Fee-paying schools: classic or dud

No. Yes. No. No.

It's okay to discuss both, but I think it's pretty horrible having a knee-jerk reaction over something so petty.

It was my parents' decision to send me to a fee-paying school (in the US, this is called a "private" school, but we would have gone to a "public" school had we stayed in the US). By my late teens, I had discovered political awareness, and insisted on being transferred to the local state school to finish my education. It was the worst six months of my entire educational career (including the bizarre Christian Scientist school where they used to beat us and lock us in closets).

My conclusion is that someone who went to a poor state school like that had a very different educational experience than me, and will have been molded into a different person. I am not going to draw conclusions about which is better or worse, but I am aware that I have had some kind of advantage.

The principal difference is that 99.9% of parents of private/public school kids have an interest in their children's education, purely by virtue of being willing to pay thousands for it. In parents of state school children the figure is considerably lower. Obviously that is going to foster a different culture.

Fee-paying schools are dud in so many ways in Britain. As a way of perpetuating inequality they're second to none, the standard of your education being determined by your parents' income seems archaic to me.

Secondly, and this applies to all selective schools,it's just a shame to spend your formative years amongst just people who are similar to you. I've met peolpe in Britain who went their whole childhood never meeting a kid from a council house or even never meeting any afro-caribean kids.

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, whilst the people who decide British educational policy don't send their kids to state schools the standard of British schools will never improve.

Here's a thought, rather than banning private schools, how about this? Any politician, council member, educational Trades Unionist who has any bearing on education policy must send their children to a state school (same for the Health service too, come to think of it). How quickly do you think money would be put into state education then?

i find the idea of private schools an absolute abomination. I've been raised the perfect liberal in that respect.

I don't have knee-jerk reaction against people who went to them (besides you generally only find out what school they went once you've established roughly whether they're dicks or not...) but I do think i've met a lot of wanks from Private Schools. I think they can be the breeding ground for a certain kind of wank. State schools too: just different kinds of wanks...

and Winterland: YES! that should be made the law. to have people in power who are willing to say what's good for us, yet send their kids to eton is horrible...

Is education a basic right? Yes, being taught how to read, write, perform arithmetic, type, and perform basic functions necessary for work is a basic right of living in civilised society. Not everyone NEEDS and not everyone even has the ability or the desire for more than that.

The sort of blanket socialist approach to education that winterland suggests - do you really think that it would raise *all* education to a uniform high standard? No, I think it would dillute education to the point of being meaningless.

It's that good old British reverse classism. Anything that supports or perpetuates the Class System is evil and must go, even if it does actually provide some kind of benefit.

I agree that wealth and status are not good indication of who deserves or even is able to utilise further education. In a perfect world, scholarships would be based on merit. A good education, good teachers, facilities, etc. - it's not free. Provide more money for all schools? What a great idea! But where's it going to come from?

There will *always* be inequality in education. News flash! Get rid of fee-paying schools, and you are not going to get rid of the class system! Ban Public Schools, and wealthy parents will hire private tutors. Parents to whom learning is important will imbue their offspring with a love of learning. The number one factor in determining or measuring how well a child will do at school is not wealth, is not whether the child goes to public or state school, it's the number of books in the parents' home.

My state school was paid for by property taxes, and it was good enough to send 20 students in my class to Ivies and the next 80 to other prestigious schools, out of a class of 400. The schools in my old state are very good, though.

Kate OTM about books in the home. My mum's were in her dresser drawer. Hollywood Wives sure taught me a lot!

Xpost

one way to undermine them (i've mentioned this before): anyone who pays for compulsory education has to pay fullcost (ie the same as overseas students) for higher education.

kate's kind of right about the postcode lottery, but i think now it's even more insidious that that with so-called "parental choice", ie middle-class parents who know how to work the system tick all the boxes to get into the schools perceived to be the best, whereas those with less knowledge of how to play the game (regardless of how interested they are in their child's education) end up at the "bog-standard comps"...

...ooh hello, i appear to be on my high horse, sorry...

I agree that wealth and status are not good indication of who deserves or even is able to utilise further education. In a perfect world, scholarships would be based on merit.

Fee-Playing or "first class" or whatever you want to call them schools should continue to exist so that persons who show that merit can get scholarships to them.

If you provide a "first class" education to the average patron of a cattle-hall style state school (I am describing the school I went to) it will be wasted. Should you waste time and money improving the cattle hall, or should you provide the means and the money to get bright and motivated students to better schools? I think the latter.

Education is one of the few things I am perfectly happy, in fact I think it is necessary to have a two-tier system for.

x-post...

I'd rather go with want rather need as the basis for educational distribution. But then I'm one of those optimistic pro-intellectual and pro-education types who believes that education in itself is a positive good. I don't think we should be forcing people to learn anything beyond the basics, but anyone who wants to go further should be able to.

Ability wrt education is a whole great box of weasels which I don't particularly want to get into.

Xpost: yeah, what Carsmile said abt middle-class parents.

The overseas fee to attend Oxford still works out cheaper than Eton, Westminster etc.

Good state schools find ways to support everyone. Mine did. But one of the reasons they worked so well is because parents who might've gone private if living on the East Coast did not keep their kids out of our midst.

and scholarships don't work (unless you have an entirely scholarship based programme which would just be silly). The amount of people I have met who have been sent to a private school on a scholarship and then recieved hideous bullying for being *working class* is not worth thinking about.

Xpost

incidentally: how early do you think one can tell if a child is deserving of a first rate education? t

I agree. But I do NOT want to waste another penny of my hard-earned taxes sending a ned with entitlement issues, like, oh, say, C-man, to further education! It's just a waste!

I hope you're joking with the use of 'ned' there...

I'm not sure that motivation is something you can teach, anyway.

(x-post, yes, I am joking with the use of "ned")

BUT what I'm asking for is equality of opportunity. Does everyone need a first-class education? Maybe not. Should everyone have that chance? Yes, yes and yes again. What do you do with smart kids whose parents don't have books in the home, don't do their homework with them? Is it fair to say 'if your parents don't care about your education, neither should the state?'

The fact is that Britain's state schools are run by people who often have no stake in their quality. An end to selective schools would force them to look at standards in their local schools.

And do all people DESERVE a first-class education? Well yes, who exactly is it that you think doesn't?

Is education a basic right? Yes, being taught how to read, write, perform arithmetic, type, and perform basic functions necessary for work is a basic right of living in civilised society. Not everyone NEEDS and not everyone even has the ability or the desire for more than that.

*but* how are you going to decide who gets to go to the good schools? when do you make this decision? at birth?

