Ethical considerations in selection and streaming in education

Abstract

Under this rather forbidding title I want to dig below the immediately practical questions to do with selection and streaming in schools and look at certain of the fundamental moral and social value questions that pervade debates on these topics. In doing this I am not seeking to evade the directly practical issues that arise. It is rather that, in an area where much of the empirical evidence on what happens under different practical arrangements is inconclusive and raises such sharp controversy, there is a danger that we lose sight of what is really at stake. The analytical exercise of the kind I shall undertake therefore seeks to bring to the fore just those basic issues of principle on which any organisation of schooling inevitably takes some stand. After all what we really want is a system that as far as possible embodies the principles we really espouse rather than one locked into principles we have inadequately examined. The basic question I am therefore addressing is: what are the principles of selection and streaming we think the educational system should reflect and what can we say about the practical organisation of the system simply on these grounds.