English for the Rejected

This 1964 book examines the treatment of below average children in the British education system. In the secondary schools of Britain children were divided at 11 plus into the academic and non-academic, and sent accordingly to grammar and secondary modern schools. In the secondary moderns the children were streamed again, the more academic children doing work which approached grammar school standards. Holbrook writes powerfully and disturbingly about the teaching of the children of average or below average ability. He highlights how the British system was geared to the examining of the top layer of the age-group, the rest being 'unexaminable'.