John Carey: the constant reader

"Much of the blame for the continuing high proportion of public-school pupils in Oxbridge, in Carey’s view, can be put down to 'the destruction of the grammar schools'. If institutions like his own 'perfectly ordinary suburban grammar school” still existed, they would long ago have become “the largest recruitment field for Oxford, since entry to them was by merit not money'. The same thing, unfortunately, is happening in the U.S. to the detriment of American intellectual life.