psychological and sociological ideas and their competing conceptions of equality. In the House of Commons debate on the legislation, two Labour MPs, Stuart Holland of Vauxhall and Martin Flannery of Sheffield Hillsborough, recounted, in effect, the history of differentiation in education in postwar Britain, outlining the impact of the ability discourses on the organization of schooling. Mr. Holland: One of the surprising aspects of the Government proposal in the Bill is the degree and scale of its backwardness...I wonder whether the Government are trying to reverse not only the principle of equality but the principle of equality of opportunity. In practice, the principle of selection—division into two classes in schools—has been rejected by virtually every progressive education authority in the developed countries. Implicitly the Government case relates to the assumption reflected by Sir Cyril Burt and others on the testing of intelligence, as if such testing were in a genuine sense scientific at a particular age. One of the Sunday newspapers recently published a devastating summary of something that for all of us—not only the Opposition—has already become part of conventional wisdom—that such testing has no scientific basis, in a genuine sense, at or around the age of 11. It is exceptional that Burt’s findings, which entered into the conventional wisdom of educational philosophy in this country for several decades, have been so explicitly repudiated… It is surprising that despite the devastating repudiation of Burt and all he stands for the Government Front Bench are prepared to reintroduce selectivity into education rather than admit that the comprehensive principle—difficult though it may well be in practice—is the only one on which to achieve equality of opportunity. Mr. Flannery I was most interested in my hon. Friend’s anecdote about Sir Cyril Burt, who at one stage had the whole of education plunged into fantasies about intelligence. Does my hon. Friend remember the great endeavours to define intelligence? First, we all said that it was inborn all-round mental capacity. Then we discarded that definition. Then the world of education alighted on a definition of intelligence. It was decided that it was that

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quality which was tested by intelligence tests. That was the definition at which we finally arrived from Sir Cyril Burt. That was his tremendous contribution. (HC Deb, July 12, 1979)

By the early 1980s, the transformation of the British general education system was effectively complete. In the 1965–1966 school year, some 9.9% of secondary school pupils in England and 28.3% in Wales were attending comprehensive schools; by 1980–1981 the figures had increased to 89.5 and 96.6%, respectively. Between the 1970–1971 and 1980–1981 school years, the percentage of Scottish secondary pupils attending comprehensives also rose, increasing from 58.5 to 96% (Manzer, 2003, 469). In one of the largest and most important institutions under the competency of the British state, significant institutional change had occurred.

Conclusion After decades characterized by stasis, the British general education system would experience two major reorganizations within twenty years. The first change involved the replacement of prewar systems that left a significant number of young Britons with no access to secondary education with a universal secondary system organized on the basis of early selection and student differentiation. The second change involved the dismantling of these selective systems in the 1960s and 1970s and the establishment of mixed-ability comprehensive schools in most of the country. What explains these twin transformations across the landscape of education policy in Britain? This case study has emphasized the significance of policy discourses and particularly their influence on partisan actors in shaping the developments analyzed here. The ideas of fixed, unchanging, and measurable ability of the prewar educational psychologists’ discourse, which would be largely adopted by political actors—including crucially the British Labour party— during the interwar years, would be the basis of the tripartite system’s institutional framework. The interwar discourse coalition, however, would collapse rapidly in the 1950s and early 1960s and practices of early selection based on perceived ability would lose much of their legitimacy as the result of the rise of a counter-discourse led by educational sociologists which challenged the assumptions of the psychologists with new ideas that emphasized the dynamic character of ability and the effects of

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environmental factors in shaping individual ability. By the late 1950s, this shift would help to generate new uncertainty about tripartitism among the public and partisan actors, most notably the Labour party, which would in a significant change seek to end early selection and replace the grammar, technical, and secondary modern schools of the tripartite system with the mixed-ability comprehensive schools. The effects of this discursive shift were not limited to secondary education, and the new beliefs would serve to shape the institutional framework of British higher education during the same period. In the case of the university system, however, selective practices would be retained, ensuring that British higher education institutions would maintain a hierarchy of prestige. As the past three chapters have also highlighted, the timing of developments in the British case was crucial. The initiation of the national reform process by the mid-1960s would serve to establish comprehensive reorganization at the local level before the shifts in social, economic, and political conditions of the 1970s that had the potential to undermine them would occur. As the next three chapters consider, the West German system would also face pressures for change to its three-tiered selective school organization in the immediate postwar decades, including a shift in policy discourses that influenced partisan actors similar to the one that took place in Britain. Crucially, however, the emergence of the West German counter-discourse would be delayed by a set of institutional factors related to the constitutional organization of the new West German state and structural legacies from the prewar era; as a consequence, reform proposals would miss the window of political opportunity in the 1970s, and continuity, rather than change, would characterize the postwar evolution in the structure of German general education.

Notes 1. This system has been characterized as a “central service, locally administered” (Crook, 2002, 253). 2. In some instances, the establishment of comprehensive schools was driven by building and facility shortages owing to wartime damage. While some comprehensives were set up in a handful of mainly rural (and Conservative-led) authorities, such as Cardigan and Westmoreland, most of the early postwar comprehensives had been established in large cities that had borne the brunt of Nazi air attacks, including Coventry and London (Fenwick, 1976, 87, 94).

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3. This figure compares to 4,000 secondary moderns, 1,000 grammar schools, and 200 technical schools in England and Wales at the time (Fenwick, 1976, 94). 4. Wilson, who had served as President of the Board of Trade during the Attlee government and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Minister during the years in opposition, had become party leader after Gaitskell’s unexpected death in January 1963. 5. The Department of Education and Science (DES) was created in 1964 as a fusion of the Ministry of Education and the Office of the Minister for Science. 6. Stewart had been largely responsible for Learning to Live while serving as shadow education minister in the 1950s (McCulloch, 2016, 6–7). 7. Concerns about Soviet expansionism led the first postwar Labour government to issue the first peacetime conscription in British history, the 1948 National Service Act, which continued the wartime conscription policy requiring able-bodied young men between seventeen and twenty-one to serve. 8. Young women also failed to see their enrollment numbers increase during this period and actually registered a slight decline in their relative university population rates from 1930 through 1958, despite being specifically marked for greater participation by the postwar planners (Anderson, 2006, 132). 9. Crosland, while generally sidestepping questions about higher education in his works in the 1950s, maintained that an additional effect of comprehensive reorganization would be that all secondary students, not only those attending grammar or public schools, would have access to university education (see also Anderson, 2006, 155). 10. Although Robbins’ name would be tied to the policy changes in higher education that stemmed from the early 1960s, many of the reforms associated with the report actually predate its 1963 publication, including those dealing with university funding and admission. Before the 1960s, students could either pay tuition fees directly themselves or compete for a raft of different financial awards, including state or university-sponsored scholarships and funds provided by individual LEAs. Self-funding of higher education had been the norm prior to the war, but by the end of the 1950s, the number of students receiving some form of public or private assistance had risen dramatically (Chitty, 2004, 162). A new system of student financing was introduced in the Education Act of 1962, which established a national standardized benefit level, subject to parental meanstesting, to cover a student’s tuition and independent living expenses. Although seen at the time as more of an effort to coordinate and streamline a disordered jumble of funding methods, the new arrangement would be a necessary step for the later development of a mass higher education

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12. 13. 14.

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system by creating the conditions in which paying for higher education ceased to be an obstacle to attending university for more than a generation of British families (Anderson, 2006, 139). The designation of some thirty institutions as polytechnics in the new non-autonomous sector was accomplished in the May 1966 White Paper, A Plan for Polytechnics and Other Colleges (DES, 1966). A former head teacher, Short had been a NUT-member whose MP candidacy has been sponsored by the union (see Wiborg, 2017, 69). For a comprehensive analysis on the role of think thanks in the rise of the New Right in Britain, see Denham (1996). Including, in his one of his last publications before his death in 1971, Cyril Burt, whose article “The Mental Differences Between Children” appeared in the second of the Black Papers (1971). Changes in public opinion would be driven more by press reports of the seeming excesses of progressive educational methods than academic writings such as the Black Papers. A case in point was the so-called William Tyndale school affair in 1976. A junior and infant school in Islington, William Tyndale had established a highly progressive teamteaching regime that allowed children considerable choice in their daily routines, with few rules imposed on them by the faculty or staff. Revealed by an investigative article in the Times Education Supplement, the affair sparked widespread outrage and concern over the extent to which basic educational standards had been sacrificed to ideology (see Lawton, 2005, 90–91).

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Lowe, R. (1988). Education in the postwar years a social history. Routledge. MacKenzie, M. (1967). The road to the circulars: A study of the evolution of Labour party policy with regard to the comprehensive school. Scottish Educational Studies, 1(1), 25–33. Manzer, R. A. (2003). Educational regimes and Anglo-American democracy. University of Toronto Press. Matthews, R. C. O., Feinstein, C. H., & Odling-Smee, J. C. (1982). British economic growth, 1856–1973. Oxford University Press. McCulloch, G. (2016). British Labour party education policy and comprehensive education: From Learning to Live to circular 10/65. History of Education, 45(2), 225–245. McPherson, A., & Raab, C.D. (1988). Governing education: A sociology of policy since 1945. Edinburgh University Press. Montague, J. B., Jr. (1971). The fear of Americanization? Comprehensive school under fire in Britain. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 46(1), 44–47. Morris, N. (1969). England. In A. Blum (Ed.), Teacher unions and associations: A comparative study. University of Illinois Press. Parkinson, M. (1970). The Labour party and the organization of secondary education, 1918–1965. Routledge. Perkin, H. (1972). University planning in Britain in the 1960s. Higher Education, 1(1), 111–120. Preston, P. (1964, June 18). Survey finds little opposition to comprehensive schools. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/ jun/18/comprehensive-schools-survey-11-plus?CMP=gu_com Robbins Report. (1963). Higher education; Report of the committee appointed by the Prime Minister, under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961–63. HMSO. Shattock, M. L., & Berdahl, R. O. (1984). The British university grants committee 1919–83: Changing relationships with government and the universities. Higher Education, 13(5), 471–499. Simon, B. (1991). Education and the social order: 1940–1990. Lawrence & Wishart. Trowler, P. (2003). Education policy (2nd Ed.). Routledge. Watt, J. (1989). The introduction and development of the comprehensive school in the West of Scotland 1965–80 (Doctoral dissertation, University of Glasgow). University of Glasgow Thesis Repository Wiborg, S. (2017). Teacher unions in England: The end is nigh? In T. Moe & S. Wiborg (Eds.). The comparative politics of education: Teachers unions and education systems around the world (pp. 56–86). Cambridge University Press. Wilson, H. (1964). Purpose in politics: Selected speeches. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Wooldridge, A. (1994). Measuring the mind: Education and psychology in England, c. 1860-c. 1990. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Germany I: The Reconstruction of General Education

Introduction The political system of the Federal Republic of Germany has long been viewed as a model of consensus democracy (Lijphart, 2012). According to this conception, a combination of cultural preferences for cooperation rooted in Germany’s historical experiences and institutional features such as federalism and coalition governments that enable a variety of actors to exercise veto authority within the policymaking process has led to a system in which adjustments occur only slowly and incrementally (Katzenstein, 1987). Even within this continuity-favoring context, however, the persistence of the practice of separating young people at age ten into different types of schools in the state-administered general education system is remarkable. Many of the organizational characteristics of the system have remained from arrangements that developed early in the nineteenth century, despite two world wars, multiple regime changes, occupation, division, and large shifts in the country’s socio-economic structure.1 When examined from a comparative perspective, the perseverance of early selection and differentiation in general education is all the more puzzling. The system, which achieved widespread adoption and institutionalization under an autocratic regime in Prussia and later in unified

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_7

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Imperial Germany, reflected a view of social organization more consistent with the hierarchically structured authoritarian political orders under which it formed than with more pluralist systems, such as the one that developed in West Germany after 1945. While many other countries in postwar Western Europe practiced early differentiation in education, most, including Britain, would amend this practice in the 1960s and 1970s by delaying the age at which separation took place and merging the various schools in their differentiated systems into a single comprehensive school attended by most students. Indeed, among the large countries of the region, only West Germany would emerge from this reform era with the differentiated structure of its traditional system still largely intact (Levin, 1978, 440; see also Nikolai, 2018, 1). While one certainly would not anticipate a radical reconfiguration of all inherited institutional legacies in the course of a country’s democratic evolution, one would expect shifts to be more likely in those arrangements most reflective of the autocratic and elite-oriented structure of the old order. By sorting young people into a system of different occupationally determinant schools that largely reproduced the existing social structure and distribution of political and economic power, the traditional German general education system reflected just such an old-order arrangement. As Nixdorff (1969, 2–3) writes, the system “did not facilitate the much-needed process of social integration. It did not socialize the students into a national political culture, but instead, socialized them into compartmentalized sub-cultures. It divided students into three types of schools, primarily on the basis of their social class background.” As such, he writes, the traditional system “did not suffice for the new Republican regimes after 1918 and 1945” and the values of inclusiveness and equal opportunity associated with liberal democracy. Yet the practices that characterized general education in the Imperial era would not only continue in the democratic West German state but be extended to the regions of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) (where the traditional system had been dismantled by the Soviets in 1946) following its reunification with the FRG in 1990. Explaining why such a system reemerged and persisted in West Germany after 1949, requires first an understanding of the ideas and discourses associated with human ability and their transmission to policymaking actors that is illuminated by discursive institutional and ideational process-tracing approaches and second, an analysis of the interplay of these ideas and discourses with the institutions of the Federal Republic

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across the early postwar decades that reflects a historical institutional perspective. It also benefits from comparison. The development of postwar general education in the FRG demonstrated remarkable similarities to the British case examined in previous chapters. A set of ideas associated with a conception of ability as fixed, hereditary, and distributed across identifiable categories in the population that corresponded with the view that selection and a differentiated system of schools were the most appropriate arrangements for general education was communicated to sources of educational policymaking via both organized transmission pathways and mobile carriers. As in the Britain, this system would experience pressures for reform following the rise of a counter-discourse that viewed ability as dynamic and shaped by environmental factors and a leftwing political party, the Social Democrats, would in government propose to reorganize the system around mixed-ability comprehensive schools. Yet while there are similarities in the discursive trajectories in education, differences associated with institutional context and the timing of discursive change would contribute to the variation in outcomes between the two countries. This chapter begins with an overview of the historical development of the practices of differentiation and early selection before 1945. It then turns to an examination of the reconstruction process of the traditional system in the Western Zones of occupied Germany after World War II, the ideas that served as its foundation, and the development of the broader institutional framework in which it would become anchored in the new Federal Republic after 1949.

The Evolution of German General Education Schooling had existed in various forms in Germany before 1800, but it was primarily in the nineteenth century that the “systemization” of education took place, by which a highly structured system of well-defined and interconnected education institutions developed (see Müller, 1987). At the philosophical heart of this “traditional” system of schools were a set of ideas rooted in the education vision of Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Prussian scholar and politician who served briefly but crucially as Minister of Culture following Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon at Jena in 1806. For Humboldt, true education had little to do with imparting practical skills relevant for specific productive purposes but was to promote individual self-realization and cultivation, a process captured by the German

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word Bildung , which can be translated as both “formation” and “education.” By studying the highest levels of humanistic culture, reflected by the language, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, one could elevate oneself to the highest achievable intellectual state and thus be prepared to assume the leading positions in society. Such elevation, however, could not be realized by all youth, according to Humboldt, but only by a limited number of exceptional young people trained in exclusive institutions. Vocational education of the type emphasized in the technical and commercial schools of the time operated according to a different set of assumptions than those that stood behind the academic curriculum provided in the Gymnasium. While such schools were needed to prepare the majority of youth who were destined for manual occupations, Humboldt held that it was imperative to keep vocational training institutionally separated from general education.2 Different pedagogical assumptions and objectives required not simply the separation of pupils into different classes within a single physical structure, but a system in which vocational and academic schools would be entirely detached from one another, with different facilities, faculties, and administrations. Humboldt’s ideas would become the basis for the Prussian (and later Imperial German) general education and university systems as they developed in the nineteenth century and helped to cement the division between general and vocational education that exists in Germany to this day.3 His success in separating the two spheres is evident even in the terminology used to refer to different types of education: in German, the expression Bildung is reserved for that education offered in the Gymnasium and the universities, while Ausbildung refers to the practical training provided by apprenticeships and the vocational education institutions. The product of ideas and decisions located in a critical historical moment that predated by over a half-century the creation of a unified German state, this division would continue to stand at the center of education debates from the Imperial era well into the period of the Federal Republic. Much of the education debate during the Imperial era would focus around the perceived social inequalities of the system; the division between the elementary (and vocational) schools and the secondary schools (and universities) tended to correspond to class divisions. While admission to the Gymnasium 4 was technically open to any student who could pass an exam administered after the fourth year in the Volksschule, or around the age of nine, in practice, the charging of tuition fees ensured that secondary schools in Germany were reserved almost exclusively for

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children of the wealthier classes. Further adding to class divisions was the existence of special Vorschulen, fee-charging elementary schools common in the northern cities and areas of eastern Prussia that offered instruction designed expressly to prepare pupils for classical curriculum of the Gymnasium. Unlike Volksschulen pupils, the pupils at the Vorschulen were not required to take the standard entrance tests and by pre-arrangement could proceed directly to Gymnasium at age nine (Lamberti, 2000, 29; 2002, 18). For a significant majority of young people in Imperial Germany, general education ended, as in Britain during the same period, with elementary school. Compulsory full-time attendance in the basic Volksschule was mandated in most Länder from the ages of six to fourteen, after which part-time study in a vocationally oriented Fortbildungsschule (Continuation School) was the only further educational option available outside of in-firm apprenticeship training. Reflecting the country’s religious divide between Protestants and Catholics, elementary students also often attended confessional-specific (and state-supported) Volksschulen, which were typically overseen by church-administered inspectorates.5 Calls for reform of the traditional system appeared periodically between 1871 and 1918. Most significant among the various reform efforts were those associated with the New Pedagogy (Neue Pädagogik) movement within the German Teachers’ Association (Deutsche Lehrerverein [DLV]), a professional body of elementary school teachers founded in 1871 and based in Berlin. Seeking to end what the group viewed as an elitist system designed to keep lower class Volksschule students out of secondary education (and thus from reaping its attendant socio-economic opportunities) members of the DLV called for new types of socially and religiously integrated schools, including the Allgemeine Volksschule, or common elementary school, and later the Einheitsschule, a school type in which differentiation would be eliminated entirely and all students would attend the same institutions from Kindergarten to university (Lamberti, 2002, 17). Such proposals fundamentally challenged the traditional organization of Germany’s general education system and the beliefs of elite differentiation that had been at the heart of state educational policy since Humboldt’s Prussian reforms. Standing to defend the traditional system were a set of powerful social and political actors, including the conservative political parties, the Catholic and Protestant churches,6 and, notably, the secondary school teachers and administrators. Mirroring the divides

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between school types in the general education system, elementary and secondary school teachers were not viewed as common members of a single profession, but as separate occupations that differed widely in terms of income and social prestige. Until the 1920s, only teachers in the Gymnasium were recognized as members of the state civil service (Beamten), with commensurate benefits in pay, status, and employment protection (National Institute on Student Achievement, Curriculum, and Assessment, 1999, 214). Crucially, the qualifications for each set of teachers also differed. Secondary school instructors were trained in the higher secondary schools and universities, while the elementary teachers obtained teaching certificates in Lehrerseminare, special teacher training institutions that were widely held in lower standing than the universities and did not require a university entrance certificate, the Abitur, for admission (Lamberti, 2000, 25, 34). Secondary school teachers would consistently resist the expansion of access to upper secondary general education and university study not only because it threatened the elite character of the institutions in which they taught but also because it served to dilute the qualification that differentiated Gymnasiallehrer from “mere” school teachers. General Education in Weimar The establishment of the democratic Weimar Republic after World War I brought with it the possibility of significant reform in general education, and several key changes to the system would occur, including, most notably, a guarantee of free elementary education and, at least formally, an end to the Vorschulen through the establishment of a compulsory common primary school (eine gemeinsame Grundschule) for grades 1–4.7 These reforms had significant implications for the secondary schools as well, since they effectively set the age of selection to ten, when the period of common schooling ended and pupils destined for the advanced track left to begin their studies in the higher schools. In most respects, however, continuity with Imperial-era arrangements characterized general education during the Weimar years and the basic structure of the Imperial system largely survived into the Weimar era, including the practice of early selection for placement in one of the three traditional schools and the continued divide between elementary and secondary education. Although the Social Democrats sought to end early selection and had adopted a variant of the Einheitsschule in 1911 as their

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preferred school model for the general education system (see Sass, 2018, 96), they were unable to surmount the opposition of the middle class and religious parties, which remained faithful to the traditional arrangements. In negotiations over the Weimar Constitution, the two sides would reach a compromise by which the practices of selection and separate schools would be permitted to continue but in an ostensibly more “meritocratic” form. Article 146 of the Weimar Constitution thus reaffirmed the traditional split between the secondary schools and the elementary system but also indicated that admission to the advanced schools in the Republic was to be based on pupils’ talents and motivation rather than their parents’ wealth, religion, or social standing. The Constitution also called for grants to be made available to less affluent students to help them afford advanced studies. Like many other aspects of Weimar democracy, however, such promises were never translated into practice. The succession of financial crises that plagued the Republic throughout its short life, along with a general reluctance on the part of authorities to provide funds, sharply limited the availability of hardship-based tuition grants in the Weimar era (Samuel & Hinton, 1949, 47). In the end, despite representing a clear juncture8 in Germany’s political and institutional evolution that provided a clear opportunity for actors to reform a set of educational practices and arrangements associated by many with class division and elitism, the Weimar era saw the persistence of the traditional system and the continuation of parental wealth and status as the primary factors determining which young people would obtain access to advanced education and the opportunities it offered. Continuity also largely reigned in educational policymaking arrangements. While some movements towards policy centralization took place after the Republic’s founding in 1919, including the establishment of a new department for culture with competence for education within the federal Ministry of the Interior and the creation of a commission of federal and state officials to coordinate policy at the national level, the failure of the political parties to agree on a central strategy ensured the continuation of the cultural federalism that had marked the Imperial period and the perpetuation of considerable institutional variation in the general education systems of the respective Länder9 (Hearnden, 1976a, 3). The National Socialist Era 1933–1945 Young people’s role in the Nazi movement and the regime’s youth policies have been frequent subjects of study (see Giles, 1992; Koebner et al.,

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1985; Rempel, 1991). The ideological, political, and practical significance of youth to the regime and Nazi party would serve to elevate young people to a position of prominence within the Hitler regime. Education, as Pine (2010, 1) writes, is “fundamental to our entire macro-view of the Third Reich.” In terms of general education, the focus of the Nazi regime was largely on the Grundschule rather than the post-primary schools. In addition to providing younger and presumably more ideologically malleable pupils, the Grundschule, with its inclusive structure, comported with Nazi rhetoric of classlessness and national unity, while the traditional secondary schools and particularly the humanist Gymnasium were sharply at odds with the anti-intellectual and anti-liberal Nazi Weltanschauung (Samuel & Hinton, 1949). In the decentralized educational structure of Weimar, institutional diversity within the secondary sector had increased significantly, with some sixteen different selective secondary school types in operation by 1933. Under the Nazis, who had largely centralized education policy within the Reich Ministry for Science, Education, and Popular Culture (Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung ), the system underwent significant consolidation, shrinking by the late 1930s to a more manageable three basic types. In addition to the traditional Gymnasium, these included the Aufbauschule, a secondary school located in rural areas that was designed to provide higher education to the children of farmers and small village families, and the Deutsche Oberschule, or German High School, which owing to its emphasis on national culture, history, and geography, became the preferred secondary school type of the regime. Nazi promotion and consolidation efforts in the secondary sector would be so successful that by 1938 four out of every five secondary students were studying in the Deutsche Oberschule (Hearnden, 1976a).10 Nazi conscription policies and youth labor programs also had an impact on secondary schooling, resulting in the shortening of secondary courses of study to eight years from the customary nine (Tent, 1982a, 265). In addition to the reorganization within the state education sector, the Nazis established a new category of elite party-administered institutions, known as the National Socialist Selective Schools (NS-Ausleseschulen). These boarding schools, which were based on the English public schools and bore names such as the Adolf Hitler Schule and the Reichsschule der NSDAP , were designed to educate a new generation of party leaders and state officials. Unlike traditional secondary schools, however, selection to these institutions was based largely on ideological and racial purity, as well

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as the standing of one’s family in the Nazi party (see Pine, 2010; Scholtz, 1973). Whatever the Nazis’ impact on the organizational landscape of general education, the social composition of the differentiated school populations would remain principally the same during the Third Reich. Nazi rhetoric may have emphasized the importance of the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft ) over individual social groups, but Hitler’s regime did little in practice to change either the dominance of the wealthy classes in secondary schools or the long-standing division between elementary and secondary education (Tent, 1982a, 265).

Reconstituting Education Under Occupation 1945–1949 In the immediate aftermath of Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945 and the division of the country into four zones of occupation, issues of basic survival demanded most of the Allies’ attention, with the humanitarian crisis compounded by the arrival of millions of refugees from the former Eastern territories of the Reich that had been overrun by the advancing Soviet Army in the winter and spring of that year.11 Against this backdrop, the structure of the education system was not a major area of concern for the Allies. By the fall of 1945, however, concerns over crime and delinquency among the itinerant young people displaced by the war forced the occupying powers to address schooling and accelerate the implementation of plans to reconstitute the education systems in the respective occupation zones (Taylor, 1981, 91; Welsh, 1989, 88–89). Among the occupying powers, central coordination in education and schooling was relatively weak, with planning and policy decided largely by local German authorities in the respective zones of occupation. Little collective Allied consideration had been given to the schools in early postwar planning; the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945, which set out the basic framework for governance and administration in occupied Germany, referred only to the need for Allied control over education in order “completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas” (cited in Ruhm von Oppen, 1955). It would be 1947 before the Allied Control Council in Berlin would issue a common statement on education policy in the form of Control Council Directive No. 54, which called for a “democratized” education system. In addition to a renewed emphasis

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on the teaching of democratic norms and civic responsibility, the Directive called for a more democratic organizational structure for German education. In language reflecting a significant American influence,12 it stated that “schools for the period of compulsory education should form a comprehensive educational system. The terms ‘elementary education’ and ‘secondary education’ should mean two consecutive levels of instruction, not two types or qualities of instruction, which overlap” (Allied Control Council, cited in Ruhm von Oppen, 1955, 233–234). Despite the fact that Directive No. 54 was issued by all four of the occupying powers, only the United States and the Soviet Union would pursue policies of fundamental reorganization in general education during the period of occupation. In the Soviet Zone, the Law for the Democratization of the German School (Gesetz zur Demokratisierung der deutschen Schule) adopted in the late spring of 1946 replaced the traditional system and implemented an integrated eight-year period of common schooling through age fourteen, followed by a period of upper secondary study at either a vocational training institution (Berufsschule) or university preparatory school (Oberschule). The Law also abolished private education and sharply limited the role traditionally played by the churches in overseeing the schools (Günther & Uhlig, 1969, 11). The relative ease with which the Soviets successfully overhauled general education in the East was primarily rooted, as Hearnden (1976b, 46–47) points out, in two factors. First, the Soviets operated in a much more sympathetic environment to school reform than the Western powers. Berlin had been the center of activity for the school reform movements of the Weimar era and the Soviets found no shortage of educationalists in their zone sympathetic to comprehensive schools. Second, and more significantly, the 1946 Law was adopted by the provisional Land governments set up by the Soviets some five months before the October 1946 elections in the Eastern zone.13 By the time of the September 1946 elections, Soviet-directed changes to the structure of general education were viewed as a fait accompli by much of the population, since the school year under the new system had already begun by the time the elections were held. The timing of the reform limited the middle-class parties’ attempts to rally opposition to the law during the campaign, largely neutralized public debate on the topic, and helped to ensure that the dismantling of the differentiated school system would proceed in the Soviet Zone without protracted conflict. The success of a Soviet campaign to install members of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische

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Partei Deutschlands [KPD]) into the leading positions in the educational departments and school councils in the Eastern Länder also facilitated the change by helping to ensure that local education officials would be sympathetic to the Soviets’ reforms (see Welsh, 1989, 89–90). The 1946 Soviet reform would prove to have a significant long-term impact on the general education system in the future GDR, which would be established in the areas of the Soviet Zone in 1949. The school organization in the GDR would continue to maintain, in various forms, a largely comprehensive structure throughout its forty-one-year existence. Only after reunification with the West in 1990 would the Soviet-inspired system be eliminated and differentiation in schooling return by way of institutional transfer from the West. The early establishment of a comprehensive system in the Soviet Zone would have consequences not only for successive generations of young people raised in the GDR but for education reform debates within the FRG as well. Advocates of the traditional system in the West would consistently seek to associate comprehensive schooling with the Communist East, creating a link in popular and political debates that would cast not only attempts to implement the Einheitsschule (and later the Gesamtschule) as radical and dangerous left-wing experiments but any reform aimed at lessening differentiation in the German education system. Even moderate reforms of the type supported by the new Christeian Democratic Union (CDU) party in the occupation period (see below) would by the 1950s become associated with “communist leveling” (Herrlitz et al., 2008, 163). In the western part of the country, the British and French authorities were for the most part content to allow German authorities in the individual Länder to draw up the organizational blueprints for the rebuilding of the educational systems themselves, though they insisted, along with the other Allies, that most of the new school types either created or emphasized by the National Socialist regime be abolished.14 In most instances, the British and French policy of German autonomy in education resulted in a relatively unproblematic return to the traditional pre-Nazi system of elementary Volksschulen, intermediate Realschulen, and higher level Gymnasien, with selection around age ten for placement in one of the three school types. In some areas of the British Zone, however, SPD-led Land governments initially pursued secondary reorganization along more comprehensive lines, though these generally met with little long-term success. In

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Schleswig-Holstein, the majority SPD government argued that political democracy in the new Germany demanded an equally democratic system of general education and passed a law in 1948 that ended the traditional practice of early placement into separate schools and replaced the externally differentiated school structure with an internally differentiated but commonly attended three-year middle school. Under the new organization, students would continue to be placed into separate academic and vocational streams, but significant portions of the curriculum would be the same for all students. The transfer of students between the two streams, a rare occurrence under the traditional system, would be facilitated in the middle school, thus softening the hard deterministic practice of relegating students either to the academic or the vocational path at age ten with little chance of transferring “up” the chain of prestige. The experiment with this new type of middle school would ultimately be short-lived, however. The CDU, which had opposed the law when it was first proposed, argued that simply eliminating tuition and course material fees would end whatever inequalities were perpetuated by the traditional differentiated system. Following their victory in the 1950 Land elections, the CDU repealed the 1948 legislation. In Hamburg, a 1949 law crafted by the coalition SPD-Communist (KPD) government called for the implementation of a universal, threetiered secondary system similar to the one proposed under the 1944 Education Act in Britain. The proposed law called for an extension of the period of common schooling in the Grundschule from four to six years, a move that would postpone the selection process for pupils from age ten until twelve and delay their start in one of the traditional differentiated schools. The proposal provoked a strong backlash from a powerful coalition that included civil servants, the Gymnasialverein, which represented Gymnasium teachers, and professors from the University of Hamburg15 (Hearnden, 1978, 21–29; Heidenheimer, 1974, 394). In a memorandum published by the University’s faculty senate, professors argued against the law by claiming that it attempted, erroneously, to use a system founded on pedagogical principles as a tool for initiating broader social and political changes. As the faculty maintained in their public comments on the proposal, attempts to extend the principles of democracy from the political to the educational sphere would benefit neither.

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Because the limits of education are not clearly marked [in the government’s reform plan], the school is attributed with socio-political functions, which are for it intrinsically unrealizable. At the same time, such an attribution results in a thoroughly undesired and significant deferring of political responsibility. The will of the people to achieve social unity depends on many forces and powers outside the education system. The school can support these forces to some extent or it can hinder them. It can, however, neither create nor destroy a political order. Thus in the weighing of motives and setting of goals, socio-political arguments should not have priority before pedagogical considerations, as they appear to have in the explanations [for the law], especially regarding the question of the Einheitsschule and the design of the secondary school. (Universität Hamburg, 1949, 9–10)

Significantly, the same memorandum included arguments in favor of continuing the practice of selection at age ten that drew heavily on conceptions of childhood and early adolescent intelligence from academic psychology. In response to a question submitted by the Northwest German Higher Education Council asking whether it was preferable “from a psychological, physiological, and pedagogical” standpoint to select pupils for transfer to secondary school at age ten as in the traditional system, or at age twelve as proposed in the SPD-KPD law, Hans Wenke, a professor of education and psychology at the university, maintained that nothing had contradicted the view of more than a century of experience that young people were sufficiently developed both mentally and physically at age ten to be identified for transfer to a secondary school (Universität Hamburg, 1949, 40–41). The arguments put forth by the university and other opponents of the school reform would resonate with the larger population. The 1949 school law would become a central issue in the 1953 campaign for the Bürgerschaft, the city’s parliament, and opposition to the SPD-KPD school reform initiatives would contribute to the coalition’s defeat that year, leading to the repeal of the law by the new CDU-led government (see Lüth, 1971, 55–64).Even in left-leaning Hamburg, reform of the traditional education system in the early postwar years proved to be a politically untenable project.16 One of the most significant British contributions to German education in the occupation period was their assistance in the creation of what would become known as the Zweiter Bildungsweg (ZB) or Second Educational Path. Although the ZB generally involved adult learners returning to

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school in hopes of expanding their career prospects, it would in time come to play a significant role in debates concerning separation of pupils at age ten for placement in one of the three traditional schools by providing supporters of differentiation with an institutional corrective to the possibility of incorrect initial selection (Ertl & Phillips, 2000, 404). Under the ZB, individuals who had not obtained the Abitur via the traditional route of the Gymnasium could still gain admission to a university in two basic ways. The first involved the direct transfer from a technical college to a university. Prior to 1939,17 it had been common for students who had attended a Realschule to progress to post-secondary studies at colleges of technology, but with few opportunities for further education, since the Abitur was required for admission to a traditional university. At the suggestion of British education authorities in North-Rhine Westphalia, the Land Ministry issued a regulation in 1948 that permitted technical college graduates in the Land who had passed their final examination to attend the University of Aachen, a practice that spread over time to the rest of the FRG (Edwards, 1978). The second method, which also had its postwar origins in the British Zone during the occupation period, involved the establishment of special institutions, including Abendgymnasien (evening gymnasiums) and Kollegs (sixth-form colleges) that provided adults who had completed their general educations in the Hauptschule or Realschule with an opportunity to obtain the Abitur and ultimately attend a university (Führ, 1997, 161–163). The American Reform Proposals Like the British and French, the United States would begin the postwar occupation with a policy that largely left the organizational reconstruction of education in its occupation zone in the hands of local German authorities. Working within a set of vague guidelines for education policy articulated in JCS 1067, the Joint Chiefs of Staff occupation directive issued in April 1945 to the US occupation commander that called for the denazification of the German schools, demilitarization of the curriculum, and the promotion of democratic ideals, American educational officials were at first willing to allow German authorities broad discretion to reestablish the selective system as it had existed before 1933. In Aachen, the first area under US control permitted to reinstate schooling in June 1945, German officials reconstituted the traditional system with no registered American objection.18 At an educational conference in Frankfurt

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in December 1945, the head of the Bavarian division of the Education and Religious Affairs branch of the Office of the Military Government of the United States (OMGUS) announced that schools in the Land had reopened along traditional lines and even expressed concerns that an SPD proposal to end the long-standing division of schools according to confession was too radical and could generate a backlash (Tent, 1982a, 264). By 1947, however, American policy would shift in the direction of encouraging, and then attempting to impose, large-scale institutional change within German general education in the areas under its occupation, including plans for the comprehensivization of secondary schooling based largely on the model of the American high school. Much of the impetus for this policy shift came as a result of recommendations provided by a group of American education policy specialists led by American Council on Education president George Zook who visited Germany in the summer of 1946 at the request of the State Department to examine the condition of the educational system in the country. The group’s report, delivered to the American Military Governor General Lucius Clay in September 1946, called for nothing short of a revolution in the organization of German education, including its general, higher, and vocational sectors. While members of the delegation were critical of a number of features of German education, they saved their most forceful objections to the practice of selecting pupils at age ten for placement in different schools. William Benton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, wrote in the report’s introduction that the selective system in Germany was in reality a “caste system” in which “the overwhelming majority of pupils, a large proportion of whom deserve university education because of their ability, finish elementary school and then go on to vocational education, their adult potentialities frustrated by the early and undemocratic division of the educational stream” (United States Education Mission to Germany, 1946, vi). The core report highlighted what Zook and his colleagues viewed as the dire political consequences of the system. In it they argued that selection in German general education “has cultivated attitudes of superiority in one small group and of inferiority in the majority of the members of German society, making possible the submission and lack of self-determination upon which authoritarian leadership has thrived” (United States Education Mission to Germany, 1946, 19). The delegation maintained that education in Germany helped to sustain anti-democratic beliefs and attitudes among the population, and urged the occupational

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authorities to replace the system with one organized along comprehensive, unified lines. To the extent that differentiation between vocational and professional tracks was necessary, the group argued that it should be achieved through a reorganized curriculum and the offering of elective courses, not through separate schools (1946, 22). Despite objections from some members of the State Department, OMGUS adopted most of the Mission Report’s recommendations. The American blueprint for reforming German education as it developed in late 1946 and early 1947 would call for several key changes to the traditional pre-1933 system. Under the plan, primary education would be extended to six years, all of which would take place in the same school. Upon completion of primary schooling, all students would further study together for three years of general education in a common lower secondary school. At the level of upper secondary general education, some differentiation would occur, with an anticipated minority of all students continuing in general education for an additional three years in an upper-level secondary track in preparation for university entry. The American proposal stressed, however, that the upper-level students should, whenever possible, be located in the same facility as those in the lower level. The plan further called for an end to fees for tuition and course materials and university-level certification for all teachers, not just those in the secondary schools. In an action that marked the major turning point in education policy during the occupation, OMGUS sent a telegram on 10 January 1947 to authorities in the four Länder in the American zone that called on them to draft and submit plans for reforming their general education systems in accordance with the newly articulated American reform objectives (OMGUS, 1947, in Merkt, 1952, 53–54; Müller, 1995, 126–133). Notable among the individual responses to OMGUS from the Länder was the opposition—if not outright hostility—towards the proposed reform in the southern Land of Bavaria. Led by Culture Minister Alois Hundhammer and backed by the powerful Catholic clergy,19 Bavarian authorities from the newly constituted Christian Social Union (CSU) party issued a counter-proposal to the Americans in which they offered to provide some secondary school tuition assistance to the children of poorer families,20 but insisted that the practices of secondary school selection, the separation of the elementary and secondary sectors, and training for elementary teachers not be changed. Stressing the need for the “internal”

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reform of schools, the Bavarian counterproposal centered instead on plans for re-injecting traditional moral and religious principles into education. Minister Hundhammer further highlighted in the response the appropriateness of the traditional system on the grounds of accepted scientific understandings of performance and ability, citing as reasons for early selection the presence of immutable biological differences in the population. The fact would have it that the ability for higher education aims is reserved by nature to a numerically limited circle; and the further fact that these abilities are distributed to all ranks and classes in the population, but not so that they are completely evenly distributed among the individual social classes. This biologically established inequality cannot be eliminated by civilizing measures, not even by a change to our so-called two-tier school system in favor of a unitary system… the beginning of secondary school may not be delayed beyond the age of ten for reasons founded in developmental psychology. (Hundhammer, 1947 in Merkt, 1952, 63, 64)

The Bavarian campaign21 against the proposed OMGUS reform, which included mobilizing popular opinion through carefully crafted radio appeals by Hundhammer, would ultimately lead American authorities to resort to ordering the Land government to implement the change, precipitating a political crisis that would only be averted with the personal intervention of General Clay and a compromise between the two sides (Jacoby, 2000, 113–114). In the end, Hundhammer and his conservative allies would win out and only the provision for free tuition and textbooks would be implemented. Despite a direct demand for change issued by the occupation force of a conquering nation, the traditional selective system would endure in Bavaria. In Württemberg-Baden,22 the formal response by Land officials to the American request for reform proposals seemed to contain all the elements sought by OMGUS, including plans for a streamed comprehensive system and financial assistance for students to attend secondary schools. The plan contained a significant caveat, however. Land officials maintained that any reorganization of education had to be in accordance with the new Land constitution, passed in November 1946, a determination that officials claimed would require a prolonged delay in the implementation of the new law while questions of constitutional compatibility were examined

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(Braun, 1947, 147; Taylor, 1981, 67). Authorities in WürttembergBaden would employ other stalling tactics, including postponing the creation of local committees to facilitate curricular and organizational reforms, as OMGUS officials had demanded (Jacoby, 2000, 118). In this way, Land officials were able to avoid any significant changes to the traditional structure until the period of OMGUS’s authority over education expired. In effect, the American reform effort was killed in Württemberg-Baden by delaying it to death. Whatever the American concerns over the authoritarian qualities of the general education system in Germany, there was no groundswell for its reform from the population in Württemberg-Baden during the occupation; if anything, available data point towards a public preference for continuity with past arrangements. A 1947 survey in the Land conducted by OMGUS found that nearly 2 out of 3 Germans who had indicated that they had any opinion on schools at all (only 62% of those surveyed) considered the teaching plans and types of instruction “adequate” under the traditional framework (OMG-61 in Merritt & Merritt, 1970). The majority of students’ parents, the segment of the general population with the greatest potential for influencing any reform of schooling, did not participate in the debates over the American proposal. WürttembergBaden’s Minister of Culture, Theodor Bäuerle, later remarked on the absence of most parents from discussions during the occupation period, noting that the only parent groups involved in any of the reform debates were those from the upper-middle classes who generally supported the Gymnasium and the reconstitution of the traditional system (Kuhlmann, 1970, 163). The reactions of the southern Länder to the American reform efforts are arguably understandable given the region’s traditional conservative political and social cultures and the dominance of Christian Democratic parties in early postwar Land governments. Yet the SPD-dominated areas in the American occupation zone would likewise fail to see lasting institutional change as a result of the US initiatives. In Hesse, where the Social Democrats led a government in coalition with the Christian Democrats after the 1947 Land election, the independent reputation of CDU Culture Minister Erwin Stein coupled with a progressive initial school reorganization proposal, gave US officials hope for a more receptive audience to its reform ideas. Such hopes were to go unfulfilled. A powerful resistance coalition to the American plan soon emerged in response to a law proposed by

