boaby
Posts: 2788
Joined: 29/12/2006
From: Aberdeenshire
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ORIGINAL: sharkboy
What constantly amazes me about this debate is that the anti-public school people always play the inequality card (and with pretty good reason), but do you really think that abolising private schools would improve the standard of state schools?
I think it would, in time. I think the type of parents who currently pay for a "better" education for their children would look to improve the state school system by maybe getting involved in PTAs or extra-curricular activities or even nipping the ankles of councillors and MPs to improve the funding of education. Can you imagine how better run state schools would be if the people who mattered to politicians, and actual politicians, had their kids in those schools?
I also think that having "better" teachers in the state school systems would improve them.
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Private schools tend to produce the educational attainments that we would like to see in all our state schools, not just those at the top of the league. So why, when we seek equality, do we tend to think that it's OK to bring the ones at the top down to the same level instead of raising up the ones at the bottom?
To me it's not about bringing the top down, it's raising the bottom up. I don't want everyone to get the same education. I want everyone to have access to everything - and so, for success at school to be determined by ability.
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Banning public schools won't suddenly fix our education system.
Quite so. Nothing will. Suddenly. So much needs to be addressed and improvement of consequence will take time. More time than a term of government - which, for those with a Machiavellian bent, is a problem - to be solved by means unknown to me.
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Until teachers get the recognition and reward that they deserve, there will always be this inequality between public and private schools.
As long as there are private schools there will be inequality. Ironically, the increase of access to education led to the disrespect of teachers. More pupils for more time meant more teachers. Which meant more and mass teacher training and - gasp - women teachers. The pay gap put schools off paying for men teachers so, like a Tory wet dream, the race to the bottom among yet more of the little people began. I could go on, and on, and on.
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For example, someone mentioned the school system in Finland - did you know that to be a teacher in Finland you require a Masters degree? The state has said "we only want the best teaching our children", so they set the bar high, and as a result have pretty much the world's best results (100% literacy, though as Bartlet said in the West Wing, "maybe they don't and they're just bad with numbers too" ). Highly paid and educated teachers in schools that don't lack for much in terms of facilities tends to produce good results - no real shock in that, is there? Instead, we get people coming out of uni who take to teaching with all the best intentions, only often to be beaten down by the system. So what's at fault here - the teachers or the system? Bit of both perhaps?
"We only want the best teaching our children." Our. The government, the politicians, the more influential among our society... the kids going to state school are their kids, not our kids. So long as their kids and can read and count well enough to work for our kids what do I care?
Make people interested in the system rather than allow them an escape from it. See how better it gets.
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As for the ethical nature or otherwise of the schools, how is it unethical to want the best for your child?
It's not. The parents aren't unethical. Blinkered, naturally so. It's the system that makes the best facilities, conditions, environments financially rather than meritoriously unattainable to many that is unethical.
If we want to make schools better for all then it ultimately rests on the T word. Which, unlike the F word, causes consternation among those proponents of private schools. I refer, of course, to Tax and Fee. "I'll pay a fee to get my child a better education. A tax? You want me to pay more tax to pay for other people's children to get an education? Phuuuuuuuuck off. I'll vote for the Tory."
< Message edited by boaby -- 20/1/2013 3:09:12 AM >
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"Aberdonians, and with some degree of purpose and right on their side, have absolute contempt for Glasgow. There is a side of Aberdonians who, let's be absolutely honest about this, feel so superior to Glasgow that you can measure it by the yard."
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RE: Are private schools ethical? - 
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