(several x-posts)

The difference is that its easier to coast at private schools if you know exactly which hoops to jump through while at state school its easier to drop out altogether.

There's another reason why private school exam results are so good, which is that they don't bother entering you if they don't expect you to pass.

Winterland OTM.

I agree with all your points. I just disagree with the methodology of achieving it.

What do you do with smart kids whose parents don't have books in the home, don't do their homework with them? Is it fair to say 'if your parents don't care about your education, neither should the state?'

Is the responsibility for children the responsibility of the individual, or the responsibility of the state? We are getting down to the core problem that I have with socialism and this way of thinking.

What do you say? Sorry, kid, you lost the genetic lottery. You got dud parents. My experience is that kids who are bright, kids who are motivated will *always* find a way to get what they need. As evidenced by the number of bright kids from a non-posh, non-public-school background made good on this very board and this very thread. Should it perhaps be easier? Yes. But should we do it for them, at the expense of others? No.

occasionally i used to see suggestions like removing the charitable status of public schools/putting a huge tax on school fees. would any of these work?

i've definitely met people for whom this wasn't the case.

did you go to one? No.

would you send your kids to one? Hell no! I'm paying for education through my taxes. Do you expect me to pay TWICE for something? What kind of mug do you take me for?

do you have a knee-jerk prejudice against people who went to them? No.

xpost

http://www.northwood-cheltenham.co.uk/assets/images/Cheltenham_Ladies_College.jpg

having won a scholarship when I was 11. I was very, very happy there and remember my school days with much fondness.

Yes (although in Nigeria & Pakistan, not the UK, where I went to state grammar [selective] school in Kent)

No, but I might move to an area with good schools, although I'm not planning on kids ever anyway

No but I believe from my experiences at (haha a tewwibly elite Oxbridge) university that public schools and/or growing up with parents that send their kids to them encourage(s) said offspring to act like complete twatpackets until they grow a brain in a rather higher proportion than the general public.

(This may be different in the UK than in America... for varying reasons.)

It is essential to be educated with people from as many possible walks of life as you can manage, otherwise it's much less of an actual education.

I think the problem with Kate's argument is the conflation of intelligence with motivation. The notion that every bright pupil is in a social climate where they want to succeed. In many schools there's a stulifying climate where academic success if frowned upon among pupils. How do you get these people out of that state of mind? This is an age old problem of course and not one I expect us to get round on this thread.

I am not missing the irony in champion procrastinators like most of us discussing motivation either ;)

Is that part of education? *Can* that be part of education? Is this something the State should even be getting involved with?

Kate, this is simply not true. Sure many Kids do do this,and you're right there are probably a few on here. But ask teachers, especially teachers at some of the poorer schools with high class numbers, whether they have the time or facilities to really push the brightest kids and they'll tell you "no". The fact is that it's the kids with no books at home, with working parents and pressures to be out and earning who money should be focussed on.

But should we do it for them, at the expense of others? No.

This is an argument I've had many times. Truth be told, I'm really uncomfortable advocating the banning of anything and even more uncomfortable discussing it with some-one like my brother (working-class comp. school boy, planning on sending his kids to private school). I just can't see politicians taking education seriously unless they're forced to take a stake in it. The truth is that if all selective schools were to be abolished tomorrow the pro-education lobby would be a fearsome, articulate, well-connected group. Things would change.

x-post...

It should permeate the atmosphere, not be a box to be ticked.

xpost I agree with winterland too.

There was a philosophy in the place that each student was bound to be good at *something*, and when that something was identified and encouraged, it would become easier to learn the other stuff.

It's what teaching is all about and the efforts of those teachers who DO manage to extract even average results from some schools in pretty horrific areas should be celebrated.

I think Suzy is talking a lot of sense here. Which is why we need more funding for state schools and not simply shrugging off the responsbility and saying that because the students there are failing, they will fail regardless of what anyone does. It's defeatism.

This is sounding like the classic argument from WWI:
"All the same rations and all the same pay, all the boys would be back in one day."

The fact is that it's the kids with no books at home, with working parents and pressures to be out and earning who money should be focussed on.

Well, come up with a solution, and run for your local council.

Because in theory, this is true. But in practice, it's unworkable, and in your proposition, it's done at the expense of depriving bright, motivated kids whose parents are the ones paying the school taxes in the first place. Way to alienate your voter base and get the Tories back in at the next by-election!

I can't see the two-tier system as we have it now as a good thing, segregating in two streams the "intelligent" (or those who have figured out how to work the system/moving to the right areas/knowing the right people) and the bladdy loaded. Although there is an argument that the intelligent should be pushed in a way that a lot of state schools don't have the resources for, I don't think that the choice for move or not should be based on money or your social standing. Matt is saying all of this far better than I, of course.

Despite all this, part of me is uncomfortable about taking away the right for people to choose, even IF it is only possible for a certain elite. Feh.

One thing that gets my goat - people who sneer at those who send their kids to private school, but are happy to contribute to the ghettoisation and social division of cities by moving to expensice areas with 'nice' schools.

My argument comes down, again and again, to the pragmatic question of WHO IS GOING TO PAY FOR IT? Which is the platform that Tories usually do win on, so forgive me for sounding like a Tory.

There's a reason that fee-paying schools have fees. Because a good education *IS* expensive. Well-prepared, healthy, organic food is more expensive than mass-produced and highly processed food, too.

Pumping more money into *all* education sounds like a fantastic idea to me. Where do you get the money from? 100% luxury tax on a private education? (Which would be effectively banning it for the middle classes?) Or stop wasting money on shite like sending expensive helicopters which don't even work properly to an expensive war which the population doesn't support anyway? That would be a great idea, too.

Also because the schools are profit-making businesses whereas state schools are not.

Also the teachers did have a great deal of love for their subjects, and were not scared to throw a hissy fit if a book or theory had actually proved inspiring to them and we were all messing around. The main thing they had to say to us about the importance of a good school was that ultimately 'good school' matters most as a concept when you are talking about college than high school, and that a lot of private school students had less allocation per student than we did, and to make the most of it. Teachers who heard that they had been denied tenure were supported by angry students who would storm into the office of the principal with their payslips from Saturday jobs showing how much money they'd paid in State tax, reasoning that as they were now taxpayers like their parents they had a right to have their say.

Schools like the one Sam teaches in are ALWAYS in states where there is private school creaming, low or no state taxes or property taxes. Minnesota is not one of these states, has magnet school programmes and a policy where any student in the state can attend any school for tuition in a magnet subject. When I think of all the wealth in states like Texas and California which does not filter into the school systems like it does elsewhere, it makes me sick, because states like these have the biggest rich-poor divide in America. On the East Coast, which is more heavily taxed, the private school brain drain is what ruins the schools. There are a handful of posh private schools in Minnesota, but they tend to be for kids of transferred businessmen and rich kids who can't behave themselves in public school.