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the coalition government that would have markedly reduced differentiation in Hessian schools. Particularly forceful in arguing against any “Americanization” of general education were groups representing the secondary schools, including teachers in the Landesverband Hessen für Höhere Schulen (the Hessian Association for Secondary Schools), which adopted the view that the differentiated system was not only academically superior to the American alternative but was a better organizational design given the biologically rooted differences in talent and intelligence within the population. According to the Association’s members, criticisms directed at the social exclusivity of the secondary schools (such as those registered by the members of the US Education Mission in their report) were fundamentally mistaken; students with lesser abilities and work habits selected themselves for the lower school track, regardless of their parents’ social class (Jacoby, 2000, 119). The Hessian Branch of the German Philological Association (Deutscher Philologenverband [DPhV]), which represented Gymnasium teachers, maintained for their part that any extension of the period of common schooling resembled “practices of the Third Reich” that would, if enacted, push in the Land “into the arms of the Communist Eastern Zone” (quoted in Kuhlmann, 1970, 40). Similar to their counterparts in Württemberg-Baden, parents involved in the Hessian reform debates tended to be those with children in the secondary schools who supported retaining the traditional system. As with other advocates of educational differentiation, they drew on a combination of psychological and pedagogical arguments as justification for rejecting the American plans for a comprehensive general education structure. The parent councils of the secondary schools implored Minister Stein to retain the special position of the Gymnasium in the German education system because, as they viewed it, the human and social value of the five to ten percent of gifted students who attended the elite schools was equivalent to that provided by the remaining ninety to ninety-five percent of the student population. The councils further argued that psychological theories favored the separation of ten-year-olds into different school types because children at that age were not given to feelings of “bitterness” and thus could recover more quickly from placement in a less prestigious school than older students. The proposal of the Americans, with its plans for a comprehensive lower secondary school and a less differentiated upper secondary system amounted, in their view, to little more than an assault on the country’s future, designed to bring about

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the “intellectual disassembly” of the new Germany (quoted in Kuhlmann, 1970, 40). Business leaders would also voice their objection to the US reform plan in psycho-sociological terms. The Hessian Chamber of Commerce maintained that in proposing a less differentiated school structure, the Americans mistakenly assumed that the existence of additional Begabungsreserven, or talent reserves, within the youth population. Such a view, according to the Chamber, was based on an “unmerited generalization” that many students of advanced ability had not been given the opportunity to pursue higher education under the current system. Significantly, the organizations with sufficient social and political bases of support to provide meaningful backing for the US plan for the schools in Hesse were generally quiet during the debate. The SPD, despite being the majority party in the coalition government and a traditional advocate for comprehensive education, failed to provide any systematic support for the new law and never attempted to mobilize its rank and file around the issue, letting many of the claims of the resistance coalition go uncontested. Joining the SPD on the sidelines were the country’s newly reconstituted trade unions. Unions had been vocal supporters of mixed-ability schooling in the pre-National Socialist era, but were largely disengaged on the issue in the immediate postwar period of reconstitution and played little role in the debates associated with the American comprehensivization plans. Jacoby (2000, 119–120) maintains that the trade unions’ non-involvement was due to concerns among unions that supporting the American-led school reforms would link them to US plans to deconfessionalize schooling, thereby offending religious workers, a key target population for organized labor recruitment efforts after the war. By the fall of 1947 opposition to the American proposal was growing and even Stein’s public statements on the reform initiative would come to reflect the views of the resistance coalition that had formed in opposition to the law his government had proposed. In a report on the coalition’s efforts to rebuild the school system, Stein invoked not only the notion of different abilities in the population but the liberal and democratic terminology of the occupiers to argue for the appropriateness of retaining a differentiated system. The creation of an inclusive education system for all young people follows from the democratic principle “equal educational opportunities for all.” It needs to be emphasized that equal educational opportunities for all are

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demanded here, not equal education. Democracy is not a collective; it recognizes the differences in human beings and their abilities. The democratic school, however, keeps open all paths to everyone in pursuit of the principle of equality in order to place each person on the path that accords with the type and extent of his capabilities and that leads him to his highest level of accomplishment and the best possible achievement in society…the democratic school is not the uniform Einheitsschule, but rather the one divided into branches. (Stein, 1947, 174)

Stein would ultimately withdraw his active support for the proposed law and adopt the same delaying strategy employed by his southern counterparts. When the Americans resorted, as they had with Hundhammer in Bavaria, to ordering Hesse to extend the period of compulsory elementary schooling (thereby ending selection at age ten) for the 1948–1949 school year, Stein simply convinced the Landtag to delay the start date of the new school year by six months and dragged out subsequent negotiations with occupation officials. Hesse would ultimately end tuition and course material fees for secondary schools and seek to elevate the status of elementary school teachers by requiring them to study in special pedagogical institutes, which, though an improvement from the Lehrerseminare, still did not provide the university-level education that teachers in the secondary sector obtained.23 Stein’s strategy would find success, American occupational control over education once again would come to an end before significant structural changes were realized (Jacoby, 2000, 113). In Bremen, where an SPD-KPD coalition ruled, the Americans seemed to have an even more accommodating partner and reform initiatives appeared to have, at least initially, a real chance of success. In May 1948 the government succeeded in passing a law providing for free secondary school tuition and course materials, followed up by legislation in March 1949 that created a six-year elementary school and a new “internallydifferentiated” secondary school in which all students would attend the same facility but would be separated into one of four different educational streams. As with left-sponsored reform efforts in other Länder, the arrangements outlined in occupation-era legislation in Bremen failed to translate into a durable institutional design. Here it would be concerns among SPD officials over the potential difficulties that students educated in the city’s common schools might face when pursuing further education

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and employment in the rest of West Germany that helped to delay implementation of the comprehensivization plan, which in any event would be entirely scrapped when a separate nine-year Gymnasium was reintroduced in 1957 (Jacoby, 2000, 115). By 1948, internal changes within the Education and Religious Affairs branch of OMGUS would lead to a deemphasizing of organizational reform and a refocus among American education officials towards creating cultural exchanges with West German educational institutions, reconstructing educational facilities, and establishing experimental schools, research institutes, and other aid programs (Tent, 1982b). In the end, the ambitious efforts of the Americans to change the structure of West German general education and particularly the practice of early selection and division between the elementary and secondary sectors would be largely unsuccessful; within the first few years of the new Federal Republic’s existence, a form of the differentiated system would with few exceptions be reestablished across the new Federal Republic.24 Summing up the developments from the period of reconstruction, Lawson (1965, 44) writes: In the promulgation of school laws between 1948 and 1955, the tendency was to adhere vaguely to the general Occupation goals, such as the legal right of all children to equal educational opportunity, but to change very little in practice. Only Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen changed the organizational structure of the school system, and the change was more similar to that of the British Education Act of 1944 and other European efforts at compromising selection with equality than American organization. The change was easily made in the [cities], but it lasted only in Berlin.

Despite having inflicted massive physical damage to Germany’s cities, industry, and infrastructure, helped to secure the country’s unconditional surrender, and imposed a military government over a large section of the nation upon whose aid millions of Germans depended for their very survival in the desperate years following the war’s end, American authorities, convinced that the differentiated school structure had abetted the rise of totalitarianism in the early 1930s, could not compel the Germans to abandon their traditional selective system after the war.

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Embedding Differentiation: Institutions and General Education in the FRG The traditional general education system and its differentiated organizational structure that was recreated in the Western occupation zones between 1945 and 1949 would soon become embedded within a constellation of institutions in the Federal Republic of Germany that would significantly shape the system’s evolution in the second half of the twentieth century. Some of these arrangements were innovations in the FRG, while others were legacies of previous regimes. Much of this new institutional structure was enshrined in the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) adopted by the new West German state upon its founding on May 23, 1949. Article 7 empowered the state to oversee the entire education system, reasserting its traditional monopoly over schooling. Although the Basic Law did allow for private schools, it required that they obtain the approval of the state, conform to state standards, and, significantly, not select their students on the basis of family wealth or rank. This final requirement served to limit the development of an elite independent school sector of the type found in England. As a consequence, middle- and upper-class parents who wished to see their children attend more prestigious schools or secondary school teachers seeking employment would have few alternatives outside the state-run secondary sector. This provision also helped to ensure that secondary school teachers and parents of students in the higher schools, both of whom had been against comprehensive reform prior to 1949, would continue this traditional opposition in the political debates over differentiation and selection in the FRG.25 Beyond the provisions granting the state authority over education, the single most important constitutional measure for the evolution of differentiation policy in the FRG would be found in Article 30, which permanently designated the new republic a federal state in which powers not expressly granted to the central government—including education— were to be exercised by the Länder. This arrangement, while both encouraged by the occupation authorities and reflective of pre-Nazi traditions, would help to ensure that the selective systems of general education reconstituted during the period of occupation would persist in the Federal Republic, along with some level of variation across the Länder. Although cultural federalism would create authoritative space for future experimentation and policy innovation in individual Länder and Gemeinde

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(municipalities), most notably through the establishment of the lower secondary comprehensive Gesamtschule as an alternative to the traditional schools,26 its primary effect was to limit the possibility of systemic structural reform efforts in general education by sharply curtailing the policy influence of the generally more progressive federal authorities in Bonn and delegating authority to Länder authorities, who, as Hahn (1998, 114) writes, “showed little concern for social and educational developments, either in their own schools or in a broader context.” While a decentralized educational structure in Britain would facilitate changes in the organization of schooling in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural federalism in the FRG would serve as a mechanism of institutional “lock in” in the FRG for the practices of differentiation and early selection set up in the Länder between 1945 and 1949, crucially shaping subsequent policy developments and the outcome of reform initiatives. While the Basic Law granted policymaking authority for education to the individual Länder, an effort would be made to coordinate policy across the Bund through the Standing Conference of Ministers of Culture (Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister or Kultusministerkonferenz [KMK]). Formed in 1949 with a permanent secretariat in Bonn, the KMK was comprised, as the name implies, of the culture and science ministers from each of the individual Länder governments. From the outset the KMK was relatively weak as a policymaking body; its resolutions were not legally binding since under the Basic Law decisions pertaining to education would require individual Länder legislation.27 With conservative opponents to comprehensive reform from some Länder certain to be present for any decision, however, unanimity in decisionmaking—itself a product of the cultural federalism provided for in the Basic Law—made it unlikely that meaningful institutional change in the differentiated system would originate with the KMK in the 1950s. The primary contributions of the Conference to policy in the 1950s tended to be more administrative and coordinative in nature.28 The Düsseldorf Agreement, reached in 1955 (and later expanded under the Hamburg Agreement in 1964), resolved issues related to different academic and qualification standards in the Länder, including harmonizing the grading system and establishing common start and end dates for the school year, but generally failed to address issues relating to the practices of early selection and differentiation (Gass-Bolm, 2005, 131; KMK, 1955 in DAEB, 1966, 1005–1008).

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Parents figured into another significant set of provisions in the Basic Law. Given Nazi practices of youth indoctrination and mobilization, parents’ right to raise their children free from state influence would be viewed by many in postwar Germany as a fundamental liberty that demanded attendant legal protections. Article 6, Section 2 of the Basic Law stated that “the care and upbringing of children is the natural right of parents,” and Article 12, Section 1, granted all Germans the freedom “to choose their occupation or profession, their place of work and their place of training.”29 German courts would later cite these provisions as the constitutional basis of what would become known as the principle of parental choice (Elternrecht ) in education.30 According to this principle, the decision regarding which school a child attends is crucial for determining his or her future occupation; children, however, are simply too young at age ten to make this decision themselves at the time of selection. As such, the right falls to a child’s parents to help determine the most appropriate school. In the Federal Republic, the practice of including parental preferences in the selection process would become commonplace by the 1950s, although other considerations such as teacher recommendations and academic performance could also be factored into decisions depending on the particular Land. The practice reflected a notable change from past arrangements when selection was largely based on a student’s performance on an entrance exam or, more likely, parents’ ability to pay for a Vorschule. The principle of parental choice would also influence the shape of political debates over the general education system in the FRG. Proponents of the traditional system would argue that ending differentiation would be both anti-democratic and a violation of the Basic Law, since it limited citizens’ freedom of choice in the upbringing of their children. As a consequence, the Elternrecht would serve to curb the willingness of political parties to pursue major reforms in differentiation and selection practices, since advocating the dismantling of the system would be sure to generate a backlash from a significant portion of parents in the FRG (Ertl & Phillips, 2000, 401). The Elternrecht could also, however, serve as a source of change within general education; if significant numbers of parents chose either comprehensive schools as an alternative to traditional schools or began placing their children in the higher schools at the time of selection at age ten, the exercising of the Elternrecht could lead to a more equal distribution of students within a still formally differentiated system.

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As discussed later, such a change would ultimately become the adaptational response in West Germany to shifting conditions in the 1970s and 1980s, when the percentage of the student population attending either the Realschule or Gymnasium would grow significantly and attendance figures for the Hauptschule would commensurately decline. A further institutional legacy of the occupation era and early FRG centered on the continuing division between teachers from different school types. The general failure of initiatives to raise the standing of Volksschule teachers relative to their Realschule and Gymnasium counterparts in the occupation period helped to ensure the continued split between elementary and secondary school teachers in West Germany’s emerging system of interest groups.31 Gymnasium and Realschule teachers in the FRG would be organizationally represented, respectively, by the DPhV and the Association of German Secondary School Teachers (Verband Deutscher Realschullehrer [VDR]),32 which both were aligned with Germany’s powerful state bureaucrats in the German Civil Service Federation (Deutscher Beamtenbund [DBB]), a peak labor association founded in 1950 as an alternative to the SPD-affiliated German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund [DGB]). As in the past, the secondary school teachers would utilize this institutional position to maintain alliances with state officials and middle-class parents’ associations to combat change in general education and maintain traditional practices (see Heidenheimer, 1974, 394). Elementary school teachers in the new Federal Republic would be represented primarily in the Education and Science Workers Union, (Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft [GEW]), which would become the country’s largest labor union. Like many other leading sectoral unions, the GEW would align itself with the DGB (Fuhrig, 1969, 100–101). Crucially, however, this affiliation would result in an exodus from the GEW of many conservative southern teachers, who had the option of joining the Union of Training and Education (Verband Bildung und Erziehung [VBE]), a second union representing teachers from the elementary schools which was itself an organizational member of the DBB (Markovits & Silvia, 1992, 177). In the FRG, Volksschule teachers would thus not only be divided from their secondary school counterparts but split among themselves. Although elementary teachers had been key proponents for many of the reforms of the Imperial and Weimar eras, the combination of competition for members created by the existence of a rival union in the VBE,

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coupled with the presence of a small but influential group of conservative secondary school teachers within the membership,33 would serve to limit GEW calls for changes to the differentiated system in the 1950s (Heidenheimer, 1974, 394; Kuhlmann, 1970, 98). As with the SPD, it would not be until the mid-1960s that the GEW would come to support fully a policy advocating change in differentiation practices in the FRG, helping to delay the introduction of reformist policy initiatives and ultimately reducing the possibility for a reorganization of general education.

Discourses, Institutional Recreation, and Policy Continuity In a retrospective essay on the developments in the German educational system since World War II, the German education historian Hans-Georg Herrlitz writes: It is astounding how enduringly the conservative parties and associations succeeded in blocking a dramatic structural reform of the secondary sector along the lines of the obligatory Grundschule, especially if one considers just how strongly developed the German Einheitsschule movement already was in Weimar Republic and how sharply the Western occupation forces had criticized the selection practices of the differentiated German school system. (2008, 16)

Why were the traditional practices of differentiation and early selection successfully reconstituted in the newly democratic West Germany despite the presence of such seemingly favorable conditions cited by Herrlitz? The historical case analyzed in the preceding pages points to two sets of interrelated causes. The first set consisted largely of variables exogenous to Germany’s general education system. The inability of the Western Allies to develop and implement a common strategy for pursuing structural reform in education, despite collective calls for a democratized school system such as those found in Allied Control Council’s Directive 54, clearly influenced the outcome. The British and French, both of whom had established selective systems of their own after World War II, were less inclined to oppose the reconstitution of the traditional structure in Germany, while the Americans, whose conception of a democratized school system was rooted in their own comprehensive high school, would pursue an ambitious set of reforms within their Zone. As the chapter

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documents, however, these efforts would largely fail and the three-tiered structure would return to the areas under American occupation as well. Part of this failure can be explained by the flawed design and implementation of the American reform strategy; as Jacoby argues the inability of OMGUS education authorities successfully to mobilize the political actors or organizational resources successfully to implement their desired reforms allowed opponents of the reform to limit its appeal by characterizing it as the “Americanization” of German education, despite the indigenous traditions of the Einheitsschule and New Pedagogy movements (Jacoby, 2000). The period in which the Allies could promote reforms was also relatively brief—the end to the occupation powers legal authority over education caused by the rise in Cold War tensions and the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949 largely removed the occupiers as potential sources of institutional change in postwar Germany’s system of general education (see Lawson, 1965). The policies and strategies of the Allies, while important for the restorative outcome, only represent part of the causal story. The American strategy to mobilize domestic actors to support their plans failed largely because there were few actors willing to be mobilized; West Germans demonstrated marked preferences for maintaining differentiation and early selection that was of such strength that they were willing to risk a major political row with their occupiers at a moment when much of the population was relying on Allied aid for its basic survival. This dimension of the case is best explained through the conceptual lens of policy discourses and examining the role played by discourse coalitions in the relevant political debates. During the reconstruction process, an alliance of actors formed around a shared set of ideas associated with the interrelated notions that the supply of intelligent young people was fixed in the population and unlikely to expand as a result of education or other changes in the social environment. The German discourse, which closely resembled the prewar discourse of the educational psychologists in Britain that so strongly influenced the Education Act 1944, was perceived to have a “scientific” basis in pedagogical, sociological, psychological, and biological understandings of youth and ability in the immediate postwar years. Placing ten-year-olds into the Volksschule, Realschule and Gymnasium was not, as the Allies maintained, undemocratic but was more democratic than the structure proposed by the Americans because the practice, if equally applied, would provide all young people with the opportunity to

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follow the most appropriate educational and occupational pathway purely on the basis of their natural endowment. From this discourse flowed a set of clear complimentary policy preferences that would be advanced by the actors in the West German discourse coalition during the occupation era. As Kuhlmann (1970, 32) writes: Universities, churches and industry groups, the CDU and liberal groups as the well the majority of surveyed parents, teachers, and scientific experts were unwilling to compromise in their support of early selection. Because they assumed that ability was inherited and essentially fixed, they held their concern for early ability and their objection to the idea of a common cultivation of talent, which by negating the natural differences in ability would in their view quickly lead to a general leveling of ability.

These ideas would strongly influence debates over general education during this time, providing not only the justification behind conservative calls for a return to the traditional system but also limiting the extent to which proposed reforms would be accepted by publics and other actors involved in education policymaking. When coupled with the counterexample of the comprehensive system that had been set up in the Soviet Zone, the West German ability discourse would provide policy actors with powerful rhetorical and ideational resources for collective action that would be deployed in the defense of an inherited institution and a collective identity to resist the imposition of an education system that most Germans considered vastly inferior to their own. To be sure, the most committed and vocal members of this coalition were those whose clear political and material interests coincided with the policy positions advocated within the discourse. Were these conservative actors, who subscribed to an extreme version of the discourse that drew strongly on more biological and psychological conceptions of ability and age as justification for early educational separation, the only members of the coalition, one could argue that this account overstates the causal importance of the discourse as a causal factor or that disentangling the discursive from the materialist causes in the shaping of these actors’ preferences is effectively impossible, whatever the “reality” of the role the former played. As the analyses of the individual reconstitution processes in the various Länder demonstrate, however, support for some form of differentiation during the occupation period existed largely across the political spectrum

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and not simply among those conservative forces who, in simple material terms, had the most to gain by the reconstitution of the traditional system. While the Social Democrats may have pursued changes in the organization of general education in Bremen, Hamburg, and Schleswig– Holstein, the party and its allies in organized labor never fundamentally challenged the basic principle of differentiation during the occupation period. The various proposals of Social Democratic governments for extending the period in the common Grundschule or creating separate streams within a common lower secondary school were still rooted in conceptions of early selection and differentiation that stood at the core of the traditional organization. As Gass-Bolm (2005, 129) notes: even if a willingness to reform was present at the beginning [of the postwar period] this hides the fact that reformers and conservatives in essential ways shared the same assumptions on key points that differentiated them from the Allies. A truly comprehensive school (Einheitsschule) such as the one preferred by the Americans and demanded by German reformers in the Weimar period was never part of the debate in West Germany. German education officials were united in the view that mass and elite education were to be separated…a horizontal school system had no advocate… the differential achievement potential of pupils was recognized as natural [and] for this reason separation into Volksschule and Gymnasium was not assailed.

Crucially for later outcomes in the organization of German general education, the reconstitution of the differentiated system corresponded with the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Western occupation zones. A new institutional framework for education that largely reflected the traditionalist views raised in response to the occupation forces’ calls for a more democratic education system thus emerged just as the political cycle associated with the restoration of the differentiated system was nearing its end.

Conclusion The ability discourse of the occupation period and the macro-institutional framework of the new German state would become mutually constituted in a manner that would serve to “lock” differentiation and early selection into the general education system and establish a rather extreme form of institutional path dependence that would render the system particularly

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resistant to change. While a general discursive consensus on differentiation also existed in Britain around the establishment of the tripartite system and its methods of selection in the mid-1940s, no comparable institutional embedding or mutual constitution would be achieved. As such, changes in the policy discourse such as those that occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s could have a much more powerful and immediate effect on British differentiation and selection practices. Beyond variation in the institutional framework of both countries would be variation in the strength and influence of the national discourse coalitions in the immediate postwar decades. The views of the educational psychologists in Britain and their reflection in institutional arrangements such as the tripartite system would be challenged by academic researchers and politicians alike within just a few years after the passage of the Education Act 1944. In West Germany, as the next chapter examines, the ability discourse would retain its hegemonic standing among policy actors throughout the 1950s, crucially delaying the start of the public and political debates over the structure of general education in the FRG.

Notes 1. A similar point could be made regarding the country’s system of vocational training (see Thelen, 2004, 7). 2. Institutions like the Realschulen that offered courses in both arts and sciences were not only unnecessary in Humboldt’s view but dangerous because the mixture of practical and classical served to dilute and contaminate each (Taylor, 1981, 14). 3. As Taylor points out, this split served to move vocational education into the hands of industry itself and almost entirely outside of the state education system, a development that relegated occupational training to a significantly lower level of prestige by the end of the nineteenth-century (Taylor, 1981, 14–15). 4. The advanced secondary sector was itself actually split into three basic types for much of the Imperial period: the traditional classical Gymnasium, the Realgymnasium, which stressed the natural sciences, and the Oberrealschule. This final type, established first in 1882 and designed to meet the demands of the country’s growing industrial sector, did not offer Latin or Greek, but stressed math, science, and modern languages. Although all three types were granted equal status after the Reich School Conference of 1901, students who wished to study certain university subjects such as law, medicine, or philology were required to attend a traditional Gymnasium (Samuel & Hinton, 1949, 46).

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5. Lamberti (2002, introduction) notes how the process by which the state achieved a monopoly over the German education system during the nineteenth-century actually resulted in a greater role for religious authorities in public education. State authorities believed that failing to incorporate the churches in the state system would lead to a separate sector of religious schools outside of the state’s competence. Such a sector, as developed in France after the public education system was secularized during the Third Republic, would challenge the state’s control over schooling in Germany and thus was discouraged by authorities. 6. The churches were doubly inclined to fight reform efforts, since they not only administered confessional schools in the state education system but also relied on the humanist curriculum of the Gymnasien to prepare future clergy for the seminary. 7. In practice, many of these fee-charging preparatory schools would continue to operate until banned permanently by the Nazis in 1936 (Hearnden, 1976b). 8. Or, in Samuels and Thomas’ less technical phrasing a “splendid opportunity” (1949, 47). 9. This variation, which also to a lesser extent has marked the Federal Republic, was evident both in the types of schools present in different Länder and the selection practices employed to place students in them. More conservative states such as Bavaria maintained a strict division between elementary and secondary levels, while others added more comprehensive elements into the organization structure of the education system. Notable in this regard was Thuringia, which under an SPD-led coalition adopted the Einheitsschule as the basis for the system in 1922, only to see it diluted beyond recognition after the central government removed the coalition from power in 1924 following the communists’ entry into the Landesregierung (see Mitzenheim, 1965). 10. Ironically, both the Aufbauschule and the Deutsche Oberschule were originally products of the liberal Neue Pädagogkik reform movement (see Lamberti, 2002, 18, 108). 11. In later debates over the reconstruction of the school system in the Western Zones, the refugee representative groups would prove to be consistent advocates for retaining the traditional system, maintaining that a strongly selective system offered the most effective means for them to advance professionally and socially in the FRG (see Kuhlmann, 1970, 51). 12. By this time, American authorities were pursuing a policy of fundamental reorganization of schooling along comprehensive lines within their zone (see below). 13. The autumn 1946 elections would be an embarrassment to the U.S.S.R. Despite attempts by the Soviet occupation authorities to ensure the victory of the pro-Moscow German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische

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Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED), which had been formed in April 1946 by the Soviet-coordinated merger of the Social Democratic and Communist parties in the Russian Zone, the middle class parties led by the CDU and the Liberal Democrats actually gained majorities in the Landtag elections in Brandenburg and Sachsen-Anhalt (Creuzberger, 1996). In Berlin, where the SPD had managed to remain independent in the Western controlled parts of the city, the SED garnered a mere 19.8% of the popular vote in city-wide elections, which translated into 26 out of 160 seats in the city council. These elections would be the last competitively contested votes in the areas of the Soviet occupation until 1990 (Murphy et al., 1999, 399). French policy would become somewhat more activist in the later years of occupation. As Taylor (1981, 101–103) notes, French authorities, spurred by the call in Directive 54 to democratize education in Germany, sought change in the curriculum of the Gymnasium, calling on administrators and faculty to shift the emphasis from classical language instruction to more relevant and practical ends. Employing a strategy also used against American reform efforts (see below), German authorities in the French Zone would simply delay implementation of any significant changes until the occupation mandate over education ran out. Hamburg was not alone among universities in its opposition to changes in the general education system and its support for maintaining the historical relationship between the Gymnasium and the German universities. Objections to changing the practices of early selection and school differentiation were voiced by the rectors and faculty at a number of universities, including Munich, Heidelberg, Tübingen, and Erlangen, among others (Kuhlmann, 1970, 39; Merkt, 1952, 187, 259). The contention that characterized the debates of the late forties and early fifties would resurface in Hamburg in 2008, when plans to consolidate the secondary sector would generate another political row. The Nazis had sought to change this practice with an order issued in April 1939 that ordered all technical universities to accept students who had successfully completed final exams at their colleges of technology, but the order, like many others issued by the Reich’s Ministry for Education, was not implemented by all the Länder governments (Edwards, 1978, 186). Aachen would be under British control following the formal division of Germany into zones of occupation later in 1945. A legendary figure in Bavarian politics, Hundhammer was a founding member of the CSU and sat on the committee that drafted the state’s constitution before serving as Minister for Culture in the first Bavarian postwar government. Described by a sympathetic biographer as a Bavarian patriot, fundamentalist Catholic, and recognized monarchist who believed

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in a form of extreme federalism, Hundhammer was as a delegate to the conservative Bavarian Farmers Union before entering the state’s parliament as its youngest representative in 1932. Forced from politics after the Nazi takeover, Hundhammer was imprisoned for a period at Dachau in 1933 for publishing a pamphlet critical of the Nazi movement (O. Braun, 2007). Such a measure had already been called for by the CSU in the thirtypoint program the party had published the previous year. Point 7 reads: “The development of every true ability to be furthered regardless of the class and social position of one’s parents. No rank or class may have a monopoly on the higher secondary schools…sufficient public assistance must be made available to poor talented students” (CSU, 1946, 4). Among the more outspoken opponents of reform was the Bavarian Catholic Church, which, like the Protestant Churches in other Länder, opposed ending the confessional division of primary schools and ending the traditional practice of educating future clergy in the Gymnasien. As Tent (1982b, 139–140) points out, the Americans did not win much favor with the Bavarian Catholic community by appointing as their primary negotiator for school issues a former priest who had married a former nun. In 1951, Württemberg-Baden would merge with WürttembergHohenzollern and Baden, two adjacent Länder from the former French Zone, to form the present Land of Baden-Württemberg. The tradition of training Volksschule teachers in separate non-university institutions would be maintained in nearly all Bundesländer into the 1950s with the exception of Hamburg and Berlin (Müller, 1995, 176–190). In Berlin, the extension to six years of the period of common schooling in the Grundschule instituted during the formal occupation period would be maintained (see Hearnden, 1976a). Many private schools in Germany are church-maintained and pedagogically traditionalist, but the sector also houses a number of progressive institutions. In addition to Steiner Schools are Landerziehungsheime (boarding schools) and Odenwaldschulen, both of which were founded on progressive Reformpädagogik principles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Hahn, 1998, 115). See Chapter 9. As Erk (2003, 303) points out, the requirement of unanimity for all KMK decisions provided them with de facto legal authority, since the Education Ministers would enact the provisions of any KMK agreements back in their respective Landtage. Such coordination was essential in ensuring that some level of homogeneity existed in the general education system in the FRG under conditions of Länder autonomy in education (von Dohnanyi, 1978, 17).

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29. Article 12a of the Basic Law established the basic rules regarding military conscription. Under the article, later expanded on under the 1956 Conscription Law (Wehrpflichtgesetz), all able bodied young men were required to report for either nine-months military service or a period of alternate civilian service. 30. One of the earliest and most influential court decisions regarding the Elternrecht was rendered by a higher administrative court (Oberverwaltungsgericht ) judge in Hamburg in 1953. Issued at the height of the political debate over the 1949 SPD-KPD education reform law and only a few years after the Basic Law came into effect, the decision concerned a student whose parents had sought to enroll him in a Gymnasium equivalent called the Wissenschaftliche Oberschule. The student had been denied entry after an examination committee that included his elementary school teacher and principal decided not to recommend his placement. The parents then protested the examination committee’s decision in court, where a judge found in their favor. In his ruling, the judge maintained that the choice of school type was of such fundamental significance to a young person’s personal development that such decisions should, under the provisions of the Basic Law, fall to parents and not state officials. Only in instances in which it could be determined that a student attending a higher secondary school solely on the basis of his parent’s wishes would arrest the development of his classmates in the desired secondary could the student’s admission be declined for want of aptitude or ability (“Einer führte”, 1953). 31. Variation in salaries for teachers at different schools most plainly demonstrates this continued disproportionality. In 1957, the average annual salary for a Volksschule teacher was 5,810 DM, while Realschule and Gymnasium teachers earned 6,850 and 9,420 DM respectively (see Kuhlman, 1970, 19). 32. The DPhV and VDR would become part of a single peak organization for secondary school teachers in 1969, when they helped form the German Teachers’ Association (Deutscher Lehrerverband), along with DBB-represented trade school and business school teachers. 33. The secondary school teachers’ section of the GEW would veto a proposal put forth at the union’s 1954 conference that called for ending selection after fourth grade and establishing instead a two-year transitional period before student placement would occur. A similar idea would be proposed by the German Committee for Education and Training (Deutscher Ausschuss für das Erziehungs und Bildungswesen) a federal advisory body, later in the decade (see Chapter 8) (Kuhlmann, 1970, 36).

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References Braun, A. (1947). Die Kultusministerien der amerikanischen Zone zur Schulreform. Pädagogische Welt, 1, 143–150. Braun, O. (2007). Alois Hundhammer: Konservative Existenz in der Moderne. Das politische Weltbild Alois Hundhammers. Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung. Christlich Soziale Union (CSU). (1946). Das Grundsatz Programm der Christlich-Sozialen Union in Bayern. Val Höfling. Creuzberger, S. (1996). Die Sowjetische Besatzungsmacht Und das politische System der SBZ . Böhlau. Edwards, A. W. J. (1978). Technical education and the ‘Zweiter Bildungsweg’. In A. Hearnden (Ed.), The British in Germany: Educational reconstruction after 1945 (pp. 174–197). Hamish Hamilton. Einer führte den Prozeß. (1953, April 16). Die Zeit. https://www.zeit.de/ 1953/16/einer-fuehrte-den-prozess?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww. google.com%2F Erk, J. (2003). Federal Germany and its non-federal society: Emergence of an all-German educational policy in a system of exclusive provincial jurisdiction. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 36(2), 295–317. Ertl, H., & Phillips, D. (2000). The enduring nature of the tripartite system of secondary schooling in Germany: Some explanations. British Journal of Educational Studies, 48(4), 391–412. Führ, C. (1997). The German education system since 1945. Inter Nations. Fuhrig, W. D. (1969). In A. A. Blum (Ed.), Teacher unions and associations: A comparative study (pp. 83–118). University of Illinois Press. Gass-Bolm, T. (2005). Das Gymnasium 1945–1980: Bildungsreform Und Gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Westdeutschland. Wallstein. Giles, G. (1992). Schooling for little soldiers: German education in the Second World War. In R. Lowe (Ed.), Education and the Second World War: Studies in schooling and social change (pp. 17–29). Falmer Press. Günther, K. H., & Uhlig, G. (1969). Geschichte Der Schule in Der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1945 Bis 1968. Volk und Wissen. Hahn, H. J. (1998). Education and society in Germany. Berg. Hearnden, A. (1976a). Education, culture, and politics in West Germany. Pergamon Press. Hearnden, A. (1976b). Education in the two Germanies. Westview Press. Hearnden, A. (Ed.). (1978). The British in Germany: Educational reconstruction after 1945. Hamish Hamilton. Heidenheimer, A. J. (1974). The politics of educational reform: Explaining different outcomes of school comprehensivization attempts in Sweden and West Germany. Comparative Education Review, 18(3), 388–410.

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Herrlitz, H. G. (2008). Der mühsame Weg zur Gesamtschulreform: Ein Projekt der Protestbewegung. Erziehungs Und Wissenschaft, 7–8, 16–17. Herrlitz, H. G., Hopf, W., Titze, H., & Cloer, E. (2008). Deutsche Schulgeschichte von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart Eine Einführung. Juventa. Jacoby, W. (2000). Imitation and politics: Redesigning modern Germany. Cornell University Press. Katzenstein, P. J. (1987). Policy and politics in West Germany: The growth of a semi-Sovereign state. Temple University Press. Koebner, T., Janz, R. P., Trommler, F. (Eds.). (1985). Mit Uns Zieht Die Neue Zeit: Der Mythos Jugend. Suhrkamp. Kuhlmann, C. (1970). Schulreform und Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1946–1966: Die Differenzierung der Bildungswege als Problem der westdeutschen Schulpolitik. Klett. Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK). (1955). Abkommen zwischen den Ländern der Bundesrepublik zur Vereinheitlichung auf dem Gebiete des Schulwesens [Düsseldorfer Abkommen]. In Deutscher Ausschuss für das Erziehungsund Bildungswesen (DAEB), Empfehlungen Und Gutachten, 1953–1965: Gesamtausgabe. Klett. Lamberti, M. (2000). Radical schoolteachers and the origins of the progressive education movement in Germany, 1900–1914. History of Education Quarterly, 40(1), 22–48. Lamberti, M. (2002). The politics of education: Teachers and school reform in Weimar Germany. Berghahn Books. Lawson, R. F. (1965). Reform of the West German school system, 1945–1962. University of Michigan. Levin, H. M. (1978). The dilemma of comprehensive secondary school reforms in Western Europe. Comparative Education Review, 22(3), 434–451. Lijphart, A. (2012). Patterns of democracy: Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries. Yale University Press. Lüth, E. (1971). Die Hamburger Bürgerschaft 1946–1971. Verlag Conrad Kayser. Markovits, A., & Silvia, S. (1992). Federal Republic of Germany. In J. Campbell & J. P. Windmuller (Eds.), European Labor Unions. Greenwood Press. Merkt, H. (Ed.). (1952). Dokumente Zur Schulreform in Bayern. Kommissionsverlag R. Merritt, A. J., & Merritt, R. L. (1970). Public opinion in occupied Germany: The OMGUS surveys, 1945–1949. University of Illinois Press. Mitzenheim, P. (1965). Die Greilsche Schulreform in Thüringen (Doctoral disseration). Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Veröffentlichung der Friedrich-SchillerUniversität Jena. Müller, D. (1987). The process of systemisation: The case of German secondary education. In D. Müller, F. Ringer & B. Simon (Eds.), The rise of the modern

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educational system: Structural change and social reproduction 1870–1920 (pp. 15–52). Cambridge University Press. Müller, W. (1995). Schulpolitik in Bayern Im Spannungsfeld Von Kultusbürokratie Und Besatzungsmacht, 1945–1949. Oldenbourg. Murphy, D. E., Kondrashev, S. A., & Bailey, G. (1999). Battleground Berlin. Yale University Press. National Institute on Student Achievement, Curriculum, and Assessment (U.S.). (1999). The educational system in Germany: Case study findings. Office of Educational Research and Assessment, U.S. Department of Education. Nikolai, R. (2018). After German reunification: The implementation of a two-tier school model in Berlin and Saxony. History of Education, 46(3), 374–394. Nixdorff, P. (1969). The pace of West German educational reform as affected by Land politics (Doctoral dissertation). University of Florida, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Pine, L. (2010). Education in Nazi Germany. Berg. Rempel, G. (1991). Hitler’s children. UNC Press. Ruhm von Oppen, B. (1955). Documents on Germany under occupation, 1945– 1954. Oxford University Press. Samuel, R. H., & Hinton, T. R. (1949). Education and society in modern Germany. Routledge & K. Paul. Sass, K. (2018). Cleavages and coalitions: Comprehensive school reforms in Norway and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany (1954–1979) (Doctoral disseration). The University of Bergen, Bergen Open Research Archive. Scholtz, H. (1973). NS-Ausleseschulen; Internatsschulen Als Herrschaftsmittel des Führerstaates. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Stein, E. (1947). Bericht des Hessischen Ministers für Kultus und Unterricht über die Pläne zur Erneuerung des Schulwesens im Lande Hessen vom 26.9.1947. Die Pädagogische Provinz, 174–184. Taylor, M. E. (1981). Education and work in the Federal Republic of Germany. Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society. Tent, J. F. (1982a). Mission on the Rhine: American educational policy in postwar Germany, 1945–1949. History of Education Quarterly, 22(3), 255–276. Tent, J. F. (1982b). Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and denazification in American-occupied Germany. University of Chicago Press. Thelen, K. (2004). How institutions evolve: The political economy of skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge University Press. United States Education Mission to Germany. (1946). Report of the United States Education Mission to Germany. GPO. Universität Hamburg. (1949). Die Schule in Unserer Zeit; Zur Frage Der Neuordnung des Hamburger Schulwesens. Denkschrift Der Universität Hamburg. Selbstverlag der Universität Hamburg.

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von Dohnanyi, K. (1978). Education and youth employment in the Federal Republic of Germany. Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. Welsh, H. A. (1989). Revolutionärer Wandel Auf Befehl?: Entnazifizierungs- Und Personalpolitik in Thüringen Und Sachsen, 1945–1948. R. Oldenbourg.

CHAPTER 8

Germany II: Historical Legacies and Frozen Discourses

Introduction In retrospect, the reconstruction of the traditional differentiated general education system in the areas of the former German Reich under Western occupation in the immediate postwar years does not represent a particularly unexpected empirical outcome. The fundamental conditions in place all pointed to a probable failure of reform initiatives during the occupation in the Western zones. The presence of a policy discourse that legitimized differentiation practices and the strength of the restorative coalition coupled with a tacit acceptance of differentiation on parts of the Left and the negative counter example of comprehensive school reforms in the Soviet sphere meant that efforts to end the three-tiered school system and practice of early selection would be unlikely to succeed. Among the Western occupational authorities, only the Americans, with their model of the comprehensive state high school, would view these practices in the German general education system as symptomatic of authoritarian attitudes and call for their fundamental reform. But while the restoration of traditional general education system may not qualify as unexpected, the absence of change in the system in the years that followed is puzzling. As this chapter discusses, there would be some modifications to German education in the early postwar period,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_8

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but overall the characterization of the era as “Two Decades of NonReform” is largely accurate. As Robinsohn and Kuhlmann write in their article of that name, “in contrast to some other European countries, the adjustment of the educational system to the socio-economic and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century have not really taken place in Germany” (1967, 311).1 During this period, the West German general education system would largely resemble those of the Weimar or even Imperial eras. “In virtually none of the Länder during the 1950s,” a 1973 OECD report noted, “was any serious attempt made to reconstruct the school system on the basis other than that extant in the 1920s. Indeed, some Länder appeared to have gone back to the years immediately before 1914 for their models of reconstruction” (OECD, 1973, 18). Why did traditional practices of differentiation and selection persist in most of West Germany during this time while the same period was marked in Britain and other countries by a movement away from practices associated with differentiation and early selection? This chapter finds the answer in the interplay between ideas and institutions and the formation of specific discourse coalitions of political, economic, and societal actors that successfully blocked change. The new center-right parties in West Germany backed the reestablishment of early selection practices that characterized German general education traditionally, while left parties and trades unions were more open to modifications from the pre-1933 system, such as the expansion of the common primary school. As noted in the last chapter, however, there were significant limits to the change that left parties and groups would pursue: neither the German Social Democrats nor the unions were willing, for example, fully to support postwar American calls for the creation of comprehensive high schools in the US occupation zones in the 1940s. As the current chapter discusses, this tacit acceptance of differentiation would continue in the 1950s, with the SPD overseeing the continuation of the traditional system in the Länder where it governed. German employers did support the reestablishment of the traditional three-tiered system after World War II and—as the current chapter examines—would oppose reform efforts in the immediate postwar decades. Yet business and industrial actors were not in maintaining the traditional system, but only members of a coalition that included churches, parents, and, most significantly, secondary school teachers and conservative political parties, all which were united by a shared fixed-ability policy discourse that viewed selective schooling as the most appropriate organizational

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framework for general education given the basic differences in individual human beings. This chapter maintains that political debates over schooling in West Germany would become “frozen” in the first postwar decades by the continuing dominance of this fixed-ability discourse that had been such a powerful legitimizing force for the reconstruction of the traditional system in the occupation period. In Britain, the ideational originators of this discourse, the educational psychologists, would begin significantly to lose influence in the 1950s within academic and political circles. For reasons related to the macro-institutional framework on the new Federal Republic and the reconstruction of educational sociology and psychology as academic disciplines after World War II, the German variant of the discourse would retain its hegemonic standing in the new Federal Republic, crucially insulating policy discussions from ideational trends in other European countries that challenged the static and hereditary view of ability and delaying the development of a German challenger discourse. As a consequence, while other countries initiated significant structural reforms in general education, West German policy continued to reflect the view that separate schools for students of different ability corresponded to the “natural” conditions in the population and was therefore the most appropriate pedagogical framework for the political, economic, and intellectual rebuilding of the nation.

