Phooey, in answer to your post from last night, people from grammar and secondary school do mix outside of school, just as adults in different jobs mix outside of work. DS and his friend from the comp are in the house playing a game together as I type.
I dislike the argument that adult life is about people of all different abilities mixing. Hopefully in their leisure time adults mix with a wide variety of people, but in a great many jobs they don't mix that much (obviously in some public facing jobs one group is the client of the other) and with very good reason.
When I am at work, I don't have to try to sit in work discussions and make decisions about a complex scientific problem while a semi-literate adult with no knowledge of science sits next to me finding it difficult to contribute or follow the argument.
Do you team teach in a classroom with an adult who has no knowledge of your subject area and limited skills in understanding child development and teaching methods? Do they disrupt your lessons by constantly failing to understand the teaching process at the level you are teaching?
If it is unacceptable for you to have to jointly teach with such an adult, why is it acceptable for my son to have to learn sat next to such a pupil?
I don't want to make this personal, but your response is by your own admission angry. If you thank god for what you have when you see people in low status jobs, I question how appropriate it is for you to be teaching in a secondary modern. Many of my family have low status jobs, and they are very proud of them. If you feel thick when watching university challenge, then I doubt you are equipped to teach the most able sixth formers.
In terms of my 'out of sight, out of mind' comment, I meant that as a child I did not feel like a failure next to children from the Grammar because I didn't see them during my working day at school. Sets on the other hand were very visible. I don't think it was necessary for me to see the achievements of grammar school children because they had no bearing on what I was doing, and what I was doing was appropriate to my educational needs at that point. What the grammar schools pupils were doing would not have been appropriate for me.
In much the same way, I didn't need to be familiar with what Oxford undergraduates were doing when I was at a different university. Now that I'm long past undergraduate level, I work alongside people who went to a grammar, and people who went to Oxford. I have never met anyone who thought less of me because I had arrived at the same point as them via a different route. I feel that if I had gone to a grammar I would not be where I am today, because I was not able enough at that point in my life to cope with a grammar environment and that would have held me back in my education.
But you (a secondary modern teacher and therefore the last person who should be adopting a fatalistic approach) are determined to make out that people are branded failures for their whole life purely on the basis that at one point in their life a different educational experience was deemed appropriate for them at that point in their development.