Correlli Barnett: How Britain squandered her post-war chance

Taken from the Royal Society of Arts lecture given by the Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge

Thanks to the classics-and- Christianity indoctrination of the Victorian public schools and Oxbridge, élite and intelligentsia came to neglect technology and to scorn commercial success as low and vulgar; and instead esteem the professions and public or imperial service. What's more, when Britain after 1902 did belatedly develop a system of state secondary schools, the mandarins of the department of education made sure that the curriculum was modelled on that of public school – in other words, highly academic, even in the case of science. Nothing so vulgar as mere technology or engineering, let alone any element of the vocational.

In this way, the requirements of university entrance for the bookish few determined the education of the unbookish many. When you couple this kind of schooling with Britain's continued failure to develop technical and further education colleges to a European standard, you have an education system right up to the Second World War that bore little relationship to industrial success in a world market.

No wonder, then, that, from the start of rearmament in 1936 right through the Second World War, Britain was handicapped by the lack of skilled technologists and production engineers, as well as by a too narrow industrial base in advanced technologies like radio and machine tools.

What was needed was that Government should swiftly advance beyond prologue by implementing in full the 1944 Education Act. But at the end of the post-war decade, the ancien régime in British education and training remained virtually intact. The regime's human output still presented a contrast of extremes between a small up-market range of university graduates, and the mass production of crudely finished proletarians outclassed by their American or European rivals. For a start, Butler's tripartite system of secondary schools had led to the very opposite of that parity of status and opportunity which he had intended. Instead, it had perpetuated the educational class divide. On the one hand, "blue-collar" (secondary modern and secondary tech); and on the other, "white-collar" (grammar schools).

The failure to implement the brave blueprints of 1944-6 cannot only be blamed on the inability of educationalists to make up their own minds. To turn those blueprints into reality required unstinted capital investment and generous current expenditure. But governments had to find economies to offset the military and other costs of clinging to the world-power role, as well as meeting the costs of the welfare state.

Of all the ways in which Britain squandered her irrecoverable post-war opportunity to reinvent herself as an industrial trading nation before her old trade rivals came back on stream again, her failure to give herself a "world-class" education and training system must be the most disastrous.

Even today, we have not caught up with other advanced nations in providing education for personal and national capability. In terms of adult literacy, we rank fifth from bottom out of the 29 members of the OECD. Some 22 per cent of our population lack the numeracy skills needed to cope in modern society. The proportion of 17-year-olds in education and training is lower here than in almost all other industrialised countries.

And even though the number of young people going to some sort of university has expanded since the 1950s, the humanities still dominate. The University and Colleges Admissions Service issued figures last week showing rises of up to 20 per cent in students opting for "rice-pudding" subjects – soft and easy to digest – like media studies and cinematics. But those opting for chemistry are down by 7 per cent, mechanical engineering down by 5 per cent. Estelle Morris, the new Secretary of State for Education, describes the scale of our educational problem as "frightening." I will leave you with that cheerful thought.