Developments in General Education in the 1950s Among the more important changes that did occur in West German general education in the 1950s was the total elimination of the charging of tuition and other fees by state secondary schools. This practice, which—despite determined Allied attempts to end it during the occupation era—continued in some regions until late in the decade, had long had the effect of limiting the number of working-class students studying in the higher schools. A second significant development involved the universities. Between 1955 and 1965, enrollments in Germany’s traditionally elite universities doubled to nearly 300,000 (Katzenstein, 1987). Part of this expansion was due to the increase in the number of students obtaining the Abitur in the 1950s and part to demographic changes. To meet the anticipated growth in population, federal and Länder authorities began a higher education building program in the early 1960s. Conducted in accordance with the recommendations of the

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Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat ), an advisory body created in 1957 to provide recommendations on educational and research at the tertiary level, this coordinated effort would lead to the creation of over twenty new universities and other higher education institutions within a decade. In a further act of cooperation between Bonn and the Länder, officials agreed in 1955 to the so-called Honnefer Modell of financial aid,2 which provided individual fellowships to disadvantaged students, making university attendance possible. A final development concerned the expansion and consolidation of the Zweiter Bildungsweg , which had first developed in the British Zone during the occupation period (see Chapter 7). In 1957, the KMK established uniform standards for the Abendgymnasium, which ensured that an Abitur completed by a ZB student would be recognized across the Bund. This agreement limited admissions to students age nineteen or older who had either completed vocational training or had accumulated three years of work experience. It further required students who were not Realschule graduates to attend an additional six-month course before beginning studies in the Abendgymnasium. The KMK also established similar regulations for students studying at special university preparatory academies (Kollege), which provided an additional alternate path to higher education (Führ, 1997, 162). Despite these efforts at standardization and mutual recognition, the booming postwar economy and high demand for manual workers served to keep enrollments in ZB institutions low during this period and contributed to high dropout rates (Edwards, 1978). While it would be inaccurate to characterize these developments as insignificant, one would be hard pressed to claim they collectively served to transform the general education system. As Merritt et al. (1971, 127) note, until the mid-1960s, policy developments in schooling could be classified more as modifications rather than fundamental reforms. In the FRG, differentiation and early selection would remain largely unchanged institutionally and unchallenged politically. As they had before 1933, German pupils generally completed four years together in the Grundschule, before being selected for placement in one of the three traditional school types. Although it was technically possible to transfer “up” from a lower to a higher prestige school type under the principle of permeability, such transfers were extremely rare in the first postwar decades.3

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The West German Fixed Ability Discourse As in Britain, the general education system of West Germany as it was reconstituted in the late 1940s and early 1950s had roots in a set of beliefs concerning the nature of human intellectual capabilities and its relationship to the structure of schooling that dominated thinking in the country during the period. The core of the discourse consisted of three general beliefs. First was the view that talent or ability (Begabung ) could be categorized into three different types—the practical, practicaltheoretical, or theoretical—each of which corresponded to a particular cognitive orientation and occupational role in the economy. According to this view, individuals of the “practical” type were best suited for manual labor, those with “practical-theoretical” orientations for mid-level supervisory and technical positions, and the “theoretical”-minded for guiding managerial and directorial positions in the economy and state. The second assumption held that different ability types were generally determined at birth; individuals acquired their particular abilities hereditarily and were unlikely to possess skills and aptitudes that their parents did not also possess. Such a view would be invoked by supporters of school differentiation in the early postwar years to deflect criticism of any social bias in the practice of selecting students for placement at age ten, since it provided a seemingly scientific explanation for the wealthier classes’ disproportionate levels of representation in the secondary schools. Finally, the discourse maintained that these inherited abilities were more or less fixed in set amounts within the population. The vast majority of individuals fell in the practical category, while a minority comprised the practical-theoretical group and an even smaller percentage of the theoretical variety. According to the discourse, one’s ability type was both identifiable at an early age and unlikely to change significantly over the course of biological maturation or exposure to education. A belief in differentiated individual ability long preceded academic psychological or sociological classification or the rise of modern occupational categories; the distinction between Ausbildung (training) and Bildung (education) upon which the Humboldtian education system had been founded in the nineteenth century rested on just such an assumption. Over the first half of the twentieth century, however, the philosophical justification that Humboldt and others had invoked would become supplemented by more “scientific” arguments rooted in modern socio-psychological conceptions. Bildung in the Gymnasium and the university would be

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reserved for those students endowed with the “theoretical” type of mind, while Ausbildung in the Volksschule and dual system of education and vocational training would serve as the appropriate mode of education for the majority “practical” type in the German population (see Kuhlmann, 1970, 18). The institutional compliment to this view of discernable, innate, and unchanging ability was a differentiated general education system that included both separate schools designed best to suit each ability type and a process by which individual students’ ability type could be determined and school placement decisions rendered. General education would serve as only the first, albeit most important, step along a set of relatively standardized educational pathways of secondary and postsecondary institutions that mapped to the proclivities of each of the three ability categories. Further complimenting the tripartite conceptions of ability and schooling was the view that the structure of the labor market was premised on a tripartite division as well, with each ability type and corresponding educational pathway and qualification linked to a particular occupational category. As Kuhlmann (1970, 166) writes, “Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium are …geared towards three supposedly clearly separate ability types, which anticipate three career fields and three managerial levels … for finer gradations and transitions, this system offers little room.” As the earlier discussion of Britain makes plain, the presence and influence of these beliefs were not unique to Germany, at least not in the early postwar period, when differentiation in general education was the rule rather than the exception and educationalists in other Western European countries argued in support of the system on the grounds of fixed and differentiated ability levels in young people. While American occupation forces might have considered German education practices anti-democratic and reflective of an authoritarian social order, for many European countries—including those with democratic traditions—such practices were viewed as scientifically valid and pedagogically sound.4 The core ideas of the German version of the fixed ability discourse owed their impact on general education to the efforts of a group of ideational originators that included academic psychologists, sociologists, and educationalists who were committed to maintaining the traditional structure of the system and whose influence within education policymaking circles would continue throughout the 1950s. As Kuhlmann (1970, 126) writes, “from 1933 to 1960, a committed set of scholars

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dominated the landscape of education policy, for whom no reform impulses were possible because they believed psychological and sociological natural laws and essential forms applied, which seemed to exclude a priori any changes [to the general education system].” Within this group, one individual, Prof. Karl Valentin Müller, stands out as a particularly influential agent of the German fixed ability discourse. Described by German-American sociologist Max Horkheimer as a specialist in the connection between talent and social environment (Begabungssoziologie) in a report commissioned by the American Library of Congress on the state of German social science in the early 1950s (Horkheimer, 1952, 29), Müller served after the war as Professor for Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and as the director of the Institute for Empirical Sociology (Institut für empirische Soziologie), originally named the Institute for Talent Research (Institut für Begabungsforschung ), in Hannover. Tellingly, the Institute had been set up in 1946 not by the Christian Democrats, but with the support of the SPD Minster for Culture in Lower Saxony Adolf Grimme, who himself had been a member of the interwar Bund Entschiedener Schulreformer, a progressive splinter group of secondary school teachers that had broken away from the conservative Philologenverband in 1919.5 Culture Ministries in several other Länder also commissioned researchers who shared Müller’s socio-biological views to prepare advisory studies on education policy for their governments during the same period (Gass-Bolm, 2005, 134). In the 1920s, Müller had belonged to a right-leaning faction within the SPD that sought to mix biological and racial theories with Marxist conceptions of workers’ revolution, arguing that only white Europeans were capable of understanding—and therefore realizing—socialism, and providing as evidence for this theory data highlighting, among other findings, the relatively high percentages of blondes in positions of authority within trade unions. Müller had worked in the Saxon Ministry of Culture in the early 1930s but was stripped of his office by the Nazis after their seizure of power due to his SPD membership; later in the decade, however, he would be permitted to lecture at universities in Prague and Dresden. Müller published widely during the Nazi era, promoting a theory that sought to explain ability differences in different racial groups and advocating the racial fusing (Umvolkung ) of Germans and Czechs (Gutberger, 2006, 75–88; Proctor, 1988, 23–24).

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In the postwar era, Müller continued to expound on many of his earlier views on the innate nature of human talent, substituting the Nazi-tainted concept of race with the less ideologically discredited notion of class in his writings in the late 1940s and 1950s. Much of Müller’s postwar research examined the relationship between and among social standing, intellectual ability, and school placement in the differentiated system. While acknowledging that the upper classes were overrepresented in the German secondary schools, Müller argued that this resulted “from the largely natural correlation between school screening and social screening” (quoted in Gass-Bolm, 2005, 133–134; see also Robinsohn and Kuhlmann 1967, 325). The same talents that led individuals to attain higher levels of social rank led them to perform better academically, so it was not surprising that the upper classes would be overrepresented in the Gymnasium. To critics who would argue that a student’s relative performance in school was affected by environmental factors such as family conditions and upbringing, Müller countered that such considerations were irrelevant for determining scholastic achievement, maintaining late into the 1950s that “ability is a biological category…unconditionally rooted in hereditary traits which are either there or not there” (Müller, 1959, 7). Much of the discussion regarding ability and education in postwar West Germany was framed around the issues of Begabungsreserven and the question of whether stocks of talented young Germans who had been held back by the institutional design of the education system existed in the FRG. To researchers such as Josef Hitpass (1964) and Udo Undeutsch (1960), the fact that the United States and other European countries already enrolled significantly higher percentages of students in higher education than Germany demonstrated that the existence of such stocks was likely. To Müller, however, such beliefs were “social fairy tales.” In an address to Gymnasium teachers in Lower Saxony, he mocked the notion of “vast treasure troves of talent waiting to be unearthed, which lay hidden in the recesses of the people, in classes that are poorly off economically and only await the social princes who with the divining rod of some elaborate school reform and promotion scheme for talented students, can pull them into the light” (“Die letzte Hürde,” 1964, 8 December). For Müller, expanding access to the higher schools by allowing the entry of students who were not clearly members of the small intellectual elite or attempting as a matter of policy to make the Gymnasium more socially

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inclusive was both scientifically unfounded and certain to lead to a decline in educational quality. Similar views were expressed by Dr. Albert Huth, an occupational psychologist and former Volksschule teacher who had worked for the state employment office in Bavaria in the 1920s and 1930s and after the war served as Professor of Psychology at the Institute for Teacher Education in Munich-Pasing.6 In a series of articles published between 1948 and 1952, Huth postulated that young West Germans in the postwar period were exhibiting significantly lower levels of ability than their prewar counterparts. Drawing on seemingly reliable statistical evidence7 based on his own data collection, he maintained that along a range of academic performance indicators, fourteen-year-olds examined in 1946/1947 school year demonstrated the same level of ability as twelve-year olds had in 1930. Accompanying this decline, moreover, was a clear movement of talent in Huth’s sample from the theoretical to the practical type. The general ability of young Germans was thus not only dropping, compared to previous generations, but fewer youth were demonstrating the abilities traditionally required for study at the Gymnasium. In a 1957 study, he argued that the percentage of young people who had actually passed the Abitur was identical to those with the ability to pass the Abitur in the population, namely five percent of the population (Huth, 1957). For Huth, as for Müller, there were no untapped reserves of academically inclined Germans for whom the selective practices of the education system needed modification. Huth’s core contribution to the postwar West German ability discourse involved the crucial dimension of economic productivity, which, alongside Müller’s notions of heredity and ability, would have the effect of, in Kuhlmann’s terms, “doubly anchoring” (1970, 64) differentiation in West Germany, creating two distinct but mutually reinforcing subdiscourses that legitimized the traditional structure in general education and provided a set of ideational barriers to reform.8 Huth argued in his research that the educational system preferred by West German industry in the early 1950s “corresponded perfectly” with the findings of pedagogical psychology on differentiation and ability. Based (according to Huth) on conversations with business leaders and the published comments of the Chambers of Commerce, he argued in a 1952 article that the optimal percentage of students from the total student population for each type of school matched the three general types of occupation demanded by

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industry. Included in his article was an easily accessible table that demonstrated this correspondence across occupational and ability categories. Significantly, these optimal figures roughly matched the actual distribution of West German students in the schools at the time, providing the impression that the three-tiered general education system that had recently been reconstituted in West Germany represented the most appropriate arrangement for the country’s economy. “If one wishes to reveal an occupational principle to guide decision for school tracks and career advice,” Huth wrote, “one will inevitably come to the same postulations, for the levels of ability of German youth correspond exactly to those percentages provided in this table” (Huth, 1952, 135) (Table 8.1). The implications of Huth’s findings were clear enough: any change to the differentiated system of general education would necessarily result in a distorted distribution of skills in the West German economy, limiting the country’s reconstructive efforts and productive capabilities just the country was returning to economic growth and stability. Conceptions such as those of Huth and Müller’s drove much of the academic discussion in the early postwar period (see Zimmer, 1975, 27–28). As Gass-Bolm (2005, 133–134) writes, “Biological concepts of ability dominated in the 1950s…. According to this theory, ability was a hereditarily conditioned factor. Individual advancement was thus only possible within tight limits, while selection for placement in different schools by contrast was a natural necessity. In particular the socially unequal division of school students from this view was not unjust at all, Table 8.1 Optimal distribution by occupation and school category in West Germany Year

Orientation Hauptschulen stage (%) (%)

Realschulen (%)

Comprehensive schools/Steiner schools1 (%)

Gymnasium (%)

1960 1970 1980 1990

0.0 0.0 6.4 6.4

13.5 20.1 25.5 25.2

0.1 0.1 3.6 7.0

20.1 24.7 28.2 30.7

66.4 55.2 36.4 30.7

Source Huth (1952, 133) 1 Steiner schools, known as Freie Waldorfschulen in the FRG, are private comprehensive schools founded on the spiritual and philosophical principles articulated by the Austrian Rudolf Steiner in the early twentieth century

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but rather a biological fact, since children of parents from intellectual professions would have a higher probability of being talented themselves.” While some academic contemporaries challenged the conclusions of the fixed ability discourse, noting, for example, the role of environmental factors in shaping educational performance,9 such findings had less of an impact on education debates or influence among policy actors than those of Huth and especially Müller (Kuhlmann, 1970, 116). The latter, Zimmer writes, “operated virtually unrivaled in the Federal Republic between 1946 and 1959” (1969, 150). Beyond the debates over ability, there existed an absence of reform enthusiasm more generally in the FRG, even among those who could be expected to be supporters of change. Many West Germans who otherwise showed progressive political leanings also believed that there was little need to make significant modifications to general education (Fuhrig, 1969, 105fn). This group included many liberal educationalists who, as Ebsworth (1961, 160–161) notes, “were, naturally, very conscious of the leading position Germany had once held in the educational world and…hypersensitive to new ideas from abroad.” This situation stood in marked contrast to the developments in other European countries during the same period. In both Britain and Sweden, the ideas associated with the static and hereditary conceptions of ability that dominated policy discussions in the 1940s would by the late 1950s be challenged by new ideas regarding the nature of ability and its relationship to environmental conditions. These dynamic ability counter-discourses would strongly influence the reorganization of the education systems in both countries. By the mid-1950s the educational sociologists in Britain such as Halsey and Floud were challenging the views of the interwar psychologists that had held individual intelligence to be a fixed and innate characteristic. In Sweden, a new generation of educationalists trained in behavior studies rather than psychology would likewise question the basic assumptions of fixed intelligence that had so sharply influenced reform discussions in 1940, creating a new consensus on education that would culminate in the wholesale comprehensivization of the system in 1971, when the three different types of traditional secondary institutions were merged into a single integrated Gymnasial school10 (Heidenheimer 1974, 388–389, see also Paulston, 1968, 116). Why did this paradigm shift bypass West Germany during the same time period? Much of the explanation is found in the disruption of the natural generational cycling of pedagogical academics and researchers in

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German universities and institutes caused by the National Socialist experience and its subsequent effects on the content of the postwar education discourse in the FRG. Given the restrictions in the Nazi period, many German pedagogues had little exposure to the new thinking and research that was developing outside of the country (Kuhlmann, 1970, 114). Allied denazification efforts led to the removal of many younger faculty members and researchers appointed after 1933, ensuring that many key academic positions were held after the war by a generation of older scholars. In the area of education, Heidenheimer writes, “older pedagogical orthodoxies and traditions were re-established in Germany just when they were being challenged [elsewhere]” (1974, 389). This elder cohort would serve to carry many of the reigning biological and static conceptions of ability from the 1920s well into the postwar era. As such, ideas concerning talent and school organization that dominated academic—and by extension policy—discussions in the first decades of the Federal Republic’s existence continued to reflect the views that ability was a hereditary trait and that only that small minority of able young people should have access to advanced education. Beyond the more unique characteristics evident in postwar West German sociology was the more general condition of the field in Europe, where cross-national scholarly networks remained relatively underdeveloped. This condition was particularly evident within the sub-discipline of educational sociology, where academic discourses associated with schooling were largely limited to individual countries and debates over new empirical findings and their policy implications seldom spilled over national borders11 (for a discussion, see Chisholm, 1996, 197). Hence while educational sociologists in Britain and Sweden were publishing groundbreaking studies that were calling into questions many of the psychological and pedagogical assumptions that had served as the foundation of their differentiated schooling systems, their counterparts in West Germany were restating and updating arguments that defended the arrangements of the traditional Germany system, largely insulated from the revolutions taking place around them. Despite the lack of cross-national exchange, it is conceivable that German researchers would have reached similar conclusions themselves through their own examinations of the FRG’s general education system as it reemerged in the 1950s. Here too, however, the Nazi legacy was influential. The National Socialist experience had retarded the development of educational sociology in Germany not only in terms of personnel, but

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also in the application of modern social scientific tools, such as survey and data processing methods, in studies of the education system. By the mid1960s, West Germans would begin using such methods to demonstrate that certain groups, especially industrial and agricultural workers, were dramatically underrepresented in intermediate and secondary schools, but during the crucial first years following the establishment of the FRG, researchers lacked the tools even to make such a determination. As a consequence, policymakers had few ways of assessing the effects that measures taken in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as the elimination of tuition and the provision of free textbooks and course materials, were having—or not having—on the social composition of the different schools (Robinsohn & Kuhlmann 1967, 313; see also Betts, 1981, 12; Gass-Bolm, 2005, 130). The fixed ability discourse in West Germany had become, in effect, frozen in place.

The Fixed Ability Coalition in the FRG Views of the type articulated by agents such as Huth and Müller serve as the ideational origination of policy discourses. As discursive institutionalists argue, however, in order to affect policy debates, such ideas require actors to communicate and legitimate them. A set of powerful actors during this period in the FRG would accept and promote the static and hereditary conceptions of ability. The discourse coalition that helped to ensure that the organization of general education reflected such conceptions included members of secondary school associations, government officials, representatives of organized business, parent groups, and—crucially—political parties. From their privileged institutional positions within the emerging West German polity, these actors would regularly draw on the core assumptions of the discourse to discourage even moderate proposals for change in the structure of general education for the first two decades of the postwar era. The belief that no more than five percent of the population possessed the abilities needed to perform the intellectual tasks demanded by the Gymnasium and university study was widely accepted and attempts to challenge traditional arrangements would be viewed as scientifically unjustifiable and a threat to pedagogical standards and industrial performance. As Kuhlmann observed, “the multiplied impact [on the coalition] from men like … Müller and others who made claims of objectivity and science, cannot be overestimated” (1970, 126).

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Among the various interests associated with education, the fixed ability discourse in early postwar West Germany was most prominently reflected in the policy positions adopted by the secondary school interest groups, and particularly the Deutscher Philologenverband, the influential Gymnasium teachers’ association. In the 1950s, the DPhV’s intermediation efforts were aimed primarily at defending traditional arrangements,12 including the administrative and academic separation of school types, selection for these schools during the fourth year of the Grundschule around age ten, the practice of requiring different educational standards for elementary and secondary teachers, and the exclusive character of the Gymnasium by keeping enrollments comparatively low (Gass-Bolm, 2005, 120–135). In the past, these arrangements might have been justified by reference to Humboldt’s pedagogical principles, but such appeals would seem to conflict with the values of the new democratic West Germany. Given this altered political climate, the DPhV, Gass-Bolm (2005, 134) writes, “was welcome to the ideas of the biological argument, which provided seemingly scientific proof for the necessity of a three-tiered school system and the selection paradigm.” The Philologenverband regularly promoted a view of talent as “a genetically inherited constant of nature” (Brinkman, 1977, 402) during this period to support not only early selection, but also differentiation in the German general education system. A 1957 conference report by the Saarbrücken chapter of the DPhV noted that “the three tiers of the school system [corresponds] to the natural distribution of ability” (quoted in Kuhlmann, 1970, 18). Leading fixed ability proponents, such as Wilhelm Hartnacke, who had served as the Nazi Minister for Culture in Saxony,13 frequently wrote for Philologenverband publications throughout the 1950s, emphasizing the discourse’s core assumptions and attacking any suggestion of combining students with mixed abilities after initial selection at age ten (Gass-Bolm, 2005, 134). Proposals to extend common schooling or suggestions that selection at the age of ten was too early were met by the DPhV with reference to the demonstrated psychological appropriateness of the traditional system. In response to a 1955 study that recommended the creation of a two-year middle bridge between the primary and secondary schools, the Philologenverband invoked this now customary line of argument. According to the judgment of the majority of leading pedagogues and psychologists, the suitability for secondary schools can be revealed at the

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10th year, and that, for example, the higher school with its long accepted instructional methods are able to satisfy thoroughly the pedagogical and psychological demands of transferring to a new school type in the 5th and 6th year (quoted in Ried, 1956, 24)

Opposition to reform of West Germany’s general education system among groups like the DPhV was rooted not only in concerns for their material interests but in an emerging set of beliefs that held it to be the responsibility of higher education institutions in the FRG to create a “leadership class” (Führerschicht ) to helm the principal positions in the West German state and its newly created social market economy. Such an elite would never be realized if the differentiated system were to be dismantled and, as one writer in the Philologenverband’s trade journal put it, “the competent were smothered in the numbers of incompetent, the less talented, and the untalented … our future depends on the selection of the best” (Erdmann, 1948). As they had during the reconstruction debates in the occupation period, the Gymnasium teachers would also continue in the 1950s to equate suggestions for less differentiated schooling arrangements with East German practices, characterizing them as reflective of communist thinking and a step toward the Einheitsschule model present in the GDR (Gass-Bolm, 2005, 132). In the view of West German industry, the three-tiered school system was well suited to supplying the economy with the distribution of skills that corresponded to the requirements of German businesses during the 1950s and complimented the in-firm apprentice system administered by the Congress of German Industry and Commerce (Deutscher Industrieund Handelstag [DIHT ]). By limiting the period of fulltime mandatory schooling to eight or nine years for the majority of students and ensuring that most would graduate from the Volksschule with no formal occupational or higher educational qualifications except for entry into the dual system, the differentiated school organization guaranteed that significant percentages of young people would enter into apprenticeships around age fifteen. Business interests even opposed the few minor modifications to general education proposed during the 1950s, such as calls for extending the mandatory period of study in the Volksschule to ten years.14 In the context of the Wirtschaftswunder and Germany’s postwar reconstruction, this economic rationale would have a powerful legitimizing effect on the traditional arrangements in general education and serve to deflect criticism of its perceived elitism and social bias (Taylor, 1981).

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Such criticisms as they existed tended not to be based in any empirical understanding of the links among education, qualifications, and employment, which owing to the lag in the application of social science techniques in the early FRG were in any event not being utilized. As Kuhlmann (1970, 61–62) writes, “Because modern, sophisticated and comprehensives analysis of occupational qualifications [were] lacking, but at the same time profit margins and wages … were continually increasing, representatives from the peak industry associations could with clear reasons point to the success of the present-day system of training and selection—and with them to the existing education system” as justification for their support for differentiation. As with the secondary school teachers, industry’s views on education reflected, in Kuhlmann’s words, “a certain, relatively closed worldview” that saw the means to raising the standards of all students in the promotion of a small educational elite within the higher schools (1970, 67). Such views were consistent with Huth’s conception of a correspondence among ability, school type, and the economic needs of industry, which groups like the DIHT directly acknowledged during the period (DIHT, 1964, 36–38). Interaction between representatives of industry and the academic agents of the static and hereditary view of ability was common throughout the 1950s. Speaking before the DIHT in 1958, Frankfurt Pedagogy Professor H. Weinstock reiterated Huth’s basic ability/occupation categorization—the West German labor force could be divided into three general categories, an “ordering and organizing class,” of workers, an “achieving” class of upper-level managers and professionals, and a mid-level class of technicians and supervisors. The existence of these categories coupled with the state of technological development in the economy served, he claimed, as the “legal basis and necessity of the three tiers in our school system” and political attempts to change its basic structure, amounted, in Weinstock’s opinion, to a “fool’s farce” (quoted in Kuhlmann, 1970, 65). Such rhetoric aside, the politics associated with general education during the Federal Republic’s first decade were characterized largely by the absence of contentious and ideologically charged debates over the reform and reconstitution of the traditional system that marked the conflict between American and German education authorities during the occupation, and a relative lack of programmatic interest in the issues of differentiation and selection on the part of both the Christian and the Social Democratic parties.15 This comparative absence of significant

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policy debates at either the federal or Länder-level was a reflection of two factors. First, shifting patterns of electoral competition and the concomitant process of de-ideologization that accompanied the movement from mass to catch all parties16 had served to moderate views on education, particularly on the Left. In a political environment in which stability was highly valued, party programs promising fundamental changes were likely to be received with little enthusiasm from the electorate. Second, something approaching a consensus on the issue of differentiation between the two major political parties emerged in the 1950s around a set of principles that reflected key assumptions within the West German fixed ability discourse, particularly those regarding the acceptance of inequalities in natural endowments. For the Christian Democrats, the party that would dominate federal politics throughout the 1950s under the chancellorship of former Cologne Mayor Konrad Adenauer, issues related to the organization of general education were not a priority, at least in terms of formal party pronouncements, during the early years of the Federal Republic. CDU/CSU education policy focused instead on the internal reform of schooling, and specifically the need to reestablish the relationship between churches and schools as a step toward rebuilding the spiritual and moral foundation of a generation of young people raised under the Nazi dictatorship and corrupted by forced exposure to National Socialist ideology. As the CDU’s foundational 1945 Cologne Principles stated: Church-run religious education is an integral part of education. Through the pernicious doctrines of racial hatred and mass incitement, Hitler poisoned many youth. They must return to the realization of true moral values. Science and art should be free to unfold and the true teachings of humanity, whose German proclamations belong to the whole of humanity, should help to comprise the moral reconstruction of our people. (CDU, 1945, 4)

The CDU’s first official program, agreed to at the party conference in Hamburg in 1953, made no mention of general education, despite devoting significant space to other youth concerns, including calls for legislation protecting young workers and a new vocational training law (CDU, 1953). Following the pitched battles over the American reform proposals of the occupation period, the party was, Hoffmann writes, “inclined to maintain the conventional school structure: eight or possible

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nine years in the Volksschule; the Mittelschule, the nine year Gymnasium and the three year vocational school” (1968, 64). The preferences of the party’s two main constituencies, the churches and middle classes, certainly influenced its continued support for differentiation in general education in the 1950s. Beyond the role played by these groups, however, was the strength of beliefs associated with the fixed ability discourse. In the 1950s, the Christian Democrats would be the most faithful political adherents to the discourse, which was seen not only as scientifically legitimate but also a compliment to the party’s focus on the moral and spiritual rejuvenation of youth in the new Germany. “The organizational differences of the school system,” Jacoby writes, “were seen [by the CDU] to reflect natural differences of ability in the population but not to perpetuate such distinctions – which could in any event be transcended by common values” (2000, 101). A debate in the Bundestag on education in 1958 reveals how the discourse figured into the CDU policy orientation as well as the authority which was afforded to academics such as Müller by public officials on both sides of the political spectrum. During the debate, SPD representative Ulrich Lohmar, an academic and leading voice in the party on education issues, claimed that the CDU interior (and future foreign and defense) minister Gerhard Schröder was unwilling even to recognize the paucity of working-class students at universities and technical education facilities, making reference to how “the investigations of Professor Müller” had shown “the talent reserves in the so-called upper social groups [were] much more extensively utilized…as in the so-called lower social groups” (Bundestag, 1958). In his response, Schröder also cited Müller’s research, noting that it demonstrated that the problem of low working-class participation in higher education was not to be attributed to the system of early selection, but was a simple consequence of the natural distribution of ability in the population. But now, ladies and gentlemen, regarding the talent question. It has been said … the percentage of students from workers’ families is not adequate. This is a point that must be carefully examined… I say again: for us talent is what is decisive. Indeed, talent is not simply distributed as a percentage according to the strength of population levels. It is not so. You yourself [Lohmar] have cited a work from which I would like to quote, on how

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things are. The children of the upper stratum [who are] grammar schoolready – if I may use this expression – is 44.6%, of the upper middle stratum 22.6%, of the middle stratum 9.4%, of the upper lower stratum (gehobenen Grundschicht ) 3.7%, and of the lower stratum 1.5%.17 Whether these numbers please us or not is not the question. I assume that you consider the work from which they come to be conclusive and that these numbers… are correct. But from this arises something … that others can easily derive. Having small numbers of students from the “lower stratum” [attending higher education] is thus not conclusive that the promotion system is inadequate (Bundestag, 1958)

This statement by Schröder, Hoffmann writes, “comes clearly from the genetic view of talent, which also form the basis of Müller’s investigations” (1968, 230). The concept of biological and hereditary ability, he further notes, “was naturally very convenient for the CDU. For it presented the opportunity to buttress the social-conservative tendency of its education policy with scientific arguments. The social stratification appeared according to genetic conception of talent as an expression of ‘natural’ social selection. The promotion system, the three-tiered school and selection practices: they all rested upon a ‘natural’ principle, so that the education policy arrangements pursued by the CDU seemed to correspond to the demands of social justice” (1968, 232). The views of the SPD were more complex. Support for comprehensive schools prior to 1933 and the attempts of various SPD-led Länder governments to legislate reforms in the immediate postwar years would make the party as the most likely source for politically driven change in the traditional structure of the general education system in the FRG. Yet external political considerations coupled with internal divisions limited the party’s ability to construct a coherent set of policy principles for the organization of general education. The early postwar era was a time of ideological and political uncertainty for the SPD, which faced the challenge of recreating German Social Democracy not only in light of the Nazi catastrophe, but also the situation in the East, where the regional party had been forced to merge with the Communists to form the new Soviet-directed SED. As with their Christian Democratic counterparts, the SPD paid relatively sparse attention to schooling in its early policy documents; such absences, however, masked deeper conflicts within the party over education and its position in its vision of a postwar West German society. Throughout the 1950s, the SPD sought to reconcile its view on the relationship between the

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education system and social equality, on the one hand, with the distinctly inegalitarian beliefs associated with differentiation in schooling that had reemerged in postwar Germany. Hoffmann writes that “clear cut ideas about the new organization of the school system are not represented in this phase of social democratic education policy.” While the party rejected a rigid hierarchical three-tiered system, it also did not promote a pure Einheitsschule, opting instead for more flexible differentiated system that allowed for easier transfers between school types and the possibility of a common—though internally differentiated—middle school in which students were separated into different ability streams but with common core lessons (Hoffmann, 1968, 452–453). The basic view was articulated by the party in response to a questionnaire sent by the DPhV prior to the 1953 federal elections asking whether the party favored the Einheitsschule or the retention of the traditional three-tiered system.18 The SPD is of the opinion that the ‘historically grown tripartite structure of the German school system’ in many ways no longer meets the requirements of the school structure of our own century and the requirements of modern pedagogy. But it also rejects an undifferentiated ‘unified school’ and, on the contrary confesses in its action program to an ‘organically structured school system’ which enables every child, irrespective of his or her social situation, to obtain an education that suits his or/her predisposition. (quoted in Ried, 1956, 148)

The party’s traditional Marxist view that the structure of education would change as capitalism gave way to socialism began to fade as the SPD adopted a more pragmatic stance in the 1950s in the face of losses to the CDU/CSU in the first three federal elections. Under its “New Society” (Neue Gesellschaft ) program, the SPD would begin to reject the demands for radical social leveling and would become increasingly open to the reality of an education system that generated unequal outcomes for the young people who passed through it (Jacoby, 2000, 103). Still unacceptable for this new postwar SPD were differences in outcomes based on family wealth or social class; under the new thinking, students’ ascension to the higher secondary schools and the opportunities they offered was to be a function solely of their individual abilities. Much as their British Labour counterparts had done earlier, the SPD moved toward the view in the 1950s that the elimination of class and status factors from the selection process would make open new avenues

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for economic wealth and social mobility to the talented children of the working class.19 This new philosophy was described by Hoffmann: The way to leading professions would be principally opened to the gifted children of poor parents through state-funded education, which would make possible their social ascent. This would create a new talent and performance-based dominant class whose claim to power could not be refuted by the established classes. By replacing ownership with educationbased performance, the classist systems would disintegrate and in its place would step a socially mobile meritocracy. The demands of equality within this group correspond exclusively to the starting point of each individual person… The parity of starting conditions is just as fair socially as the social inequality that arises by reason of different performance abilities. What is decisive in this “New Society”-based on the equality of educational opportunity is that the social status of each individual is a function of his industriousness and ability and no longer rooted in the fortuity of his birth. (Hoffmann, 1968, 393–394)

A school system structured on the principles of differentiation could comport with such a philosophy provided that it was truly class-blind and meaningfully offered opportunities for social and economic advancement to even the less well off in West German society. While the more biological and psychological elements of the ability discourse would never play as significant a role in the party educational ideology, for the first time the SPD, Kuhlmann writes, “accepted, or rather tolerated, elite theories and at the same time overlooked the presented scientific works that questioned the authority of the school typology” (1970, 93). As the Labour party in Britain had a decade earlier, the German Social Democrats would crucially give its assent to the three-tiered school structure. In North-Rhine Westphalia, a law on schools passed by the SPD-FDP coalition that governed from 1956 to 1958 not only left the selective school organization unchanged, but helped to reinforce it by defining and regulating the differentiated school types (Sass, 2018, 119). Into the early 1960s, the party would question only the method of selection—which it argued was excluding the talented children of the working classes—and not the practice itself (Betts, 1981, 8). Similar views were articulated by the German Trade Union Confederation, which would argue in its 1963 program that “there must be for each child educational and training opportunities open that correspond to his assets and abilities,

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independent of the social position and economic situation of his parents” (DGB, 1963, 73). Even in Länder that were led exclusively by SPD governments, differentiation in the period would become legally and socially reembedded. In Hesse, a Land with a long history of educational progressivism that was dominated by the SPD in the first postwar decades, legislation in the first twenty years after the war served primarily to consolidate—rather than reform—the traditional school system, despite the fact that workingclass attendance levels at the Gymnasium had increased only slightly and remained extremely low (Nixdorff, 1969, 154).

Public Opinion and Education The final segment of West German society to contribute to the embedding of differentiation in the 1950s was the West German public itself. While the West German middle classes would seek to keep the Gymnasium and access to university education selective and elite, the limited educational ambitions of the working classes would render such seemingly democratic innovations such as the Elternrecht ineffective as a mechanism for significantly increasing the number of students in the advanced educational pathway. Passivity largely characterized the attitude of most West Germans toward educational change, particularly in the early postwar years. In surveys of individuals’ “greatest cares and worries” during the late 1940s, education was never cited by more than one percent of respondents, who were more concerned with basic provisions, such as food, clothing, and access to employment, and the return of German prisoners of war (Noelle-Neumann & Neumann, 1967). The reconstitution of the traditional system may have faced opposition from American military authorities, but not from most ordinary Germans. Indeed, in the few examples of significant public mobilization over issues related to school organization during the occupation, such as in Hamburg following the 1948 SPD law, it would be proponents of educational traditionalism that had the support of the population. As issues of basic survival began to fade the early FRG, they were quickly replaced with a new set of priorities. Rising incomes, high levels of employment, security, and political stability associated with the Wirtschaftswunder, the Western military alliance, and the Christian Democratic governments in the 1950s led to changes in the attitudes of

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Germans toward the possibilities of economic and social advancement. Yet educational reform continued to have fairly low appeal with the many West German families despite the economic boom and most Germans continued to be satisfied with the existing structure of the traditional system. This relative contentment stands in marked contrast to the situation in Britain, where increased overall wealth during the same period corresponded with growth in public interest in education and support for changes in the postwar tripartite system. Why were the responses so different? One explanation is rooted in the economic opportunities in the early FRG available to younger people of the “practically ability” type. In Britain, the educational pathway for such students had traditionally been much less developed, but in Germany, the Realschule and the dual system of vocational education were by the 1950s well-established institutions and would exercise a stabilizing influence on the structure of general education and the practice of differentiation and dampen calls for reform in the early FRG. The strong intermediate sector in particular provided an alternative to the Gymnasium and university that combined the prestige of a secondary school with a course of study designed to prepare students for employment in mid-level technical and administrative positions in the country’s booming export-driven economy. Unlike with the Gymnasium, where efforts were made to keep tight limits on enrollments, both the Christian Democrats and the secondary school associations actively promoted expanding the size of the student population in the Realschule during the 1950s (Ertl & Phillips, 2000, 399–400). Structurally, the general and vocational education sectors as they were reconstituted after World War II were largely complimentary systems—as in the prewar era, the majority of young Germans in the 1950s would enter the dual system around age fifteen upon completion of elementary schooling in the Volksschule.20 Through a combination of part-time classroom training (usually between six and twelve hours per week) and in-firm apprenticeship, the dual system offered young people the opportunity to acquire the skills demanded by employers and provided a structured pathway to full-time employment. Patterns of macro-industrial development in the early FRG also aided the rise in vocational training’s prestige. Many of the new areas of production associated with the high technologies of the postwar era, such as atomic power, space travel, and cybernetics, were underemphasized in the FRG, in some cases because of Allied prohibitions but in others because the imperatives of rebuilding

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the country demanded that resources be deployed toward more traditional manufacturing sectors, the training for which had long been the cornerstone of the dual system. During the 1950s, the contributions of apprentices and skilled craftsmen would be seen as key factors behind the reconstruction of the country’s devastated cities and production facilities and the rising incomes and standards of living associated with the economic miracle, creating a cognitive link in political and popular discourses between the dual system and economic growth that would serve to elevate the postwar prestige of what Taylor reminds us was viewed as a “backwater” institution in the early twentieth century (1981, 280). As long as vocational education and training could provide the skills in demand from industry and secure employment at high wages for that majority of the youth population who had followed the pathway from Volksschule to apprenticeship, policymakers would see little immediate reason to modify either the dual system21 or the differentiated general education system. The second factor contributing to the lack of correspondence between economic attainment and educational expansion in the FRG is found in what economist Friedrich Edding called “the low level of aspiration of the parents themselves” (1967, 108). Parental involvement had long been a key feature of the Gymnasium, with parents expected to help their children with assignments in the afternoons following the end of the school day around noon. The possibility of having to provide such oversight presented problems for many working-class families, who were far more likely than their middle-class counterparts to have both parents employed. Many working-class German parents were further reluctant to send their children to higher schools for fear it would, in Heidenheimer’s words “show up their own failings” and teach children “to think that they were their parents’ betters” (1974, 391). In a study of parental educational choices in Schleswig–Holstein in the late 1950s, only 15 percent of unskilled industrialized workers and no agricultural workers sought to keep their children in education beyond elementary school while 96 percent of upper-class families (which included parents who were academics or high ranking state officials) sent their children to the higher schools (cited in Betts, 1981, 8). It is important to note that the notion of education as an investment in one’s economic future—a concept that drives so much of the present-day discussion of educational access and expansion—had yet to materialize in the FRG in the 1950s. West Germans would double their

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rates of personal consumption between 1950 and 1962, but most of their new income would go toward acquiring consumer goods, rather than investing in education (Kuhlmann, 1970, 60). Increased access to the higher secondary schools for working-class students might have resulted in improved economic and social circumstances in the long term, but in the short term it meant additional years studying in a classroom as opposed to earning a wage on a shop floor; such future-oriented choices were unlikely to be made by families that had come to rely on young members’ earnings in the manual economy to improve basic standards of living. While the percentage of students attending the secondary schools would increase during the 1950s and 1960s, fifteen years after the founding of the Federal Republic and ten years after the Hamburg court’s ruling on parents’ rights in the selection process, the Volksschule remained by far the most frequently attended school type in West Germany, with nearly 70 percent thirteen-year olds enrolled in this school type (Nixdorff, 1969, 39).

The DAEB and the Rahmenplan At the federal level a new forum emerged in the 1950s that served as the most likely drivers of any future adjustments in the general education system and as an ideational transmission path for new ideas to enter policymaking discussions. The German Committee for the Education System (Deutscher Ausschuss für das Erziehungs und Bildungswesen [DAEB]) had been created by the federal government over the opposition of the Länder following a request made by the FDP faction in the Bundestag in 1953, which had raised concerns over potential problems posed by the organizational variation in education across the country. Although such problems were significant,22 particularly before the standardization agreement of the KMK in 1955, the DAEB would come to focus on more general structural questions about the system. The fundamental issue, as the Committee stated in one of its early reports, was that the German system “had not caught up with the changes which have altered the situation and consciousness of society and state during the last fifty years” (DAEB, 1966, 27). The DAEB initially promoted a range of measures designed to realign German schooling with political and social developments, including increased education for democratic citizenship, more academic training for elementary school teachers, lengthening the period of study required for elementary education, and the establishment of the

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Hauptschule,23 a more clearly differentiated and defined upper elementary school that the majority of student would attend before entering the dual system (DAEB, 1966, 353–362). Significantly, the DAEB members’ perceptions of the problems facing the system and the extent to which they could actually influence policy choices were themselves largely shaped by the discursive and institutional constraints outlined above. In Britain, expert bodies within the Central Advisory Councils for Education such as those led by Newsom and Robbins had served as ideational transmission belts for dynamic ability ideas, moving the views of counter-discourse academic originators to policymaking actors and the public and in the process helping to facilitate significant changes in the organization and expansion of education. Unlike its British counterparts, the DAEB relied more on the personal knowledge of its members rather than empirical research, was short of staff and funding, and had very little power to influence policymakers, particularly at the Länder-level (Herrlitz, et al., 2008, 168; Robinsohn & Kuhlmann, 1967, 314). Moreover, the primary recommendations the DAEB would make were not rooted in new pedagogical ideas or revealing studies of the German educational system, but instead in conservative notions about education more closely associated with the fixed ability views. As such, the group’s proposals largely favored continuity with the basic framework of the three-tiered traditional system. The most important contribution to structural policy debates the DAEB would make came in 1959 with the publication of the Framework Plan for the Reorganization and Standardization of the State School System (Rahmenplan zur Umgestaltung und Vereinheitlichung des allgemeinbildenden öffentlichen Schulwesens [Rahmenplan]). On one level, the Rahmenplan was designed to address the tension that was being generated by the combination of social change and institutional rigidity, but more immediately the Committee was concerned with the growing problem of early school leavers and grade repeaters in the general education system. The percentage of students required to repeat school years rose markedly beginning in the mid-1950s, with nearly five percent of all Realschule students and over nine percent of Gymnasium students needing to re-sit an entire grade, with many opting simply to drop out entirely. In Baden-Württemberg in 1962 only about one in five of Gymnasium students completed their course of study in the prescribed time period; students at the Realschule performed better, but nearly half of all students still failed to finish on time (Kuhlmann, 1970, 14–15).

