Education, education, education as someone famously said.

Reading articles written by people who are, or have been in or part of the public gaze, people we have come to acknowledge for common sense and a constructive way of looking at things, they all seem to me to be getting things the wrong way around, getting their proverbial knickers in a knot for no reason at all. I speak of the debate raised by Theresa Mays reintroduction of the Grammar school.

There has been no deeper ideological divide than the way we educate our children in this country. The class divide, the furtherance of inequality within the people of this country is cemented by the skewed opportunity we give our children, mostly conferred by the money we can afford to spend on them by sending them to private schools. The very word speaks volumes, it's a "private world" where most are excluded.
The one area where there was any attempt to offer ordinary kids the sort of education the private schools offered was the Grammar School which in many ways mimicked the private educational system by stressing the ethos and the team spirit within the school.
Dress, sport and team games inculcated into the child his belonging to something larger more important than just his own individuality. He / she represented, through their actions the school ethos  and in recognising that there was such a thing became attendant to it, finding a place for it in their own inner curriculum.  Respect and discipline were the result of the sociability that a Grammar School inculcated within the student, a sense of being privileged to be seen as being a part of what the school represented.
This, some would say created a divisive attitude in young people and could only be challenged by ridding the state educational establishment of the opportunity to divide children and under the banner of "pluralism"  everyone was thrown into the same pot with the hope that something good would rub off.
Well it has, we have one of the worst educational systems and poorest educated children in the western world when measured by that old perennial, the exam.
From being up there with the best we now languish middle or lower with many nations who were uneducated when we banished Grammar Schools now spectacularly better.
For "pluralism" to work you have to lower your sights, you have to stop trying to achieve the best in terms of academic achievement  and concentrate on the less well off. Not only those who come from poorer backgrounds and therefore, it is assumed, a lower sense of worth and a lower sense of personal achievement, it's an attempt to find the mean, the average but essentially it's a political experiment in curbing the dynamics of a society to a one sized fits all experiment which copes with massive diversity, a multi ethnic, multi cultural polyglot we devised in the 50s to cope with our economic needs.
The refusal to consider there are winners and losers goes against all common sense but it's an ideological impediment that many closeted around the educational establishment believe.
If we accept that one of the wonders of childhood is its diversity a diversity in the brain as well as the emotional substructure we all depend on surely the most sensible thing to do is to structure our educational system to cater for all eventualities.
A Grammar School for those who have the academic ability, (whilst curbing the middle classes of the power to gerrymander the assessment) but above all to make the derided Secondary Modern School (the school you went to if you failed the exam) the elite of our public policy for funds and facilities. The ethos so important can be created by attracting (financially) the best teachers who themselves can inculcate into the children a sense of self worth and the importance to achieve goals.
Don't try to do things on the cheap as was the Comprehensive School system. There's no washing powder which can bring out all the pupils sparkling and attentive but with proper attention and rigour, including  discipline as well as modern techniques for baiting the hook, attracting the crucial interest in the child for subjects which in themselves give relevance in his or her common instinctual environment.