Kate, the urban middle/professional class is the last demographic the Tories have any chance of making gains with. If anything, they will vote Lib Dem to put the boot in New Labour.

The big decider would be if the choice was between a non-denominational fee-paying school and a churchy non-fee one.

And it doesn't necessarily make you sound like a Tory. The Lib-dems suggested a 1 penny in the pound tax rise with all profits going to education a while back and both the Tories and Labour pooh-poohed the idea.

Nick brings up another interesting side to the debate. Yeah, going to a posh school was not all fun and games, and from a social point of view, it was an utter disaster which probably did me a lot of psychological damage. *BUT* I did experience a hell of a lot more damage at the local state school, and without the benefits of having a good education.

Which is worse? Social bullying or physical bullying? And which is better, bullying with no recourse, or bullying with the super-nerd status to actually compete with the fuckers who bullied you, later on in later life?

HSA is another public school boy with mixed feelings and a lot of resentment. He did the reverse trip - he was failing at his local state school, so his Guardian-reading parents went against their social consciences and sent him to Westminster.

Kate, the urban middle/professional class is the last demographic the Tories have any chance of making gains with.

This I doubt very much. A sizeable urban-professional class were by and large former Thatcherites seduced by New Labour and notoriously fickle and likely to swing back to the Tories whenever they notice their wallet looking thinner. This is the biggest reason why New Labour exists in the first place.

This is far from true, unless you make the assumption that *most* middle-class parents can afford to either move house to be near a good school or can afford private education. If not, you go to whatever's nearest, unless there are special reasons such as religion, siblings or if you can get a scholarship/pass an 11+ exam. There is really very little scope to play the game.

To answer the qs : Should they exist - yes. Did I go to one - no, state Grammar school. Would I send my kids - yes, if I could afford it. Prejudice - no.

I accept that better funding will not abolish the class system (and that isn't my point anyway, except where its thinking and mechanisms act against many people) nor will it automatically solve motivational problems. But I do think it can help in many ways - more teachers per pupil will mean more help for them individually, less huge classes where people can easily get lost and disappear. The fact that many of the most motivated pupils are siphoned off into fee-paying schools means the proportion of pupils who are utterly unmotivated, or even negative about education, can predominate, so bringing the more motivated pupils back might help the overall mood in that way.

not sure, yes, yes (though n/a), no.

Thing is, in many many cases it is very clear that the fee-paying school is the better option for a child's education; certainly I'm happy I went to the local public school as opposed to the local state school. In an ideal world of course the state school system would provide an education of equivalent standard - but I've yet to work out how exactly that will happen, because merely throwing money at it is not going to work. And in any case there'd be no need for fee-paying schools if a free education was good enough.

If fee-paying schools were abolished without the standard of state education being raised, Kate is otm that the children of rich families with some sort of interest in their education would still inevitably be better off, through the hiring of private tutors and the like.

The amount of people I have met who have been sent to a private school on a scholarship and then recieved hideous bullying for being *working class* is not worth thinking about.

None at my school. I don't think I actually ever knew who was on scholarship and who wasn't. It was a specialist music school so I think quite a large proportion of pupils was on some form of scholarship.

(xpost - Martin, I agree that 'reading maths at Cambridge' should not be seen as automatically superior to 'being a motor mechanic' but is this not more of a societal attitude than a specifically public school one? Also, Latin was definitely one of the most useful subjects I ever studied at school, and I'd refuse to accept the abolishment of fee-paying schools until and unless Latin is made compulsory in the state system.)

Secondly, this argument is kinda alien to me. In Finland there are only handful of private schools, and 99,9 percent of students go to public schools, from the elementary to the academic level. Also, all education is free, and the state provides you with a student aid and rent aid. I'm not saying this has diminished all class differences, but it sure as hell is one of the reasons Finland is much less a class-based society than Britain. It's not a perfect system (it has been accused of being too equalizing, for example) but compared to the UK and the USA, I think in terms of social equality it is a better one (I hope I'm not sounding to presumptuous here). Obviously, you can't just install this sort of social democratic model on your countries as such, but all I'm saying it's not an impossible option, and it has lots of merits.

That's not entirely correct. My argument centres around the fact that if you put a lot into something, you get a lot out, and that seeing that in practice at your school is an edifying experience and will keep your entitlement issues more collective than individual for the rest of your life. True, the tax base was high, but it was a priority for the residents of the state and town and most of the houses in my town were two-bed GI tract housing built after WWII, not a 'mansion' in the city limits. As I have said repeatedly, there are a high proportion of families who need AFDC, single-parent families, recently arrived asylum seeker-type immigrants rather than academic/professional immigrants. My mother had to take food stamps for a few years, but some of my friends had lawyers and doctors for fathers. Others were postmen and lady bus drivers. It was a good mix and reflected the real life of the town, and was intended to do so (our assistant principal was the mayor). You were encouraged to relate to them as people, not demographics. I will admit that we were very lucky that none of the other suburbs seemed willing to accept Jews, most of whom were well-motivated at home to do well because of past injustices, and many of whom, like me, were the children of parents who had been to the same schools.

I think that the supposed grotesque squalor of comprehensive schools is in many ways a figment of the middle class Daily Mail imagination.

Your assessment of the East Coast private school siphoning is also a lot more complicated than you get into. It's a Zip-code lottery.

Texas and California, I can't comment on.

This is something the state and the municipal councils here have tried to solve as well. For example, in Helsinki, urban planning is done so that every district has cheap town-owned apartments as well as the more expensive private ones. Obviously, the mean income levels between districts still differ, but not as much as they would if the city council wouldn't do anything.

O, T and fucking M. With the possible exception of certain areas.

Indeed, but if the education at fee-paying schools wasn't substantially better than most state alternatives, the number of parents who would be willing to shell out money for it would be much less.

Not in my actual, real-life experience.

And obviously not in HSA's actual, real-life experience. (Though perhaps grotesque squalor isn't the right word, but "failings" would be closer to it.)

Well, yeah, you have a point. This point could also work if you subsituted "Minnesota" for "Finland" and "New York State" for "US/UK" in what I was trying to say to Suzy above.

But those Kingsdale kids were quite scary.

yes, too much money gets eaten up by pointless adminstration in the UK system. Anyone one of us could go into the education department of our local authorities and implement cost-cutting moves if given carte blanche to do so.

Did I go to one? My Dad wanted me to, my mum said over her dead body. Thank you thank you thank you.

