ABSTRACT
Contemplating the future of the English ‘sixth form’ when rising numbers were already challenging its elite image, Alec Peterson suggested abandoning the term altogether as an obstacle to rational discussion. For many of his pre-war generation who ‘owe everything to the sixth form and will not forget it’, it was too ‘emotionally overloaded’ with memories of a time when, ‘with a handful of others,’ they first tasted intellectual excitement and saw the possibility of a university place ‘with all the accompanying visions of expanded ambitions and upward social mobility’ (Peterson 1973:2). That theme of irrational attachment to a partly mythical past appears in many accounts of resistance to change. For example, puzzled observers of the sixth form curriculum were advised to abandon any notion ‘that a curriculum is a set of arrangements which rationality has called into being and which rationality can alter’; that peculiar pattern of studying a very few subjects in depth was so bound into the grammar school tradition of preparing an academic elite for high status occupations that it had remained immovable against all criticism of excessive specialisation (Taylor et al. 1974:5). Deploring its immovability twenty years later, the first head of the National Curriculum Council recalled that debates about reforming A level had been ‘second in irrationality’ only to arguments about overcrowding the preceding stage. Thus reasonable proposals for curriculum space in which to develop core skills had been ‘met with unsubstantiated assertion and, sadly, an implication that treason was afoot’ (Graham 1993:126).
