down and out in the UK

Erica Meltzer sends a link:

Jane Mitchell was the daughter of a lorry driver. Reflecting on her education during the 1940s, she wrote: "I enjoyed the mental drill and exercise I was put through, even the memorising from our geography book of the principal rivers and promontories of the British Isles . . . It never occurred to me to question the purposes or methods of what we were made to do at school. The stuff was there to be learned, and I enjoyed mopping it up."

Jane went on to become a classics lecturer at Reading University. It is hard to imagine a child of her background taking so academic a career route today. Then again, it is hard to imagine that such a child today would receive the rigorous education she enjoyed.
Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down by Matthew Hunter | Standpoint June 2012

Reading the whole thing now.