Would I send my kids to one - I'd say no, but the pernicious aspect of the entirity of the British education system is that the myth of parental choice pervades and skews the sector, leading to me also seeing the classic liberal dilemma of hating them utterly, but also 'wanting the best for my child'.

Do I hold a prejudice against people who did? No, in terms, of acting differently. But I do infer a great deal about someone from it; I use it as a lazy proxy for many things, and a short cut to 'understanding' someone in terms of their background and culture.

Comments on the thread thus far:
That fee-paying schools are charities is utterly scandalous. Tax the feckers.

I despise selection with a passion; it's bad enough to segregate on ability. Add the financial means of the parents into the mix, and you've got a truly divisive institution that perpetuates the idea that there's in some sense a 'natural' dimension to power relations in this country, rather than a set of power-relations that proceed from the way in which things are organised that are amendable to change and thus changing the power relatiosn.

I recall assisted places and have to say I think they're a scandal. That money was leaving the system to go to fucking private schools was a telling policy to elaborate the fucked up Victorian Daily mail agenda the Tories pandered to. Cunts cunts cunts.

Ultimately, I hate (i mean hate in the sense of blood boiling rage) the existence of such schools. I don not hate those who went there. Nor do I hate the people who sent them there. Reposnsibility for education choices is diffused (kids who went say 'what choice did I have?'. Parents say 'what choice did we have?'. The end result is a divided society and gross educational inequality, to which all shrug and say 'I didn't sign up to that. I just wanted the best for my kids.' So lets remove the ability to skew education in this manner by removing the schools.

Then middle-class parents have to engage the state sector, and suddenly, political pressure is brough to bear. There's no opt-out to the private educational sector, and we get past the fucking aspirational fantasy that private school trade on, which is itself part of the problem.

I must admit that the vast majority of my friends who went to school privately were boarders in New England somewhere, rather than day students. They would go to district schools until secondary school and then board for the rest of it. I'm sure the districts that happened in didn't have to be in the wrong postcode to diminish, but I do know what you mean.

Not so much imagination as gross exaggeration and generalisation. The trouble with the Daily Mail is it argues from the particular to the general. I've watched Richard Littlejohn's programme on Sky, which does the same thing. The Daily Mail finds one or two failing comps and tells its readers "Our comprehensives are all failing and Labour's to blame!" so vehemently that (some, perhaps most of) its readers believe it.

What do you mean by "ample natural resources"? Also, we do pay more taxes, but also get free some of the services you have to pay for. But one of the reasons public schools have fared so well here is the sort of "culture of equality" which is a big part of the Scandinavian welfare state. Everytime the idea of private school is voiced, there is a mass of protests, because people fear (rightly, I think) it would make our society more inequal.

You may have a point there. Except the problem is, it will improve only in areas which are predominantly middle class.

Why? One of the few good things about the centralisation of British educational policy is that if the middle classes were to campaign for the lowering of class sizes, recruitment of more teachers etc. the whole country would benefit.

Hold on a minute, most schools do that, it's called streaming and I would imagine it's pretty well essential. The teacher has a real uphill struggle in a mixed ability class.

Hold on a minute, most schools do that, it's called streaming and I would imagine it's pretty well essential. The teacher has a real uphill struggle in a mixed ability class.

This isn't done in Finland, except with mathematics, and that's one of the reasons the system is sometimes accused of being too equal.

No no no. Selection will always be essential at some stage in the educational process - certainly within any school. Children of any ability will thrive if work is tailored specifically to whatever their ability is, whether it's challenging the brighter ones or giving extra help to the less bright. The subjects which were divided by ability into sets at my school were probably the ones where the teaching was most effective - certainly the one year of Spanish I did in a mixed-ability set was something of a farce. I don't see anything wrong with extrapolating this to the level of selective schooling.

I recall assisted places and have to say I think they're a scandal. That money was leaving the system to go to fucking private schools was a telling policy to elaborate the fucked up Victorian Daily mail agenda the Tories pandered to. Cunts cunts cunts.

I have no idea how assisted places actually worked, but I was on one and it was all that made it possible for me to go to the school that I did. I don't think they can be entirely bad.

Who was your ex-music teacher??

end of year exams should allow ppl to go up and down the sets based on hoew they do too. promotion and relegation!

With play-offs...quick fire two-man physics tests.

I want to an average to not very good public school that is steadily declining -- my Mom informs that it has now the lowest SAT score averages in Fairfax County -- which worries her as far as property rates and what she will get for her house when she sells it. They do now have the International Bac program -- which she sees as a tool to attract kids to the school. I did the GT program and I liked it. I'm not really sure how I feel about the GT/tracking system though. Almost everyone in the GT program was white and upper middle class. At the time I was going to high school they also created a magnet school -- I think it was called Technology and Arts H.S. -- but the bus ride there would have been an hour and besides the 'technology' in the name scared me.

I was happy enough in public school and grateful for its diversity. At the time, my school was about 40% black. I never thought I would send my imaginary children to private school. But, when I went to a (private) college, where I think 30% or so of the kids went to private high school, I realized that a lot of my friends who had gone to private school had a much better eduacation than I did, with greater foundations in history and languages.

Now that I am considering teaching, I am looking at private schools. Though they pay even less than public schools, the programs at many seem excellent. But there are also a lot of interesting public schools in New York that have interesting curriculums too. A movement occurring now in U.S. education is the push for small schools -- Bill Gates has given a ton of money to creating smaller schools, which essentially seem based on the private school model. The problem with these, as I can see so far, is that they use the existing school buildings, and break up the population into 4 or so small schools, each with its own philosophy. Or sometimes, there is one large school and one small school sharing the building, and tensions erupt. I wonder if American schools are headed this way and will no longer be associated with the types of things you need a large school to do, like offer a ton of sports and clubs and electives and field a state-winning football team.

Any chance of a link to that thread?

Surely less? In that you only have to take into account results in one subject at a time. French and maths were setted at my school (I suppose sport was effectively setted between those who liked to do it and were in teams, those who liked to do it and weren't on teams, and those who preferred to sit around on the athletics pitch gossiping), and both worked extremely well. There was lots of promotion/relegation activity going on as well but none of that affected me.

Thisis the problem in a nutshell; they weren't entirely bad in their immediate individual effects, but had a pernicious effect. It's being a super-rich beneficiary of Bush's tax cuts then saying we'', it made me happy, so it can't be all bad = measure of desireability of policy choice must be about more thasn individual felicity.

