Tony Halpin (Extracted from "Brightest are failed by state schools", The Times, 25 November 2005)

"The educational apartheid dividing state and independent schools was laid bare yesterday by new research into the achievements of bright children. The most able children are only half as likely to achieve top grades at A level in state schools as they are in the fee-paying sector, a government adviser told head teachers."

[Ed: Politicians in the Western nation-states are almost at the point where they -- and not only parents and educational experts -- will publicly confess that state secondary schools have failed. They chiefly fail the brightest children -- those on whom any civilisation depends. State education, first instituted by Chancellor Bismark of Germany in the 1870s, was designed to produce a biddable population which would work hard in the factories in peacetime and become self-sacrificing soldiers in wartime. Germany and the other nation-states that copied this certainly succeeded -- as the two World Wars have demonstrated. At the same time, however, state education has produced a dumbed-down population and less social mobility than obtained in pre-Bismarkian times. But we need as much talent as is potentially available now and developed countries are wasting at least half -- perhaps more -- of their most valuable assets.]