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These high failure rates amounted to a second round of selection that took place within the schools themselves; unlike with the selection at age ten, however, students who failed this second selection often ended up leaving school all together. The solution offered by the DAEB to address this problem was the Förderstufe, a two-year common intermediate schooling stage to be completed after the first four years of the Grundschule. Under the proposal, all students except for a very small minority of young people whose advanced ability was beyond dispute would attend the intermediate stage. These manifestly gifted pupils would then move directly to a new type of academic secondary school, called the Studienschule, but the remaining students would continue in the new common stage. During the Förderstufe, teachers would be better able to assess the specific abilities and talents of individual students than they could in the Grundschule, thereby improving the accuracy of their recommendations for placement in one of the three traditional schools, which would now occur after 6th grade, or when students were around age twelve. While implementation of the Förderstufe would clearly represent a change in the organization of West German general education, by most estimates, the proposals made by the DAEB in the Rahmenplan were still traditionalist in substance, especially when contrasted with pre-1933 reform ideas such as the Einheitsschule. Though postponed for some students, differentiation and early selection would still exist under the new plan. As the authors of the Rahmenplan stated: The different educational requirements that our society, based on the division of labor, puts to its young people and the differences in the educational abilities of these young people, compels us to adhere to three educational goals of our school system, which can be reached after periods of study of various length: a comparatively brief one connected to work and career, a middle one, and a higher one. (DAEB, 1966, 75)24

Despite its relative conservatism, the Rahmenplan would find itself opposed by long-standing supporters of differentiation, including the Philologenverband, which among its many criticisms, claimed that the plan was based on the false premise of the existence of significant ability reserves. In its published response to the plan, the group argued that “it has been shown by many parties that theoretical ability reserves are not present in great amounts” (Schorb, 1960, 28) and cited Huth’s

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talent distribution figures to justify its rejection of the Förderstufe (see Zimmer, 1975, 62). The Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände) made a similar argument, stating that “according to the recently emerging results of scientific ability investigations one is to doubt whether a still untapped educational reserve exists to any degree, as the [DAEB] presumes as a given premise of its reform proposal” (Schorb, 1960, 163). Whatever the views of such groups, the suggestions provided in the Rahmenplan, along with similar proposals to extend the period of common schooling such as the Bremer Plan issued in 1960 by the GEW teacher union,25 were near-universally ignored by the federal states. Although the KMK opened the door to the individual Länder to implement the Förderstufe in its 1964 Hamburg Agreement, by the end of the decade only Hesse would have instituted a mixed-ability intermediate stage in any of its schools, though for only a small minority of students (Nixdorff, 1969).

Conclusion In a survey of differentiation practices in Western Europe written in 1975, the educational sociologist Jürgen Zimmer noted the remarkable correspondence between the structure of a country’s general education system and beliefs concerning the provision of ability and its distribution in the population. The tendency in countries with vertically organized school systems – to prepare particular students for particular occupational categories – correlates closely not only with the dominance of nativistic theories of ability, but also with the attempt to separate a biologically determined, distinguished and easily identifiable elite as early as possible through discriminating and permanent methods of selection and to provide it with an appropriate secondary school education. As far, however, as dynamic theories of ability influence school policy, they correspond with attempts to abolish vertical forms of differentiation and to minimize the contingent academic inequality of opportunities of the particular student populations with social handicaps. (Zimmer, 1975, 6)

The dominant type of ability discourse in a given country, as the British case study demonstrates, could change. In many nations of Western Europe, a set of ideas that stood in sharp contrast to the interwar and

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immediate postwar beliefs on youth, ability, and educational institutional design would help give rise to new discourse coalitions that would challenge the economic, social, educational, and scientific rationale behind secondary school selection and reconfigure the institutional arrangements of general education. In West Germany, however, cultural federalism and structural legacies from the Nazi era had hindered the emergence of new ideas and coalitions, but by the middle of the 1960s, this situation would begin to change. As the next chapter discusses, challenges to the dominant policy discourse would also arise in the FRG, with actors raising economic, sociological, and pedagogical objections to many of the assumptions upon which the three-tiered German education system had been founded. Crucially, however, this extended lag meant that when the West German variant of the dynamic ability discourse would emerge, it would be in a markedly different political and cultural climate than had existed only a decade earlier, contributing to the ultimate failure of structural reform initiatives during the 1970s.

Notes 1. In a historical study of West German education in Hesse and West Berlin in the first two postwar decades, Brian Puaca (2009) challenges the conceptions of Robinsohn, Kuhlmann and others that the West German school system was “stagnant” between 1945 and 1965, arguing that significant changes did indeed take place in areas such as political education, teacher training, and history instruction during the period. Importantly, however, the changes documented by Puaca consist almost entirely of internal rather than structural reforms; the external organization of general education, he acknowledges, remained largely unaltered into the 1960s. Moreover, in choosing Hesse and West Berlin, Puaca has selected the two West German regions with the most progressive traditions in education in all of West Germany—as case studies they are almost certainly unreflective of developments across the FRG. 2. Named after Bad Honnef, a spa town in North Rhine Westphalia near Bonn where Federal and Länder officials formulated the system. 3. The percentage of students moving from the Realschule to the Gymnasium after initial selection, for example, was only 1.1% in the early 1960s (Kuhlmann, 1970, 13). 4. Sweden provides another democratic example. As in many other northern and central European countries, the Swedish general education system had been based on the traditional German model and developed in the

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

late nineteenth and early twentieth century along differentiated lines. Growing dissatisfaction with the system, particularly over the admissions procedures for the secondary realskola and the division between general and vocational education, had led the government in 1940 to appoint a group of education experts known as the School Committee to examine general education and provide recommendations for future policy Significantly, the four educational psychologists on the committee recommended unanimously to the government that the traditional system of early differentiation be retained, maintaining that reliable methods rooted in psychological understandings of intelligence and ability existed to identify at a fairly young age (around eleven) the roughly ten percent of young people with academic or theoretical abilities (Husén, 1962, 12). The psychologists’ opposition had a significant impact on the 1940 debates, helping to create an impasse that would delay the start of the reform process in Sweden until later in the decade (Heidenheimer, 1974, 389). For a history of the Bund, see Neuner (1980). A 1964 title article on the school system in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, identified Huth and Müller as leading proponents of the view that access to the Gymnasium and Abitur should be sharply limited (“Die letzte Hürde,” 1964, December 8). For a discussion of some of the inconsistencies, methodological problems, and spurious conclusions in Huth’s research, see Drewek (1989, 200). Other academic proponents of nativistic ability theories from this period include Ilse Schidetzky, Hubert Walter, and Wilhelm Neuhaus (see Zimmer, 1969, 150). Drewek (1989) challenges the view of Zimmer, Kuhlmann, and Robinsohn that the ideas of Müller and Huth were broadly accepted by the sociological and psychological research community during this period, highlighting critical contemporary work by Lehmensick (1950a; 1950b) and Roth (1949), among others. Yet Drewek also acknowledges the political influence Müller and Huth had in the early FRG, noting that “their work [had] a not insignificant relative importance within the restorative currents of this time” (1989, 212). To the British and Swedish cases already discussed can be added comprehensive reforms in France. The College d’Enseignement Secondaire was created as a comprehensive middle school in 1963 and as an alternative to selection at age 11 for placement in one of three schools in the French differentiated system (see Gaziel, 1989). A case in point is the Central Advisory Council study Children and their Primary Schools (commonly referred to as the Plowden report) published in Britain in 1967, which examined how elementary education was taught in the UK and assessed its impact on the transfer to secondary schools. The Report, which significantly influenced the structure of the British

8

12.

13.

14.

15.

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primary system, found that the UK was in need of a wholesale reorientation in elementary education and called for more “child-centered” approaches to teaching. Although the report was published in abridged form in German in 1972, its findings were virtually ignored and its impact on debates in the country were, in Gruber’s terms, “insignificant” (Gruber, 1987, 57). Joining Gymnasium instructors in opposing change to the differentiated system were the Realschule teachers. The increasing prominence of the Realschule as the result of its postwar spikes in enrollment during the 1950s, along with its growing ties with industry, in the immediate postwar decades served to raise fears among its teaching staffs that any significant reform would entail a loss of its distinctive position within the general education framework (Robinsohn & Kuhlmann 1967). A former Dresden school inspector who had battled proponents of the Einheitsschule in the 1920s, Hartnacke also served for a period in the 1930s as the co-editor of Volk und Rasse (People and Race) a leading “scientific” journal that published research associated with Nazi racial theory. The DAEB had recommended adding a mandatory ninth year of study at the Volksschule in 1954 and later a tenth year. By 1956 a number of Länder, including Hamburg and Schleswig–Holstein, as well as West Berlin, had extended the period of mandatory study to include the ninth year but the tenth year proved more controversial. As Taylor (1981, 162–167) discusses, employers were split on the issue of the ninth year, with the craft sector completely opposed to any extension and industrial concerns more open to the idea. Both sectors, however, opposed the addition of a tenth year. The trade unions, for their part, supported the extension of general education, provided that students spent the time as students in state-administered schools rather than as apprentices in company training programs. The smallest of the three primary parties in the 1950s and 1960s, the liberal Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, [FDP]) would assume contradictory positions on the issue of educational reform in the different Länder during the occupation era and early years of the FRG. The party, which served as a junior coalition partner in most of the CDU-led federal governments between 1949 and 1965, supported the introduction of such reforms in Berlin in 1947, but voted against the same reforms four years later. While the party advocated for the extension of the Grundschule in 1947, it insisted a similar arrangement be ended in Schleswig–Holstein in 1951 (Robinsohn & Kuhlmann, 1967, 325– 326). Under the influence of Dr. Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, a staunch supporter of comprehensivization and later State Secretary for Education in SPD-FDP coalition led by Willy Brandt (see Chapter 9), the

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

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party would begin in the 1960s expressing more consistent support for dismantling the vertical system. For the classic early statement on this movement, see Kirchheimer, 1966. The figures cited by Lohmar and Schröder in the debate were published in Müller’s 1956 study, “Talent and Social Stratification in Highly Industrialized Society” (Begabung und soziale Schichtung in der hochindustrialisierten Gesellschaft ). To the same questionnaire the CDU and FDP responded with unqualified support for the three-tiered system (Ried, 1956, 148). The view that differentiation in general education would be acceptable provided that it was based on ability would be reflected in the revolutionary Bad Godesberg program issued in 1959. The Program, which made no calls for change in the organization of general education, stated that, “all privileges in access to educational institutions must be abolished. Only talent and performance should make promotion possible” (SPD, 1959). This pattern would change markedly beginning in the 1980s, when secondary school graduates, mainly from the intermediate school ranks but also from the Gymnasium, would begin entering the dual system in significant numbers (Ertl & Phillips, 2000). Up until the 1970s, the capacity of the state to influence the in-firm apprenticeship system was largely limited, since the system was selfgoverned by industry thorough local chambers of commerce. Despite calls in the early postwar era by organized labor and its political allies in the SPD for greater state oversight of the system and the extension of co-determination rights to firms’ training programs, efforts aimed at overhauling the dual system would produce few tangible legislative results (see Taylor, 1981; Thelen, 2004). The wide variation in standards among the Länder in the early 1950s, prompted a popular maxim, “Vater versetzt, Sohn sitzengeblieben,” (Father transferred, son is held back) to describe the situation faced by many West German families at the time (Friedeburg, 1989, 319). The suggestion for implementing the Hauptschule was first made in 1942 by Hitler himself, who hoped to create a new secondary school in Germany based on an Austrian model (Lowe, 1992, 18). As Betts (1981, 7) notes, the authors of the Rahmenplan adopted a view of the relationship between the three-tiered school system and three main types of employment that was similar to the one expressed in the 1943 Norwood report in Britain. Among the sharpest critics of the Bremer Plan were representatives of West Germany’s churches, who claimed that the system proposed in the plan resembled that of East Germany and its implementation would lead to the dechristianization of West German schooling (Burger, 2017).

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Paulston, R. G. (1968). Educational change in Sweden: Planning and accepting the comprehensive school reforms. Teachers College Press. Proctor, R. (1988). Racial hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Harvard University Press. Puaca, B. M. (2009). Learning democracy: Education reform in West Germany, 1945–1965. Berghahn Books. Ried, G. (1956). Dokumente Zur Schulpolitik. Stellungnahmen Des Deutschen Philologenverbandes Und Anderer Verbände Und Einrichtungen 1949–1955. Diesterweg. Robinsohn, S. B., & Kuhlmann, J. C. (1967). Two decades of non-reform in West German education. Comparative Education Review, 11(3), 311–330. Roth, H. (1949). Der Elfjährige und die Schulreform. Die Sammlung, 4(8/9), 562–574. Roth, H. (1969). Begabung Und Lernen. Ergebnisse Und Folgerungen Neuer Forschungen. Klett. Sass, K. (2018). Cleavages and coalitions. Comprehensive school reforms in Norway and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany (1954–1979) [Doctoral Disseration: The University of Bergen]. Bergen Open Research Archive. Schorb, A. O. (1960). Für und wider den Rahmenplan: eine Dokumentation. Klett. Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SPD). (1959). Godesberger Programm Grundsatzprogramm der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Beschlossen vom Außerordentlichen Parteitag der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands in Bad Godesberg vom 13. bis 15. November 1959. Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Taylor, M. E. (1981). Education and work in the Federal Republic of Germany. Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society. Thelen, K. (2004). How institutions evolve: The political economy of skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge University Press. Undeutsch, U. (1960). Die Sexta-Aufnahmeprüfung. Kritik und Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten—Die Gymnasialunterricht, 1, 7. Zimmer, J. (1969). Restauration oder Innovation: Zur Rolle der Psychologie in der Reform des Bildungswesens. In K. Aurin (Ed.), Bildungspolitische Probleme in psychologischer Sicht (pp. 146–163). Europ. Verlagsanst. Zimmer, J. (1975). Wissenschaft und Schulreform: Ein Interkultureller Vergleich zur Funktion der Psychologie im Ablauf von Schulreformen. In F. Braun (Ed.), Schulreform Und Gesellschaft: Vergleichende Studien Über Die Gesellschaftl. Bedingungen Von Schulreformen in 7 Europ. Ländern (Part II). Max-Planck-Inst. für Bildungsforschung.

CHAPTER 9

Germany III: The Failure of Reform

Introduction Beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating through the mid-1960s, a group of West German academics and researchers would begin to challenge the fixed ability discourse that dominated education thinking and policy in the first postwar decades in the FRG and in the process would elevate the issue of general education to a level of importance unseen since the days of the New Pedagogy movement some fifty years earlier. Attempts during this time to draw attention to the drawbacks of the traditional German system would help generate the first real political debate about education since the occupation period. Unlike the Allied reform initiatives of the late 1940s, however, the drive for change in the 1960s would largely be the result of ideational factors, including, crucially, the emergence of a counter-discourse in West Germany that would recast an education system that had been viewed as a bedrock of stability, continuity, and past national greatness into a source of economic decline and social inequality that was premised on a false set of beliefs about the nature of human ability. The West German variant of the dynamic ability discourse would directly influence political debates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While it would be primarily political actors on the Left, most notably the SPD, that would seek to transfer the new thinking from the academic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_9

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to the policy sphere, the ideas of the new discourse, by challenging fundamental assumptions behind the traditional education system, would create conditions in which blanket opposition to reform of the type that characterized conservative positions in the early postwar era would be viewed as distinctly anachronistic by the end of the 1960s. By then, some of the most hardened advocates of educational traditionalism would begin openly considering the possibility of change in the organization of general education along more comprehensive lines. By the mid-1970s, however, the political, economic, and social context in which reform advocates found themselves had altered significantly from the previous decade and, following a protracted attempt to reshape the school system, the SPDFDP coalition in power would largely abandon its education reform plans. The three-tiered system of Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium would emerge from the period in effectively the same place as it was prior to the emergence of the reformist movement.

The German Dynamic Ability Discourse in Education By any measure, the context in which West German political and social institutions operated had undergone a massive shift during the eighteen years between the Nazi surrender and the resignation of Konrad Adenauer as the FRG’s first chancellor. Occupied in a devastated country in 1945, West Germans would set about rebuilding their industrial and commercial base with such success that within five years of the country’s founding, living standards would already surpass those recorded just prior to the start of the war (Balfour, 1968, 174–181; Taylor, 1981, 121). Spurred by Ludwig Erhard’s 1948 currency reform and the rising international demand for German manufactured goods, the West German economy created some seven million jobs in the 1950s, growing at an astonishing 7.96% during the decade and a still impressive 4.45% in the 1960s (Owen-Smith, 1994, 9, 257). This dramatic surge in national wealth was reflected in the perceptions of ordinary FRG citizens of their own personal economic conditions—the percentage of West Germans responding that they were better off now than a year ago increased from 12% in 1951 to 25% in 1962, while the percentage claiming to be worse off dropped from 56 to 18% during the same time period (Noelle-Neumann & Neumann, 1967, 374). By the time Adenauer stepped down at age 87 in 1963, the destruction, territorial division, occupation, and Nazi political legacy

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that had served as the backdrop to the country upon his ascendancy to the chancellorship in 1949 had given way to more “normal” concerns over the future direction of a West German society that was more stable and prosperous than it had been at any time since the days of the Imperial Reich. Debates that had been muted by the overriding common imperative of reconstruction in the 1950s spilled out into the political arena in the 1960s as actors would increasingly question the fundamental assumptions upon which the institutions of the postwar state had been built. Linked to the country’s growing prosperity in the 1950s were demographic changes; West Germany would experience a spike in its birth rates beginning late in that decade that would peak in 1965 with live births outnumbering deaths by over 400,000 (Federal Research Division, U.S. Library of Congress, n.d.). By the mid-1960s, the population growth had begun to affect the total number of students in the general education system. While the number starting their first year at the Volksschule grew slowly between 1950 and 1962 from 800,000 to 816,000, between 1963 and 1966, the number rose from 816,000 to over 937,000. Similar leaps were observed in the in the secondary schools, where the total student population increased from 117,000 in 1960 to 145,000 in 1966 (Kuhlmann, 1970, 51). Geopolitical considerations would also affect the attitudes of West Germans toward domestic institutions, including the education system. As in Britain, the onset of the Cold War had caused policymakers in the FRG to consider the education system in terms of the strategic rivalry between the West and the Soviet bloc. In particular, the “Sputnik shock” in the West that followed the launch of the first satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957 convinced many in the FRG, including Chancellor Adenauer, that the Soviets had surpassed the West in the production of talent and helped to generate a new focus on expanding education in the country (see Becker, 1989, 331). It was against this backdrop that a new discursive framework centered around the need to expand educational opportunities for young Germans would begin to emerge. As the previous chapter discussed, the ideational originators of the fixed ability discourse coalition and their counterparts in politics, business, and schooling explicitly rejected the notion that economic growth could be driven by educational expansion. In their view, national wealth was dependent on the cultivation of a specially trained educational elite. Limiting access to the secondary schools and universities

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to this biologically endowed group not only reflected the distributional limits of ability in West German society, but was the arrangement best suited for producing a leadership class to oversee academics, business, and state administration. To such beliefs, the most appropriate educational path for most young Germans consisted of eight or perhaps nine years of general education in the Volksschule/Hauptschule followed by three years of vocational training in the dual system. Expanding these students’ access to higher education would result in a massive decline in educational standards, a weakening in the quality of West German leaders, and an end to German economic competitiveness and productivity. Within industry, new thinking about education and the economy that challenged this view had begun to emerge in the late 1950s, reflected most notably in the Ettlinger Circle (Ettlinger Kreis ), a group of industrialists and educationalists led by the Weinheim engineer and businessman Hans Freudenberg that produced a series of influential booklets examining the relationship between the changing conditions of economic production in Germany and the education system. In their writings, Circle members considered the effects on the skill demands of industry of developments in production and technology that had occurred since the school system was formed in the nineteenth century, concluding that there was now an urgent need to improve the qualifications of the average worker and increase the percentage of students in the secondary schools. Industry today needs not only increasing numbers of employees with middle school certificates or the Abitur, but beyond that a wide class of reliable employees with improved elementary school training, who are schooled in the skills of cooperation. The unqualified worker who goes through training in the present-day elementary and occupation schools (Berufsschule) is not at all sufficiently prepared for life the in the modern world (quoted in Kuhlmann, 1970, 57)

Although the Ettlinger Circle would advocate for improving and lengthening of elementary school and for greater ease of transfer between different school types in the general education system, the Circle, and business community more generally, remained largely ambivalent on the question of whether structural change in the differentiated organization of the education system was desired. The needs of this new economy did not easily translate into clear pedagogical categories and a particular school structure (Kuhlmann, 1970, 57). To the extent that industry and

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employers sought to influence education in the FRG, they would focus their efforts largely on the vocational sphere rather than on primary and secondary schooling (Sass, 2018, 197). By the late 1950s new academic conceptions and research questioning the reigning view of education and the economy would also begin to emerge in West Germany. Coupled with a new acceptance of governmental planning, this thinking rejected the belief that the West German economy demanded a small percentage of highly qualified elite to guide the economy and a much larger population of workers trained for employment in manual occupations. Among the more influential academic developments would be the ascendancy of human capital theory (HCT), which had originated among American scholars in the 1950s.1 The central tenet of the theory held that by creating skills needed for economic growth, investment in education should translate into higher personal earnings for individuals and greater overall productivity for society (Williams, 1982, 98–99). In making this claim, HCT directly contradicted the basic assumption of the fixed ability discourse, since it held that the level of talent in the population was neither constant nor the primary determinant of economic wealth in a society; both ability and productivity could be raised through a general increase in the provision of education. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the ideas of HCT would come to hold significant influence in policymaking circles within Western countries, including the FRG (Herrlitz et al. 2008, 168). A key moment in this evolution was an OECD conference on education held in Washington, DC in October 1961 attended by most member states’ ministers of finance and—where such ministries existed—education. At the conference, a set of policy experts from European and American research institutes and universities presented the economic case for expanding access to secondary and higher education; true to the Keynesian thinking dominant in economic policymaking circles at the time, conference presenters argued that long-term growth could be enhanced by a greater governmental role in educational forecasting, planning, and investment. These arguments appeared to fall on receptive ears. In the words of Phillip Coombs, the conference’s chairman and an American assistant secretary of state, the OECD conference represented a “breakthrough” in how governments considered the relationship between education and economic growth and demonstrated the benefits of extending practices of state intervention and long-term target setting from the economic

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to the educational sphere, particularly among the European members in attendance (quoted in Elvin, 1961, 98). For West Germans, the conference also highlighted how far the country was falling behind other European nations in training advanced manpower, a fact widely publicized in the FRG by a 1962 report by the KMK on the proceedings of the conference, which on the basis of the conference’s findings called for the rapid further development of school and higher education policy (Merritt et al., 1971, 129; OECDKonferenz, 1962). Such expansion had already begun in the West German general education system, albeit at a significantly lower rate than in other countries. The percentage of all 7th graders enrolled in Realschulen jumped from 9.6% in 1954 to 17.1% in 1966, while the percentage of school graduates who completed studies at Realschule increased from 8.7% in 1954 to 12.4% in 1963. For the Gymnasium, the percentage of thirteen-year-old boys and girls in attendance increased from 13.1 to 18.3% and 10.3–14.2% respectively between 1952 and 1957 and the percentage of the eighteen-year-old cohort completing the Abitur rose from 4.2% of the population to the 6.9 percentage between 1950 and 1965 (OECD data, cited in Gass-Bolm, 2005, 135; Kuhlmann, 1970, 25; Robinsohn & Kuhlmann, 1967, 329).2 While the 1962 KMK report helped publicize West Germany’s poor comparative performance in education, such findings had been discussed in academic circles for some time. Since the late 1950s Friedrich Edding, an attendee at the Washington conference generally regarded as the FRG’s first professor of Bildungsökonomie, or economics of education, had demonstrated in his research that education in the FRG was both underperforming and underfunded relative to other nations (Edding, 1959; Hahn, 1998, 118). The significance of the OECD meeting and KMK report lay in how they would communicate the education system’s shortcomings from the academic sphere to the public and political circles. This communicative process would accelerate significantly in the spring of 1964 with the publication of a series of articles in the German Evangelical church’s popular weekly journal Christ und Welt written by Georg Picht that carried the dramatic title “The German Educational Catastrophe” (Die Deutsche Bildungskatastrophe). Picht, a theologian and director of an education research institute in Heidelberg who was a former member of the DAEB, translated the empirical findings of Edding and the OECD, and the abstract economic arguments of HCT into language that resonated with the larger public. In so doing, he helped to generate

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a sense of impending crisis in Germany in a remarkably short time over a system that until recently had been viewed as model for other countries to emulate. In his analysis of the situation in the FRG, Picht invoked the fundamental HCT premise of the direct relationship between the level of education in a society and its economic growth. Through the Weimar era, he argued, Germany’s education system had performed magnificently, producing the optimal mix of skills and abilities needed to guide the nation from its pre-unification condition as a loosely affiliated confederation of largely agrarian kingdoms and duchies and a handful of independent city-states to a modern unified and industrialized nationstate in the center of Europe that had quickly risen to the ranks of the world’s great powers. By the 1960s, however, the last generation of Germans to be educated during this golden age was leaving the workforce. According to Picht, this development had in fact been underway since the early 1950s but had been masked by the influx of educated East Germans fleeing the GDR. With the newly erected Berlin Wall keeping Easterners from replacing retiring Westerners, the FRG would soon face an enormous dearth of educated labor, endangering everything that had been achieved during the period of postwar reconstruction. As Picht wrote, “An educational crisis means an economic crisis. The economic boom that has lasted up until now will come to a sudden end if we lack qualified young workers, without whom no system of production can be successful in the technological age. If the education system fails, the continued existence of the entire society is threatened” (1964, 17). To avoid this fate, Picht argued that the FRG needed more young people obtaining a secondary qualification for entry into the university. Contrary to the elite notions that held the Gymnasium’s purpose to be the production of a small and exclusive cadre of future leaders, Picht directly associated the size of the higher school-leaving population with the country’s prospects for future economic growth. “The number of Abiturienten,” he wrote, “signifies the intellectual potential of a people, and in the modern world the competitiveness of the economy, the level of GNP, and the political position depend on intellectual potential” (Picht, 1964, 26). According to Picht’s data, nearly every other West European country would be producing significantly higher percentages of Abiturienten than West Germany by 1970, despite the increases in the FRG during the first two postwar decades. Projections for Sweden, Norway, and France found

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that roughly one in five of their young people would obtain a college entrance certificate and in Denmark and Italy one in ten, but in the Federal Republic just over one in twenty (Picht, 1964, 25). Not only was a smaller proportion of youth completing academic secondary schooling in West Germany than in other countries, but the foreseeable supply of German college students would not suffice even to fill 1970 requirements for teachers, potentially leading to a shutdown of the system that would deprive the German economy of skilled labor. To avert this doomsday scenario, Picht called for a raising of the number of Abiturienten the country was producing each year, arguing that significant talent reserves existed in the FRG, particularly in rural areas. While Picht’s primary argument for school reform was rooted in economic considerations, he also highlighted the role played by the education system in determining the social configuration of society. In his view, the relationship among education, class, and wealth had changed markedly in the twentieth century. With the breakdown of the strict social hierarchies and the rise of the modern “performance society” (Leistungsgesellschaft ), social ascendancy and the distribution of income had largely come to be a function of educational chances. “The school,” Picht wrote, had become “a socio-political direction mechanism, that determines the social structure more strongly than all the social legislation of the last fifty years combined” (1964, 32). In emphasizing the social consequences of the general education system, Picht was going against a long-standing taboo in German pedagogy. For most of the twentieth century, German educationalists had argued that social questions should not enter into education discussions, and certainly not those related to policy (Kuhlmann, 1970, 75).3 But by the mid-1960s, the manifold social inequalities present in the general education system could no longer be ignored. In the wake of Edding and Picht, a new generation of sociologists educated after the war and trained in modern statistical and surveying methods would begin to demonstrate that entire subpopulations within the FRG were being excluded from higher education and they would openly question whether the system’s traditional focus on cultivating a small elite in the Gymnasien and universities corresponded with the modern democratic society that the FRG was purported to be. The most prominent and influential member of this new generation was Ralf Dahrendorf, a Tübingen sociology professor who would briefly sit as a member of the Bundestag for the FDP during the first

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SPD/FDP coalition that took office in 1969 and later serve in the European Commission before becoming chancellor of the London School of Economics (and eventually a British citizen) from 1974 to 1984.4 In Dahrendorf’s view, the emphasis by Picht, Edding, and others on the economic implications of Germany’s educational shortcomings highlighted only one part of the problem. In his 1965 book Bildung ist Bürgerrecht (Education is a Civil Right) he argued that schools were more important that issues of labor and productivity in creating equal life changes for the entire population. “A country can neither become nor remain free,” he wrote, “if it seals off from its people the opportunities that general and higher education offer them” (1965, 9). Such a sealing off was, according to Dahrendorf, just what certain groups in the population were experiencing; young women, rural and working-class youth, and, to a smaller degree, young Catholics, were all significantly underrepresented in higher education, while other groups, most notably the children of civil servants and academics, were dramatically overrepresented (1965, 48–53). For Dahrendorf, the formal equality of opportunity provided for under the Basic Law had clearly been inadequate to stop such gross disparities in the allocation of life chances, as were the “passive” measures proposed by Picht in reaction to the problems of an unmodernized education system. The FRG, in Dahrendorf’s view, required an active education policy (aktive Bildungspolitik) that expanded access to higher education for underrepresented groups by establishing education as a fundamental right of the citizenry. Only then could true equality of opportunity (Chancengelegenheit ) be achieved in West Germany and a democratic society be realized to go alongside the country’s democratic political system. Like Picht, Dahrendorf’s advocacy for educational expansion offered a challenge to traditional arrangements. Yet Dahrendorf went considerably further than Picht in engaging the assumptions of the proponents of static and limited ability, maintaining that such beliefs were manifestly indefensible from a scientific standpoint and systematically citing and refuting them in Bildung ist Bürgerrecht. The first of these arguments is directed to the question of the education reserves… Is there enough talent available to double the number of Abiturienten? Won’t an active education policy run up against the natural boundaries of ability? And up crops the ominous number of 5 percent

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“theoretical ability types” in the Federal Republic, which alone is to indicate the reservoir of Abiturienten and by whose measure there are already too many students in the higher schools today – a conclusion reached not only by vulgar pedagogues. …It is necessary first to recognize that alleged facts such as the discourse (Rede) of a determined percentage of theoretical or some other kind of ability type are not provable in a scientific sense. Such declarations…are premised on an untenably discontinuous distribution of ability. The laws of probability suggest that ability of any tendency is arranged on a continual scale, so that the determination of whether one wants to consider 5, 10, or 15 percent sufficient for specific purposes is in any event arbitrary. There is no test whose conclusions permit that only 5 percent – or, in the other extreme 20 percent, have the ability to complete the Abitur successfully, except the experiment of reality itself, namely allowing as many as possible to take the Abitur. …If the modern ability research has yielded anything clear, it is this: that ability cannot be statistically seen...Talent is in fact a potential, a highly dynamic factor. It can be developed; under unfavorable conditions, it can remain unawakened and even regress. The discourse that ability was a fixed and clear factor is thus pure vulgar psychology and is at best connected to the science of the turn of the century…each operative thesis based on a static conception of ability with definitive numbers is certainly false. (1965, 54–55, 56)

If theoretical ability types were truly fixed in the population, Dahrendorf asked, what explained the variation in the percentage of the West German population obtaining the Abitur in different Länder? In Rhineland-Palatinate, the figure stood at four percent, but in the neighboring state of Hesse, eight percent of the same population had passed the exam. The number of female Abitur holders in West Berlin, he observed, was twice the number as in Hamburg. No one, Dahrendorf maintained, could seriously claim on the basis of these facts that the hereditary endowment of talent was double in some Länder what it was in others. Whatever their acknowledged influence, arguments against expanding access to higher education rooted in claims of fixed and static ability were manifestly false (1965, 55). It is hard to overstate the effect of Dahrendorf and especially Picht’s writings on the public and political debates over education in West Germany. As Hahn (1998, 121) notes, the latter’s German Educational Catastrophe created a veritable panic, complete with a media frenzy, the calling of emergency sessions in both the federal and Land parliaments,

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and a spate of quickly formulated government programs designed to increase the number of Gymnasium students and assuage public concerns. In Bavaria, education authorities established a contingency program to tap its educational reserves, distributing 500,000 brochures with the title “Something Should Become of Your Child” (Aus ihrem Kind soll etwas werden) meant to encourage parents to pursue higher education options for their children. In accordance with Picht’s recommendation, Baden Württemberg education officials pledged to double the number of Abiturenten and began a campaign called “Students to the Countryside” (Studenten aufs Land) that sent secondary school students into rural areas to try and convince parents of the benefits of higher education. In 1965, a group calling itself Aktion Gemeinsinn (Campaign Public Spirit) began a public relations campaign to boost higher education participation rates, particularly among traditionally underrepresented social categories. The group, whose members included such notables as Peter von Siemens, former Prussian Prince Wilhelm Karl and the wives of both Federal President Heinrich Lübke and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, published ads in West German newspapers calling on parents of middle and lower classes to utilize the Elternrecht to send their children to better schools and encourage them to seek greater levels of education. Noting how only eight percent of young people in West Germany (compared to 31% in France and 64% in the United States) spent longer than eight years in full-time education, the ads highlighted the benefits of extended schooling in terms of increased financial returns. As one of the psychologists commissioned by the group’s advertising company to work on the campaign stated, such convincing was needed among lower class Germans because, “common people think little about higher education” (“Product” 1965, 58). Young people themselves also became involved. In July 1965, 100,000 German university students held a demonstration in Bonn that called on the government to improve the state of education in the FRG by increasing levels of national planning and enhancing cooperation between the Bund and Länder in financing schools and universities. The protest was the direct result of the Christ und Welt articles, which had, according to Der Spiegel, “inflamed” the Freiburg students’ association and inspired its members to arrange a meeting with Picht and organize the July demonstration (“Ins Freie” 6 July 1965). Within a period of just a few years, education, which had been an issue of comparatively minor importance for most of the FRG’s early existence,

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was suddenly thrust to the fore of the domestic policy agenda, unleashing a reform cycle that would last for the next decade. To be sure, the DAEB had identified serious structural problems in the West German general education system as early as 1955, but it was only with Picht and Dahrendorf that closed discussions among academics and policy experts would become open public debates that would create the discursive opportunity space for reform. It is important to note that in terms of policy recommendations, the first wave of reform advocates in West Germany focused largely on expanding the number of high school graduates within the existing framework of early selection and differentiation. As Herrlitz points out, “Even the education reformers Picht and Dahrendorf in their well-known polemics at the beginning of the 1960s were still far from considering a structural reform of the selective system” (2008, 16). In their view, developing talent and expanding opportunity in German education was essentially a quantitative problem that could be solved by boosting higher education attendance rates—especially for traditionally underrepresented groups—and limiting the percentage of drop-outs (Friedeburg, 1989, 372). For a second wave of reformers, however, neither the economic dimension emphasized by Picht nor the social one highlighted by Dahrendorf would be possible to address without a fundamental organizational reform of general education. Simple numerical expansion without structural change would not correct a system founded on a set of assumptions that were increasingly being discredited. Dahrendorf’s attacks on these assumptions in Bildung ist Bürgerrecht reflected a larger trend, particularly within academic sociology, toward reconsidering ability as a biological phenomenon and questioning the influence of the fixed ability conception on the German educational and occupational frameworks (Kuhlmann, 1970, 119). Empirical support for this view would come from a raft of new studies carried out in the late 1960s that cast serious doubt on such understandings of the relationship among social environment, academic ability, and selective school systems. In North Rhine Westphalia, one study demonstrated that some 40% of Realschule students had the ability—measured by standardized tests—to attend the Gymnasium, while under the existing placement practices, only six percent of them would be deemed suitable by teachers for transfer into the higher school.5 Other studies also identified the presence of similarly talented students who had been placed in the Hauptschule after the

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initial selection and were cut off from further educational opportunities (Kuhlmann, 1970, 13). Observers would also begin to raise doubts about whether in a period of technological automation and shifting production techniques the three-tiered system really corresponded to West Germany’s occupational structure as well. If anything, some argued, the relationship had become inverted, with continued differentiation in education actually propping up an outmoded conception of the types of occupations in the West German economy and in so doing delaying necessary adjustments in the labor market and economy. As the sociologist Helmut Schelsky explained it, “three types of occupation do not determine the school system, rather the three-tiered division of schools is carrying a social and education taxonomy into the system of occupations, that socially and occupationally are becoming increasingly questionable” (quoted in Kuhlmann, 1970, 17). The most influential of this second wave of studies would be the result of the creation of a new federal advisory body on education, the German Education Council (Deutscher Bildungsrat [DBR]) in 1965. While the new council technically replaced the DAEB, two factors would render the DBR a significantly more powerful body with a clearer mandate and greater influence in shaping political debates. First, it included representatives from the political parties and other interest groups, including trade unions and churches, in addition to educational researchers and academics. Second, the environment in which the DBR would carry out its charge in the 1960s was radically different from the one in which the DAEB had operated in the 1950s, marked by a much greater sense of urgency among politicians and the public as a result of the debate unleashed by Picht, Dahrendorf, and other agents of the West German counter-discourse (see Hahn, 1998, 117). Reflecting the tight interlinkages between academic conceptions of ability and the organization of general education, the first report produced by the DBR summarized the current state of research on ability and learning (Begabung und Lernen). Edited by the Göttingen pedagogy professor Heinrich Roth, the report offered a clear and comprehensive repudiation of the conceptions of fixed and inherited ability. In its introduction, DBR chairman Karl Dietrich Erdmann, a historian from Kiel, provided a vision of a German education system founded on the new principles articulated by the report’s authors. “School organization and didactics will not originate in the idea of a preformed constant quantity

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of ability,” he wrote, “but will rather be oriented around how ability can be developed, furthered, and guided.” In the future school, Erdmann maintained, the old correspondence between three dominant ability types and three kinds of occupation would give way to a new arrangement in which, “the individual will be helped to find the path to self realization in the highest possible individual performance he can achieve and society will find on the basis of a wide and differentiated promotion of ability and those forces which it requires for a variety of functions and occupation” (Erdmann in Roth, 1969, 6). The 1968 DBR study represented a decisive break from the thinking that had dominated academic and political discussions of education in Germany for decades. As Ludwig von Friedeburg, a professor of sociology at Free University of Berlin in the 1960s who later became Culture Minister in Hessen (see below) described the findings, “the report compiled by the Bildungsrat from a variety of disciplines laid out a striking compendium on the connection between ability and learning that would be decisive for the broader discussion. Ability was not to be understood as an isolated statistical factor, determined by genetic endowment. In terms of the learning process, it proved to be changeable under the influence of many factors, that together determine whether cognitive capabilities and the potential for performance will develop or not.” For the organization of general education, the implication of these findings was clear: “for the separate school types there is no hereditary biological justification” (Friedeburg, 1989, 374).