Also, people misunderstand the comprehensive ideal - it wasn't about lower-common denominator. It was about saying that physically segregating children and seperating them out at the age of 11 was pointless, pernicious, watseful and damaging. Get kids in one roof based on where they live will break down the 'them and us' seperation of the selective system. Allow late-developers to come through and not be pigeon-holed at 11.

I'm emphatic here as I see private schools as simply grammar schools with lower class sizes and better facilities. I can't stand selective education, so it's natural I'd hate a rarefied example based on parental wealth.

In setting, you have four or more boxes, and an exponential set of combination of kids!

The latter would just require more testing, more administration, more attention - all of which are resources!

It's like when Tuomas starts going on about how great Finland is. I'm glad that Finland is perfect. I don't live in Finland, though. I live in Hell Central London.

Though a tracking seems inherently undemocratic, when I taught in Japan, where they teach all students together up to junior high, until high school admissions test select students on ability and perfomance, I had a real problem teaching to a wide variety of levels. I found that I/we taught to the middle, leaving the smarter kids bored and the lowest ability kids or kids who didn't care just slept or tuned out. I think it would take a very talented or specially trained teacher to be able to teach to each level. I would like to learn more about how to do this. Though I know what they are doing in NYC elementary schools is dividing students within the class by level. So you have, say, four reading groups of different levels who sit together in circles and read the same or similarly leveled books.

Me too. My friend Tom and I (both of the comprehensive in middle class area bracket) counted up amongst our friends and we found about two comprehensive students (excluding us) and one grant maintained. The rest all went to fee paying places. We were shocked.

I think to a certain extent public schools and elite universities do foster a sense of entitlement or confidence in their pupils, a 'the world is yours' atmosphere. Try as teachers might, this is lacking in many state schools. I was very grateful for setting in my school, I found several of the mixed ability classes tedious in the extreme. But I can also see that being stuck in a lower stream could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy for many pupils.

State education does need more money, if only because money gives hope. If you're being spent on, you're not being ignored. Being ignored in favour of shinier schools/ brighter pupils is what kills motivation to do.

(I haven't explained this very well, but I have work to do.)

you *could* do tho - without a work permit. It's the beauty of the EU!

Anna OTM, particularily with regard to British schools. It is galling to have to read about the boarding school experiences of every magazine and newspaper editor as reminiscences for which they are paid handsomely. You don't have those sorts of articles anywhere in America but Vanity Fair.

No egg-carrying at our school. Our football team was supposed to be pretty good, in fact. Not that it rubbed off on me. I was in the lowest set - 'Berry's wobblers'.

i went to state school in a small town from k-8 (till i was about 12/13?). when i was in 7th grade, we hosted an exchange student from england, who was in his gap year before uni, and who went to the local state high school. his science class was 'food for fitness' and he got credit for bowling. seriously. it was eye-opening to my family. he said that people cheated on exams in the 'hard' classes like math and science, and people talked through the class and didn't respect the teachers at all.

so my parents gave me the choice of going to that school or a local catholic school. i picked the catholic school. it wasn't fancy, it wasn't rich (it was fee-paying, but the fees weren't that high), but generally speaking the kids were there to learn. there weren't entrance exams, it wasn't particularly selective. there was no official streaming or anything, but i had classes with the same 25 'smart kids' for all four years in most classes.

i hated that school because of the social and religious issues, but i learned a decent amount. the number of kids in my classes that went to 'good' schools? probably close to 100%. at least 60% of the whole year went to unis that were better than community colleges.

i ran into a girl from my old hometown my first year at my good state university. she was the only one from what would have been my graduating class (over 100 kids) that had gotten in. and she was very matter-of-fact about the fact that she only got in because of affirmative action-- being the only black kid in a farm town has its benefits, apparently.

like i said, i'm way to out of it to make sweeping generalisations about fee-paying schools, but i'm really really glad i had the opportunity to make the choice, otherwise my life would have been completely different, and i don't think for the better.

While I'm keen to have everyone in state schools, I certainly don't agree with mixed ability classes; my experience was that teachers definitely aimed at the kids in the middle, and the clever kids got bored and the less clever ones left behind. This happened in classes that were setted, too, but at least they were less bored/left less far behind.

On the other hand, I think I probably gained from not having many clever kids in my school; for example, it made it a lot easier to get completely exempted from maths lessons and just teach myself, which I suspect might have been harder in many private schools.

I think the main difference with my school was that the standard of co-curricular activity was really good. Did DV go to the same school as me? I forget, perhaps he'll agree/disagree here.

I felt the activities were done to a very high standard, the plays and things were taken very seriously, same goes for the debating society. Also there was loads of co-curricular charity work in my school which I think is oddly missing from most schools.

I don't know what I gleaned from it all but I do think there was something. A girl I know often teases me and says "oh you still haven't lost your Belvedere (school name) sparkle Ronan!" and things.

Did you go to one?
No. I went to the old bog standard comprehensive. Poor me.

Would you send your kids to one?
No.

Do you have a knee-jerk prejudice against people who went to them?
Probably, mainly due to the astonishing number of dicks who, in spite of having no brains whatsoever, end up as doctors or lawyers or bankers or working in the meeja.

I think that the supposed grotesque squalor of comprehensive schools is in many ways a figment of the middle class Daily Mail imagination.
Dadaismus and Jerry The Nipper in agreement shockah!!!!!!!!!

I think to a certain extent public schools and elite universities do foster a sense of entitlement or confidence in their pupils, a 'the world is yours' atmosphere
This is the real nub of the matter and this is really more important than Kate's "motivation".

Like JtN, I don't think i even met anyone who went to private school until I went to university and even now, I don't think any of my friends went to one.

conversely, I know people who went to the state school for GCSES/A levels, and although did very well, possibly didnt realise their full potential. the ones that did really well (first at degree level, distinction at masters) had to fight tooth and claw to achieve it. but for one of my old friends, whose parents had the money to pay for public school, but who made a political decision to send their son to state school, i think that was something that failed him. his previous lack of interest, or atitude towards work went from low (i used to do his maths homework wehn we were about 8), to zero. he failed all his gcses, spent some years in crammer school (which are all very expensive natch), trying to get some gcses, ended up passing them just. i sort of fell like that private school might have benefitted him quite a lot. it is the fact that his parents didnt sit down and think, what does X need, what is 'best for him' (why that was in scare quotes above, i dont know), but thought, private schools are an abomination, there is no way he is going there, that riles me. personally i think it is awful to shoehorn yur child into fitting into whatever your own political predjudices/beliefs allow. the point of all that guff i wrote is that different children suit different systems, and it is that which, if you can, should influence your decision.
the problem with endless handwringin about 'should we ban them' is that circumstances could totally change your point of view. if you have kids in the future, you could find yourself totally contradicting what you previously held to be true. so to be so certain in your desire for public schools to be abolished, so knee jerk, so emotional, is something scary to me.

it is a difficult debate to have, and it requires mainly the input of parents and teachers i think, as they are the ones who are directly affected. i dont see much evidence of these groups here, and the emotional level of debate here is worrying to me. this should not be an emotional issue!

however, this i totally agree with:
"That fee-paying schools are charities is utterly scandalous"

i am still yet to find a logical/justifiable explanation for this. anyone?

for the record i am, a) er...yes*, b) yes, for half my education, c) cant possibly answer this now d) no.

actually, dammit thats what i am talking about. it is the fact that the third question is in the conditional that worries me. if you dont have children, why the fuck are you making that decision now, 1/5/10/20 years before the event? how can you make up your mind now?

