The comprehensive system is distinct from the tripartite system that comprised grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, and was brought in (piecemeal, and not in every part of the country) to replace it, especially through the sixties and seventies. As the name implies, the idea of a comprehensive school is that everyone goes there (apart from people in private education, but that's another matter).
However, teaching mixed ability classes in such a way as to stretch the brightest while engaging the dullest is hard, and for this reason almost all comprehensives divide pupils into classes of different abilities. Streaming and setting are two ways of doing this. Streaming refers to the practice of dividing a year group into (say) three groups - top, middle and low - which would be treated separately for all their lessons. Setting is more flexible, and groups people on a subject-by-subject basis, so that you could be, for instance, in the top group for French but in the bottom group for maths. In both cases, however, there are mechanisms (which vary from school to school) that allow pupils to be moved from one stream or set to another, should they turn out to have more (or less) promise than they initially showed. This is what distinguishes the comprehensive system from the tripartite system, where pupils take an exam at 11, which effectively seals their educational fate.
Yes, the Omelas comparison is extreme - secondary modern pupils aren't actually tortured, although many of them carry the shame and bitterness of failure with them for the rest of their days. What I had in mind also though, was the way in which in Omelas there's a conspiracy of silence about the price paid for the city's well being. The phrase "grammar school system", in erasing the experience of the vast majority of children, is doing something analogous, I think.
Yes, ex-secondary modern pupils have achieved fame, riches and success, but few of them have achieved academic success, and where they have done so it has typically been by the much harder road of night school, autodidacticism, etc. The system didn't offer them any second chance: they had to carve it out for themselves.
(In my area, they abolished the 11-plus the year before I was due to take it. My older brother took the exam and went to grammar school: I didn't, and went to the comprehensive that had until the previous year been the secondary modern. My mother taught at the one, and my father at the other. So I think I saw most sides of the system.)
no subject
The comprehensive system is distinct from the tripartite system that comprised grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, and was brought in (piecemeal, and not in every part of the country) to replace it, especially through the sixties and seventies. As the name implies, the idea of a comprehensive school is that everyone goes there (apart from people in private education, but that's another matter).
However, teaching mixed ability classes in such a way as to stretch the brightest while engaging the dullest is hard, and for this reason almost all comprehensives divide pupils into classes of different abilities. Streaming and setting are two ways of doing this. Streaming refers to the practice of dividing a year group into (say) three groups - top, middle and low - which would be treated separately for all their lessons. Setting is more flexible, and groups people on a subject-by-subject basis, so that you could be, for instance, in the top group for French but in the bottom group for maths. In both cases, however, there are mechanisms (which vary from school to school) that allow pupils to be moved from one stream or set to another, should they turn out to have more (or less) promise than they initially showed. This is what distinguishes the comprehensive system from the tripartite system, where pupils take an exam at 11, which effectively seals their educational fate.
Yes, the Omelas comparison is extreme - secondary modern pupils aren't actually tortured, although many of them carry the shame and bitterness of failure with them for the rest of their days. What I had in mind also though, was the way in which in Omelas there's a conspiracy of silence about the price paid for the city's well being. The phrase "grammar school system", in erasing the experience of the vast majority of children, is doing something analogous, I think.
Yes, ex-secondary modern pupils have achieved fame, riches and success, but few of them have achieved academic success, and where they have done so it has typically been by the much harder road of night school, autodidacticism, etc. The system didn't offer them any second chance: they had to carve it out for themselves.
(In my area, they abolished the 11-plus the year before I was due to take it. My older brother took the exam and went to grammar school: I didn't, and went to the comprehensive that had until the previous year been the secondary modern. My mother taught at the one, and my father at the other. So I think I saw most sides of the system.)