Partisan Actors and Discursive Change The new discourse in education in the FRG would be decisive in launching the political movement for school reform. As Friedeburg claimed, “The impetus (to reform) came not from politics or administration but from engaged researchers who drew educational policy conclusions from scientific analyses… the concept of ability (Begabungsbegriff ) moved to the center of academic discussions with considerable consequences for education policy” (Friedeburg, 1989, 370). Among the political parties, all would ultimately undergo major policy reorientations by the end of the 1960s, though the adjustment process would ultimately be incomplete for the Christian Democrats. At the time of the publication of Picht’s articles, the implicit consensus on general education that had existed since the late 1940s had yet to be broken. Picht himself

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had maintained in the German Educational Catastrophe that while some individual politicians had shown leadership, the West German parties in general had largely failed to respond to the problems his work had highlighted, writing that “the only real interest that can be detected [in debates on education policy] is the interest in not committing oneself. In this point there exists between the federal chancellor and all factions of the Bundestag an unclouded harmony” (Picht, 1964, 93). In an interview, he accused the parties of reaching a “standstill agreement” (Stillhalte-Abkommen), in which they secretly promised each other not to publicly argue over the issue in the run up to the 1965 federal election (“Bildungsnotstand” 17 August 1965, 25). Whatever Picht’s assessments, of the two Volksparteien, the Social Democrats were clearly the more sympathetic to his conclusions and recommendations. Indeed, inside the SPD a policy reorientation had been taking place since the early 1960s that would move the party from its tacit acceptance of the reconstituted education system premised on differentiation and its relative indifference to education toward a more reformist policy perspective and the elevation of education—along with science and research—to the top of the party’s domestic priorities. This new reformist stance was evident in a debate on education policy in the Bundestag in the spring of 1964, when Ulrich Lohmar, the same SPD MdB who just five years earlier had cited Karl Valentin Müller on the floor on the chamber,6 quoted directly and at length from Picht’s Christ und Welt article on the need for greater coordination and planning in education by federal agencies. Lohmar further drew on Picht’s argument on the need for accessing the reserves of talent available in the population, comparing attempts in the FRG in this regard unfavorably with those in Britain, where the Robbins report had recently been published. There are reserves of talent within our people that have not been sufficiently tapped in many Bundesländer… We can learn something … from our British neighbors. The British government found it necessary some three years ago to appoint a commission designed to address the state and developmental possibilities of the education system in Great Britain…Lord Robbins and his colleagues calculated considerable reserves of talent among the young people of England. They sought these reserves among young women, manual laborers, and the population active in the rural economy. Great Britain is an industrialized country like the Federal Republic. What suppositions support the view that matters in our country should be different than in Great Britain? …The Social Democratic fraction of the

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Bundestag is of the view that we collectively must consider how the “education emergency” in our country can be overcome as quickly as possible. (Bundestag, 1964)

A major turning point for the SPD would come later in 1964 with the publication of the party’s Bildungspolitische Leitsätze (Education Policy Principles). Noting the comparative underdevelopment of the West German school system emphasized by the OECD and KMK reports, the document called for a systemic reform of education around the principle of “sufficient freedom of choice, in order for each young person to be able to allow for the corresponding encouragement of his abilities and interests” (SPD, 1964, 17). The Leitsätze proposed a new structure for schooling, centered around the implementation of the Mittelstufe, a twoyear middle stage similar to the Förderstufe proposed by the DAEB in the 1959 Rahmenplan in which core courses would be offered to students of mixed-ability. Like the Förderstufe, this Mittelstufe was to be a probationary period of observation, which was intended to allow those students who demonstrated “practical” abilities to develop alongside those with more “abstract” thinking skills. Following the Mittelstufe would be parallel academic (Studienstufe) and vocational stages (Berufsstufe). While the former could lead to the traditional upper level (Oberstufe) of the Gymnasium and the Abitur and the latter to the dual vocational training system, it would also be possible under the proposed framework for students in the vocational pathway to obtain a university entrance qualification, thereby eliminating the Gymnasium’s effective monopoly on access to university study. Harmonizing the positions of the Bund faction and the party members in the individual Länder around the proposals suggested in the Leitsätze proved to be problematic for the party leadership. Sensing the growing political salience of education policy, the SPD sought to better coordinate its disparate positions and update its policy again, giving the task at its 1966 conference to its Education Policy Committee, led by future FRG president Johannes Rau and Carl-Heinz Evers, who oversaw school policy in the West Berlin Senate.7 Rau and Evers sought to formulate a policy that took into account not only the opinions of academic and policy experts, but the demands of the burgeoning student protest movement, which by 1967 had emerged as a significant political force (Friedeburg, 1989, 395). The result would come in January 1969 with the party’s adoption of the Committee’s “Model for a Democratic School System”

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(Modell eines demokratischen Bildungswesens ). Citing the need to “secure equal starting and education opportunities for young people, independent of the income of their parents” (SPD, 1969, 9), the Committee’s document called for an overhaul in the general education system of the FRG. Under the proposed model, the Hauptschule and Realschule would be merged with the Gymnasium to form a new type of lower secondary school that all students would attend, known as the Gesamtschule.8 Following this lower stage would be a mandatory two years in upper secondary school in which students could pursue both academic and vocational courses of study. The SPD model also called for the transformation of post-secondary and tertiary education, proposing that the various types of vocational and technical schools—which had long held significantly lower prestige than the traditional universities—be merged with the universities to form new comprehensive higher education institutions, or Gesamthochschulen. In an interview Evers claimed that the entire education system in the FRG merited such a dramatic change because its present form was consistent with neither democratic principles nor the demands of a modern industrial society. Germany, in his view, had been in a “deep freeze” in its thinking about education, and continued to rely on antiquated conceptions of vocation in debates over schooling, practical training for professions, and the universities (“Die Weichen” 1969, October 12). In the evolution of the SPD’s position on the organization of general education during this time, we see significant parallels with the trajectory followed by the British Labour party between the Education Act’s passage in 1944 and the mid-1950s, when Labour moved to adopt the comprehensivization of secondary schooling as a policy aim. In both instances, the shift in party position would coincide with the emergence of new ideas that challenged the traditional justifications for separation according to perceived ability in general education. Crucial differences between the two parties’ positions would not concern the policy prescriptions, but the timing of their respective policy reorientations and the institutional context in which they would pursue reform. Upon taking office in Bonn, the West German Social Democrats would encounter a markedly different climate than their counterparts across the North Sea had only five years earlier. For the FDP, which had been in coalition at the federal level with the Christian Democrats for much of the FRG’s existence, timing was also

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crucial. The party’s new found independence in 1966 from the limits imposed by serving as a junior partner in the CDU/CSU coalition coincided with the emergence of the new education discourse.9 Up until then, only a handful of Liberal party figures, most notably Dahrendorf himself and Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, a secretary of state in the Culture Ministry in Hesse, had called for major changes to the education system. In its 1967 Aktionprogramm, however, the party would assume a far more reformist stance, adopting Dahrendorf’s slogan “Education is a civil right” as the guiding principle behind its new policy. Significantly, the new FDP program went beyond calling for an increase in the number of Abiturienten, proposing instead the structural reform of the differentiated system. As Hamm-Brücher argued, “the raising of the Abiturienten quota to 9, 12, or 15 percent will not solve our problem – our problem concerns identifying the education system with the democratic form of state and its societal conditions” (quoted in Friedeburg, 1989, 396). The program called for the implementation of the mixed-ability stage for grades 5 and 6 and a much less rigid system of selection. Stating that “ability is not only a hereditary disposition but also a developmental process” (FDP, 1967, 10), the program proposed that the system be reformed to give students more opportunities later in their education to demonstrate aptitudes for particular courses of study. The FDP program also called for the experimental deployment of differentiated Leistungsschulen (performance schools), a type of comprehensive secondary school in which students would be separated into different tracks on the basis of ability and performance but would have access to the same types of courses, including the traditional Gymnasium curriculum of ancient languages and mathematics, as well as technical and vocational courses (FDP, 1967, 10). The call for a more democratic school was reiterated in the party’s 1969 electoral platform, which placed education at the center of its domestic program and again called for the establishment of a type of differentiated Gesamtschule (FDP, 1969). Among the Christian Democrats, the response to the new education discourse was significantly less welcoming than within the SPD and FDP, at least initially. Answering a query put forward in 1964 by the SPD in the Landtag in Baden-Württemberg regarding Picht’s reform proposals, CDU Culture Minister Dr. Gerhard Storz ceded little ground, challenging both Picht’s forecasts on the future need for Abiturienten and his understanding of the role of the Gymnasium as a quality assurance mechanism in the West German education system.

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[B]efore one calls for a doubling of Abiturienten, one should consider anew the purpose and the actual function of the Abitur… now and in the future it will depend on allowing through into our overfilled academic institutions to the greatest extent possible only suitable and well prepared new students. Plans,… of such an ostensibly revolutionary sort [as Picht’s] run the risk of leaving out of consideration the freedom of the individual, the freedom to select a profession, and lastly the right of parents (Elternrecht ). Eventually, total planning is part of the total and authoritarian state… the German education system is structured in some ways differently than those in other European countries. It is not, however, also worse and more backwards, as today so often is incorrectly concluded. Abroad, at least in the USA, people hold a rather high opinion of it. (Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, 1964)

Chancellor Erhard, who himself had helped to elevate the standing of education as a state priority by claiming in his inaugural address in 1963 that it had become as important for the present day as the social question had been in the nineteenth century, seemed to demonstrate Picht’s assertions regarding the indifference of West German political leadership to the school system. Asked about the June 1965 student protest in Bonn inspired by Picht, Erhard claimed it had not made “the slightest impression” on him (“Ins Freie” 1965, July 6). He later stated that the discussion of an educational catastrophe was becoming a “giant nuisance,” and argued that that it was the result of “intellectualism tipping into idiocy, when intellectuals only fuel dissatisfaction, but understand nothing of the issue.” Equally severe in his assessment of the public debate that Picht’s writings had set off was CSU Chairman Franz Josef Strauss, who claimed that the warnings of a coming crisis in education were nothing more than “idiotic claptrap” (“Bildungsnotstand” 1965, August 17). Within just a few years, however, the Christian Democrats, like the British Conservatives in the early 1960s, would be unable to ignore the reformist momentum inspired by the changing discursive conditions. The same party whose leaders had so thoroughly dismissed the findings of Picht and other critics in 1965, would by 1969 have become more receptive to calls for changes to the traditional system. The emergence of a real possibility for deep and durable reform to the organization of West German general education by the 1970s owed much to this new “openmindedness” to the comprehensive school on the part of the CDU (Sass, 2018, 185).

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The first signs of a programmatic shift in the CDU came in 1968, when the party dropped its long-standing support for the confessional separation of schools in its Berlin party program.10 Fearful of being labeled “an enemy of reform” in the late 1960s, the CDU carried out what Betts (1981, 15) terms a “rapid conversion” on educational policy to better suit the shifting public attitudes in the run up to the 1969 federal elections.11 The most dramatic display of this new found reformist enthusiasm took place at the party’s cultural policy congress held in March 1969 in Bad Godesberg. Here leading party figures members, including CDU General Secretary Bruno Heck, indicated their willingness to consider for the first time establishing the two-year mixed-ability stage and even the introduction of the Gesamtschule, though Heck went to lengths to emphasize it would only be on an experimental basis and not involve support for its general introduction as a new school type. He did pledge, however, that the party would “accept good results,” indicating that the Christian Democrats would be open to a more widespread deployment of comprehensive schools in the future. As the party’s federal executive committee (Bundesvorstand) expressed it, “the three-tiered system should not be viewed as a taboo that must be treated as something given to us by God” (quoted in Friedeburg, 1989, 399). Not all Christian Democrats were sympathetic to this newfound progressivism on education. Bavaria’s CSU Culture Minister Ludwig Hubner rejected in general terms any introduction of the Gesamtschule, calling them “hotbeds for performance neurotics” and refused to consider the results of any scientific study of their efficacy. Other CDU figures were less colorful in expressing their opposition, citing concerns with the costs of introducing the Gesamtschule. Representatives of the Gymnasien within the party, for their part, fought to ensure that the party at least pledge to retain differentiation for the period after the two-year observation stage. Yet the fact that some party leaders were opening up to the possibility of reform represented a significant change from the past. As Der Spiegel reported, “the formerly wide defensive front of the CDU/CSU against the Gesamtschule has, as [the Cultural Congress] demonstrates, begun to waver” (“Kultur” 1969, March 9). By 1969, the CDU/CSU seemed to be in a position similar to that of the British Conservatives in the early part of the decade. While some factions remained resolutely opposed to any change in the threetiered system, the general trend was toward allowing for new educational models, at least on an experimental basis. The discursive shift that began

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with the OECD conference in 1961 and accelerated with the writings of Picht, Dahrendorf, and the new pedagogues had suddenly and sharply influenced what actors perceived to be appropriate in the organization of general education. Under the new conditions, the Christian Democrats—much like the Tories—could no longer simply appeal to the “natural” biological basis of differentiation and early selection or invoke Adenauer-era slogans of “no experiments” as the basis of its support for the traditional school structure. Conditions for reform of the type initiated by Crosland in 1965 in Britain and carried out in other European countries during the decade seemed also to be present by the late 1960s in the FRG. Writing at that time, Kuhlmann (1970, 45) captured the sense that change was coming, at long last, to Germany’s outmoded education system. For the first time since 1949 the political coalitions in the question of comprehensive schooling can no longer be predicted. Liberals and Christian Democrats, church leaders, and Catholic teacher associations, farmer associations, businesses and also Gymnasium teacher associations are now open to discussion and even to individual trials. The educationalists and sociologists are in the meantime in a position to contribute practical arguments, if not yet scientifically controlled experiments in schools. The conversation is now nearly back where it was when it was cut off after 1949.

As Berlin School Council representative Herbert Bath more directly put it, “[t]he reorganization of the secondary school system … is inevitable” (Bath, 1970, 127).

Policy Initiatives and Failures, 1969–1974 In October 1969 Willy Brandt assumed the chancellorship as the first Social Democratic leader of the West German Republic, governing in coalition with the FDP as a junior partner. In his government declaration presented in the Bundestag on October 28, Brandt spelled out his agenda for reforming education, emphasizing the need for cooperation in education planning across levels of government and calling for the universal acceptance of a tenth year of mandatory schooling and the highest possible percentage of young people to stay in education up to the age of eighteen.

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The tasks of education and science can only be solved collectively by the Bund, Länder, and Gemeinde (communities)… serious problems in the entire education system result from the fact that it has hitherto been unsuccessful in coordinating the four primary areas of our education organization – schools, colleges and universities, vocational training, and adult education – according to a transparent and rational conception. As long as a common plan is lacking, it is not possible to engage the people and resources needed to achieve optimal results…the Federal Government will be led by the knowledge that the central mission of the Basic Law, to give all citizens equal chances, has not come close to being fulfilled. Planning in education must contribute decisively to the realization of social democracy. (Bundestag, 1969)

Brandt’s government would enter office on the heels of three major developments in the education policy, all of which took place earlier in 1969. In February, the DBR published its recommendations for the introduction of comprehensive schools in the FRG in the report On the Establishment of School Experiments with the Comprehensive School (Einrichtung von Schulversuchen mit Gesamtschulen). The title of this report alone revealed a great deal about the differences between the British movement to comprehensivization and the West German process that the DBR report would initiate. Although the national drive to dismantle the tripartite system began in Britain with the publication of Circular 10/65 in 1965, comprehensive secondary schools had been operating in some local areas in England and Wales since the early 1950s and expanding in number ever since. In the FRG, by contrast, only ten Gesamtschulen existed in the whole country at the time of the 1969 DBR report’s publication. On the eve of a reform initiative to remake the West German general education system, the comprehensive school would still be considered an experiment in the FRG, even to many of its supporters. Such was the view of the DBR itself, which in its report made clear that the pedagogical arguments for establishing comprehensive schools in the FRG were only hypotheses that still required testing under scientific controls (Deutscher Bildungsrat, 1969, 21). The report called for the pilot deployment of some forty Gesamtschulen across the Länder, with a major evaluation and appraisal scheduled for 1976. Whatever the limits of its proposals, the report also conveyed a clear sense of the potential benefits of change in the West German education system. According to the study, under the traditional system too many children were denied an academic type of education, with students’

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school achievement largely dependent on their social background. In the view of the Council, the Gesamtschule could—in theory—help workingclass students overcome this disadvantage and provide greater equality of opportunity. The report postulated that early selection could lead to errors in school placement and that the Gesamtschule, by delaying differentiation, could provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate their “true” aptitudes before they were locked in to a specific educational, occupational, and class-determining path. It is the danger of selection that the individual very early in his selfconsciousness is committed to a certain performance category through the perceptions and judgments of others. Even if this determination is objectively false or becomes objectively false by the further development of the pupil, the opportunity for the individual to assert himself against such a determination in his self assessment or the assessment of others is very small…For this reason, performance differentiation is not carried out too early in the Gesamtschule and first in few subjects and there in small measure… Such a progressive differentiation can hinder the premature determination of the pupil for a particular performance level. Selection takes place, but it does not have the character of finality; it can be revised more easily and for a longer period of time than in the present system (Deutscher Bildungsrat, 1969, 27)

The DBR suggested that the experimental schools be set up as “integrated” comprehensives, that is, schools in which most courses would be attended by all students regardless of ability levels and each student would obtain the same qualification at the end of 10th grade.12 Under the integrated model, students had the option of continuing their studies in the equivalent of an upper-level Gymnasium or an advanced secondary level that included both general and vocational courses. When the KMK approved the experimental program in November 1969, however, Christian Democratic Land education ministers insisted that the “additive”13 or “co-operative” type of comprehensive school, in which the three different schools of the traditional system would be merged into a single facility but differentiation otherwise largely retained, also be permitted. Students in cooperative comprehensives would still be placed in separate tracks based on traditional selection criteria, although faculty and staff would work together to facilitate transfers across them. (Führ, 1997, 125–126)

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The second development preceding the ascendancy of the SPD-FDP coalition in Bonn concerned a change in the distribution of educational policymaking power between the Bund and Länder. The exclusive and jealously guarded authority of the Länder over education had been an obstacle to educational change since at least the Weimar Republic; but the Grand Coalition between the CDU/CSU and SPD that assumed power in 1966 helped to reduce tensions between federal and regional administrations, opening the door to greater coordination in issues related to the school system (Hahn, 1998, 117). Some of the groundwork for this coordination had already been laid by the joint efforts to expand higher education facilities under the advice of the Wissenschaftsrat. This increased role for the federal government would be formalized in May 1969 with the passage of an amendment to Article 91 of the Basic Law that enhanced the power of the Bund in educational planning and budgeting and led to the creation of a new Federal Ministry for Education and Science in Bonn. To help facilitate coordination between state and the newly empowered federal authorities, the Federal-State-Commission for Educational Planning (Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung, [BLK]) was also established (OECD 1973, 34). The final development in 1969 concerned the passage of a law overhauling the governance of the West German vocational training system. Since at least the 1950s, West German trade unions had been pushing for a new vocational training law that would provide for a greater state role in regulating the in-firm training component of the dual system, but had faced resistance from both the industrial and craft sectors, which wished to retain their traditional autonomy in overseeing apprentice programs. The issue would remain alive, however, in the 1960s, partly due to pressure from the SPD and growing public concern with the system, particularly after a series of articles published in Der Stern magazine highlighted some of the system’s shortcomings (Taylor, 1981, 195–196; Thelen, 2004, 257). Upon joining the Grand Coalition in 1966, the SPD proposed a new law, forcing the CDU/CSU to offer its own legislation and leading to the passage of a compromise bill (Berufsbildungsgesetz) in August 1969. The law contained several changes to the existing system, marked most notably by the creation of a new Federal Institute for Vocational Training Research (Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildungsforschung )14 to advise the federal government on all issues related to vocational training and set

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standards for the skill content and length of apprenticeships for particular occupations. The law also created committees at the Länder-level to oversee planning and classroom training and help ensure that curricula and standards remained uniform across the country. While many of these provisions were new, the framework also demonstrated significant continuity with traditional arrangements, especially regarding the role of local chamber of commerce, which largely retained competence over firmbased component of training, including the administration of certification exams (Thelen, 2004, 262). The effect of the vocational training law on general education debates was significant. Increasing the state’s role in the provision of vocational education provided a new institutional site through which state actors could seek to harmonize the social and economic objectives that the dynamic ability discourse had highlighted in the 1960s, shifting the campaign for “equality of opportunity” to the vocational sphere, where it would potentially face less opposition from resistance actors than in general education (Hearnden, 1976, 56). Beyond the formal legal and institutional changes that took place in the FRG in the late 1960s was the more general shift in the attitudes and expectations of the population. West Germany in 1969 was in many ways a different country than it had been in 1964 when the “crisis” in general education had first erupted. The student movement and the rise of the socalled Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition [APO]) had reached its peak in the intervening years. Protesting conditions in universities, the American war in Vietnam, and emergency legislation passed by the Grand Coalition,15 and seeking to confront older generations on their roles during the Nazi era, West German students were the most visible symbol of a broader transformation that was taking place in society. Within a few short but dramatic years, the political climate in the FRG had radically and unalterably changed. It was within this new context that the SPD-FDP government would begin its reform program. As Minister for Education and Research, Brandt selected Hans Leussink, a nonpartisan academic, and as State Secretaries Hamm-Brücher of the FDP and Klaus von Dohnanyi, then a relatively junior SPD minister.16 The education policy team tasked with carrying out Brandt’s ambitious agenda would be noted for both its zealous commitment to education reform and its relative lack of political skills needed to carry out such changes (Heidenheimer, 1974).

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The reform process developed rapidly after the SPD-FDP coalition took office. In April 1970, the DBR released its Structural Plan for the Education System (Strukturplan für das Bildungswesen [Strukturplan]) a far-reaching advisory report that provided recommendations for changes in all aspects of the German education system except higher education, which remained under the purview of the Wissenschaftsrat. The plan was, in the words of the DBR Chair Helmut Becker, a “fundamental consensus program” that sought to balance the range of opinions represented in the Council (OECD, 1973, 35). Instead of calling for a full comprehensivization of the secondary sector, as many Social Democrats wished to see, the Strukturplan instead proposed a complicated new arrangement that sought to lessen the degree of stratification in the system while at the same time retaining its basic differentiated structure. The most controversial element of the Strukturplan was also its least original. As the DAEB had with the Förderstufe a decade earlier, the DBR similarly proposed ending selection at age ten by introducing a common orientation stage (Orientierungsstufe) for grades five and six, in which all students would be taught according to the same curriculum. A student’s performance during the orientation stage would form the basis of teachers’ recommendations for placement in one of the officially recognized school types, which now—befitting earlier DBR recommendations from its 1969 report—would include the Gesamtschule in addition to the three traditional schools. The Strukturplan also called for the establishment of a truly “permeable” (durchlässig ) school system, in which “no educational track should lead to a dead-end” and shut students out of further advancement possibilities (Deutscher Bildungsrat, 1970, 38). It also proposed that all students be awarded the same qualification, the Sekundarabschluss I (Secondary Leaving Certificate I),17 following completion of the tenth school year, or what the Council termed Sekundarstufe I (Secondary Stage I). Significantly, the certificate was to be awarded to all students regardless of the school type they attended and was to be based on their performance in nine commonly taught subjects. Following this first stage would be the upper-level Sekundarstufe II , where students could take general or vocational courses of study but in either instance would again obtain the same qualification, the Sekundarabschluss II , a broader version of the traditional Abitur. The DBR expressed its hope in the Strukturplan that by 1980 roughly one-half of a given age group would be attending an upper-level secondary school. The report also proposed that differences in

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the training of elementary and secondary teachers, another long-standing contentious feature of the traditional German system, finally be resolved by requiring that all teachers obtain a university qualification. While a step in the right direction, the Strukturplan did not go far enough for the new Brandt government. In its June 1970 Education Report (Bildungsbericht ), the SPD-FDP coalition issued a more ambitious set of reforms. The report acknowledged the contribution that the differentiated education system had made to the country in the past but maintained that under the conditions of democracy and social change a new system was merited. The German educational system, which was established in the 19th century not according to democratic, but class and authoritarian state ideas on order and education, produced achievements acknowledged throughout the world under the social conditions and criteria pertaining at that time. However despite many partial reforms and individual corrections, this system no longer meets the demands of present social development. (Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft, 1970, 6)

Invoking the language of Dahrendorf, the report maintained that the reform of the education system was not merely to be carried out for the purposes of technical progress or economic efficiency, but to achieve the goals of social policy and the realization of the fundamental right to education through the establishment of a system in which “equality of opportunity through the individual promotion of talent” rather than the cultivation of an elite class of well-educated was the primary principle (Bundesminister für Bildung & Wissenschaft, 1970, 9). The Bildungsbericht noted that since its founding the FRG had experienced significant increases in the number of students at the Gymnasium and Realschule, full-time vocational schools, and traditional universities, but that this expansion had taken place “neither in substance nor in structure” with general educational reform (Bundesminister für Bildung & Wissenschaft, 1970, 14, 39). Expanding on the recommendations provided in the Strukturplan and the 1970 study by the Wissenschaftsrat on the reform and expansion of higher education,18 the Bildungsbericht endorsed three primary changes to the education system. First, it called for the universal provision of preschool for children ages three and four and a lowering of the elementary school starting age from six to five. For the secondary sector, the report

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proposed extensive changes, marked most notably by the establishment of a system of integrated comprehensive schools. As the OECD noted in a report on the German reforms, this recommendation indicated “an explicit break with the traditional tripartite school system” (OECD, 1973, 38). Finally, the report called for a system of integrated comprehensive institutions of higher education (Gesamthochschulen), eliminating the elite standing that the traditional universities had held since at least the era of Humboldt’s nineteenth-century reforms. It is important to note that the SPD-FDP proposals were not “simply” about reforming the structure of schooling, but at another level represented an attempt to change a key element in the West German model of capitalism, namely the tight interlinkages between educational qualifications and the occupational labor market. Such a change, moreover, would not be a by-product or unintended consequence of school reform, but stood as an explicit goal of policymakers in the coalition. In an interview with OECD representatives in 1971, Hamm-Brücher acknowledged that a loosening of these linkages was a fundamental aim of the SPDFDP reform effort (OECD, 1973, 125). The realization of the coalition’s proposals would inject, by German standards, a radical degree of flexibility, mobility, and autonomy into the labor market at a crucial period, just as the “Golden Age” of European postwar capitalism that had been characterized by high levels of economic growth, employment, and state welfare benefits was ending. Despite the increased power of federal education authorities as a result of the amendment to the Basic Law, changes to the education system would still require the approval from the CDU/CSU-led Länder. In the first meeting of the BLK in July 1970, sharp disagreements between the CDU/CSU and SPD/FDP representatives emerged over which type of Gesamtschule should be deployed in the pilots and the speed at which such schools would be introduced. Whereas the 1969 Bildungsrat report had recommended experiments with various types of Gesamtschule models, including the internally differentiated “additive” type favored by the Christian Democrats, the government’s own Bildungsbericht had envisaged a single “integrated” model for the entire country. The CDU/CSU representatives in the BLK also called for longer periods of experimentation with the Gesamtschule, the use of pedagogical—rather than social—standards to be used in evaluating their performance, and greater permeability in the existing system as a solution to rigidities in the existing three-tiered system (OECD, 1973, 40).

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In practice, the Christian Democratic-led Länder would demonstrate considerable variation in their experimental implementation of Gesamtschulen called for by the DBR. Some Länder, such as RhinelandPalatinate, led by CDU party chairman and future chancellor Helmut Kohl, simply elected not to establish Gesamtschulen on even a small-scale basis. In others, comprehensive schools were created alongside traditional schools and even provided with significant levels of funding. As Heidenheimer points out, however, such generosity may well have been part of a CDU strategy to demonstrate just how expensive the new schools would be relative to the benefits they provided (1974, 400). The cost of the reforms proved to be another issue of contention between the governing coalition and the Christian Democratic opposition. The Bildungsbericht had called for education investments to increase dramatically from 20 billion DM in 1969 to 100 billion DM in 1980. Although much of this increase would be due to inevitable rises in teacher salaries and the effects of general inflation, the figure of 100 billion DM quickly became a “political football,” seized by the CDU/CSU and the conservative press as the “cost of education reform” in the Federal Republic (OECD, 1973, 39). While cost would continue to be a concern, SPD and FDP reformers were facing a further challenge to their plans from a growing conservative backlash in the country. As Hahn writes, “the various reform projects were gathering momentum at a time of change in the intellectual climate. The student protest had run its course and was succeeded by an isolated, extreme left-wing terrorist movement, provoking hysterical overreaction in society” (1998, 126). By the early 1970s, many Germans had begun to associate education reform more generally with demands from the radical student movement and come to distrust “progressive” educational ideas, regardless of the specific sector. In this context, the SPD-FDP’s strategy of “bundling” its reforms for secondary, higher, and vocational education in a single sweeping change initiative—which may well made sense in the late 1960s when the resonance of the education counter-discourse was at its strongest among politicians and the population—would by the early 1970s prove to have serious drawbacks. This backlash would begin to spill out in political debates over the structural reforms in the general education system proposed by the DBR and the coalition. In a Bundestag debate on the Bildungsbericht on June 9, 1971 held following the first assessment report on the new Gesamtschulen, the SPDFDP reform proposals came under attack by the Christian Democrats, who sought to link the coalition’s plans for school change to the radical

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student movement and urged rejection of the government proposals (see Heidenheimer, 1974, 399). In the debate, Anton Pfeiffer of the CDU argued that the reforms’ enactment would not only be excessively expensive but would create an unmanageable glut of Gymnasium graduates. As an alternative, he advocated reforming the system around principles of greater permeability and transfer within the traditional framework. I believe [ideological beliefs] are seen most clearly [in the views of the SPD-FDP] that differentiation in the present school system simply allocates particular social classes just like that into the individual school types, that it is outdated, that it is judged to be oriented on a reputedly non-democratic social order, and therefore is to be liberalized to the point of dissolution. This would mean however that billions should be invested in these newly recommended and, as previously stated, untested institutions. We … support that the reform be carried out in a flexible system … and that this system seeks the realization of horizontal and vertical permeability. The federal government proposes in its Bildungsbericht that in the future one-half of the children in a given age cohort finish Abitur II or complete the Sekundarstufe II. About this let me say briefly the following. From 1952 to 1969 … we have succeeded in raising the percentage of Abiturienten from 4 percent to approximately 10 percent. Everyone in this parliament welcomes this. However, on the other side we know quite certainly that this increase in the Abiturienten rate could be purchased only through bottlenecks and difficulties. If we make the attempt to raise this number still further in the next ten years to 40 percent, it can lead ultimately to catastrophic conditions in the Gymnasia, in the secondary schools; it can only lead to a lowering of standards, which means less equality of opportunity and fewer education chances for the individual… …State Secretary von Dohnanyi accuses us in the debate over reform policy of lacking the courage to modernize, as if the success of education reform depends not on the admittedly arduous calculation of financial means, but on factors such as courage and modernity. (Bundestag, 1971)

By the early 1970s, many of the moderate CDU voices on education had been silenced and fallen in line behind more conservative (and generally southern) anti-comprehensive forces in the party. On such voice, Rhineland-Palatinate State Secretary for Education Hanna-Renate Laurien, publicly repudiated her own previous openness to comprehensive schools, declaring her opposition to the federal government’s reform plans in a 1971 television interview in which she maintained that the traditional system did not reproduce existing class structures and that

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more working-class students than ever were currently studying in the Gymnasium (Heidenheimer, 1974, 399). While the Christian Democrats were uniting in opposition, the reverse was happening in the SPD. The first blow came with the resignation of Leussink as Minister in March 1972. The experience of the previous three years had clearly demonstrated that reform on the scale proposed in the government’s Bildungsbericht required a seasoned senior party leader with experience negotiating the hard politics of Bund-Land relations to head the Education Ministry. Unfortunately for Brandt, no such figure was readily available, leading him to select the reform-committed but politically inexperienced Dohnanyi as his new minister. In Dohnanyi’s view, reform had stalled because the opposition had managed to convince much of the population that experiments in the Gesamtschulen had been failures and that the overall effort was futile. Invoking successful comprehensivization movements in other countries, he argued in a 1972 press release that the Bildungsbericht recommendations could hardly, from a comparative perspective, be viewed as radical. Because there exists a real chance for educational reform for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, conservative forces have formed a massive counterattack. These were not findings of the Federal Republic or the educational ideologies of the Social Democrats, but the agreed-upon requirements of not only the majority of our population, but also the education experts among us and in other countries. …certainly on the question of the Gesamtschule there is public dissension. But the integration of the three-tiered school system (Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium) into a single differentiated school is certainly not utopian; from Tokyo to Oslo and anywhere else this was realized, where a fundamental reform of education has taken place in this century. (SPD, 1972)

With the notable exception of the secondary school teachers, organized labor largely supported the Brandt proposals. The GEW, which mainly represented primary and Hauptschule teachers, largely tracked the SPD’s evolution on general education in the 1960s; by the middle of that decade, state-level branches of the GEW had begun issuing declarations calling for comprehensive schools,19 with the national GEW followed suit in 1968 (Sass, 2018, 203). The peak labor association, the DGB, also came to embrace the comprehensive model, ultimately updating its

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program to call for the reorganization of secondary education around a two-stage comprehensive school and the integration of general and vocational education (DGB, 1972, 8–9). Although the unions were generally supportive, the government found itself facing criticism from the far left, including neo-Marxists within the student movement, who saw the Gesamtschule as little more than a means of training workers to be maximally adaptable to the needs of the economy. Unlike in Britain, where leading thinkers on the Left such as Crosland had adopted the view in the 1950s that large-scale social change could be realized by educational reform, much of the German Left, radicalized in the late 1960s, maintained no such view. The leftist criticism on school reform in the FRG has the important task of destroying the illusion – spread by the SPD above all – that society can be changed through education reform. As the limits of such a reform are being demonstrated… approaches to social changes are being relegated to those areas in which they actually can be successful, in businesses and political organizations, not in schools and colleges, which at best can assume preliminary tasks. (Bühlow, 1972, 135–136)

Opposition arose even within those SPD-controlled Länder with progressive education traditions. Under Culture Minister Ludwig von Friedeburg, Hesse had taken the lead in the deployment of Gesamtschulen after 1969,20 but within a few years local attitudes were turning against it as a general model. In a Spiegel interview, von Friedeburg acknowledged that the “wind is blowing in different strengths from different directions” and “the mood may have changed here and there” but claimed that in Hesse the idea of the Gesamtschule had nevertheless found remarkable support from parents and teachers in only two years. To those on the Left who claimed that the Gesamtschule was little more than a “trick of the establishment” designed to give workers the appearance of equality, von Friedeburg replied, “the Gesamtschule certainly won’t further the revolution. It furthers the equality of opportunity and it gives the individual better possibilities.” And to conservatives who argued that the Gesamtschule would lead to a weakening of performance incentives and socialist egalitarian leveling, he claimed that “such arguments are structurally no different from the arguments that were put forward in the 20s against the common Grundschule and still earlier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against mandatory schooling. The conservatives have

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always been against greater equality of opportunity and against higher education for all” (“Das eine” 1972, August 6). At the federal level, the issue of comprehensive school reform became downplayed, especially during the 1972 election campaign, which was largely a referendum on Brandt’s foreign policy and specifically his controversial Ostpolitik. Although Brandt cited the general need for increased cooperation between Bonn and the Länder, the Gesamtschule failed even to merit inclusion in the January 1973 government declaration following the reelection of the SPD-FDP coalition in the November 1972 election. Chances for reform diminished rapidly after the election. Dohnanyi’s impolitic public forcefulness, already a liability in the government’s negotiations with the opposition, soon began negatively to affect his relationship with the SPD caucus in the Bundestag and Land ministers as well. By late 1972, fissures were also emerging between the coalition partners. In formulating their coalition agreement following the elections, FDP negotiators rejected Hamm-Brücher’s calls for a recommitment to reform, including the demand for a constitutional amendment giving the federal government even more authority in education. Instead the party contented itself with the rather uninspired call for a “furthering of education within the window of financial possibility.” The FDP claimed that the downgrading of education in the 1972 coalition agreement was actually due to the position of the SPD, which, in the words of one FDP negotiator, was not “federal enough” and too bound to traditional structures and divisions of authority between the Bund and Länder. Minister von Dohnanyi, for his part, commented that the “Free Democrats could have advocated for much more in the coalition conversations if they had wanted more” (“Vergeblich” 1973, January 7). The final phase of the SPD-FDP reform effort came in 1973 with the ratification by the BLK (after five previous attempts) of the Bildungsgesamtplan (Comprehensive Educational Plan). Reflecting the polarized political environment, the report noted that government leaders had declared “that it was still not possible to arrive at agreement on the issues of the Gesamtschule, the Orientierungsstufe, and the education of teachers” (BLK, 1973, XII). Although technically outlining a long-term program for the implementation of the Strukturplan recommendations, the Bildungsgesamtplan was in fact considerably less ambitious than its predecessor (Hahn, 1998, 124). Yet even these scaled-back proposals faced resistance. While the cost estimates offered in the Bildungsgesamtplan were significantly lower than those that had appeared in previous

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proposals, Land education ministers nevertheless expressed concerns even with the reduced spending targets. With the federal debates at a standstill, even the most optimistic of reform proponents were forced to acknowledge by 1974 that the government’s hopes for realizing the proposals for transforming the West German education system it had laid out four years earlier were fading. The human capital arguments that had been adopted by planners in the early 1960s had been upended by the OPEC oil embargo and accompanying shock, which had, to many, demonstrated the limits of educational expansion as a source of economic growth (Betts, 1981, 28). Speaking in May before the Non-Profit Organization for Comprehensive Schools (Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft Gesamtschule), a pro-reform advocacy group created in 1969,21 von Friedeburg and Joachim Lohmann of SchleswigHolstein admitted that “the defenses against the restorationist forces have been breached in several places… Apart from the strangulation of comprehensives in several CDU-Länder, there are signs of desertions in several SPD Länder… Political goals are being scaled down – and only in a few Länder, especially Lower Saxony and Hesse is the reform genuinely being carried further!” (quoted in Heidenheimer, 1974, 403). New obstacles to comprehensive reform would continue to appear in the reformist-oriented Länder. In Lower Saxony, SPD Education Minister Peter von Oertzen sought in early 1974 to assuage conservative fears in the debates over legislation that implemented the Gesamtschule by accepting the CDU-preferred cooperative type of Gesamtschule in addition to the integrated variant favored by the SPD and insisting before the Landtag that he had no intention of replacing the Gymnasium with comprehensive schools. The CDU nevertheless forcefully attacked von Oertzen’s plan, claiming it would lead to the end of the Gymnasium, even appointing a Gymnasium teacher as its shadow education minister. In a state election held in June 1974 in the wake of Chancellor Brandt’s resignation over an East German spy scandal, von Oertzen would actually lose his constituency seat and be forced to reenter the Landtag through the party list. Following the SPD electoral victory, he was not reappointed as education minister in the Land (Heidenheimer, 1974, 402). In Hesse, parents of children in Gesamtschulen began to complain that the continuing existence of the Gymnasium presented a significant problem since it served to diminish the value of their children’s qualification. At the same time, a group of Hessian parents moved to block the replacement of Gymnasien with comprehensive schools in the Land by

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bringing suit in court, obtaining favorable rulings from a panel of judges in Darmstadt. Claiming that they had “nothing against the Gesamtschule,” the judges cited the “constitutionally anchored Elternrecht ” as reason for their decision (“Ins Mark” 1974, June 30). At the federal level, any lingering enthusiasm for the structural reform of education would end with the accession of Helmut Schmidt to the Chancellery in May 1974. Stung by conservative criticism over SPD handling of education, Schmidt would drop it as a spending priority and replace Dohnanyi as education minister with Helmut Rohde, a union politician from the Labor Ministry with no background in education. The Brandt reform initiatives would represent the last major initiative to reform the structure of education in the twentieth century; SPD leadership would no longer call openly for an end to the Gymnasium or the differentiated system, but would adopt a strategy of encouraging the introduction of comprehensive schools—with parental approval—at the local level (Sass, 2018, 129). As one observer surveying the education landscape in the mid-1980s wrote, “One has the impression … that the great fundamental debates, for example about the principle of the Gesamtschule are finished for the time being. The Gesamtschule has been officially recognized, equivalence has been confirmed, it will continue to exist as one of several forms of secondary school in some Länder whilst others will probably gradually abolish the few ‘experimental’ schools of this type within their area: the issue is unlikely to excite anyone any more” (Kloss, 1985, 9).

Conclusion In his analysis of how market economies became institutionally “embedded” in Japan and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gerhard Lehmbruch argues that economic arrangements in both countries were not merely historical legacies of past decisions, but were actively supported by a set of hegemonic policy discourses, or “sets of basic beliefs and assumptions about the normative values, objective, and regularities underlying the formation of public policy,” that were shared by policy actors (2001, 41). In his view, the path dependence of these arrangements resulted from the interplay between discourses and institutions, with institutional change following comparable shifts in the hegemonic discourse.

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For Lehmbruch, discursive shifts in economic policy would be achieved only during periods of upheaval, notably depressions in the nineteenth century and the two world wars in the twentieth century. As the current chapter demonstrates, however, the rise of counter-discourse in West German education took place, as in Britain, during a period marked not by turmoil, but by stability, peace, and prosperity. The communication of ideas from agents such as Picht and Dahrendorf served, in effect, to create a crisis that convinced many political actors and the public of the need to elevate education as a priority, increase the number of students obtaining advanced qualifications, and initiate attempts to transform the structure of general education. The material preferences of policy actors, while important, were not the primary drivers of the policy debates and proposals and were themselves shaped and steered by the ideational currents and communicative processes associated with the new education discourse. Unfortunately for advocates of reform, the discursive shift of the 1960s would come too late for West Germany and movements for institutional change launched by the new education discourse would encounter the twin obstacles of economic and social upheaval in the early 1970s, limiting the impact of proposals to remake the West German general education system and helping to ensure the persistence of early selection and differentiation into the twenty-first century. While a necessary condition for change, the shift in the dominant education policy discourse that had taken place in the 1960s was not sufficient to realize fundamental reorientation in arrangements in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Notes 1. Major works in HCT include Mincer (1958) and Becker (1964). 2. Enrollment rates at the Gymnasium actually experienced a decline in the late 1950s, as young people opted out of higher education to enter a booming postwar economy in which advanced general education was not a prerequisite for high earnings (from Friedeburg, 1989, 347). 3. An example of this reaction against considering social questions in education is clearly demonstrated in the response of the University of Hamburg to the proposed school reform during the occupation era, quoted in chapter six. 4. Dahrendorf received a life peerage in 1993 and sat in the House of Lords until his death in 2009. 5. These Realschule students would, however, not attend the same Gymnasium as other students who had taken the traditional route of selection at

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

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age ten, but instead would study in the Aufbauform, a special transitional type Gymnasium, usually after completion of 8th grade or around age 14 (Kuhlmann, 1970, 13). See Chapter 7. Evers had been the driving force behind the introduction of experimental comprehensive schools in West Berlin in 1964. The term Gesamtschule had first been used in the 1964 Leitsätze (Sass, 2018, 200). The departure of the FDP from the coalition with the CDU/CSU in 1966 and the subsequent resignation of Chancellor Erhard led to the creation of the Federal Republic’s first “Grand Coalition” of Christian and Social Democrats. For the most part, the 1968 program continued to reflect the party’s long-standing perspectives on education, which held it, Betts writes, to be a “personal and individual rather than economic and political matter” (1981, 14). Such perceptions of the party were particularly strong among first time voters. In a survey taken prior to the start of the 1969 federal campaign, new voters indicated that they considered the SPD to be more competent on education issues by a margin of 44 to 26% (Edinger, 1970, 564). Some differentiation does persist in the integrated model through the provision of advanced-level courses in certain subjects, including math, German, and to a lesser extent the natural sciences (Führ, 1997, 125). See OECD 1973, 33. Later the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (Bundesinstituts für Berufsbildung [BIBB]). The emergency acts (Notstandsgesetze) passed in 1968 amended the Basic Law to provide the government with authority to, in effect, suspend the Law’s rules the event of a natural disaster or military crisis. Dohnanyi would later serve as mayor of Hamburg from 1981 to 1988. In the first version of the Strukturplan, the names for the qualifications granted upon completion of the lower and upper secondary stages were Abitur I and Abitur II , but appeared to have been changed in later versions in deference to traditional terminology (see OECD, 1973, 35). In its 1970 report, the Science Council provided estimates for the expansion of higher education in the coming decade, estimating that the population would more than double between 1970 and 1980 from 450,000 to around one million students. To meet the varied demands of this expanded student body, the Council called for a reorganization of higher education, including the creation of “comprehensive” higher education institutions advocated in the 1969 SPD education model (OECD, 1973, 35–36).

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19. In Hessen the GEW branch’s “Darmstadt Declaration” (Darmstädter Entschließung ) expressing support for integrated comprehensive schools was issued in 1965 after a speech by Evers to the group in which he maintained that “ability is not a static quantity” and that education should correct inequalities in opportunity rather than accept “relics of a corporative society as God-given differences in ability” (GEW-Hessen, 2019). 20. By 1974, the 64 integrated and 53 additive Gesamtschulen in Hesse together amounted to more than in the rest of the Länder combined (“Ins Mark” 1974, June 30). 21. The GGG has continued to the present as an active promoter of comprehensive schools in the FRG and facilitator of best practices and information sharing among Gesamtschulen.