Actually there's a much more fundamental influence - how much money your parents have.

(rjg, cozen etc. to thread to explain to me how Scottish education system is no longer great or wonderful, inbuilt religious apartheid notwithstanding)

Yes, thick as pigshit, the lot of them. Never mind all that studying for seven years nonsense. Dadaismus - I'm sure you could make some valid points if you tried and stopped cloaking all your posts in this hugely annoying combination of facetiousness, pomposity, cliche and loaded phrasing.

However, around graduation time a lot of the rodine/eton people began to mysteriously get jobs in advertising and newspapers while the comprehensive kids by and large bummed around not knowing what to do. So the advantages are really all about connections (which come with wealthy parents anyway), and you know what, i completely failed to make them while i had a chance at uni! i really regret the chip i had on my shoulder now.

Yes that's right Matt, I said every doctor and every lawyer in the world was a brainless dick, didn't I?

The importance of networking was impressed upon us early, but every time I think how much media nepotism sucks I remind myself that nobody ever says 'plumbing nepotism sucks' when some kid goes to work for his dad doing that.

huge xpost

Huh? Re: general studies - I always thought it was the other way aroun,d if anything. I know quite a few people with a general studies A-level, and they've all gone to state schools. They'd scrapped it in our school. I was always a bit cross that it meant I'd missed out on the chance to get 4 A-levels, but I don't think many universities take much note of it anyway.

are you kidding? Plumbers get paid!

I hope you're joking with the use of 'ned' there...

Depends on the capitalization.

Bollocks...wrong thread to do that on, obviously.

It is more than a little weird having gone to a (what I imagine is) medium-sized (1100 or so pupils including sixth form) school 12 miles from Exeter, staying on there through sixth form (one of my main regrets, I sometimes feel) and then going to a pretty shitty university because I panicked and picked one with a course I wanted to do rather than looked into it and found a 'good' university in a nice place, and now to be working at Exeter University, the clichés about which are largely true. I was absolutely top of the bunch at senior school and through sixth form, Principal Student, student rep. on the board of governors, in loads of plays, top set in most subjects (if not top then the one below top [it went TopTop TopBottom, MiddleTop MiddleBottom, BottomTop BottomBottom, as it were]) blah blah blah. I see an awful lot of privilige here that just doesn't exist down the road or (almost) outside of term time. Or didn't, things are changing now, obviously.

My mum always said she'd have loved to send me to grammar school but it wasn't convenient - the local one was 12 miles away, and as a ten year old I wasn't keen on being separated from my friends anymore than necessary; we'd already decided I'd go to Teignmouth rather than Dawlish because it had a sicth form, and my eldest brother had had difficulty settling into the sixth from when he moved across (my parents were worried I'd be as 'weird' as my esldest brother - I'm not. Quite).

I'm comfortable 'dealing' with people from just about any background, I think, but I don't think I have the confidence and ability to sell myself that maybe going to a grammar or public school would have engendered; I think I'd be a lot more successful at a lot of things if I had. Having said that a couple or more of my friends from school or else very similar schools and backgrounds in different areas) are more 'successful' than I am in some ways, though I think that's more due to individual drive and focus and hardwork, and I've always been a lazy sod.

Would I send my kids to private school? I doubt I'd ever be able to afford to, but there would be plenty of books around the house, it's fair to say. Do I agree with them? Knee-jerk class-warrior says no, but belief in freedom of choice says yes. I wish there was a better way of doing it. Am I prejudiced against people who went to public schools? Yes if they're useless and expect things to be handed to them (working in a library many of them seem to be - "have you got this film?" "have you checked for it like I showed you last time? you can find them yourself" "no, i didn't bother" "cheers then for stopping me doing someting useful for five mintues so i can babysit you"), otherwise no. So no, realy, because I don't like anyone who's useless and expects stuff to be handed to them, no matter what school they went to. Some of my best friends I've met here did go to public schools, though I don't think I met anyone who had until I came here.

Finland does sound ace, but rather cold.

This kind of ancient bullshit is what drives me around the bend about this country, and it's yet another reason why I want private schools abolished - we simply don't do enought symbolic shit. We say 'well, the class system will perpetuate without the private schools, so what difference would it make' when some more stuff done to set the tone would be very very welcome (see the Monarchy, the Royal Prerogatives, the establishment of the Church of England and the House of Lords).

It would be nice to think that the opportunity of a 'good' edjucation wasn't just restricted to those whose parents have lots of money, though. You know, a level playing field, everyone being born equal, that kind of stuff...

I went to state schools all the way through. What I hated, as I started to attend a catholic high school with a large intake from a fee-paying catholic middle school, was the natural assumption by the teachers and the recently-fee-paying boys and parents, that I would automatically be stupider than the recently-fee-paying boys. But I used that to my advantage.

Some of my best friends went to private, or even public schools, so I have no knee-jerk prejudices to speak of, i don't think. That said, I have experienced a certain amount of knee-jerk prejudice against myself as I've worked in the public-schoolboy-dominated worlds of the media, that sense that because of my accent, etc, I don't quite belong. But again, I use that to my advantage as well.

Kate, you may have already answered this, but exactly what benefits do the class system afford those on the bottom rungs of the ladder? The benefits to those at the top are self-evident, so you needn't list those...

Aaahahahahaha I have just laughed for about five minutes before typing that gag. Please shoot me?

Teachers should have a right to be better than other teachers. If you remove this in education you need to remove it elsewhere aswell, you've the whole public sector problem on your hands.

If there was no way of teachers making big money (I know a few in my old school certainly did) then surely the system generally would suffer for the loss of people who are good at their job.

Of course it's totally undesirable that all the best education is going to the richer people in society, but I'm not sure the principle of standardising it all is exactly perfect either.

x-post with Stevie. yeah it would be nice if everyone was born equal, but nobody is, our parents are different, our houses are different, the countries we live in are different, our health is different etc etc etc.

