Theresa May’s appointment as Prime Minister this summer was a triumph for female empowerment in top-tier politics, and a bracing de-cobwebbing of the Westminster elite. And yet, reactions to her proposals to re-invigorate education with more grammar schools were larded in an almost misogynistic dismissal.

Once one stops branding May and her grammar school policy as mere rose-tinted nostalgia – or a chunk of red meat to be lobbed to the Tory backbenchers – the modern and progressive details of May’s grammar re-vamp become clear.

The reintroduction of grammar schools under Theresa May and Justine Greening comes with various mitigations designed to redress the historic issues of social mobility and class entrenchment.

Under the new proposals, contemporary grammar schools would have to fill quotas of students from under-privileged backgrounds (while not compromising on academic entrance requirements). To help ensure this, primary schools in poor areas must be designated as feeder schools of the new grammars, which must also undertake to sponsor (many understand this to mean mentor) a neighbouring under-performing school.

To these concepts – which seem like an excellent way to bring back grammar schools in a modern, egalitarian fashion – one could offer many additional suggestions. Every one of the top 10 universities in The Guardian’s 2017 university league table takes into account ‘contextual data’ (socioeconomic background, geo-demographics, etc.) when making decisions about prospective students. It would be all too easy, were the will there, to incorporate a system like this into the grammar selection process. To claim then that May’s policy and the ensuing debate is just a rehash of the arguments of the ’60s is wilfully ignorant.

The campaign to introduce a comprehensive education system in Britain, spearheaded in the late ’60s by Tony Crosland, who, in his own words, wanted “to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland”, marked a seismic re-orientation in the purpose of education. No longer was the essence of schooling in Britain to do with excellence, merit and achievement, but rather a bland, mildewed equality that stifled potential and stamped out aspiration.

No one disputes that grammar schools, by their very nature, cause segregation and that this segregation is sometimes influenced as much by socio-economics as academic merit. But it is the considered view of many that this segregation reaps academic benefits and enhances social mobility.

For the bright young child from a poor family, disillusioned with slow progress at a non-selective primary school, the local grammar school is a beacon of hope and aspiration. For this child, intellectual merit (and a healthy portion of personal industry) may be the only currency they have to purchase themselves a better life.

Speaking to The Guardian in opposition to the new plans, Angela Rayner, shadow education secretary, hit the nail on the head, although meaning to say quite the opposite: “If you’re going to say, ‘there’s bright kids and there’s kids that are not that bright, and we need to segregate those kids, then say it’”.

This is a truism – one that must be treated delicately and inclusively – but a truism nonetheless. Some kids are and were always going to be brighter than others, and despite the wishes of the hard Left, it is our duty to cater for the underprivileged low-achievers as well as, rather than instead of, catering for the underprivileged bright.

The return of grammar schools has long been maligned as a poisoned chalice for any government – it wasn’t even suggested during Thatcher’s years in office. The cross-party anti-grammar consensus was so strong that the status quo, until May, seemed unshakeable.

And yet there is an ancient, sinister evil lying dormant in this debate that governments are even more loath to tackle: private education. Opposing grammars on the grounds of fairness and equality while, by tacit omission, supporting private schools is weak, lazy and sows more division than grammar schools themselves are reputed to do.

The notion that rich parents can purchase gold standard education for their kids – something that should be an enshrined right for all in a country like Britain – while poor children are binned off to a bog-standard comp is fundamentally wrong.

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A study at Durham University earlier this year found that students at private schools were liable to achieve almost a whole two grades higher than their state-educated counterparts. In this light, grammar schools seem to act as a mitigating intermediary force between two hugely disparate educational systems: they may have their problems, but grammar schools will surely remain a basic necessity if nothing else, so long as the private education sector exists.

This argument, taken to its logical extreme, might just hold an answer agreeable to both sides of the grammar school debate: amalgamate private schools with comprehensives. Immediate benefits would include a pooling of resources, increased social mobility and the re-enfranchisement of thousands of disillusioned kids. For the staunch grammarians, there would be ample scope to streamline internally within the inherited machinery of both private and state schools working in tandem.

It is unlikely that this sort of policy will ever be enacted, principally because private schools smack of money, and no politician would dare knock them off their perch. In the absence of this utopia, then, the new and socially-mobile grammar schools that May proposes offer the best way to deliver fair and meritocratic education – the only sort of education we should be offering.