References Balfour, M. L. G. (1968). West Germany. Praeger. Bath, H. (1970). The general and vocational school system: Cooperation or integration? In W. D. Halls & C. Fuhr (Eds.), Educational reform in the Federal Republic of Germany (pp. 110–127). UNESCO. Becker, G. S. (1964). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. Columbia University Press. Becker, H. (1989). Bildungspolitik. In W. Benz (Ed.), Die Geschichte Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Band 4, Kultur. Fisscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Betts, R. S. (1981). The CDU, the SPD and the West German school reform wuestion, 1948–73. Association of Comparative Educationists. Bildungsnotstand – “Saudummes Geschwätz.” (1965, August 17). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/bildungsnotstand-saudummes-geschwaetz-a2c89f0a5-0002-0001-0000-000046273717?context=issue Bühlow, G. (1972). Gesamtschule Zwischen Schulversuch Und Strukturreform: Berichte Über D. Gesamtschulentwicklung in D. Bundesrepublik U. Westberlin. Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung (BLK). (1973). Bildungsgesamtplan (1st ed.). E. Klett. Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft. (1970). Report of the federal government on education 1970. The federal government’s concept for educational policy. Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft. Bundestag. (Germany). (1964). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages. Deutscher Bundestag. Bundestag. (Germany). (1969). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages. Deutscher Bundestag.

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GEW-Hessen. (2019). 50 Jahre IGS in Hessen. HLZ - Zeitschrift für Erziehung, Bildung und Forschung. Retreived February 2, 2020, from https://www. gew-hessen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/bildung/gesamtschule/Dokumente50-Jahre-IGS-Hessen.pdf Hahn, H. J. (1998). Education and society in Germany. Berg. Hearnden, A. (1976). Education, culture, and politics in West Germany. Pergamon Press. Heidenheimer, A. J. (1974). The politics of educational reform: Explaining different outcomes of school comprehensivization attempts in Sweden and West Germany. Comparative Education Review, 18(3), 388–410. Herrlitz, H. G. (2008). Der mühsame Weg zur Gesamtschulreform: Ein Projekt der Protestbewegung. Erziehungs Und Wissenschaft, 7–8, 16–17. Herrlitz, H. G., Hopf, W., Titze, H., & Cloer, E. (2008). Deutsche Schulgeschichte von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart Eine Einführung. Juventa. Ins Freie. (1965, July 6). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ins-freiea-ee52ede7-0002-0001-0000-000038176427 Ins Mark. (1974, June 30). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/insmark-a-769cc868-0002-0001-0000-000041696651 Kloss, G. (1985). Education policy in the Federal Republic of Germany 1969– 1984. Department of Language and Linguistics University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Kuhlmann, C. (1970). Schulreform und Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1946–1966: Die Differenzierung der Bildungswege als Problem der westdeutschen Schulpolitik. Klett. Kultur am Kamin. (1969, March 9). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/pol itik/kultur-am-kamin-a-19e833db-0002-0001-0000-000045849751 Landtag, B. W. (1964). Plenarprotokoll. Landtag von Baden-Württemberg. Lehmbruch, G. (2001). The institutional embedding of market economies: The German “model” and its impact on Japan. In W. Streeck & K. Yamamura (Eds.), The origins of nonliberal capitalism (pp. 39–93). Cornell University Press. Merritt, R. L., Flerlage, E. P., & Merritt, A. J. (1971). Democratizing West German education. Comparative Education, 7 (3), 121–136. Mincer, J. (1958). Investment in human capital and personal income distribution. The Journal of Political Economy, 66(4), 281–302. Noelle-Neumann, E., & Neumann, E. P. (1967). The Germans: Public opinion polls 1947–1966. Verlag für Demoskopie. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-Konferenz. (1962). Wirtschaftswachstum Und Ausbau Des Erziehungswesens: OECDKonferenz in Washington, 16.-20. Oktober 1961: Deutsche Kurzfassung Der Arbeitsunterlagen. Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (1973). Reviews of national policies for education. OECD Publishing. Owen Smith, E. (1994). The German economy. Routledge. Picht, G. (1964). Die Deutsche Bildungskatastrophe. Walter-Verlag. Produkt ohne Namen. (1965, March 16). Der Spiegel, 12, 58. Robinsohn, S. B., & Kuhlmann, J. C. (1967). Two decades of non-reform in West German education. Comparative Education Review, 11(3), 311–330. Sass, K. (2018). Cleavages and coalitions: Comprehensive school reforms in Norway and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany (1954–1979) (Doctoral Disseration: The University of Bergen). Bergen Open Research Archive. Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SPD). (1964). Bildungspolitische Leitsätze der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Vorstand der SPD. Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SPD). (1969). Modell eines demokratischen Bildungswesens. Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SPD). (1972). Pressemitteilung 61/72. Retrieved March 22, 2014, from http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/dig ibert.pl?id=001932&dok=14/001932&c=823 Taylor, M. E. (1981). Education and work in the Federal Republic of Germany. Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society. Thelen, K. (2004). How institutions evolve: The political economy of skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge University Press. Vergeblich gewartet. (1973, January 7). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/ politik/vergeblich-gewartet-a-9b699b5f-0002-0001-0000-000042713410 Williams, G. (1982). The economics of education: Current debates and prospects. British Journal of Educational Studies, 30(1), 97–107.

CHAPTER 10

The Contemporary Politics of Schooling

Introduction This chapter reviews developments in the policies and politics associated with the organization of general education in Britain and the FRG since the 1970s. While the 1980s and 1990s witnessed changes in education in both countries, these were largely peripheral to the structure of the systems, which into the 2000s continued to exhibit the features present at the end of the period considered in the previous chapters. More recent developments, however, have pointed to the possibility that both countries may be entering periods of fundamental change in education. While British political leaders have reconsidered grammar schools and selection, in Germany, the country has moved further away from the strict threetiered system that traditionally has characterized general education. Yet debates over general education today remain tied to the ideas and debates over social mobility, economic competitiveness, and the nature of human ability that reflect the enduring significance of the educational discourses of the postwar era.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_10

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Britain Despite measures such as the Thatcher government’s revoking of Labour’s 1976 law mandating comprehensivization (see Chapter 6), there would be no return to the tripartite system and 11-plus in England following the expansion of comprehensive schools in the 1970s, nor a widespread reversion at the local level. Of a total of 151 LEAs with secondary schools only ten retained fully selective systems with both grammar and secondary modern schools by 2013. Although there would be a small increase in the early 1990s, the total number of grammar schools in England has remained fairly steady since the 1990s; indeed, the 2013 merger of two schools in Kent (see below) reduced the total number of grammars in the country to 163 (Bolton, 2016, 3). While a wholesale structural reversion to early selection has not occurred, other changes in England—though less in Scotland and Wales— have introduced alternative mechanisms of differentiation in schooling that have come to challenge many of the core attributes of the comprehensive model and generated considerable debate along the way. Under Prime Minister Theresa May, such debates would become even sharper, as her government proposed in 2016 to allow for the first expansion of grammar schools in two decades. Conservatives: Thatcher and Major In the thirty years that followed the victory of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 general election, developments in education largely revolved around a set of market-oriented reforms largely designed to inject principles of competition into schooling. These reforms included measures to provide parents with greater decisionmaking authority and influence, make schools both more accountable and autonomous, and increase the role of non-state actors and institutions in the funding and provision of education. Accompanying these changes was a significant increase in diversity within the state system, with a raft of new school types replacing or taking their place alongside existing school models (Gibbons & Telhaj, 2007, 1282). One of the earlier proposals involved the Assisted Places Scheme, which was included in the Education Act 1980. Under the scheme, the government would provide financial support for up to 30,000 students to cover the fees at private schools. To critics, such a program was clearly

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aimed at lowering standards at comprehensive schools by removing able students—many of whom were from the middle classes—and furthering the perception that comprehensives could not serve students of all-ability ranges (Chitty, 2013, 109). Other alternative mechanisms would come in the form of parental choice, or the principle that parents’ preferences for the school they wished their child to attend should be considered in making placement decisions, and the introduction of new school types, which frequently operated outside of local control. Under the Education Act 1988,1 parents could send their child to any state school with space available and would be provided with performance indicators for individual schools in “league tables” to help them choose. Since determinations of school placement had previously been made by LEAs, such provisions, along with the creation of a national curriculum and expansion of centralized inspection and oversight responsibilities, sharply reduced the power of local authorities and introduced, as Gingrich writes, both a “logic of competition” and a “logic of control” to this new “market” of education (2011, 139–140). The 1988 Act also allowed parents to decide by secret ballot if they wished for their child’s school to become “grant-maintained” and obtain funding directly from the central government in London. Although such schools would no longer be under LEA control, they would not be permitted under the Act to reinstate formal selection procedures and become grammar schools (Haberstroh, 2016, 47). As the use of parental choice expanded under successive governments, however, many would question whether the practice was simply, in Benn and Chitty’s words, a “substitute for selection” (1996, 54), with some researchers finding the exercise of school choice to be connected to parents’ social background (see Butler & Robson, 2003). In addition to grant-maintained schools, the 1988 Act established city technology colleges, new secondary schools that emphasized technology, language, business, and commerce and were outside of the purview of LEAs (Trowler, 2003, 10–11). Under John Major’s Conservative governments, an additional school type, the “specialist” school, would be created. These schools would emphasize a particular “specialism” in the curriculum and receive their funding from private as well as public sources. Many of these new schools would become “partly selective,” and allow for a percentage of students to be chosen by school administrators. Under

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Major, the new grant-maintained schools would be permitted to select up to ten percent of its student population on the basis of ability or aptitude in music, art, drama, or sports, with a circular issued in 1996 increasing the percentage up to fifteen percent and giving officials at these schools more leeway in determining the process by which students could be selected (The Independent, 1996, 4 January). Although only a few comprehensives would obtain partially selective status, many more would come to practice “internal selection,” or streaming, by which students within a formally non-selective school would be grouped with other students of comparable ability in the same classes (Trowler, 2003, 156). Despite continued support in the party for maintaining and even expanding grammar schools, Conservative governments in the 1990s were eager to avoid the contentious politics associated with differentiation and sought to reframe the debate in those years in terms other than those that had characterized selection in past decades. As Major’s education minister John Patten put it in an article in Statesmen and Society in 1992: Selection is not, and should not be, a great issue of the 1990s as it was in the 1960s. The S-word for all Socialists to come to terms with is, rather, ’specialisation’. The fact is that children excel at different things; it is foolish to ignore it, and some schools may wish specifically to cater for these differences. (Patten 1992, 20)

Such a view captures much of the philosophy of the Conservatives during their time in government in the 1980s and 1990s. The party continued to reject the principles of mixed-ability schooling and enacted a host of measures designed to dilute the comprehensive principle, but all without embracing a complete reversion to tripartitism and the 11-plus. On the eve of Labour’s return to government under Tony Blair, two long-standing supporters of comprehensive schooling would describe the experience under the Tories in the following terms: The persistent and unprincipled attacks on local authorities, which brought comprehensive education into being and supported it, have sought to destabilize comprehensive education’s base and infrastructure. New types of schools have been created by the government, including opted out schools, directly financed by the state, with the aim of outflanking the comprehensive system. Despite all of this – indeed, paradoxically, perhaps because of it – comprehensive systems still cover the country and still

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provide secondary education for the majority of the nation’s children in the state system. (Benn & Chitty, 1996, v–vi)

New Labour Under the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown many of the Tories’ market- and choice-oriented policies would persist and even be furthered, despite Labour’s long-standing support for comprehensive schools. Much like their Conservative predecessors, Blair and Brown were eager to avoid a repeat of the titanic education clashes of the 1960s and 1970s; given the party’s strategy of expanding its electoral appeal to the middle classes, New Labour would soften its commitment to comprehensive education while retaining its principled opposition to the 11-plus and the expansion of grammar schools (Gingrich, 2011, 149–151). In the party’s, 1995 education policy document Diversity and Excellence: A New Partnership for Schools , issued in the year following Blair’s ascension as Labour leader, the party indicated that it was “implacably opposed to a return to selection by 11-plus…” and “the division which segregation inevitably brings for education and for society as a whole.” Yet the document also allowed for the possibility that parents could help establish new grammar schools, stating that “a change in the character of a school could follow only a clear demonstration of support from the parents affected by such a decision” (Labour Party, 1995, 11). To those Labour members who had participated in the comprehensivization struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, such as former Deputy Leader Roy Hattersley, such statements represented violations of the party’s core beliefs and New Labour education representatives regularly found themselves having to defend their views within the party. During a discussion on whether to retain existing grammars at the 1995 party conference, shadow education minister David Blunkett sought to make clear to his skeptical colleagues that New Labour, like its party predecessors, would oppose any return to the 11-plus: “Let me say this very slowly indeed. In fact, if you can, watch my lips - no selection either by examination or interview under a Labour government” (Wintour, 1995, October 5). In time, however, Blunkett would amend his promise of “no selection” to “no further selection,” that is, no new grammar schools, rather shutting down the existing grammars, as his comments at the party conference

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had implied (see Chitty, 2014, 61). New Labour’s distancing from the party’s commitment to comprehensive schooling was further evidenced in its 1997 election manifesto, which argued that education policy should emphasize “standards not structures” and called for more streaming and setting within mixed-ability schools, despite the fact that some proponents of comprehensive education viewed such practices as simply recreating the same differentiation within a single school rather than in separate schools as under tripartitism (Haydn, 2004, 421).2 For New Labour, both selection and comprehensive schools were targets for criticism. In education, we reject both the idea of a return to the 11-plus and the monolithic comprehensive schools that take no account of children’s differing abilities. Instead we favour all-in schooling which identifies the distinct abilities of individual pupils and organises them in classes to maximise their progress in individual subjects. In this way we modernise the comprehensive principle, learning from the experience of its 30 years of application. We will put behind us the old arguments that have bedeviled education in this country. We reject the Tories’ obsession with school structures: all parents should be offered real choice through good quality schools, each with its own strengths and individual ethos. There should be no return to the 11-plus. It divides children into successes and failures at far too early an age. We must modernise comprehensive schools. Children are not all of the same ability, nor do they learn at the same speed. That means ’setting’ children in classes to maximise progress, for the benefit of high-fliers and slower learners alike. The focus must be on levelling up, not levelling down (Labour Party Manifesto, 1997).

Many New Labour leaders’ criticisms of comprehensive schools focused on their perceived performance inadequacies, rather than reflecting some principled opposition to non-selective education.3 Other party figures, however, would more raise their objections more explicitly in terms that resembled Labour’s arguments from the interwar years, namely that the party should support a free system of state-administered grammar schools to provide new avenues for educational opportunity and social mobility for talented working-class youth. Andrew Adonis, who later would help design the Academies program (see below) while serving as the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Tony Blair, would

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embrace elements of this view, while also making the claim that the introduction of comprehensive schools eliminated any chance the tripartite system had in succeeding. “The 1944 Act,” he wrote with his co-author Stephen Pollard, “which enshrined the idea of a free grammar school place for the intellectually able rather than the socially well-connected, was the culmination of the arguments of Socialists such as Sydney Webb and R.H. Tawney. The challenge for the next generation was to widen access to grammar schools, while extending their ethos and emphasis on qualifications and standards to the secondary modern sector, emulating the achievement of Germany and Holland in particular, with their vocational schools. The comprehensive revolution, tragically, destroyed much of the excellent without improving the rest” (Adonis & Pollard, 1997, 54–55). In thirteen years in government following its 1997 electoral victory, New Labour would pursue a set of school policies that added elements of selection into the system, while resisting any expansion or establishment of fully selective schools. Such policies were frequently applied in two of the newer school types. The first involved the specialist schools that had been introduced by the Conservatives in 1994. Although the use of selection for these schools would be criticized by New Labour in opposition under Major, the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 passed under the first Blair government made it possible for specialist schools to select up to ten percent of their intake on aptitude—as distinguished from ability—for some specialties. Critics held that there was no clear difference between the two measures, but New Labour leaders maintained the distinction was genuine. According to Minister of State for Schools Stephen Byers, ability was “what the child has already achieved,” while aptitude was “a natural talent and interest that a child has in a specific subject” and a “potential which might flourish and blossom if the child is exposed to particular types of education” (quoted in Hattersley, 2004).4 Consistent with Labour’s campaign manifesto, the Act took no direct action on the existing grammar schools, but provided for parents in LEAs the power to abolish by ballot any of the roughly one hundred and sixty grammars that had survived from the reorganizations of the 1960s and 1970s (Trowler, 2003, 20–21; Crook, 2007, 154). The second school type consisted of the Academies. These secondary schools, first proposed by Labour in the Learning and Skills Act 2000 to replace failing inner city comprehensives, were sponsored by corporations or community organizations. Like the City Technology Colleges,

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Academies operated outside of LEA control and like the specialist schools, they could emphasize particular specialisms within their curriculums. Significantly, Academies were also permitted to select ten percent of their intake on the basis of specialist “aptitudes,” leading to concerns among some that the socio-economic backgrounds of students at Academies would be markedly different from the comprehensives they replaced (Gorard, 2005, 371). As a method to help ensure an equitable intake, many Academies (and other secondary schools) began adopting “fairbanding” exams, which would place pupils in one of a number of ability bands from which set numbers would be selected for admission. While supporters argued the practice ensured that a school’s population would be genuinely all-ability, opponents expressed concern that the practice demonstrated bias against middle-class parents and limited the independence of schools to make admission decisions (Barnardo’s calls, 2010, August 27). Over the remaining years of New Labour, Blair and Brown governments would maintain a strategy built around greater choice for parents, wider differentiation within schools through setting and streaming, less control for local authorities, and the promotion of different school types through the expansion of specialist schools and Academies. New Labour leaders would claim that the aim of these programs was to “re-energize comprehensive education” rather than dismantle it, and would often pair such measures with distinctly old Labour policies, such as raising the school-leaving age (Department for Education and Skills, 2005, 2).5 Critics, nevertheless, viewed the education policies of New Labour as an extension of those started under the Thatcher governments that furthered the gradual assault on the comprehensive education project that had been at the center of Labour’s education vision in the 1960s and 1970s. As Terry Haydn wrote in a 2004 article provocatively titled “The Strange Death of the Comprehensive School in England and Wales” The past 25 years have seen an accelerating erosion of the comprehensive ‘ideal’ ... Parental choice has replaced centralized LEA allocation of pupils, systems for engineering a balanced social mix in schools have been largely abandoned, and the introduction of ‘league tables’ to measure the comparative effectiveness of individual schools has led to a polarization of secondary school intakes – the very opposite of what the original comprehensive system was intended to achieve…

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When it came to power in 1997, the Labour administration, far from reversing the moves away from the ‘common’ secondary school, accelerated the moves towards a diverse system of secondary provision. (2004, 423)

Conservatives Back in Power: Cameron, May, and Johnson Arguably the most significant development with regard to the state school system involving the Conservative party government that took office along with Liberal Democratic coalition partner following the 2010 general election actually occurred three years earlier. In 2007, then opposition leader David Cameron announced that there would be no return to the selective system or 11-plus exam under a Tory government and, most controversially among his fellow Conservatives, no expansion in the number of existing grammar schools. His announcement triggered a minor revolt within his party, including a protest resignation by Graham Brady, the Tory spokesperson for European affairs, who had attended Altrincham Grammar School in Trafford and had long supported the creation of more grammar schools.6 Cameron dismissed the criticism, claiming that grammar expansion supporters were “clinging on to outdated mantras that bear no relation to the reality of life” (Ryan, 2007, May 22). Selective education, Cameron maintained, did not help children from disadvantaged backgrounds and was “unpopular with parents,” who did not “want children divided into successes and failures at 11.” Eager to end the inter-party conflict and shift the boundaries of the debate over education, Cameron simply declared victory, saying that “[n]ow that the row about grammar schools is over, we can address the real question about the future of education” (Paton, 2007, May 28). Once in government after the 2010 election,7 Cameron initially held to his position of encouraging greater use of setting and streaming within mixed-ability schools, while resisting any expansion of grammars. Under Education Minister Michael Gove, Cameron’s government blocked an attempt to create a “satellite campus” ten miles away from an operational grammar school in Tonbridge, Kent that would have added 1,300 places, arguing that such a campus would violate Labour’s 1998 ban on new grammars. Gove also rejected a similar proposal from Invicta Grammar in Maidstone, Kent on similar grounds. Two years later, however, Gove’s successor Nicky Morgan approved a revised proposal from the Tonbridge grammar school to create the satellite site, claiming that differences between the initial proposal and the

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revised one had convinced her that the new site would be a genuine expansion of the existing school and not the creation of a new one. Comprehensive education supporters accused the government of making a “U-turn” and claimed that the new site would also violate the 1998 Act (Long et al., 2017, 7–8). Morgan defended the decision, arguing in a parliamentary statement that it “does not reflect a change in this Government’s position on selective schools. Rather it reaffirms our view that all good schools should be able to expand” (HC Deb, 2015, 15 October). The resignation of David Cameron following the Brexit referendum in June 2016 would bring about a significant shift in the government’s position on grammar schools and selection. The new Prime Minister Theresa May, who had served as Home Secretary under Cameron, announced in September 2016 that her government would seek to end the ban on new grammar schools and later called for £240 million in funding for new grammars.8 “For too long,” the government argued, “we have tolerated a system that contains an arbitrary rule preventing selective schools from being established – sacrificing children’s potential because of dogma and ideology” (Office of the Prime Minister, 2016). Throughout the debate the May government conspicuously sought to avoid the charge that it was attempting to recreate the postwar selective system. In its Green Paper seeking comments on the proposals, the government maintained that while “there is a case for relaxing restrictions on selective education … whether through the expansion of existing grammars, the creation of new selective schools or through allowing non-selective schools to become selective,” it was not seeking “a reintroduction of the binary or tripartite system of the past.” Speaking before Parliament following the announcement of the proposals, Education Secretary Justine Greening attempted to recast the government’s initiatives as solutions to present-day problems, rather than past challenges. This is about moving forward with a 21st-century approach to our school system, and precisely not one rooted in the 1960s and 1970s. I just hope that the Labour party is able to engage in a modern debate, rather than one that is 40 to 50 years old. (HC Deb, 2016a, 8 September)

A similar tactic was employed by the Prime Minister, who sought in a speech on education to distinguish the “modern, meritocratic education system” she was proposing from the rigid selective system of the past

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and criticized opponents for having an “old mindset” that viewed the proposal in terms of the 1960s debates. There would be no return to a system of grammars and secondary moderns under her proposal and that the inclusion of greater flexibility for transfers between schools at later ages meant that people no longer needed to worry about “the cliff-edge of selection at 11” (Vaughan, 2017, February 8). Whatever the government’s attempt to recast the debate over grammars and selection, the Labour opposition, led by new leader Jeremy Corbyn, was eager to use the language of the past in countering the government’s proposals. In a September Commons exchange, May told Corbyn he “need[ed]to stop casting his mind back to the 1950s,” reminding him that he had attended a state grammar school.9 Ignoring the PM’s advice, Corbyn argued—in terms that could have fit easily in parliamentary exchanges of that period—that “[e]quality of opportunity is not segregating children at the age of 11…We do not need to and never should divide children at the age of 11 – a life-changing division where the majority end up losing out” (HC Deb, 2016b, 14 September).10 The 2016 proposals by the May government unleashed a widespread public debate in England that brought to the fore issues of merit, ability, and social mobility and revealed the degree to which, despite the government’s hopes, earlier controversies associated with the tripartitism and the 11-plus continued to dominate the public discourse. As one education policy observer noted in a commentary on the government proposals, “Grammar schools…are the ghost which has never really been laid to rest in debates about contemporary British education” (Finn, 2016, September 9). Significantly, the return of grammar schools as a policy issue was accompanied by a return to public discussion of the ability debate, which, as in Germany, had been confined largely to the academics and experts since the 1970s. In discussing the May government proposals, commentators regularly referred to issues such as the definition of equality, the nature of intelligence, and the capacity of modern science to assess a young person’s future potential, that had marked the debates of the 1960s. Even Cyril Burt’s name was again raised. As Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins wrote: May should remember history. Selection for grammar schools under the 1944 Education Act was based on the theory, associated with the psychologist Cyril Burt, that inherited or innate intelligence could be measured at

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11, and children pigeonholed into separate schools accordingly. The theory was cruel and later discredited. (Jenkins, 2017, May 9)

A similar reference to Burt and his legacy was made by author Chris Horrie, who reflected on his bitter experience failing the 11-plus in 1967 and attending a secondary modern in a lengthy Sunday Guardian essay: Few people have touched the lives of so many so directly as Cyril Burt, the educational psychologist who devised those parts of the 11-plus designed to test the general intelligence of one child against another…Burt’s entire life was a quest to define and measure human intelligence, and thus to make the process of education scientific. …]. If it was possible to accurately determine the general intelligence of a person, then it would be possible to devise a programme of education perfectly suited to them as an individual, just as a doctor would diagnose a patient and give the appropriate medicine. (Horrie, 2017, May 4)

Yet it was not only opponents of selection and grammar schools who would invoke the past. Supporters of the May grammar school proposals such as Tim Montgomerie writing in The Times would invoke the names and actions of figures associated with the Labour comprehensive school drive of the 1960s and 1970s, including, most notably, Anthony Crosland. ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.’ The authenticity of the quotation, attributed to Tony Crosland by his wife Susan, is contested but there is no doubting the determination that the socialist intellectual and Labour politician brought to his goal of eliminating the nation’s grammar schools. Only 164 remain today, compared with more than 1,200 beacons of academic excellence that predated Mr Crosland’s ruinous reign. (Montgomerie, 2016, September 8)

Much like their predecessors in the 1960s, the Tories in 2016 were split on selection and grammar schools. Many rank and file Conservatives had disagreed with the Cameron position and enthusiastically backed the May government proposals.11 Others, while open in principle to selection, had balked at the ideas of using £240 million designated by the government specifically for grammars instead of for all school types. A further group rejected the government plan outright. Among these

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was Nicky Morgan, the former Conservative education secretary, who along with former Labour shadow education secretary Lucy Powell and former Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, launched an effort to defeat the May grammar school proposals. “Now is not the time,” the three MPs wrote, “for more division or political ideology in education. Times have moved on. Expanding selection isn’t part of the answer to tackling social mobility” (Morgan et al., 2017, March 18). Opposition to grammar school expansion also came from school personnel. In a letter expressing opposition to the May plan, sixty-four state secondary school headmasters in Surrey (a Tory electoral stronghold) called the proposals “predicated on a nostalgic and unrealistic vision of society” (Gray, 2016, November 8). May’s decision in April 2017 to call early elections would ultimately put on hold the government’s grammar school proposals. While the election was dominated by issues related to Brexit, the Conservatives also sought a clear mandate for grammar school expansion, which had emerged as a key domestic policy initiative. The national Conservative party manifesto called for making Britain the “world’s Great Meritocracy” and a lifting of the ban on selective schools, claiming that “contrary to what some people allege, official research shows that slightly more children from ordinary, working class families attend selective schools as a percentage of the school intake compared to nonselective schools” (Conservative Party, 2017, 50, 55). The Labour manifesto decried the Tory grammar school initiative, calling it a “vanity project,” and stating that Labour, unlike the Conservatives “did not want a return to secondary moderns” (Labour Party, 2017, 37). The relatively poor showing of the Conservatives in the 2017 election, in which they lost 13 seats and were forced to form a minority coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland, led the party to drop the grammar schools initiative. In the spring of 2018, however, the new Education Secretary Damian Hinds announced the creation of a £50 million fund to build new satellite campuses at grammar schools (Department for Education & Hinds, 2018, May 11). Boris Johnson, who succeeded May as prime minister after her resignation in July 2019, had expressed support for grammar schools while Mayor of London and was expected by some to reinitiate the May grammar plan following the December 2019 election that returned the Conservatives with an 80 seat majority (Hazell, 2020, January 18). While the new

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government has demonstrated a willingness to expand existing grammars, it has not yet signaled any intention of building new ones. Devolution and School Policy As discussed in Chapter 2, education is a devolved matter in Britain, with Welsh and Scottish governments overseeing policymaking for schools.12 In Wales, as the empirical cases note, school policies generally tracked those in England in the twentieth century, but the establishment in 1999 of the Welsh National Assembly and Executive Committee (later the Welsh Parliament and Government) with education powers served to create greater distance between the two countries.13 Despite being run by Labour-controlled executives, devolved governments in Wales were reluctant to embrace New Labour’s approach to schooling and rejected the new partially selective secondary school types promoted by London. As a party, Welsh Labour remained broadly committed to comprehensive school principles during the New Labour governments (Rees, 2007, 11, Reynolds, 2008, 757) and unsurprisingly spoke out against May’s plan for more grammar schools in 2016. The position of the Welsh Conservatives has been more complex. Tory leaders in Wales had suggested in 2013 introducing a type of grammar school under a modified form of selection at age 14 but dropped the idea after it failed to gain rank and file support. And while Welsh Conservative leadership initially appeared open to the May government proposals, Tory backbenchers in the Assembly balked, claiming they were “not persuaded that grammar schools are the right way forward for schools here in Wales.” Among the party groups in the Welsh legislature, only UKIP called for the expansion of grammars and selection (www.waleso nline.co.uk 13 February 2017). In Scotland, devolution and the creation of a separate Scottish Parliament and Administration (later Government) has amplified the country’s long-standing educational distinctiveness. Although Thatcher/Major era policies such as providing school choice to parents and allowing schools to opt out of local control had also been extended to Scotland, they had little effect on the general preference in the country for comprehensive schools (McCrone, 2017, 252). Such a preference has continued into the period of devolution. Writing a decade after the Scottish Parliament’s opening, Michael Keating observed that “One issue on which Scots have diverged from English views markedly is on education, where

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they continued to support comprehensive schools, even as support for selection grew in England during the 19 1990s” (2010, 46). The marketoriented conception of education promoted by New Labour was “not only rejected in Scotland: it was never even seriously considered,” and— as in Wales—a Labour-controlled Scottish Administration in Edinburgh bucked its national party leadership by continuing to back comprehensives as the model for country’s education system (Hassan & Shaw, 2012, 155). During the debate on the May’s grammar proposals for England, the Scottish Conservatives voiced clear opposition to a similar policy for Scotland, noting the problems posed by the country’s rural geography and isolated communities for such schools. As Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson stated at the time, selective schooling “has never been in any manifesto I’ve written and it won’t be in any manifesto that I write for Scotland as long as I’m leader of the Scottish Conservative party” (Mason & Walker, 2016, October 3).

Germany For some twenty years following the failure of the SPD-FPD coalition reform efforts of the 1970s, the general education system in the Federal Republic of Germany was characterized by structural stasis, with the system continuing to be organized around the basic three-tiered framework, plus a limited number of Gesamtschulen concentrated in particular Länder such as Hesse, and a comparatively small percentage of students attending an unaligned orientation stage school during their fifth and sixth years. By the end of the 1970s, questions concerning the macrostructure of schooling and its social consequences that had dominated the reform period had been replaced by more “micro” concerns, such as school effectiveness. As Rudloff (2016, 379) writes, “In the Federal Republic (as in Britain), the cycle of interest on questions of inequality gradually came to an end with the end of the education boom era. In public discussion, the problem of unequal educational opportunities moved increasing into the background.” During this period, debates over the education system were generally limited to experts (Hartmann, 2008, 209). By the early 2000s, however, concerns over the structure of German schooling would once again return to the fore of public debate and the policy agenda. While this return was driven by factors different from those that had sparked the debates of the 1960s, it would follow a

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similar pattern, with discursive shifts shaping new opportunities for reform in the organization of general education that would have seemed unlikely from the vantage of the 1980s and 1990s.

Change and Continuity in the 1980s and 1990s While the structure of the general education system did not change dramatically in the period following the reform initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s, the distribution of students in the various schools began shifting significantly. In the first postwar decade, fewer than five percent of students were placed in the Gymnasium following selection at age ten. As discussed in Chapter 8, however, this number would already begin to rise in the 1960s, as would the number of students in the intermediate Realschule. The trend would accelerate in the 1970s and 1980s, as the increase in attendance figures for the higher schools would be coupled with a major decline in students attending the basic Hauptschule; by 1990 fewer than one in three secondary students were enrolled in a Hauptschule, nearly the same percentage as in the Gymnasium. The changes in enrollments, however, did not correspond with a significant percentage rise in Gesamtschule enrollments, which remained in single digits into the 1990s. In the three decades that followed the publication of the Rahmenplan, German general education experienced a large-scale distributional shift without an organizational one (Table 10.1). The reunification of Germany in 1990 following forty years of division presented an opportunity for change. As discussed in Chapter 7, East German general education was largely comprehensive in structure, Table 10.1 Percent distribution of students in the FRG by School Type, 1960– 1996 Year

Orientation stage (%)

Hauptschulen (%)

Realschulen (%)

Comprehensive schools/steiner schools1 (%)

Gymnasium (%)

1960 1970 1980 1990

0.0 0.0 6.4 6.4

66.4 55.2 36.4 30.7

13.5 20.1 25.5 25.2

0.1 0.1 3.6 7.0

20.1 24.7 28.2 30.7

Source adapted from Ertl and Phillips (2000, 396)

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at least at the lower secondary level, with students commonly educated in polytechnic secondary schools (Polytechnische Oberschule) through age fifteen. The East German system was largely cut off from developments in the rest of Europe during the Cold War, yet the secondary schools were, Wilde writes, “in many respects … more in line with the educational norms of European countries in the 1990s than western German schooling provisions” (2002, 44). Following reunification, however, it would be the GDR’s comprehensive system that would be reformed. In all five new Länder, the education system, as with other institutions of the East German state, would become aligned with practices in the West. These reforms constituted a significant undertaking, involving the closure of over 6,000 polytechnic and high schools and massive changes in administration, personnel, and curriculum.14 In a manner mirroring the variation in practices across the Länder in the West, the general education systems that emerged in the East demonstrated significant differences. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the standard three-tiered Western structure of Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium with a small percentage of students attending a parallel Gesamtschule was adopted, but in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, the Hauptschule and Realschule were merged into a single school type, creating, with the Gymnasium, more of a bipartite structure. In Brandenburg, the only new Land in which the SPD emerged as the largest party in the Landtag after the first election, an attempt was made to model the new system around the Gesamtschule, but this failed largely because of the FDP’s insistence that the system contains the business-friendly Realschule. Whatever their individual differences, all five new Länder of the East would replace the comprehensive system of the GDR with a new structure based on the West’s differentiated system: selection between ages ten and twelve for placement in a separate school type (Wilde, 2002).

The PISA Shock A set of developments in the 2000s would refocus attention on the traditional school system in Germany and reopen debates about the merits of the three-tiered framework. Arguably the most significant of these began with Germany’s poor showing on the first OECD PISA test in 2000, which evaluated members’ educational systems by measuring the academic performance of 15-year-olds in mathematics, science, and

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reading. Of 31 OECD countries assessed, Germany ranked twenty-first in reading and twentieth in math and science, placing the FRG in the lower half of all members (OECD, 2001). These scores, along with findings that revealed large gaps between the lowest and highest achievers and significant differences between Germans of migrant and non-migrant backgrounds, shocked many in Germany who had believed their country’s education system was world class.15 As FDP Bundestag member Cornelia Pieper asked during a parliamentary debate, “Who would have thought what the PISA study confirms: The nation of poets and thinkers has forgotten how to read and write” (Bundestag, 2001). Much as with the “educational catastrophe” debate unleashed by Picht and Dahrendorf in the 1960s, German media seized on the PISA results as evidence of a new crisis in education16 (Odendahl, 2017, 211). The country’s school system, which had receded to the background as an issue of public concern since the 1980s, once again rose to the fore of the national political dialogue. From politicians and policymakers, the response to the PISA scores was swift. Calling the results “alarming,” Federal Education and Research Minister Edelgard Bulmahn, wrote that “a country with the economic and political significance of Germany belongs at the top of the league and cannot be satisfied with an education system performing at the OECD average level – never mind below it.” She urged education authorities to enact twelve recommendations put forth by an education task force she had headed in the early years of the SPD-Green coalition that governed Germany from 1998 until 2005. The KMK likewise issued a statement following the release of the PISA results that included a set of measures for Länder to adopt. Among the recommendations were calls for furthering opportunities for young people of migrant backgrounds, making greater use of technology in the classroom, and enhancing “allday” school offerings, but there was no mention of reforming early selection or the three-tiered system (KMK, 2001; Forum Bildung, 2002). For some Germans, the most troublesome findings of the PISA test were not the country’s cumulative scores but rather those related to the inequalities of the school system. PISA found that fifty percent of children of parents from the top income and education levels attended a Gymnasium, while attendance figures for children whose parents were in the lowest quarter of income and education was only ten percent. To politicians such as Reinhard Loske of the Green party, these findings

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represented the “truly frightening part” of PISA, which Germans, absent the results, “would have not have believed at all” (Bundestag, 2001).17 In terms of the school structure debate, the PISA results offered, in a sense, something for everyone (see Messinger & Wypchol, 2013, 105). Much as with Theresa May’s 2016 grammar school proposals in Britain, the conflicts of the 1960s played a central part in the post-PISA debates in Germany, with both supporters and opponents of comprehensive schooling espousing a particular interpretation of that era’s legacies. To supporters, the failure to achieve complete reform of the general education system of the type envisioned in the Brandt proposals of 1970 had led the perpetuation of unmodernized school structure which, as PISA demonstrated, was clearly unsuited for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The academic deficiencies and social inequalities in the traditional system revealed by PISA pointed to the drawbacks of the selective system while at the same time highlighting the possibilities of the Gesamtschule.18 As Professor Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, wrote: there is no empirical evidence that the early separation of pupils has a positive influence on the average PISA test results. In fact, there is even some evidence that the early separation tends to reduce average pupil performance. In any case the early separation leads to a massive increase in the performance differences of the tested pupils… Germany must again debate the benefits of the comprehensive school…It is now time to forget the old ideologies of the left and right and to adjust the German educational system to international standards. (2006, 250)

For groups opposed to comprehensive schools, the PISA results were also viewed through the lens of the 1960s and 1970s, but with a completely different interpretation of that era’s legacies. As DPhV head Dr. Heinz-Peter Meidinger stated in 2006: All signs point to the Federal Republic standing on the threshold of a hard battle over the structure of schooling and the dismantling of the threetiered school system… In particular, in the PDS, the Greens, and parts of the SPD, there is a willingness to prepare a new campaign for the introduction of the Gesamtschule with the ultimate goal of bridging all school types into a so-called community school (Gemeinschaftsschule)…This jeopardizes the consensus that has been painstakingly found in the Conference

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of Ministers of Education (KMK) for the jointly agreed post-Pisa reforms aimed specifically at improving the quality of teaching. The debate over school structures prevented effective school reforms in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. This also contributes to some of the deficits that exist. (DPhV, 2006)

Migrants and the School System In addition to the PISA shock, two long-term developments were significant in the new debate about education: the rising number of migrants in German schools and the continuing decline of the Hauptschule in the three-tiered system. The share of Germany’s population with a migrant background had increased significantly since the 1960s, when the building of the Berlin Wall ended migration from the East and the booming economy and labor shortages led the FRG to recruit more foreign guest workers from countries such as Italy, Greece, and Turkey, many of whom remained in the country after the formal end of the guest worker program in 1973 with their families. In the early years of the guest worker programs, the children of foreign laborers had sharply limited access to the higher schools in the threetiered system. As Lehman (2019) notes in her study of migrant children in West Germany and Europe between 1949 and 1992, culture ministries in the Länder responsible for education policy approached the issue of schooling for foreign children differently than how they viewed it for German children. Although migrant children had a right to an education in the FRG, “it was,” she writes, “a right to a basic education in lower secondary school. Access to middle-and upper-secondary schooling was barely even imagined as a possibility” (68). The inequalities of the system that so curtailed the opportunities for German working class youth were, Lehman argues, “magnified for foreign children,” who faced both social and political exclusion as well as the hardships associated with economic disadvantage (140). In many OECD countries, students from migrant backgrounds are among the highest performers academically; in Canada, Britain, and the United States fifty percent or more of 15 to 34 year-olds with the highest levels of education in the population were of migrant origin in 2013. In Germany, by contrast, the comparable figure was only fifteen percent, well below the EU-10 and OECD-16 averages (OECD, 2015). Indeed, despite an increase in the number of students with migration origins attending Gymnasium since 2000, the Hauptschule has remained

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the school option for a comparatively high number of migrant students, with 21.4% of first generation and 8.9% of second generation migrant students attending in 2017. These figures were significantly higher than the Hauptschule attendance rates of Germans with non-migration backgrounds, which stood in 2017 at only 4.4% , down from 7.3% in 2013 (Sachverständigenrat für Integration und Migration, 2019, 3). Overall, the number of Hauptschulen in operation in the FRG has fallen significantly in the 2000s; in 2014/2015, only 3,039 such schools were open, a decline of more than forty percent over the previous decade (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2016). By 2010s, only a handful of Länder (though some of the largest in terms of population19 ) retained the Hauptschule in its traditional position in the three-tiered system (Messinger & Wypchol, 2013, 110). These developments served to lower sharply the social standing of the Hauptschule, with some labeling it a “Restschule,” or remainder school, suitable only for those incapable of making the cut in the higher school types.20 The traditional Realschule has also seen its share of the student population decline in the 2000s; the percent of the secondary population in Realschulen fell from 26.9 to 20.6% between 2006/2007 and 2016/2017. Such changes have been accompanied by a steady rise in the percentage of students attending integrated forms of the Gesamtschule, which grew from 8.7 to 18.3% in the same period (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2018, 13).