Ronan, I don't know about Ireland, but in the UK, private teachers don't get paid much more than state school ones (they may sometimes get less)

They work in the private sector more because they don't need a PGCE (sometimes), or probably more often because they prefer the culture, or they're scared of rough kids.

1. no, they should not exist. opportunity and equality of education, like health, should be the same for all children. some children are not better than other children. creaming off 'the best' for those that can afford it, leaving the rest of us with the remainder, not good. judge a society by what it provides for its worst off, not its best.

2. no, i didnt go to one. i find the idea almost laughable

3. no, i wouldnt send mine to one. life is about more than classes, they are going to live in an ordinary world, so they will go to an ordinary school, filled with the kind of people they will encounter in the rest of their lives

4. i dont have a kneejerk prejudice against public schoolers so much, and if i did i think it was mainly theoretical, as i hadnt really met any until ilx

You don't. It should be the spine of every lesson.

Okay, side-question - anyone go to both state AND private schools? Was the education definitely better at the fee-paying schools? Or were the classes simply smaller, the facilities better?

Although there's no denying that teaching at a private school is 90% of the time a much cushier number, if only because you're less likely to be dealing with the real behavioural problem cases.

(I think your third point betrays a misconception about private schools gareth, as I said to you, there is nothing particularly extra-ordinary about private schools, to be honest my school was in the city centre and I'd say the bus journey at 13 was more character building than having a few jumped up kids from the same area as me call me a tosser)

x-post, Matt: of course most aren't motivated by money but the fact is people do want to make decent money for being good. I amn't motivated by money in what I want to do for a living but I still am entirely conscious if I pursue that career I will be underpaid.

Depends how you swing this argument really, if you didn't give a toss you could sit on your ass at a public school and noone might notice, at a private school you'll be found out eventually and although it's difficult, some effort will be made to move you along, or at least you'll be under alot more pressure from parents etc)

stevie, i posted about this upthread. i went to state school in the u.k. and private in america. not sure how valid that is for comparison, but...

Hey, why post this? These kind of "I'm not saying who I'm referring to but they suck" posts just create bad feeling, no? I know it seems clear in your head, but it's not to everyone else. It's not to me, anyway. I just get paranoid.

why should child a get a better education than child b?

He was found one evening last May, having made himself seriously ill by drinking huge quantities of spirits with six other 16-year-old boys from Downside College.

Ryan, who grew up on a council estate, was sent to the Roman Catholic boarding school in Somerset by a television production company after being excluded from a number of state schools for disruptive behaviour. Later, talking about the incident, Ryan said: "I was drinking it [vodka] like water, I realise now.

"I can remember looking at a squirrel at three in the afternoon and the next thing I knew I woke up in hospital at 11 at night. I felt dead. I couldn't even feel my fingers.""

from the EVENING STANDARD today

-see, even in the midst of some hardcore drinking, this student was able to take timeout to contemplate the beauty of nature, thanks to his expensive education.

It was also, I should mention, a Catholic school - this may skew things further.

should fee-paying schools exist?

No, but that doesn't mean if I were in power I'd abolish them immediately, or even at all. Maybe I would. I don't know.

would you send your kids to one?

I don't think so. But I don't really feel qualified to answer.

do you have a knee-jerk prejudice against people who went to them?

Not really, unless they are all together and being annoyingly, stereotypically so. There was a v.obviously public school educated work experience kid in here the other day. I felt a bit sorry for him in a way, because it was so obvious and people were smirking at him behind his back. In many situations, it's the sly, not obviously rah-rah-rah privately educated ones that are the ones who are really getting the benefit of it, and who perhaps deserve most resentment. Such as me. Except I'm err... not.

x-post

Ahhhh...

I'm amused by the way that people assume that going to a public school automatically means that you're brimming over with confidence, knowledge of how to work the system and contacts in every walk of life you could possibly wish for. IF ONLY.

anyone go to both state AND private schools? Was the education definitely better at the fee-paying schools? Or were the classes simply smaller, the facilities better?

Several state primary schools, public school from 11. The primary schools all varied hugely - my very first was such a mess that my parents took me out after a term, or so they tell me - I can't remember anything about it. My 'middle school' was apparently considered a decent one - I think this must have been in a pre-catchment area age, I had to travel quite a way to go there. Then we moved to Somerset and my parents deliberately chose the Catholic school five miles away rather than the inferior village school.

As far as I can tell - the town I went to school in had two main schools, one public and one state, and the topic of why exactly the public one was better was one beloved of my parents - it's all of those things you mentioned, Stevie. Facilities were unquestionably better - computer labs, sports grounds (my school owned a lot of land in and around town), science... stuff, the resources to make certain projects possible. Class sizes were better but not great until A-level, and I definitely, definitely thrived better in groups of six or seven rather than 25-30 - I think lots of teachers were surprised that I wasn't really all that quiet and shy. The key was the teaching, and the general attitude towards it - yeah, a couple of teachers (mostly the foreign ones, sadly, got given a hard time, but in most cases their authority was ultimately accepted.

I think what has been overlooked is that public schools themselves are very varied things. My school was undoubtedly 'posher' than the state school, but it was very much a minor public school, i.e. hardly Eton or Westminster. Hardly any of the pupils would have been 100% products of public schools - the vast majority of each year's new intake would have come from a state school. I assume their parents couldn't afford public school from 5-18 and so shelled out on the more important years. In any case its odd specialist music school status (and resulting scholarships) skewed things a lot.

(xpost x a million)

xpost

Do you actually think state schools, across the board, can be said to be RADICALLY different from private schools? Are all state schools even similar enough for that distinction.

The majority of children do lots of things, there's nothing negative about a child not partaking in some of them, same way there's nothing wrong with an adult not doing it either. We're talking about life here, going to a school with all rich kids is as real an experience as going to any other school, there's no absolute scale of what constitutes a representative experience of life, it's anything goes, and even if there was I wouldn't want my kids to be shoe-horned into conforming with it either.

Child A shouldn't get a better education than Child B but how do you intend to right that wrong? Why should child A be child A in the first place? Why should Child A fall ill and die? Why should Child A never get near a school in his life?

