ABSTRACT
Concern with academic standards in schools and colleges has been growing since the end of the Second World War but took on an added urgency after widespread liberalisation of education in the 1960s. As universities in the United States expanded their intake from 1945 onwards professors found that many of their freshman students lacked the intellectual capacity to cope with the courses as then structured. In Britain the Butler Act of 1945 created a three-tier secondary school system of grammar schools for the top 20 per cent in intellectual ability, technical schools for those supposedly gifted in this direction, and secondary modern schools for the rest. Parallel to this state system were the private schools, highly selective in their own way. This system effectively insulated decision makers – themselves exclusively from grammar or private schools – from contact with the intellectual norms of the majority so that when comprehensive schools were introduced in the 1960s and the insulation removed, the writing classes misinterpreted their new experience as a lowering of standards rather than as the revelation of reality. Meanwhile many Third World countries were engaged in massive expansion of their educational systems, aiming for universal primary education and for increased access to secondary education. Again, mean academic performances inevitably fell as those who had previously been excluded from the educational process were exposed to curricula designed for an intellectual élite.