The Hamburg Reform Initiative The sum effect of the PISA shock and the changes in Germany’s demography and student distribution patterns—and the politics they would engender—were on display in a 2009 effort by the city government in Hamburg to reform its school system. As noted in Chapter 7, Hamburg had been the site of one of the sharpest conflicts over education in the early postwar period, when the SPD government faced a massive backlash in 1949 to its introduction of a six year common primary school that ended with a CDU victory in the 1953 Bürgerschaft elections and a return to selection at age ten and the traditional three-tiered system. With the exception of the introduction of the integrated Gesamtschule during the 1970s reform era, the traditional system remained in place in the city with few changes into the 2000s. By the time a new Green21 /CDU coalition government took office in 2008, declining

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enrollments, rising inequalities,22 and concerns over academic performance, coupled with a perception that the skill levels of Hamburg school graduates were not sufficient for the demands of modern employers, had created significant reform pressures.23 The coalition quickly introduced a set of school reforms consisting of two primary components. First, as in 1949, the coalition proposed extending the period of common study to six years from four, along with renaming the Grundschule the Primarschule, or primary school. Second, the Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gesamtschule would all be merged into a single school under the proposals called the Stadtteilschule, or district school. In this new school type, students could potentially receive any of the secondary school certifications under the three-tiered system, including the Abitur in the thirteenth year. Under this arrangement, the Gymnasium would continue to operate alongside the Stadtteilschule, though its students could obtain the Abitur in the twelfth year. In this new bipartite system, parents could select whether they wished their children to attend, independent of teacher recommendations (See Edelstein & Nikolai, 2013; Bale, 2016). The proposed reform sparked a massive opposition campaign. Led by lawyer Walter Scheuerl and his organization “Wir wollen lernen” (We want to learn), opponents managed to collect the requisite number of signatures to hold the city’s first ever binding referendum on the sixyear primary school reform component. On July 18, 2010, some 54.5% of Hamburgers voted against the primary school proposal, while 39.3% voted in its favor (Bale, 2016, 24). As in the first postwar decade, supporters of early selection in Hamburg would be successful in thwarting attempts to change this core feature of the German system. Among the several reasons the Hamburg reform initiative was notable was its display of the post-PISA evolution of the CDU. As discussed above, the Christian Democrats, including the Hamburg party, had maintained their support for the traditional system in the period following reform era in the 1970s. During the long period of SPD control of the city government in the 1980s and 1990s, the CDU, Edelstein and Nikolai (2013, 491) write, “vehemently opposed” any merging of the Hauptschule and Realschule and following their return to power in 2001, the party sought to stabilize enrollments in the traditional schools rather than carry out structural changes. Despite such efforts, enrollments continued to decline in the Hauptschule, leading to financial concerns

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over the cost of keeping open schools that had fewer and fewer students each year and increasing the attractiveness of merger for the CDU. Beyond economics, however, were the effects of shifting beliefs within the CDU (both in Hamburg and the national level) regarding the appropriateness of the traditional three-tiered system. “The fact that Hamburg’s Christian Democrats supported a far-reaching structure reform,” Edelstein and Nikolai write, “reflected a profound change in the party’s school-policy mindset” (2013, 491). Crucial in this respect, were the 2001 PISA results, which, Bale writes, “opened up all kinds of ideological space” among policy actors regarding education reform. This “de-ideologization” of education politics was clearly visible in evolution in the views of Hamburg’s CDU mayor Ole von Beust, who had been an “ardent defender” of the traditional system as a young person in the 1970s, but by 2010 had come to view it as “an expression of obsolete, hierarchical thinking” (quoted in Edelstein and Nikolai, 2013, 491).24 At the national level, this changing mindset was on display in a proposal introduced for debate at the party’s 2011 conference that called for a merger of the Hauptschule and Realschule across the country into a new school type, called the Oberschule, by 2020, along with more powers to the federal government in Berlin over education and greater standardization of school requirements among the Länder. As in the 1960s, the proposal ran into opposition from the CSU as well as CDU officials from southern Länder, who argued that the Hauptschule should remain an independent school type in the German system (Gräber, 2011, June 11). The DPhV sharply criticized the proposal, saying that it amounted to the “social democratization of the CDU” that stood in opposition to the party’s long-standing commitment to a selective system of general education (quoted in Nikolai et al., 2016, 131). In the face of these criticisms, the Oberschule proposal was significantly watered down at the party conference (Messinger & Wypchol, 2013, 136–137), but the fact that such a suggestion would even be made at the highest levels of the party demonstrated how far the CDU position had evolved. Whatever the views among Christian Democrats, the trend toward merging the lower schools continued into the 2010s; by the end of the decade, 11 of the 16 Länder had in place some version of a twotiered structure in which the Gymnasium retained its position as the academic track, while some variety of a combined Haupt and Realschule served vocationally oriented learners (Nikolai, 2018, 1). Such developments occurred even in traditionally conservative Länder such as

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Baden-Württemberg, which had largely retained the three-tiered school system with relatively few students in integrated Gesamtschulen despite evidencing a particularly close connection between social origin and educational attainment. With the intention of replacing the system of separate Hauptschulen and Realschulen, the Green-SPD coalition elected in 2011 after decades of CDU governments introduced the Gemeinschaftsschule, an all-day school with integrated courses until the tenth grade that provided the opportunity for students to work toward the attainment level of each of the three-school types in the traditional system (Baden-Württemberg, 2014, 5–6; Busemeyer & Haastert, 2017, 131, 136). Faced with such developments, even the DPhV has softened in its opposition to merging the two-school types. The GEW, for its part, has supported merger, viewing it as a step in the direction of a fully comprehensive system (Nikolai et al., 2016, 131).

The New Ability Debate in Germany The moderating of the CDU on retaining the Hauptschule as a freestanding school type after PISA did not represent an abandonment of the differentiated system; the party, along with groups such as the Philologenverband, remains firmly committed to maintaining selection and the standing of the Gymnasium in the system. As then Lower Saxony cultural minister David McAllister put it during the 2011 party debate over the Oberschule, “keep your fingers off the Gymnasium; otherwise there will be trouble” (Focus , 2011, 15 November). A 2013 study of the CDU and SPD school programs found that there had not been a fundamental convergence in the two parties since PISA, despite convergence around a two-track school structure in some Länder such as in Hamburg. In this sense the present situation resembles that of the late 1960s, when allegiance to the traditional structure began to show signs of weakening among Christian Democrats (though, as with the present situation, less in the south) in the aftermath of the Bildungskatastrophe and the introduction of the Gesamtschule. In terms of the ability discourse, however, there are significant differences between conditions today and those in the 1960s. While the dynamic conceptions of ability that Roth and others promoted in the 1960s continue to be promoted by pro-comprehensive parties such as the SPD and Greens, the hard view of ability as biologically fixed and innate is no longer consistently expressed by mainstream supporters of

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selection such as the Christian Democrats. Instead, it has found new support among German nationalist and anti-immigrant populist parties, such as the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, [AfD]) party, and the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, [NPD]), which have emerged as its discursive inheritors as well as the most ardent defenders of the traditional three-tiered system.25 While the influence of the dynamic ability conceptions of Heinrich Roth and his Bildungsrat contemporaries was significant, it ultimately reached its limits with the Brandt reforms, and generated a backlash among Christian Democratic politicians and pedagogues, who were inclined to view problems in the education system as a result of environmental conceptions of ability (Kössler, 2016, 131). Since PISA, however, there has been a return of social scientific analysis dealing with problem of social imbalance in the education system (see Hartmann, 2008). While some research has noted positive elements to the traditional system (see Chapter 2), many findings have highlighted its social inequities and recent years have seen calls by figures such as Vernor Muñoz Villalobos, the Special Rapporteur on education issues for the UN Commission on Human Rights, to dismantle it, claiming that it was socially discriminatory and structurally prejudiced against immigrant children (“Germany’s school”, 2007, March 22). The response of conservatives to these findings has been to double down on the selective system by claiming in part that whatever flaws exist in it are a result of the educational expansion that took place after the 1960s. Such a view is articulated by Eberhard Elbing, a psychology professor at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. According to Elbing, the concept of Breitenbildung, or mass education, which he associates with the reform era, had led to a “preference for mediocrity” that is evident most clearly in the increased share of students at the Gymnasium and the declining performance of Germans in international exams of basic competence, such as PISA. The manifest drawbacks of Breitenbildung, he argues, have helped to generate a new “democratic” conception of elite education, which demonstrates “respect for individual skills” and, inadvertently, even greater levels of student differentiation than the traditional system through the offering of special “gifted” classes and institutions outside of Gymnasium (see Hartmann, 2008, 14). The psychologist Elsbeth Stern has articulated similar concerns about mass education, rejecting the Gymnasium’s evolution into a school attended

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by most students and arguing that most of its current students are only of average intelligence and ability. In her view, Gymnasium attendance rates should only be between 20 and 25% (“Die meisten”, 2013, May 8).26 For Elbing, elites could potentially consist of any talented student, regardless of national origin (2005, 22). In this respect, he and other conservatives differ sharply from the nationalist ability discourse that has become intermixed with the issue of migrants. If one could say that conceptions of fixed and inherited ability were paired with race during the interwar and Nazi periods and class and social mobility in the first postwar decades, the nationalist view has been characterized by an emphasis on culture and ability, with adherents questioning whether Germany’s growing migrant population, many of whom are Muslim, are reducing the overall level of ability in the country. Arguably the most significant—and controversial—contribution to this vein of the contemporary ability debate in Germany came not from a psychologist or sociologist, but an economist, SPD party member, and board member of the German Central Bank named Thilo Sarrazin. In a bestselling book published in 2010, Sarrazin maintained that in order to solve its problem of declining birth rates, Germany requires immigrants, who are likely to come not from Europe but from Muslim-majority countries. The comparatively high fertility rates of Muslims compared to ethnic Germans means at present trends that the former would likely comprise the majority of the country’s population by century’s end. Crucially, Sarrazin argued that Germany’s Muslims were not only more likely to be unemployed and dependent on state services than ethnic Germans, but were less intelligent. Intelligence in his view, is a largely inherited trait and the long-term consequences of these demographic trends would be a decrease in the overall intelligence of the German population, with dramatic consequences for the country’s economy and society. Among its many topics, Sarrazin’s work included an extended discussion of the German education system that examined the causes of Germany’s poor performance on PISA and a consideration of the relative merits of the traditional school structure. Included in the book was a summary of the relationship between static and dynamic conceptions of ability that concluded with a spirited defense of differentiation and selection in education. For Sarrazin, the increased percentage of German students attending the Gymnasium has led to a massive stigma associated with attending the Hauptschule, but he rejected recent attempts to create

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a two-tiered system of the type seen in Berlin and Hamburg in which the new secondary schools could grant all certifications up to and including the Abitur. Such a program, he argued, would necessarily lead to the creation of a system centered around the “Einheitsschule,” in which the Gymnasium would be “superfluous” (2010, 219). For Sarrazin, national groups’ variation in educational ability, as seen in the PISA test results, was associated both with genetic endowment and with the level of ethnic diversity in the population. In his analysis of the 2006 PISA results, Sarrazin noted what he viewed as a clear correspondence between national ethnic uniformity and educational performance. [I]t is completely obvious that it is easier for the education systems in nations like Korea and Finland with largely homogenous populations. The national differences in performance are, however, apparently largely due to innate differences in educational ability, otherwise their stability in completely different school systems cannot be explained. A realistic pedagogy serving the students starts here and accepts the genetic variability of human systems. (emphasis added 2010, 213)

Sarrazin’s conceptions of ability showed clear parallels to the thinking of the postwar discourse agents such as Karl Valentin Müller and Albert Huth. While his work did not directly draw on these figures, it did rely on estimates from Volkmar Weiss, a Leipzig researcher, whose findings on the decline in the average of IQ of German children since the time of unification were cited by Sarrazin in Deutschland schafft sich ab (Sarrazin, 2010, 375).27 Much of Weiss’s work on intelligence in postunification Germany shared clear affinities with Huth’s studies on pre and postwar youth in the 1950s. Yet while Huth was examining a much more ethnically uniform Germany (though one that witnessed massive population shifts with the mass migration of eastern Germans fleeing the Soviet army at the end of the war), Weiss was considering a much more diverse contemporary FRG and attributing the perceived decline in intelligence on Germany’s foreign population and particularly its large Turkish component (Mersch, 2005, August 8). Like Huth, Weiss also argued that the three divisions of intelligence corresponded to three positions in the work force, even quoting Heinrich Weinstock, a leading postwar advocate of the fixed ability discourse (see Chapter 7) (Weiss, 1993, 179).28

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Sarrazin’s book ignited a massive public debate in Germany over immigration, integration, and identity that dominated the headlines for weeks. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who earlier had created controversy herself by claiming that multiculturalism in Germany had failed and demanding that immigrants integrate further, condemned Sarrazin, calling his views of Muslims “absurd” (“Merkel nimmt”, 2010, September 3). The SPD likewise repudiated Sarrazin’s book and even sought to expel him from the party. Among NPD and later AfD members and supporters, however, Sarrazin’s nationalist ability discourse was greeted with enthusiasm.29 His arguments concerning the inheritance of ability, coupled with his conclusions regarding the academic performance of more ethnically homogenous countries and his clear preference for the traditional school structure, can be seen in the education postures of the NPD and AfD, both of which have called a strict implementation of the traditional three-tiered system, with a selection purely on the basis of ability (rather than parental choice), and a raising of standards and admissions criteria for the Gymnasium. To critics of these parties, their proposals to revert to strict conceptions of the differentiated system have been done with one primary purpose, namely the enforcement of a type of ethnic educational segregation, in which students from migrant backgrounds would be relegated to the Hauptschule and the higher schools would be reserved for ethnic Germans.30

Conclusion The decades since the great reform battles in the 1960s and 1970s and particularly the period since 1990 have been characterized by incremental change in British and German general education, with neither system transforming fundamentally but noteworthy adjustments occurring in both. While Conservative and Labour governments in Britain have effectively diluted the comprehensive principle that arguably reached its peak influence around the time of circular 10/65, wholesale attempts to return to a selective system consisting of separate grammar schools such as Theresa May’s 2016 initiative have found little success. In Germany, the distributional and organizational changes that have taken place since the extension of the West’s selective system to the East following reunification have been significant, but to date have not threatened the dominant

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position of the Gymnasium in the FRG’s differentiated secondary school structure. Clearly the environments in which education policies are formulated today differ from those of the initial postwar decades. Assimilating migrants, adjusting curriculums to the knowledge economy, and responding to a globalized setting in which national education systems are regularly measured and compared are just some of the contemporary issues twenty-first-century education policymakers must address. Despite this altered context, ideas about the nature of human ability continue to exert an influence over societies’ visions for the possibilities of education as mechanism for economic advancement and social equality much as they did in the previous century. As Weigand notes “as long as educational justice is not realized, the pedagogic ability concept is sure to be used as a political fighting word” (2011, 53).

Notes 1. The 1988 Act is frequently characterized as the most significant piece of education legislation for England and Wales since the 1944 Act. For a discussion, see Chitty (2014, 51). 2. Even in Scotland, where comprehensive education faced much less opposition, authorities would come under pressure to expand the practice of streaming and particularly setting to accommodate gifted students (Smith, 2006, 5). 3. Statements by prominent New Labour figures denigrating comprehensive schools compounded the perception that New Labour harbored anticomprehensive views. Among these were Blair press secretary Alistair Campbell’s reference to “an education system littered with bog-standard comprehensives” and Secretary of State for Education Estelle Morris’s comment that there were some comprehensives that she “would not touch with a bargepole” (quoted in Haydn, 2004, 420). 4. Sceptics included chief schools adjudicator Philip Hunter, who would comment that “[f]inding a difference between the meaning of two such words is the sort of exercise lexicographers get up to when they haven’t enough to do” (“Specialist schools”, 2003, July 11). 5. Formally proposed by Gordon Brown in 2007, students were required to remain in some type of education or work-place training until the age of 18 by 2015. 6. In 2010 Brady would be named leader of the influential “1922 Committee” of Conservative backbenchers.

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7. Short of a majority following the election, the Conservatives formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who were also in favor of retaining the remaining grammars while opposing future expansion; unlike the Tories, however, they sought to amend the voting rules for keeping grammar schools open, arguing that their design favored grammar supporters. 8. May had attended Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School in Wheatley before it was comprehensivized in 1971 and renamed Wheatley Park Comprehensive School. 9. Corbyn attended Adams’ Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire. 10. During the same exchange, Corbyn reminded May of David Cameron’s opposition to expanding grammar schools. 11. Even before the government’s proposals, the group Conservative Voice restarted an earlier campaign in support of new grammar schools in July 2016. 12. In Northern Ireland, the 11-plus and grammar schools persisted since the 1960s despite the changes in the rest of the UK. As education minister in the devolved government formed after the Good Friday Peace Agreement, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuiness called for an end to selection in 2002. Although the final round of “official” 11-plus exams took place in November 2008, unionist negotiators had insisted in the St. Andrews agreement that reestablished power sharing in 2007 after five years of direct rule that any future education minister would not be able to impose comprehensive schooling in the country. Since then, grammar schools have continued to require students to sit “transfer tests,” with nondenominational grammar schools and Catholic grammars administering different exams (“Q&A”, 2011, November 11). In September 2021 it was reported that school officials in Northern Ireland had agreed to a common exam for all selective grammars to be offered beginning in 2023 (Meredith, 2001, September 22). The use of early selection in Northern Ireland has generally been opposed by Irish nationalist parties, including Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic Labour Party, and supported by unionists, such as the DUP and the Ulster Unionist Party. 13. Formally, the responsibility for primary and secondary school policy had been transferred to the newly created Welsh Office in 1970. 14. The legal foundation for the reformed systems of East was found in the 1964 Hamburg Agreement (see Chapter 7), which had established common standards in education that allowed for the transferability of students and credentials across the country (Döbert & Führ, 1998, 379). 15. Hartmann see parallels between the PISA results of the early 2000s and the launch of Sputnik in the 1950s (see Chapter 8) in terms of generating concern about the suitability of the German education system (2008, 209).

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16. Reflecting the response of much of the national press following the release of the PISA scores, the cover of Der Spiegel magazine asked “Are German Students Stupid?” and labelled the PISA study “A New Educational Catastrophe” (“Sind deutsche”, 2001, December 12). 17. Looking back from 2011 on the ten year anniversary of the first PISA, wrote Die Zeit education correspondent Thomas Kerstan wrote that “only in one point was Germany out in front: in educational inequality. In no other country was school performance so closely tied to social origin as in this country” (Kerstan, 2011, December 1). 18. As Die Zeit newspaper proclaimed on the eve of the second PISA results, “Suddenly, the Gesamtschule is once again part of the conversation” (Kerstan, 2004, September 30). 19. These included Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg, Hessen, North Rhine Westphalia, and parts of Lower Saxony. 20. Some have argued that the Hauptschule should remain to serve primarily as a tool for the integration of newcomers, particularly since Germany’s acceptance of refugees fleeing the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan in 2015 (Siems, 2016, March 21). 21. Until 2012, the Green party in Hamburg operated under the name “Green Alternative List,” or GAL. 22. By 2009 Hamburgers with a migrant background comprised 43.9% of the under 18 population. Migrant youth were far more likely than nonmigrant students to drop out of school and attend vocational or special education schools (Bale, 2008, 27). 23. A new set of empirical studies into the Hamburg education system following PISA revealed significant performance and fairness deficits in the Hamburg system. 24. Berlin was one of the few regions of the FRG to retain the school reforms it made in the immediate postwar period, most notably the extension of common schooling to six years (see Chapter 7). In 2010 a new initiative from the governing SPD-Left party coalition effectively ended the threetiered system, by folding the Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gesamtschule into a new school type called the Sekundärschule, or integrated secondary school, which, as in Hamburg, existed along with the traditional Gymnasium. Although the CDU and FDP opposed the reform, observers noted that compared to the contention in Hamburg the reform process in Berlin was “quite smooth” (Menke, 2010, January 14; see also Nikolai, 2018). 25. Both parties have experienced some measure of recent electoral success. The NPD, which was founded in the 1960s, has been unable to qualify for representation at the national level but did manage to obtain seats under the five percent threshold rule in Saxony and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in the 2000s before losing them in the 2010s. The AfD, which was formed only in 2013 in response to the Eurozone crisis, has had

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greater success, securing representation in the parliaments of 14 of the 16 Bundesländer and obtaining 94 seats in the federal parliament with 12.6% of national vote in the 2017 election. It should be noted that Stern has indicated support for a common community school model for students up to age 15, after which between one-fourth and one-fifth of students would transfer to an upper secondary Gymnasium. Sarrazin would also cite Elsbeth Stern on the topic of inheritability of intelligence, though Stern would claim that he failed to provide the correct context for her findings (“Jeder kann”, 2010, September 2). Weiss had direct connections with the NPD, serving for the party on a commission on demographic developments in the Saxon parliament and writing for NPD publications (Mersch, 2005, August 8). NPD chairman Udo Voigt stated that “Herr Sarrazin has expressed the view that he does not wish to be a foreigner in his own country and has thereby affirmed the NPD policy of the past forty years” and the party later used a quote from Sarrazin on a campaign poster (“NPDVorsitzender”, 2010, August 30). For an example of this type of criticism, see the GEW teacher union analysis of the AfD education program “Die Bildungspolitik der AfD: “Survival of the Fittest” (GEW, 2018).

References Adonis, A. & Pollard, S. (1997). A class acts. Hamish Hamilton. Baden-Württemberg, Ministerium für Kultus, Jugend, und Sport. (2014). With the individual student’s needs in mind: Promoting personalized learning in all types of school,” OECD Innovative Learning Environments Project: Implementation and Change. Retrieved May 15, 2020, from https://www.oecd. org/education/ceri/Germany-Baden-Wurttemberg-Monitoring-Note-I.pdf Bale, J. (2016). Spectator democracy: An intersectional analysis of education reform in Hamburg. Germany. European Education, 48(1), 23–42. Barnardo’s calls for fairer school admissions. (2010, August 27). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/education-11098808 Benn, C., & Chitty, C. (1996). Thirty years on: Is comprehensive education alive and well or struggling to survive? David Fulton Publishers Bolton, P. (2016). House of commons briefing paper 1398. Retreived June 10, 2017 from https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/ Summary/SN01398 Bundestag (Germany). (2001). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages. Deutscher Bundestag

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Hazell, W. (2020, January 18). Why the government has ditched Theresa May’s dream to roll out new grammar schools. iNews. https://inews.co.uk/news/ education/government-theresa-mays-grammar-school-rollout-386927 Jeder kann das große Los ziehen. (2010, September 2). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/sarrazin/die-debatte/dieintelligenzforscherin-elsbeth-stern-im-interview-jeder-kann-das-grosse-los-zie hen-11026638.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2 Jenkins, S. (2017, May 9). The return of the 11-plus is Theresa May’s first real Trump moment. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2017/mar/09/11-plus-theresa-may-trump-moment-grammar-schools Keating, M.J. (2010). The government of Scotland: Public policy making after devolution. Edinburgh University Press. Kerstan, T. (2004, 30 September). Mehr Mut zu Experimenten! Die Zeit. https://www.zeit.de/2004/41/_Mehr_Mut_zu_Experimenten_ Kerstan, T. (2011, December 1). Der heilsame Schock. Die Zeit. https://www. zeit.de/2011/49/C-Pisa-Rueckblick Kössler, T. (2016). Auf der Suche nach einem Ende der Dummheit. Begabung und Intelligenz in den deutschen Bildungsdebatten seit 1900. In C. Goschler & T. Kössler (Eds.). Vererbung oder Umwelt? Ungleichheit zwischen Natur und Gesellschaft seit 1945 (pp. 103–133). Wallstein Verlag Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK). (2001, December 4). Erste Reaktion der Präsidentin der KMK auf die Vorstellung der internationalen PISA-Ergebnisse. Retrieved March 20, 2015, from http://www.kmk.org/aktuell/pm011204. htm Labour Party (Great Britain). (1995). Diversity and excellence: A new partnership for schools. Labour Party Labour Party (Great Britain). (1997). The Labour Party Manifesto 1997 . Labour Party Labour Party (Great Britain). (2017). For the many not the few: the Labour Party Manifesto 2017 . Labour Party Lehman, B. (2019). Teaching migrant children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992. Palgrave Macmillan. Long, R., Foster, D., & Roberts, N. (2017). House of commons library: Briefing paper: Number 7070, Grammar schools in England. HMSO Mason, R., & Walker, P. (2016, October 3). The Guardian. https://www.the guardian.com/politics/2016/oct/03/ruth-davidson-rules-out-grammar-sch ools-in-scotland Menke, B. (2010, January 14). Berlin schafft Hauptschulen ab. Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/schule/rot-rote-schulreform-berlinschafft-hauptschulen-ab-a-671880.html

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Meredith, R. (2021, September 22). Grammar schools set to run single transfer test from November 2023. BBC News NI . https://www.bbc.com/news/uknorthern-ireland-58649897 Merkel nimmt in Deutschland lebende Türken in Schutz. (2010, September 3). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/migrationsdebattemerkel-nimmt-in-deutschland-lebende-tuerken-in-schutz-a-715462.html Mersch, S. (2005, August 8). Leipziger Vererbungslehre in NS-Tradition. Berlin Tageszeitung. https://taz.de/!564315/ Messinger, S., & Wypchol, Y. (2013). Moderne CDU . Programmatischer Wandel in der Schul-und Familienpolitik. ibidem Verlag Montgomerie, T. (2016, September 8). Smarter grammar schools can be fair to all. The Times. Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https://search.ebscohost. com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=7EH116840419&site=ehost-live Morgan, N., Powell, L. & Clegg, N. (2017, March 18). On this we can all agree. Selection is bad for our schools. The Guardian. https://www.thegua rdian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/help-poorer-pupils-selection-soc ial-mobility-education-brexit-grammar-schools Nikolai, R. (2018). After German reunification: The implementation of a two-tier school model in Berlin and Saxony. History of Education, 46(3), 374–394. Nikolai, R., Briken, K., & Niemann, D. (2016). Teacher unionism in Germany: Fragmented competitors. In T. Moe & S. Wiborg (Eds.), The comparative politics of education: Teachers unions and education systems around the world (pp. 114–143). Cambridge University Press. NPD-Vorsitzender: “Sarrazin macht uns salonfähig”. (2010, August 30). Südwestrundfunk: Report Mainz. https://www.swr.de/report/presse/30npd-vorsitzender-sarrazin-macht-uns-salonfaehig/-/id=1197424/did=683 0314/nid=1197424/gc4vy4/index.html Odendahl, W. (2017). “Bildungskrise”—PISA and the German educational crisis. IAFOR Journal of Education, 5(1), 209–226. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2001). Knowledge and skills for life: First results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000. OECD Publishing Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2015). Germany policy brief . OECD Publishing. Office of the Prime Minister. (Great Britain). (2016). Press release: PM to set out plans for schools that work for everyone. Retrieved October 15, 2017, from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-to-set-out-plansfor-schools-that-work-for-everyone Paton, G. (2007, May 28). Cameron wants ’grammar stream’ option. Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1552808/Cameronwants-grammar-stream-option.html

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Patten, J. (1992). Who’s afraid of the “S” word. New Statesman and Society, 5, 20–21. Q&A: History of the 11-plus test. (2011, November 11). BBC News. https:// www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-15691850 Rees, G. (2007). The impacts of parliamentary devolution on education policy in Wales. Wales Journal of Education, 14(1), 8–20. Reynolds, D. (2008). New Labour, education and Wales: The devolution decade. Oxford Review of Education, 34(6), 753–765. Rudloff, W. (2016). Ungleiche Bildungschancen: Bildungsforschung, öffentlicher Diskurs und Bildungsreform in England und der Bundesrepublik in den Jahren des Bildungsbooms. In G. Kluchert, C. Groppe, & E. Matthes (Eds.), Bildung und Differenz (pp. 361–386). Springer VS. Ryan. R. (2007, May 22). Schools row is not my clause four moment, says Cameron. BBC News. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/may/ 22/publicservices.uk Sachverständigenrat für Integration und Migration. (2019). Ungleiche Bildungschancen Fakten zur Benachteiligung von jungen Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund im deutschen Bildungssystem. Sachverständigenrat deutscher Stiftungen für Integration und Migration (SVR) Gmb. Sarrazin, T. (2010). Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Verlags-Anstalt. Siems, D. (2016, March 21). In der Flüchtlingskrise brauchen wir die Hauptschule? Die Welt. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/karriere/bildung/ article153506531/In-der-Fluechtlingskrise-brauchen-wir-die-Hauptschule. html Sind deutsche Schüler doof? Pisa-Studie: Die neue Bildungskatastrophe. (2001, December 12). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index2001-50.html Smith, C. (Ed.) (2006). Including the gifted and talented: Making inclusion work for more gifted and able learners. Routledge Specialist schools’ selection ‘illegal’. (2003, July 11). BBC News. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3059847.stm Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschlands. (2016). Pressemitteilung: Vier von zehn Hauptschulen innerhalb der letzten zehn Jahre geschlossen. Retrieved February 12, 2019, from https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemittei lungen/2016/03/PD16_101_211.html Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschlands. (2018). Schulen auf einen Blick, Ausgabe 2018. Statistisches Bundesamt Trowler, P. (2003). Education policy. (2nd ed.). Routledge Vaughan, R. (2017, February 8). Grammar plans to be ‘smuggled out as Article 50 triggered’ iNews. https://inews.co.uk/news/education/grammar-planssmuggled-article-50-triggered-46121

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CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: The Ideational Logic of Comparative Education

This concluding chapter provides a brief overview of the primary empirical findings in the historical case studies and considers them in addressing two more general questions related to welfare states and institutions raised in the book’s opening chapters. The first asks to what extent leading conceptions of welfare state development and variation apply to the outcomes examined here and whether theories—such as those outlined in Chapter 2—that seek to explain national differences in the provision of social security, healthcare, and housing can also explain differences in state general education systems. The second considers what the British and German cases can tell us about how institutions develop over time. Here the chapter reflects on the particular place of ideational factors in the shaping and sequencing of education systems.

Explaining Divergence in British and German General Education Why did a selective and highly differentiated organization of general education endure in the Federal Republic of Germany while similar arrangements changed in Britain? This book has maintained that answering this question requires an understanding of the primary role played by policy discourses, that is the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3_11

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that underlay the institutional and policy choices made by actors and the process by which those ideas were communicated and accepted. As the preceding case studies outline, policy discourses associated with specific conceptions of human ability as fixed, hereditary, and identifiable near the end of the primary stage of schooling originated in the works of academic psychologists and social scientists in both countries during the early-to-middle twentieth century. These conceptions were legitimized and communicated to policy actors and the public through a set of organizational transmission paths and realized institutionally in the form of general education systems built around the practices of dividing students at age ten or eleven into separate schools that varied in terms of academic instruction, advancement opportunities, and prestige. Within two decades after the war’s end, however, new discourses rooted in dynamic understandings of ability that emphasized the social inequalities and economic inefficiencies of early selection followed similar transmission routes in both countries to challenge the fixed ability view and undercut the legitimacy of differentiated general education systems, contributing to the rise of reformist initiatives. These counter-discourses served as the nonmaterial equivalent of a shock to British and German general education, creating, in effect, a critical juncture in their institutional development that released the constraints that had limited reform possibilities in both countries up until that time. New or accelerated initiatives to reduce or eliminate early selection and dismantle the differentiated school organization—generally through the widespread introduction of mixed-ability comprehensive schools—quickly followed these discursive shifts. To be sure, the development processes that led to the reformist movements were not identical in the two countries. The interwar fixed-ability discourse in Britain would emphasize the measurability of intelligence through the use of psychological tests in a way that never figured into discussions in the FRG, where the principle of parental choice in education was established in the Basic Law as the primary method for selecting students for placement in one of the traditional system’s three schools. As Chapters 4 and 5 discuss, the focus on measured intelligence had the effect of rendering the British discourse more vulnerable to challenges since the test could and did serve as a political focal point for broader attacks on the overall tripartite system that would resonate with many in the population, most notably parents for whom a poor 11-plus performance could mean a dramatic curtailing of child’s opportunity in a

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society that otherwise offered new possibilities for mobility and economic advancement. The general absence of intelligence tests as a selection method in West Germany would deprive political actors of a comparable target around which publics could relate and rally in opposing early selection and would serve as a built-in limitation to the transformative potential of the counter-discourse launched by Picht and others in the early 1960s. Indeed, by equating early selection in education with parents’ right to raise their children as they saw fit, the practice in West Germany could be framed by political actors and decision-makers as a fundamentally democratic institution and held in contrast with the coercive family policies that characterized both the Nazis and the Communist regime in the East. Such a framing also limited the comparative support in the FRG for the Gesamtschule, which despite the prewar Einheitsschule model, would be viewed by many in the FRG as a foreign entity, a radical experiment, or the school type of the GDR. In contrast to the Conservatives in Britain, many Christian Democrats would refuse to set up comprehensive schools on even an experimental basis. These differences, while significant, cannot explain the ultimate outcomes of institutional change in Britain and continuity in Germany. As the cases reveal, at the start of their respective reform periods Britain and Germany seemed equally primed for change in their education systems, with observers in both countries describe it as inevitable. And yet, while discursive shifts and reformist proposals may have been necessary conditions for institutional change in British and German differentiation practices, they were not sufficient. Crucial for the outcomes was not that an education counter-discourse arose in opposition to the fixed-ability view, but when it arose. Agents of the British counter-discourse would claim by the early 1950s that the country’s tripartite school system was predicated on erroneous assumptions about the determined and fixed nature of ability. Within a decade, this view would seriously undermine justification for the system, contributing to the rise of a separate process of experimentation with comprehensive schools in several local education areas that would accelerate markedly within a few years. By the time the Labour government would begin its national comprehensivization drive under Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, the comprehensive school would have lost much of its experimental status in Britain and gained considerable legitimacy among educationalists, politicians, and the general public.

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As Chapter 8 documents, however, the German variant of the fixedability discourse that emerged in the immediate postwar years retained its dominant standing in the FRG significantly longer than in Britain as the result of factors tied to the experiences of the National Socialist regime, namely the return of an older generation of educationalists, psychologists, and sociologists to leading positions in universities and research academies after 1945, the underdevelopment of modern social scientific methods of analysis in education, and the comparative isolation of West German educational research from broader European currents. German political actors and members of the fixed ability discourse coalition whose British equivalents had earlier abandoned notions of fixed and biologically inherited intelligence continued to draw on such views as justification for differentiating young people in education at age ten well into the 1960s. Powerful critiques of this perspective, as Chapter 9 examines, would ultimately emerge in West Germany as new social scientific investigations revealed major flaws in the FRG’s education system, generating a public debate on education that would lead to a loosening of the antireform militancy among the selective system’s supporters. As a result of this delay, the effect of the discursive shift on policy arrangements in the FRG would be considerably more limited than in Britain. By the time an education policy reform movement would arise in the early 1970s in the form of the Gesamtschule pilot deployments and the changes proposed in the Strukturplan and the SPD Bildungsbericht, national economic conditions had worsened, new social rifts had opened, and the political climate had become significantly more polarized. The proposed reforms further coincided with the rise of a new movement in the FRG centered around educational traditionalism that originated largely in response to the student movement and political upheaval of the period. This movement would serve to limit the institutional reform potential of the education counter-discourse in West Germany by providing supporters of the traditional three-tiered system with powerful resources to mobilize actors against the SPD proposals for change. A similar traditionalist movement, reflected most visibly in the Black Papers and Callaghan’s “Great Debate” on education, and a hardening of anti-reform attitudes inside the Conservative party would also arise in Britain in the 1970s, but by this point the comprehensivization of general education was already well underway. The national counter-discourses also interacted with the organizational structure of educational governance in the cases to affect the observed

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outcomes. In both countries, education was largely decentralized, with significant administrative and policy competence provided to the regional Länder and local Gemeinde in the FRG, local authorities in England and Wales, and a regional authority in Scotland. Whether decentralization helped or hindered education reform in a causal sequence was dependent, however, on when a country’s respective counter-discourse emerged. In Britain, decentralization in education governance both reflected and reinforced the counter-discourse that arose in early 1950s with the first studies of the educational sociologists. LEAs would begin to reorganize around comprehensive lines in a process that paralleled the ascendancy of the counter-discourse, helping to legitimize the comprehensive school model for nearly a decade before the Wilson government would launch its national campaign. In the FRG, by contrast, the formal introduction of comprehensive schools as alternatives to the traditional three-tiered system followed the rise of the counter-discourse; prior to the public and political ascendancy of the ideas of Picht and others in the mid and late 1960s, few such schools existed anywhere in the country. Reformoriented political actors in the FRG would thus have to act under conditions in which the policy change they advocated would be viewed as untried and the legitimizing conception of dynamic ability that supported it could be characterized by opponents as an untested empirical assertion.

Education and Welfare States What can this study of the organization of general education in Britain and Germany tell us about the position of education within welfare studies more generally? In a review of the some of the perceived differences between education and other social policies, Busemeyer and Nikolai cite the argument that “education indirectly and prospectively affects the primary distribution of incomes in the labour market rather than compensating income inequalities ex post in the manner of most social insurance policies” invoking Wilensky’s distinction between the “equality of opportunity” education is said to provide and the “equality of outcomes” that is the aim of social insurance (2010, 495). In general education, one could argue this indirect quality is amplified by its “distance” (relative to, say, post-secondary vocational training) from the labor market and the distinction between opportunity and outcome is not always readily discernable. Instead, it is linked to the discursive and ideational environment; in the context of fixed conceptions of ability, debates over the social purpose of

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education involved providing gifted students from lower socio-economic classes the opportunity to attend the higher secondary schools in a selective system to higher social standing and greater economic security. In the context of dynamic conceptions of ability, these debates shifted to an emphasis on achieving a uniform outcome for students through commonly attended comprehensive schools which came to be seen as means of social leveling still divided by class. Nowhere was the role of discursive context more evident than in the programs of the British and German left-wing political parties. As noted in Chapter 3, the question of the educational preferences of left parties has emerged an issue of debate within the comparative education literature (Busemeyer & Nikolai, 2010) with scholars such as Wiborg (2009) emphasizing variation in the ideologies of these parties as a core feature in her explanation of national differences in comprehensive education. As the cases here demonstrate, however, the ideological commitments to equality and social leveling on the part of the British Labour party and the German SPD would be interpreted through the lenses of the respective discursive movements for general education. Influenced by the findings of Cyril Burt and other psychologists, Labour would adopt and promote differentiation during the interwar years, with the party serving in many ways as the leader of the discourse coalition that would drive the reorganization of general education brought about by the Education Act 1944 and the implementation of the selective tripartite system. The party’s leadership position in the fixed ability discourse coalition would be critical for later developments; its renunciation of early selection in the 1950s and departure from the coalition would undercut a crucial pillar of political support for tripartitism, greatly facilitating its dismantling in the ensuing decades. Unlike Labour, the SPD had never been the primary supporters of the traditional three-tiered structure in Germany, which found its most vocal adherents with the conservative and Christian Democratic parties. Yet similarly to their British counterparts, the SPD would interpret its party ideology through a fixed ability discursive perspective after the war, reconciling early selection with its egalitarian ideological commitments in the late 1940s and 1950s and tacitly accepting the reconstructed threetiered traditional system. The SPD would likewise turn against this system in the 1960s, following the rise of the counter-discourse in education that rejected many of the assumptions of the fixed ability perspective, and seek its reform.

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Institutions and Ideas This discussion in this book has highlighted the significance of ideas and discourses for a particular set of institutional features in national education systems. But to what extent do the findings here transfer to other institutional features in advanced democracies? While the British case highlights the relationship between ideas and institutional change, the case of Germany reveals how ideas can inhibit such change. The frozen discourse in the FRG characterized most notably by the continuing dominance of fixed notions of ability well into the 1960s proved to be a powerful mechanism for ensuring path dependence in the structure of German general education. The notion of “freezing” is an old one in comparative politics, famously utilized by Lipset and Rokkan in their study examining how the party systems in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s continued to reflect cleavages spawned by the processes of modernization and industrialization that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1967). Lipset and Rokkan’s study highlighted the potential significance of social relationships for future institutional trajectories, but as the case of postwar West German general education demonstrates, ideas can also become frozen within institutional structures, with significant consequences for later politics and policy. By ideationally shielding arrangements from pressures, a frozen discourse can perpetuate arrangements that, according to materialist conceptions of politics, could be expected to undergo significant adjustment. During the period examined in this study, the FRG faced many of the same material pressures for change as Britain, including a growing middle class, a spike in the youth population, and shifts in the nature of production that demanded class of new skilled workers. By shaping actors’ perceptions and understandings of these developments, the frozen discourse in West Germany would, for a crucial period, limit their impact, setting the stage for the persistence of the traditional German school structure into the 1970s and beyond. The prominent role for nonmaterial factors in shaping the institutional development of general education raises the question of the sector’s particularly openness to such causal forces. In considering this question, it may be useful to return to the conceptual understanding of general education as a “discourse-driven” issue area first raised in Chapter 3. What makes an issue area discourse- rather than interest-driven? A range of factors may be noted, but the core differences concern the relative lag

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and/or ambiguity in the material effects produced by its institutions. Lag here refers to the temporal distance between the period of institutional production or initial participation and the realization of a set of material effects perceived to be associated with the institution, while ambiguity reflects the difficulty in assessing the effects of an institution across a set of performance indicators of importance. With interest-based arrangements, the material effects tend to be more immediate than with discourse-driven issues and are more likely to be predictable and measurable (as with, for example, expanding social assistance transfer payments). Among educational sectors, general education exhibits particularly high levels of lag and ambiguity. A significant duration may occur between periods of general education participation and those of stable occupation, income, and social placement. Moreover, while scholars have long noted the difficulty in determining the redistributive effects of education compared to other social policies (Busemeyer & Nikolai, 2010), for general education such a determination is particularly challenging, given that individuals frequently enter a range of other intervening educational institutions after (and sometimes during) primary and secondary schooling, such as vocational training or university education, which may assume a potentially large share of the causal weight in shaping occupational and social trajectories. High levels of relative lag and/or ambiguity generate questions for actors about the benefits of particular institutional designs; under such conditions, ideas can provide explanations and identify causal mechanisms that address uncertainty by linking particular institutional arrangements with predicted material outcomes. As proponents of discursive institutionalism have noted, however, such ideas must be communicated and accepted across networks of policy actors and publics if they are to influence preferences and policy choices. Such was the case for general education in Britain. As the perceived need to raise the school-leaving age and provide access to secondary education grew in the decades before World War II, the preferences of leading actors, including many on the left and in the Labour party, for the design of any expanded general education system were crucially shaped by educational psychologists’ ideas about the relationship between human ability and a selective school structure that had been communicated as early as the 1910s. The psychologists’ perspective achieved a hegemonic standing in British policy circles, obtaining significant acceptance across customary partisan lines in

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politics, while alternative discourses could muster only scant or inconsistent acceptance among actors and have limited effects on policy outcomes and institutional choices. For the tripartite system, the lag in identifying its material effects was largely a function of the arrangement’s novelty; until the Education Act 1944, British policy actors and the public had no direct experience with a universal and selective secondary system to base judgments about its long-term consequences. But institutions need not be entirely new to be discourse-driven. Policy actors may invoke existing ideas and their associated causal mechanisms in order to legitimize and realize new versions of old arrangements, particularly following periods of radical change. In postwar West Germany, actors justified the reconstruction of the three-tiered school structure that had been in place prior to the Nazi assumption of power by drawing on a policy discourse that found the necessity of selection to be rooted in the inherent biological differences among the population. It would be around precisely such a discourse that a coalition of policy actors would mobilize in reconstructing the traditional system, including in the US occupation zone, where German officials successfully resisted calls by American authorities to adopt a new, largely non-selective, school structure modeled on the American high school. Beyond the issue of actor preferences, the discursive designation is crucial in assessing the developmental paths of institutions. As Banchoff (2005) notes in his study of stem cell research in Britain, Germany, France, and the United States, interest-driven issues are characterized by a particular logic of path dependence, according to which legacies from early battles over institutional design at the time of an institution’s creation afford some actors greater participatory opportunities and decision-making authority in future policy debates. New institutions create networks of actors whose material interests are tied to the continuation of arrangements under those institutions and who thus consistently oppose changes to them. Such an understanding can provide an explanation for why many institutions and policies associated with interest-driven issues appear so to be resilient to reform (2005, 204, 207). For Banchoff, policies associated with “value-driven” issues such as stem cell research, demonstrate a different path-dependent logic. While the lasting effects of institutions on the configuration of actors and interests are central to notions of path dependence for interest-driven issues, patterns of continuity, and change in value-driven issues are further shaped by how the

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constitutional and policy frameworks of state institutions influence the terms of future legislative debates in ways that eliminate certain policy alternatives and provide actors with rhetorical resources used to advocate caution and incrementalism in debates over policy change (2005, 202). As with the value-driven institutions examined by Banchoff, different developmental logics apply to discourse-driven institutions. This is first seen in the logic of institutional change. For discourse-driven issues, institutional change is tied initially to the rejection of foundational ideas— generally on the basis of an appraisal of material effects—which generates a reevaluation of preferences by actors and a shift in the perceived legitimacy of the arrangement by the public. This process may take place gradually, as new information and evidence is discovered and its implications discussed and communicated over time, but change may also occur more abruptly. Such are instances of “discursive collapse,” in which relatively sudden changes in the acceptance of previously assumed causal relationships bring about a widespread delegitimizing of the ideational foundation of an institutional arrangement. In Britain, research in the 1950s on the social effects of the tripartite system alongside new sociological and psychological conceptions concerning the nature of human ability and the relationship between ability and educational structure led many political actors—including former organizational supporters of the selective system—to reject tripartitism in education and call for its dismantling and replacement with the alternative model of the comprehensive school. At the same time, the British public was growing increasingly concerned about an education system that relegated young Britons to such a highly determined educational pathway at such a young age, particularly given mounting evidence that the methods of selection for the different schools in the system were resulting in inaccurate and disproportionate assessments and placements. By the end of the 1950s, it had become increasingly difficult even for committed supporters to argue in favor of the selective system’s continuation by invoking the ideas of a discourse that had been “hegemonic” only a few years earlier. In distinguishing discourse from interest-driven conceptions, the claim is not that these are permanent categories but instead are viewed as part of a continuum along which movement is possible. As the material effects of such arrangements become better known over time and uncertainty decreases, the preferences of actors may harden and institutions that were discourse-driven at one time may come to exhibit more interest-based features. But such a hardening itself is not always permanent and, as

11

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353

the socio-political and socio-economic context changes, new performance criteria adopted, and new ideas emerge, uncertainty may again come to characterize an arrangement and preferences may again be reevaluated in light of the discursive conditions.

