ABSTRACT
In Britain, the private schools in general and the public schools in particular have attracted a level of public debate which is out of all proportion to their numerical significance. The use of the public schools is a crisis of confidence in the parents’ own ability to secure control over a system of education which is governed by political rather than market forces. Yet the belief that both the earlier and the current generation of parents using these schools have their sights firmly set on top positions survives both the passage of time and the transition from selective to essentially comprehensive secondary schooling. Smith continues his discussion of the role of the grammar schools by saying that whilst they do offer a sense of cultural inclusion with the ruling elite they simultaneously preserve relational segregation through spatial separation. Alterations in the institutional characteristics of schooling have undoubtedly been accompanied by more subtle changes in the actual experience of learning.
