Talk:Political career of Rab Butler (1941–1951)

John Ramsden Age of Churchill and Eden

Apparently the 1940-57 volume of the Longman History of the Conservative Party, by the late John Ramsden, contains a lot of useful material on the postwar reforms and tracing the intellectual origins of the Charters to interwar Tory thought. My copy is boxed up somewhere, so wikipedia will have to wait for that particular pleasure, unless somebody else wants to post stuff. May be enough material to hive off the 1945-51 period into a separate article, but we'll see in due course. Paulturtle (talk) 07:05, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Later Perceptions of the Butler Act

At the time, most of Butler's efforts were taken up in negotiating with the various churches, and finally closing down the tired controversy about state aid for religious schools which had been droning on since 1870 at least; the CofE accepted it partly because having most of their schools nationalised was the least bad option and partly so that they could respond to wartime demands for more Christianity in schools and in public life generally. However, in later years the Butler Act came to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as a massive extension of postwar educational opportunity for bright kids to go to grammar school and then to university.

The other issue is that it passed into popular myth that the Butler Act enforced selection by the Eleven Plus exam. I used to believe that until somebody set me straight. It may be that as selection came to be (rightly or wrongly) a dirty word on the political left, it suited people to imagine that it had been Those Horrible Tories who had brought it in in the first place. The two points are perhaps contradictory - a case has often been made that the abolition of grammar schools sent social mobility into reverse (every Prime Minister from 1964 to 1997 went to grammar school, but since then we've had Blair, Cameron, Boris, Sunak etc), but we can debate that on another occasion.

Anyway, we could do with some sourced content at some stage making these points, either in this article or in the article on the Act itself. I'll keep an eye open. Paulturtle (talk) 23:52, 12 March 2024 (UTC)