Conclusion The explanatory framework in this book has emphasized the primary— though not exclusive—role of ideational and communicative factors in explaining the differential development of general education in Britain and Germany after World War II. Such an emphasis stands in marked contrast to leading conceptions of educational development, which largely attribute institutional and policy outcomes in education to the material power and preferences of actors operating within structural constraints. To the degree that these perspectives consider nonmaterial factors, they appear largely as secondary variables or are employed much like structural variables, i.e. in a “top-down” fashion. This book finds that at key moments in its development trajectory in the twentieth century, education was a battlefield of ideas and that any full accounting of its institutional dynamics requires conceptions of ideational origination, dissemination, and legitimation involving actors ranging from policymakers to publics. The battle over education forms a crucial element of a larger struggle over the distribution of social and economic opportunities that has marked much of the political conflict in industrialized societies in the modern period. It reflects deep, fundamental, and long-standing debates in these societies, including competing visions of human nature, the power—and limits—of the state in regulating the social and economic differences among its members, and differing conceptions of social justice. In this sense, education stands at the center of politics of the welfare state.

References Banchoff, T. (2005). Path dependence and value-driven issues: The comparative politics of stem cell research. World Politics, 57 (2), 200–230. Busemeyer, M. R., & Nikolai, R. (2010). Education. In F. G. Castles, S. Leibfried, J. Lewis, H. Obinger, & C. Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the welfare state (1st ed., pp. 494–510). Oxford University Press

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Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (1967). Party systems and voter alignments: Crossnational perspectives. Free Press Wiborg, S. (2009). Education and social integration: Comprehensive schooling in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan

Index

A Aachen, 200, 219 Abendgymnasien (evening gymnasiums), 200 Abitur, 24, 37, 192, 200, 229, 230, 235, 256, 266, 268, 272, 278, 281, 288, 292, 299, 326, 331 Adams, John, 123 Adenauer, Konrad, 243, 264, 265, 283 Adolf Hitler Schule, 194 Adonis, Andrew, 310, 311 Advanced-level (A-level) exams, 30, 142, 173 Allied Control Council Directive no. 54, 195, 213 Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, [AfD]), 329 Ansell, B., 2, 5, 13, 54, 57 Aptitude, 5, 11, 28, 101, 106, 113, 114, 133, 179, 221, 231, 280, 285, 308, 311, 312

attempts to differentiate from ability in Britain, 112 Archer, M., 47–49, 55, 123, 126, 142, 154, 169, 170 Assistant Masters Association, 123 Association of Assistant Mistresses, 123 Association of German Secondary School Teachers (Verband Deutscher Realschullehrer [VDR]), 212 Association of Head Mistresses, 123 Attlee, Clement, 71, 89, 91, 111, 112, 116, 120, 122, 126, 144, 147, 183 Aufbauschule (rural secondary school), 194 Ausbildung (training), 190, 231

B Baby bulge, 169 Bale, J., 326, 327, 335

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98156-3

355

356

INDEX

Ballard, P.B., 123 Banchoff, T., 80, 351, 352 Barlow report (Scientific Manpower), 171 Bath, Herbert, 283 Bäuerle, Theodor, 204 Bavaria, 25, 202, 203, 207, 218–220, 235, 273, 282, 335 limited number of Gesamtschulen, 319 response to proposed American school reforms, 201–204 Becker, G.S., 265, 298 Becker, H., 288 Begabung (ability), 231 Béland, D., 8, 61, 64 Benn, C., 167, 177, 179, 307, 309 Bennett, A., 9, 80 Benton, William, 201 Berlin female Abitur holders, 272 integrated secondary school (Integrierte Sekundarschule), 6, 26 longer primary education in, 37 two-tiered secondary system, 38, 98 Berlin Wall, 269, 324 Berufsfachschule (vocational college), 24 Berufsschule (vocational school), 266 Berufsstufe (vocational stage), 278 Beust, Ole von, 327 Bildung (education), 190, 231, 271, 274, 289, 322 Bildungsökonomie (economics of education), 268 Bilski, R., 144, 159 Black Papers on Education, 178 Blair, Tony, 5, 308–312, 333 Blunkett, David, 309 Board of Education, 93, 104, 108–111, 123, 125

consultative committee, 71, 73, 100, 105, 134, 141 as ideational transmission path, 7, 90, 251 1943 White Paper Educational Reconstruction, 111 Boyle, Edward, 149, 150, 163, 176 Brady, Graham, 313, 333 Brandenburg, 26, 37, 219, 321 Brandt, Willy, 12, 257, 283, 284, 287, 289, 293, 295–297, 323, 329 Braun, A., 204 Breitenbildung (mass education), 329 Bremen, 26, 207, 208, 216 SPD-KPD school reforms, 207 Bremer Plan, 254, 258 Britain academies, 5, 10, 11, 94, 324, 346 business and industry representatives, 32, 108, 239 churches, 66, 99 circular 10/65, 332 circular 10/70, 177 circular 600 (Scotland), 167, 168 circular 614 (Scotland), 167 city technology colleges, 307, 311 colleges of advanced technology, 174 confessional schools, 99, 218 conservative-liberal democrat coalition government, 27 devolution and school policy, 318 dynamic ability discourse, 66, 67, 75 Education Act 1870, 92 Education Act 1902, 92, 94, 123 Education Act 1918 (Fisher Act), 93 Education Act 1936, 94 Education Act 1944 (Butler Act), 4, 10, 28, 48, 73, 89–91, 104,

INDEX

112, 114, 121, 126, 135, 137, 138, 144, 157, 198, 208, 214, 217, 279, 315, 348, 351 Education Act 1980, 306 Education Act 1988, 29, 307 educational psychology in, 10, 94, 95, 124 educational sociology in, 137 Education Reform Act 1888, 123 Education (Scotland) Act 1872, 117 Education (Scotland) Act 1936, 118 Education (Scotland) Act 1945, 119 fair-banding exams, 312 fixed ability discourse, 7, 65, 72, 90, 91, 94, 100, 117, 133, 144, 146, 150, 153, 157, 346, 348 grant-maintained schools, 307, 308 Great Debate on education, 179, 346 higher education expansion, 57, 174 institutional change in, 176, 181, 345 intelligence tests in, 96, 102, 103, 107, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120, 121, 135, 138–140, 164, 181 Learning and Skills Act 2000, 311 Local Government Act 1888, 123 multilateral schools, 90, 110, 111, 150, 151 occupation zone in Germany, 200 parental choice, 177, 344 partially selective schools, 318 private schools, 27, 31, 209, 306. See also public schools public opinion and education, 179, 249 public schools, 123, 194

357

school leaving age, 4, 30, 38, 89, 93, 94, 98, 101, 102, 126, 151, 154, 174, 350 secondary school administrators, 307 secondary school scholarships, 118 teachers, 3, 71, 92, 111 teacher unions, 92, 110, 165, 254 trade unions, 92, 111, 135, 206 tripartite system of education, 73, 137, 157 vocational training, 32, 284 British Employers’ Confederation (BEC), 108, 109, 126, 154 Brown, Gordon, 5, 309, 312, 333 Bühlow, G., 294 Bulmahn, Edelgard, 322 Bund Entschiedener Schulreformer, 233 Burt, Cyril Black Papers contribution, 184 controversies over research, 124 intelligence and education views, 95, 96, 180, 316 Norwood report, 107 reference in 1979 education debate, 31 reference in 2016 grammar school debate, 323 Spens report, 103 Busemeyer, M., 2, 5, 13, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 66, 76–78, 328, 347, 348, 350 Butler, R.A., 104, 105, 111, 125, 126, 307 Byers, Stephen, 311 C Callaghan, James, 179, 346 Cambridge, University of, 124 Cameron, David, 5, 6, 313, 314, 316, 334

358

INDEX

Campaign for Educational Advance, 104 Campbell, Alistair, 61, 333 Capoccia, G., 152 Central Advisory Councils for Education (CACE), 73, 111, 137, 141, 142, 149, 154, 252 Centre for Policy Studies, 178 Checkel, J.T., 9 Chitty, C., 29, 93, 100, 103, 114, 123, 124, 126, 136, 178, 179, 183, 307, 309, 310, 333 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) coalition with FDP in federal government, 286 commitment to maintaining Gymnasium, 328 cultural policy congress, 1968, 282 education policy changes in 1969 federal elections, 282 fixed ability discourse, 244 focus on internal school reforms in postwar period, 243 Gesamtschule, 296, 325 Hamburg school reforms, 2010, 325–327 ideational transmission pathway, 10 mobile carrier of ideas opposition to Berlin school reforms, 10 opposition to American school reforms in Hesse, 206 opposition to SPD-KPD school law in Hamburg, 199 opposition to SPD school law in Schleswig-Holstein, 198 opposition to SPD school reform proposals in Lower Saxony, 296 PISA shock, 325 proposed changes to schools at 2011 conference, 327

support for traditional education system in postwar era, 199 vocational training, 243 Christian Social Union (CSU), 202, 219, 220, 281, 327. See also Christian Democratic Union (CDU) opposition to American school reform proposals in Bavaria, 203, 204 opposition to Gesamtschule, 282 views on ability in 1946 party program, 243 Churchill, Winston, 104, 144 Clay, Lucius, 201, 203 Clegg, Nick, 317 Cold war, 214, 265, 321 Comparative welfare state perspectives, 50 Comprehensive schools. See also Gesamtschule circular 10/65 and, 166, 176, 177, 284 differences with multilateral school model, 125 dynamic ability conception, 7, 73 economic competitiveness, 147 educational psychology, 71 educational sociology, 53, 142, 181, 347 effects on educational outcomes, 52 expansion of in 1970s, 306 frozen discourses, 227 intelligence testing and, 139 legitimation of at local level, 48, 159 local experiments with, 48 national drive for in Wilson governments, 347 notions of equality, 134 in partisan ideology perspectives, 53 secondary school teachers, 71, 293

INDEX

“strange death” of, 312 Congress of German Industry and Commerce (Deutscher Industrieund Handelstag, [DIHT ]), 241 Conscription Law (Wehrpflichtgesetz), 221 Conservative Party adoption of arguments in Black Papers , 346 ambiguity of school policy in 1960s, 162 assisted places scheme, 306 comprehensive schools, 158 disagreements over expansion of grammar schools under David Cameron, 5 dynamic ability discourse, 158 11-plus exam, 313 fixed ability discourse, 346 grammar school expansion proposals in 2017 manifesto, 177, 317 interwar education policy, 100 market-oriented reforms, 306 opposition to educational expansion, 121 parliamentary education committee, 148 Robbins report reaction, 174 secondary modern schools, 113, 149 selection in education, 5 tripartite system, 89 Conservative Philosophy Group, 178 Conservative Voice, 334 Coombs, Phillip, 267 Corbyn, Jeremy, 315, 334 Costello, Elvis, 153 Cox, R.H., 8, 61, 178 Critical junctures, 60, 64, 66, 152, 153, 344

359

notion of discursive critical juncture, 5, 7 Crook, D., 153, 160, 176, 182, 311 Crosland, Anthony American high school model, 146 binary system of higher education, 174 circular 10/65, 165 comprehensive reorganization, 167, 177 The Future of Socialism, 145 influence of educational sociologists, 146, 149 selection at eighteen, 147 Crowther Report (15 to 18), 142 Culpepper, P.D., 2, 78

D Dahrendorf, Ralf, 270–272, 274, 275, 280, 283, 289, 298, 322 Bildung ist Bürgerrecht (Education is a Civil Right), 271 “Darmstadt Declaration” (Darmstädter Entschließung ), 300 Davidson, Ruth, 319 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 317, 334 Department for Education and Skills, 312 Department of Education and Science (DES), 165–167, 176, 177, 179, 183, 184 Der Spiegel magazine, 335 Der Stern magazine, 286 Deutsche Oberschule (German High School), 194, 218 Differentiation in education, 20, 32, 69, 74, 91, 107, 158, 176, 180, 187, 188, 197, 232, 240, 244, 248, 258, 275 horizontal and vertical types, 20–22

360

INDEX

Discourse-driven issues, 67, 68, 350, 352 Discursive collapse, 352 Discursive institutionalism (DI), 5, 61, 62, 69, 350 Discursive shift, 7, 10, 65, 68, 76, 141, 159, 182, 282, 298, 320, 344–346 Döbert, H., 334 Dohnanyi, Klaus von, 220, 287, 292, 293, 295, 297, 299 Drewek, P., 256 Düsseldorf Agreement, 210 E Early Leaving report, 141, 142 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic (GDR) Ebsworth, R., 237 Eccles, David, 148, 149, 154 Economist newspaper, 149 Edding, Friedrich, 250, 268, 270, 271 Edelstein, B., 326, 327 Edinger, L.J., 299 Education and Science Workers’ Union (Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft [GEW]), 212 Education Mission to Germany (US), 201 Education Research Group, 178 Eighteen (18)-plus, 176 Einheitsschule, 191, 192, 197, 199, 207, 213, 214, 216, 218, 241, 246, 253, 257, 331, 345 Elbing, Eberhard, 329, 330 Elementary education, 92, 112, 117, 192, 196, 251, 256, 257. See also Volksschule Eleven (11)-plus examination adoption in Britain, 148 disputes over objectivity and accuracy, 139

girls’ performance, 173 in Northern Ireland, 13, 334 as predictor for academic success, 142 sample question, 135 use in interwar period, 138 variation in scores, 136, 139, 153 working class and middle class performance, 13, 139, 161 Elternrecht (parental right), 211, 221, 248, 273, 281, 297 Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, 241, 275, 276 Erhard, Ludwig, 264, 273, 281, 299 Ertl, H., 25, 200, 211, 249, 258, 320 Esping-Andersen, G., 4, 51, 78 Estévez-Abe, M., 2, 77 Eton, 27, 93, 115 Ettlinger Circle, 266 Eugenics movement, 95 Evers, Carl-Heinz, 278, 279, 299, 300

F Fachhochschule (college of advanced technology), 24 Fachoberschule (upper technical school), 24 Federal Institute for Vocational Training Research (Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildungsforschung ), 286 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 3, 4, 6, 12, 20, 27, 28, 31, 34, 38, 39, 46, 47, 50, 57, 65, 68–73, 75, 76, 187–189, 197, 200, 209–213, 216–218, 220, 230, 234, 237–239, 241, 242, 245, 248–250, 255–257, 263–265, 267–271, 273, 276–279, 283, 284, 287, 289, 294, 298, 300, 305, 319, 320,

INDEX

322, 324, 325, 331, 333, 335, 343–347, 349 Federal-State-Commission for Educational Planning (Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung [BLK]), 286 Bildungsgesamtplan (Comprehensive Educational Plan), 295 Federation of British Industry (FBI), 108, 109, 126, 135 Fees for secondary schools, 207 Fenwick, I.G.K., 107, 110, 126, 148, 150, 151, 160–163, 182, 183 Flannery, Martin, 180 Fleming, Charlotte Mary, 133 Fleming report (The Public Schools and the General Educational System), 127 Förderstufe (support stage), 21, 253, 254, 278, 288 France, 47, 48, 123, 218, 269, 273, 351 middle school reforms, 256 occupation zone in Germany, 351 Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei [FDP]) adoption of “Education is a civil right” principle, 280 call for more democratic school system in 1969 election platform, 278 disputes with SPD over education reform strategy after 1972 elections, 295 education reform proposals in 1967 program, 280 as ideational transmission pathway, 10 internal disputes over education policy in 1972 election, 295 as mobile carrier of ideas, 10

361

reinforcing of traditional school system in North-Rhine Westphalia in 1950s, 247 school reform proposals in federal coalition with SPD, 291 Freiburg students’ demonstration, 273 Freudenberg, Hans, 266 Friedeburg, L. von, 258, 274, 276, 278, 280, 282, 294, 296, 298 Führ, C., 38, 200, 230, 285, 299, 334

G Gaitskell, Hugh, 147, 148, 183 Galton, Francis, 95, 123, 124 Gardner, L., 136, 138, 146 Garritzmann, J., 2, 13, 54, 59 Gass-Bolm, T., 210, 216, 233, 234, 236, 239–241, 268 Gemeinschaftsschule (community school), 6, 26, 323, 328 General Certificate of Education (GCE), 28, 30, 38, 136 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), 30, 38 George, A.L., 80 German Civil Services Federation (Deutscher Beamtenbund [DBB]), 212 German Committee for the Education System (Deutscher Ausschuss für das Erziehungs und Bildungswesen [DAEB]), 71, 251. See also Rahmenplan zur Umgestaltung und Vereinheitlichung des allgemeinbildenden öffentlichen Schulwesens (Framework Plan for the Reorganization and Standardization of the State School System [Rahmenplan])

362

INDEX

German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands [KPD]), 197 German Democratic Republic (GDR) comprehensive school organization in, 197 effects on West Germany school policy, 345 migration from to West Germany, 188 reform of education system after unification, 321 German Education Council (Deutscher Bildungsrat [DBR]), 73, 275 experiments with Gesamtschule models, 290 report: On the Establishment of School Experiments with the Comprehensive School (Einrichtung von Schulversuchen mit Gesamtschulen), 284 report: Structural Plan for the Education System (Strukturplan für das Bildungswesen [Strukturplan]), 288 German Philological Association (Deutscher Philologenverband [DPhV]) and biological views of ability, 233 defense of traditional system, 240 interpretation of 2001 PISA scores, 323 moderation of views on Hauptschule/Realschule merger in 2000s, 327 opposition to extension of common schooling in Rahmenplan, 254 opposition to SPD-FDP reform proposals, 290

questionnaire on school structure before 1953 elections, 246 German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]), 219 German Teachers’ Association (Deutsche Lehrerverein [DLV]), 191 German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund [DGB]), 212, 247 Germany, Federal Republic of apprenticeship system, 24. See also vocational training Auslese (selection) process for school placement at age 10, 20 Berufsbildungsgesetz (vocational training law), 1969, 286 churches, 191, 228, 244, 258, 268, 275 demographic change, 229, 265 dynamic ability discourse, 73, 75, 255, 263, 264, 287 economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder), 241, 248 educational sociology, 11, 229, 238 Education Report (Bildungsbericht ), 1970, 289 emergency acts (Notstandsgesetze), 299 federal system and education, 56, 187 fixed ability discourse, 67, 70–73, 229, 231–233, 237, 239, 240, 243, 263, 265, 267, 331 frozen discourse, 68, 349 grand coalition (1966–1969), 286 Grundgesetz (Basic Law), 209 guest worker program, 324 higher education, 27, 194, 234, 241, 266, 268, 270–274, 286, 288–290. See also universities

INDEX

institutional change and continuity in, 345 migrants and education, 322, 324 pedagogical research, 237 PISA shock, 321, 324, 325 primary education, 202. See also Grundschule (primary school) private schools, 27, 220 public opinion and education, 248 refugees and schools, 195 specialist schools, 29, 79, 311, 312 talent reserves, 206, 244, 270 teachers, 78, 191, 212, 228, 270, 289 teacher unions, 336 trade unions, 233, 275, 286 transfers between schools, 230, 246 unification and education system transfer to East, 269, 320 universities, 27, 37, 38, 190, 229, 238, 265, 270, 273, 290, 346 vocational training, 24, 232, 266, 286, 287 Gesamthochschule (Comprehensive Higher Education Institution), 279, 290 Gesamtschule attendance rates, 320 in CDU/CSU governed Länder, 282, 286, 290 characterization as radical, 290 debates over cost, 282 differences between cooperative and additive, and integrative types, 285, 290, 300 leftist criticism of, 294 omission from January 1973 SPD-FDP government declaration, 295 parent attitudes toward, 294, 296 perceived experimental nature, 25 performance evaluation, 284

363

pilot deployment proposals, 284, 346 PISA shock, 323 in SPD-FDP federal school reform proposals, 291, 295 Gingrich, J., 307, 309 Golden Age of European capitalism, 290 Goronwy-Roberts, Baron, 110 Gove, Michael, 313 Graf, L., 2, 60, 77 Grammar schools continued operation in England, 29 in Crowther report, 142 curriculum, 28, 106 11-plus performance, 13, 28, 152 expansion proposals under Theresa May government, 314–316, 318 failure rates in, 141 higher education attendance of graduates, 136 IQ cut point for acceptance, 113 middle-class overrepresentation in, 139 Ministry of Education promotion of, 135 misallocation of pupils to, 140 as opportunity for talented working-class pupils, 115 parents’ ability to form under New Labour, 309 as public counterweight to private schools, 114 social mobility, 35, 315, 317 support from secondary school representatives in 1950s, 150 in tripartite system of education, 28, 113, 135, 139, 148 working class students, 141, 142, 146 Gramsci, Antonio, 49, 63, 79

364

INDEX

Green, A., 36, 48–50, 55, 77, 115 Greening, Justine, 314 Green Party (Germany), 322 coalition with SPD in federal government, 322, 323 Gemeinschaftsschule introduction in coalition with SPD in Baden-Württemberg, 6 school reform proposal in coalition with CDU in Hamburg (as Green Alternative List), 325 Grundschule (primary school), 21, 37, 194, 213, 216, 220, 230, 240, 253, 257, 294, 326 emphasis by Nazi regime, 194 proposals for extending period of common schooling in, 198 Gymnasium Abitur, 24, 200, 235, 256, 268, 278, 326 attendance expansion, 250 Bildung concept, 190, 231 education of teachers in higher secondary schools and universities, 192, 198, 205, 234 enrollment patterns in 1950s and 1960s, 65 fixed ability discourse, 240 low working class attendance, 250 migrant attendance rates, 325 parent groups’ support of in postwar period, 239 PISA results, 322 position in Nazi education policy, 194 Prussian origins, 190 as a “quality assurance mechanism” in the education system, 280 social and economic standing of graduates, 24

teachers’ status as members of state civil service, 192 upper class overrepresentation, 234 Vorschule, 191 H Haberstroh, C., 307 Hacker, J.S., 60 Hadow report (Education of the Adolescent ), 100–102 Hahn, H.J., 27, 37, 210, 220, 268, 272, 275, 286, 291, 295 Halsey, A., 136, 138, 146, 237 Hamburg, 6, 26, 198, 199, 208, 216, 219–221, 243, 248, 251, 257, 272, 298, 299, 325–328, 331, 334, 335 1949 school law, 199 1953 Bürgerschaft campaign, 325 2010 reform initiative, 325 Hamburg Agreement, 210, 254, 334 Hamm-Brücher, Hildegard, 257, 280, 287, 290, 295 Harrison, George, 153 Harrow, 27, 93, 125 Hartmann, M., 319, 329, 334 Hartnacke, Wilhelm, 240, 257 Hassan, G., 319 Hauptschule ability types, 232 declining enrollments since the 1970s, 25 establishment in DAEB proposal, 251 integration with Realschule, 293 migrant attendance, 325 opportunities for graduates to obtain Abitur, 330 as “Restschule”, 325 role in dual system of vocational education and training, 25 Hay, C., 61, 63, 64, 67, 80

INDEX

Haydn, T., 29, 310, 312, 333 Hearnden, A., 193, 194, 196, 198, 218, 220, 287 Heck, Bruno, 282 Heidenheimer, A., 77, 198, 212, 213, 237, 238, 250, 256, 287, 291–293, 296 Herrlitz, Hans-Georg, 197, 213, 252, 267, 274 Hesse, 26, 204, 206, 207, 248, 254, 255, 272, 294, 296, 300, 319 Hidden talent, 171. See also Talent wastage Hinds, Damien, 317 Hinton, T.R., 193, 217 Historical institutionalism (HI), 5, 8, 58–61, 64–67, 76, 80 Hoffmann, A., 243, 245–247 Hogg, Quintin, 163 Holland, Stuart, 180 Honnefer Modell , 230 Hopkins, Alan, 175 Horkheimer, Max, 233 Horrie, Chris, 316 Horsbrugh, Florence, 148 House of Commons, 90, 175, 180 House of Lords, 31, 163, 298 Hubner, Ludwig, 282 Human capital theory (HCT), 267–269, 298 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 189–191, 217, 231, 240, 290 Hundhammer, Alois, 202, 203, 207, 219, 220 Hunter, Phillip, 333 Hunt, Tristan, 90 Huth, Albert, 235–237, 239, 242, 253, 256, 331

I Ideational factors

365

in comparative welfare state research, 59 institutional change and, 349 mobile carriers, 71, 72, 75 path dependence, 349 process-tracing, 8, 9, 69 transmission paths, 7, 10, 70, 72, 75, 251 Imperial Germany, 188, 191 Incorporated Association of Head Masters, 123 Institutional change in discourse-driven issues, 352 gradual notions of, 64 ideational factors and, 349 materialist conceptions of, 349 Integrated secondary school (Integrierte Secondarschule), 6, 26 Intelligence tests de-emphasis in Norwood report, 107 effects of environment on, 138 in 11-plus exams, 102, 138 general absence in West Germany, 345 Northumberland Mental Test, 118 perceived objectivity, 139 potential to identify ability at an early age, 231 revealing changes in IQ scores, 140 role in school selection, 117, 138 in Spens report, 102, 112 Interest-driven issues, 351 Isaacs, Susan, 123 Iversen, T., 2, 51, 52, 59, 78 J Jacobs, A., 9, 69–71 Jacoby, W., 203–208, 214, 244, 246 Japan, 22, 77, 297 JCS 1067 (Joint Chiefs of Staff occupation directive, 1945), 200

366

INDEX

Jenkins, Simon, 315, 316 Johnson, Boris, 27, 317 Joint Four (Federal Council of Secondary School Associations), 92 Junior technical schools, 125 K Katzenstein, P., 37, 187, 229 Keating, Michael, 318 Keleman, D., 152 Kent, 306, 313 proposed grammar school expansions, 313 Kindergarten, 191 Kogan, M., 103, 105, 124, 150, 167, 176 Kohl, Helmut, 291 Korpi, W., 51, 78 Kuhlmann, C., 25, 204–206, 213, 215, 218, 219, 221, 228, 232, 234, 235, 237–240, 242, 247, 251, 252, 255–257, 265, 266, 268, 270, 274, 275, 283, 299 L Labour Party, and advisory committee on education, 98, 108, 139 Challenge to Britain pamphlet, 144 comprehensive schools, 10, 56, 57, 159, 160, 182 Diversity and Excellence: A New Partnership for Schools policy document, 309 dynamic ability discourse, 73, 75 educational psychology, 122 educational sociology, 182 election manifesto, 1997, 310 election manifesto, 2017, 317 fixed ability discourse, 71, 72, 100

grammar schools, 162, 164, 309, 317 hard and soft notions of equality, 134 ideational transmission pathway, 10 interwar education policy, 10, 91 Learning to Livess Labour’s Policy for Education pamphlet, 147 mobile carrier of ideas, 122, 133 multilateral schools, 110, 151 national executive committee, 144 New Labour education policy, 309 opposition to May government grammar school proposals, 317 opposition to private schools, 114 promotion of educational expansion, 91 role in tripartite system implementation, 122, 144 Lag, 242, 255, 349–351 effects in discourse-driven policy areas, 351 Lamberti, M., 191, 192, 218 Landerziehungsheime, 220 Laurien, Hanna-Renate, 292 Lawton, D., 114, 147, 148, 163, 178, 179, 184 Lehman, B., 324 Lehmbruch, Gerhard, 297, 298 Lehmensick, E., 256 Lehrerseminare (teacher training institutions), 192, 207 Lennon, John, 153 Leussink, Hans, 287, 293 Liberal Democrats, 31 Lipset, S.M., 349 Local Education Authority (LEA) adoption of 11-plus exam, 113 circular 10/65 and, 166, 176, 177 circular 10/70 and, 177 consolidation in Education Act 1944, 112

INDEX

creation in Education Act 1902, 94 decision making authority for secondary education structure under 1944 Act, 94 loss of powers in Education Act 1988, 307 role in comprehensive reorganization, 157, 163 Lohmann, Joachim, 296 Lohmar, Ulrich, 244, 258, 277 London County Council, 95, 99, 148 Lowe, R., 13, 170, 258 Lower Saxony, 233, 234, 296, 328, 335 Lübke, Heinrich, 273 M MacDonald, Ramsay, 97 Macro-sociological perspectives on education, 45, 47 Mahoney, J., 59, 80 Major, John, 298, 307, 308, 311, 318 Marx, Karl, 45, 47, 49, 56, 57, 233, 246, 294 May, Theresa, 6, 27, 306, 314, 332 2016 grammar school proposals, 323 McAllister, David, 328 McCartney, Paul, 153 McClelland, William, 118, 153 McCulloch, G., 108, 124–126, 135, 147, 154, 161, 163, 165, 167, 183 McGuiness, Martin, 334 McPherson, A., 28, 117, 118, 120, 153, 168 Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, 26, 335 Meidinger, Heinz-Peter, 323 Merkel, Angela, 332 Messinger, S., 323, 325, 327 Millan, Bruce, 168

367

Mincer, J., 298 Ministry of Education (Britain), 111, 113, 114, 116, 134, 135, 137, 139, 142, 183 creation in Education Act 1944, 135 role in tripartite system implementation, 112, 113 Mittelschule (middle school), 24, 244 Mittelstufe (middle stage), 278 Moe, T., 2, 13, 52, 78 Montgomerie, Tim, 316 Morgan, Nicky, 313, 314, 317 Morris, Estelle, 333 Müller, D., 20, 32, 76, 189, 233–237, 239, 244, 245, 256, 277, 331 Müller, Karl Valentin, 234, 258 Müller, W., 32, 202, 220 Muñoz Villalobos, Vernor, 329 N Napoleon, 189 The Nation’s Schools , 113 National Association of School Masters, 92 National Curriculum (England and Wales), 29, 123 National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, [NPD]), 329 National Education Union, 123 National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), 139, 141 National Health Service, 4, 90 National service, 170 National Union of Teachers (NUT), 92, 104, 110, 113, 123, 165, 166, 177, 184 comprehensive schools, 150, 177 multilateral schools, 110

368

INDEX

Nazi era, 11, 68, 233, 255, 287 school types, 194 social science research, 68 New Pedagogy (Neue Pädagogik) movement, 191, 214, 263 The New Secondary Education, 114 Newton, Lord (Peter Richard Legh), 163, 165 Nikolai, R., 2, 13, 24, 56, 188, 326–328, 335, 347, 348, 350 Nixdorff, P., 25, 188, 248, 251, 254 Non-Profit Organization for Comprehensive Schools (Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft Gesamtschule), 296 Northern Ireland, 13, 27, 126, 316, 317, 334 North Rhine Westphalia, 200, 255, 274, 335 Norway, 22, 31, 54, 79, 269 Norwood report (Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools ), 105 Numerus Clausus , 37 Nunn, Thomas Percy, 98, 100–102, 123 O Oberschule (high school), 26, 327, 328 Oberstufe (upper level), 278 Oertzen, Peter von, 296 Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), 202–204, 214 Education and Religious Affairs branch, 201, 208 school reform proposal, 203, 204 Ordinary-level (O-level) exams, 38, 136, 141, 142, 154, 173 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

(OECD), 3, 6, 20–22, 33, 37, 79, 267, 268, 278, 290, 322, 324 1961 conference on education, 267, 283 1973 report on German schools, 228, 286, 288, 290, 291, 299 PISA exam. See Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Orientierungsstufe (orientation stage), 21, 288, 295 Oxford, University of, 93, 95, 169

P Paired comparison, 8 Parity of esteem in tripartite system, 109, 110 Parkinson, M., 93, 99, 100, 108, 110, 113, 114, 116, 135, 139, 147, 149, 159–161 Partisan ideology perspectives on education, 46, 53 Partisan politics theory, 53 Paterson, L., 119, 120, 127 Path dependence, 47, 59, 67, 68, 76, 216, 297, 349, 351 ideational explanations, 65, 351 Patten, John, 308 Perkin, H., 169, 175 Permeability (Durchlässigkeit ), 24 Pfeiffer, Anton, 292 Picht, Georg, 268–277, 280, 281, 283, 298, 322, 345, 347 Die Deutsche Bildungskatastrophe (The German Education Catastrophe), 268 Pidgeon, Douglas, 139, 140 Pieper, Cornelia, 322 Plowden report (Children and their Primary Schools ), 256

INDEX

Policy discourses, 6, 10, 65, 67, 74, 80, 181, 182, 214, 239, 297, 343, 344 Political science, 1–3, 9, 61, 69 and the study of education, 1 Pollard, Stephen, 311 Positive feedback, 59 and studies in the education turn, 59 Potsdam agreement, 195 Powell, Lucy, 5, 317 Power resources theory (PRT), 50–54, 78, 79 Process tracing, 8, 188 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 6, 21, 33, 321–323, 326–331, 334, 335 Prussia, 48, 55, 187, 189, 191 Puaca, B., 255 Public schools in England, 123, 194 Punctuated equilibrium model, 60, 66 R Raab, C.D., 28, 117, 118, 120, 153, 168 Rahmenplan zur Umgestaltung und Vereinheitlichung des allgemeinbildenden öffentlichen Schulwesens (Framework Plan for the Reorganization and Standardization of the State School System [Rahmenplan]), 252 Rau, Johannes, 278 Realschule adoption in the East after unification, 321 curriculum, 321 growth in postwar era, 264 integration with Hauptschule, 293 role in dual system of vocational education and training, 249

369

Reich Ministry for Science, Education, and Popular Culture (Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung ), 194 Reichsschule der NSDAP , 194 Reynolds, D., 318 Rhineland-Palatinate, 291 Ringer, F.K., 76 Robbins, Lionel, 172–175, 183, 252 Robbins report (Higher Education), 172–174, 277 Robinsohn, S., 228, 234, 239, 252, 255–257, 268 Rohde, Helmut, 297 Rokkan, S., 79, 349 Roth, H., 256, 275, 276, 328, 329 S Samuel, R.H., 193, 194, 217 Sarrazin, Thilo, 330–332 Sass, K., 3, 5, 50, 52, 57, 59, 193, 247, 267, 281, 293, 297 Saxony, 240, 321 Saxony-Anhalt, 26, 321 Schelsky, Helmut, 275 Scheuerl, Walter, 326 Schleswig-Holstein, 26, 198, 216, 250, 257, 296 Schmidt, Helmut, 297 Schmidt, M., 2, 53, 54 Schmidt, V., 5, 61–64, 69, 80 Schröder, Gerhard, 244, 245, 258 Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat ), 230 Scotland, and Advisory Council on Scottish Education, 119, 127 bipartite system, 120 democratic tradition in education, 121 educational psychology, 90

370

INDEX

intelligence tests, 118, 121 junior school certificate, 29, 119 omnibus schools, 119 qualifying exams, 117 Scottish Conservative party and selective schools, 319 Scottish Education Department (SED), 117, 119, 120, 245 Scottish Labour party rejection of New Labour school reforms, 120 selection in education, 97, 330 senior and junior secondary schools, 29 senior leaving certificate (Highers), 119 support for comprehensive schools, 3 technical education, 244 Secondary Modern schools business groups and, 135, 152 in May grammar school proposals, 316, 317 “parity of esteem” and, 109 performance of students on O-level exams, 142 postwar occupational structure and, 136 in tripartite system of education, 28, 135, 149 Secondary Schools Examinations Council, 105 Second World War, 3, 7, 9, 31, 58, 89, 92, 104, 121, 139, 168, 178 Setting practice in schools, 20, 29, 310 Shaw, E., 319 Short, Edward, 176, 184, 334 Siemens, Peter von, 273 Simon, Brian, 93, 96, 136, 139, 160, 177 Sinn Féin, 334

Sinn, Hans-Werner, 323 Sixth-form college, 30, 200 Snow, Charles (Baron), 164 Social Democratic Labour Party, 334 Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische ParteiDeutschlands [SPD]) and American school reform proposals, 203 Bad Godesberg program, 258 dynamic ability discourse, 67, 73, 287 Education policy committee, 278 Education Policy Principles (Bildungspolitische Leitsätze), 1964, 278 fixed ability discourse, 73, 331, 348 as ideational transmission pathway, 10 as mobile carrier of ideas, 73 Model for a Democratic School System (Modell eines demokratischen Bildungswesens ), 1969, 278 New Society (Neue Gesellschaft ) program, 246 promotion of Gesamtschule, 279, 280, 321, 346 school policy in the 1950s, 48, 120 school reform proposals during federal coalition with FDP, 295 school reform proposals in postwar occupation period, 200 tacit support for selective education in early postwar era, 264 vocational training, 24, 286 Social mobility and schools, 33 Soskice, D., 31, 50 Soviet Union, 196, 265 occupation zone in Germany, 196 Spearman, Charles, 95, 100, 123, 124

INDEX

Spens report (Secondary Education), 91, 108 Sputnik shock, 265 Stadtteilschule (district school), 26, 326 Standardization in education, 230, 252 Standing Conference of Ministers of Culture (Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister or Kultusministerkonferenz [KMK]), 210 Starr, Ringo (Richard Starkey), 153 Stein, Erwin, 204–207 Stephens, J., 2, 51, 52, 59, 78 Stern, Elsbeth, 329 Stewart, Michael, 162, 163, 165, 175, 183 Stocks, J.C., 117 Storz, Gerhard, 280 Stratification in education, 55 Strauss, Franz Josef, 281 Streaming, practice in schools, 20, 29 Streeck, W., 61 Studienschule (academic secondary school), 253 Studienstufe (academic stage), 278 Sutherland, G., 100, 102 Sweden, 13, 22, 54, 79, 237, 238, 255, 256, 269 T Talent wastage, 98. See also Hidden talent Tawney, R.T., 98, 99, 101, 104, 145, 311 Influence from educational psychology, 98 Secondary Education for All pamphlet, 98 Taylor, M.E., 5, 58, 195, 204, 241, 250, 264, 286

371

Technical schools, 28, 101, 105, 106, 109, 113, 127, 135, 152, 174, 183, 279 Temporality, 60, 67 Tent, J.F., 194, 195, 201, 208 Thatcher, Margaret, 158, 177, 179, 180, 306 education policies as prime minister, 312 as education secretary, 176 Thelen, K., 2, 5, 52, 59–61, 286, 287 Thomson, Godfrey, 118 Thuringia, 26, 321 Tomlinson, George, 114 Trades Union Congress (TUC), and comprehensive schools, 151 Education Act 1944, 104 multilateral schools, 110, 151 school leaving age, 151 testimony to Newsom Committee, 152 tripartite system, 104, 110, 152 Trampusch, C., 2 Trowler, P., 160, 168, 307, 308, 311

U Ulster Unionist Party, 334 Union of Training and Education (Verband Bildung und Erziehung, [VBE]), 212 Union of Women Teachers, 93 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 127, 318 United States (US) comprehensive high school, 228 Education Mission to Germany, 201 occupation zone in Germany, 200 Upper level (Oberstufe), 278

372

INDEX

V Valentine, C.W., 124 Value-driven issues, 351 Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), 50–54, 62 Vernon, Philip, 110, 114, 116, 140 Voigt, Udo, 336 Volksschule, 37, 190, 191, 212, 214, 216, 220, 221, 232, 235, 241, 244, 249–251, 265 Vorschule (fee charging elementary school), 191 W Wales comprehensive schools, 3, 68, 73, 157, 166, 176, 181, 284 11-plus exam, 135, 136 grammar schools, 135, 157, 173, 306, 316, 318 Welsh Conservative party views on May grammar school proposals, 316 Welsh Labour party commitment to comprehensive schools, 309, 310 Webb, Sydney, 311 Weber, Max, 45 Weigand, G., 333 Weimar Republic, 192, 213, 286 Weinstock, H., 242, 331 Weiss, Volkmar, 331 Welfare states, 2, 12, 36, 45, 51, 52, 61, 74, 343, 347

Welsh, H.A., 2, 195, 197 Wenke, Hans, 199 West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) Wiborg, S., 2, 3, 5, 36, 49, 52, 54–57, 93, 150, 166, 167, 348 Wilde, S., 321 Wilhelm Karl (Prince), 273 Wilkinson, Ellen, 113, 114, 116 William Tyndale school affair, 184 Wilson, Harold, 73, 145, 161, 176, 345 Winch, W.H., 124 Wintour, P., 309 Wooldridge, A., 95, 97, 98, 100–102, 107, 118, 135, 136, 139, 140, 178, 179 Woolwich Polytechnic, 174 Württemberg-Baden, 203–205 Wypchol, Y., 323, 325, 327

Y Yates, Alfred, 139, 140 Young, Michael, 143

Z Zimmer, J., 236, 254, 256 Zook, George, 201 Zweiter Bildungsweg (Second Educational Path [ZB]), 199, 230