Bottom Set Citizen: Ability Grouping in Schools Meritocracys Undeserving (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

While research evidence shows the negative impact of ability grouping on children, this book suggests that the reason the practice is still embraced is the unspoken allegiance to the values of empire that governments, schools and many parents, still uphold, promoting competition and hierarchies over and above ethical principles on the education of societys most vulnerable, our children. The practice, which happens across social class, humiliates children deemed less academically able by rounding them up in front and in opposition to their better intellectual peers. Wielding knowledge as a weapon of humiliation, warps childrens relationship to organised forms of knowledge, making them antagonistic or indifferent towards it. As Michael Young predicted in The Rise of the Meritocracy, this book responds with the aftermath of such tale; with what lurks in opposition to the intellectual elites; the creature they socially engineered, the Bottom Set Citizen, ready to vote. This book will appeal to anyone concerned with democracy and childrens rights in education, including the rich, on whom I shine the light of deficit for a change. Thus, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage exemplify the Bottom Set Citizen in all his facilitated glory. Other, more vulnerable BSCs are not as lucky.