In England during the 1960s and 1970s, children were obliged to take an exam which would have a profound impact on their schooling and the rest of their lives. It was called the Eleven-Plus. Pass it, and you went to one kind of school; fail it and you went to another. The majority of children, although it varied very much according to where you were born, failed. And if you failed, it meant that you were highly unlikely to receive any further education after the age of 16 - the age of 15 until 1972. (I am talking, of course, about state education here. Anyone in a private school was expected to go on to university.) So your entire academic future was decided in a morning some time before your eleventh birthday.
Why? Because an educational psychologist called Cyril Burt, who designed the IQ tests on which the Eleven-Plus was based, believed that intelligence was innate, and had nothing to do with class, environment, teaching or parental expectations. Why did the children of the better-off do well at school? Because their parents must have been smart to be wealthy in the first place, so the smarts were in the genes. He proved this by studying the achievements of 53 pairs of separated twins, who, he claimed, always had the same IQ regardless of the circumstances in which they found themselves. 106 people seems like a flimsy basis for an education system that affected millions of children over decades, and ensured that there would be no equality of opportunity.
But after Burt’s death, doubts were cast on the reliability of his findings. Like, 53 pairs of separated twins? In one country, at roughly the same time? How many pairs of separated twins have you come across? Other researchers examining Burt’s work failed to find anything approaching that number. And the research assistants named in his articles had mysteriously vanished without trace. But never mind, eh? It was only 75% of the children of Britain that were affected. The Eleven-Plus still exists in some parts of Britain.
I passed the exam. On another day, I might not have. Who knows? But that entitled me to go to a grammar school, where I could study Latin, as opposed to a secondary modern school, where I would have studied woodwork. (Which skill would have served me better in my life?) At my school, the teachers wore gowns and some of them dictated their lessons - literally. We wrote down what they said, in silence. Some of them beat us with trainers if we talked, or didn’t do our homework. Or forgot our trainers for games. Some of them threw things at us. I was not asked to write anything creative until I was 16, when I had to do so in an exam. I am not exaggerating. Not one paragraph. One of the things that mystifies me about my career is that I make a living making shit up, something I hadn’t done ever until I was in my mid-twenties.