I think you can't localise this argument to fee-paying schools, it's total revolution you're pursuing if your argument is based on stark injustice, and that's fair enough but I think it'd need more writing than we'd fit onto a few thousand threads like this.

whole load of x-post, I think I sort of acknowledge that above Matt, I'm not even sure state schools/private schools even works as more than a vague division.

perhaps, if they were abolished, there wouldnt be such a thing as a school with all rich kids, and one with none, because equality would mean that all the schools would be mixed and representative, kind of like life. there neednt be 2 kinds of school, but one, everyone puts in, everyone gets out. everyone has a vested interest in our schooling being of sufficient standard, because everyones kids are going through it together.

or, let assume they are not very different (a strange assumption considering the huge sums of money people put into sending their children there, but still).

should child a receive the promise of a better education than child b. instead of worrying about the rich life a might just miss out on, perhaps we could put him together with child b, maybe, just maybe they might even learn something from each other.

xpost

if those with money should have the right to give their children a superior education, should they be able to give themselves and their children better health care than everyone else? how about, say, if a bunch of them lived in a rich suburb, perhaps they should be able to pay to have a heavier police presence in that area?

I'm still feeling hurt.

???
so those that walk around with a board round their neck proclaiming "I am a toff, humiliate me", with their buggering, rugby loving and tory boy accents, are to be spared ill feeling, where as those who dont are to be chastised?

this seems to be a bit of a weird sentiment, if i understand it correctly.

sometimes, the more rah-rah-rah you are the more benefit you get. like that is a positive discriminatory factor in employment etc etc. as has been well documented for 1000000000 (approx) years.

like, gated communities in inner city areas eg hackney etc etc. is that not similar?

(your tape arrived today ambrose, thanks!)

And how does everyone get out what they put in exactly? Are you saying that it's possible that the very system of exams and academia isn't discriminatory from day one? Does anyone ever deserve more than anyone else?

As I said to you there are scholarship programmes in plenty of private schools, the level of segregation is not as high as you seem to think.

Policing is a different issue, it's less dependent on the individual carrying out the task than schooling.

if private schools were scholarship only, ie, kids got in on merit not $, then i'd be more ok with them. send the best, not the ones with the silverest spoons!

The ones with the silverest spoons pay for the best who are all there on various scholarships!

this is interesting today, i feel quite angry at this thread, perhaps because, other than at work (where i close ears at all times to external stimuli), i have never come across people in favour of private schooling in my own social circles before. Come The Revolution, the lot of yous

obviously with the policing/gating thing that is a very obvious desire for seperation.

I don't think there's a drive for separation, I think the parents who pay for private schools do so because they are better schools, not because they want their kids going to school with kids from similar backgrounds, necessarily.

I totally understand where gareth is coming from here!

(xpost - Ronan mainly otm re: parents' motivations, but I think there is an element of snobbery in many parents' expectations. Not enough to shell out actual money though in most cases.)

it's a mess, is it not? i can't find my stapler, let alone remember what i thought 20 minutes ago.

It's not separatism it's ensuring that your child has the best every possible advantage of doing better than someone else's child - come what may and to hell with everyone else.

School is where we form impressions of what life has in store, of the diversity of life. To give people the impression that there are them and us desensitises. The poor are 'over there somewhere' and there's no engagement, no dialogue, no compassion, no empathy.

i just cannot get my head around the fact that we are saying some children can have something, but others cannot. there is enough inequality as it is at home, but when it comes to services, all should have fair crack of whip

now, pardon, me, i'm just going up to B&Q to buy a wall for you all to stand against

No. As I said before, I never knew who was on scholarship and wo wasn't at my school, and I doubt many people did. Certainly I don't recall a single instance of class-based bullying. Then again this may be skewed by the oddity of it being a specialist music school with a high proportion of scholarships, and it was hardly Eton to begin with.

Should parents spend less on their children, even if they can afford it, and give money to charity then or something? This

Our entire lives are potentially undermined by the poverty of others. The slightly richer parents are no worse than anyone else. And Gareth, children constantly can't have things that other children have, same with adults. Everybody has something I want and vice versa.

did you go to one? nope

would you send your kids to one? probably not

do you have a knee-jerk prejudice against people who went to them? not especially

x-post Jell with the most uberklassic liberal response I ever did see as to continued existence of fee paying schools.

It's like seeing the class war in its ugliest and rawest form, not about abstract issues, but about something we've all experienced - education.

I typed out more, but I can't really be bothered to think it all through enough to debate my points as I'm tired.

Gareth's outbursts of "I can't believe that there are so many public school supporting toffs IN MY SOCIAL CIRCLE" really mystify and perhaps anger me in a way that I can't address right now.

the supposed grotesque squalor of public schools is in many ways a figment of the lower class imagination.

yes, and this is unfortunate, some have nicer clothes than others, some have better toys, nicer houses, all the rest of it. but an education is different, its the one time (other than health), that everyone gets a fair crack of the whip.

i apologise kate, perhaps that was unfair, it is perhaps indicative of how my social circle has changed over the last 4 or 5 years, that peoples opinions are hitting me more than i might have thought of here

the cries of the haves are never edifying (i cant wait for Mark C to turn up on this thread;))

It's not about hating anyone those less unfortunate than yourself it's about giving yourself an unfair advantage, by means of a better education, over someone else simply because you happen to have more money than them. There should be no scholarships, the money should be spent on improving the state education that 90 percent of us use. Let's not get into the pros and cons of charity as a means of bettering the world.

You can't please all of the people all of the time etc.

There is so very much I need to contribute to this thread but I'm too busy dammit. So for now, I will just say one thing, a very important thing that people *always* forget regarding public school/prep school etc:

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT MONEY.

The entrance exams for public schools are by no means a pushover, and while it's true there are situations where, for example, really sporty but not so clever people can slip in without passing, for the rest of us, if you fail, you're fucked.

True, but this happens with public education ALL the time in the US.

I see this has become a predominantly British argument on this thread. The issues are probably radically different there than in the US, where I suspect the quality of public education varies widely compared to the UK.

I went to catholic schools until high school; initially this was to follow my friend from kindergarden whose parents were VERY catholic (mine were not). After we moved to Colorado I went to a catholic elementary/junior high because it was inexpensive and small in comparison to the public schools. I went back into public school in high school.

MOST private schools in the US offer some kind of scholarship to attend, I think. Public schools in the US can be unbelievable shit depending on the area you live in; in many places, school funding sometimes comes from property taxes collected in the school district, so naturally, wealthy areas are going to have better funding than poor areas. This is bad but it isn't something that is going to get fixed any time soon with the US economy the way it is. My wife grew up in relatively wealthy areas and went to public schools and got a fine education there, but she's also under the impression that all public schools are like this, and when she hears how many of them are now, she's confused and surprised. Would I send my kid to one? I don't have a kid yet, so I don't know. It would absolutely depend on where we lived and how much money we had. We're not religious so I probably wouldn't send the kid to a strict religious school (although I take it that Burma isn't either and Aja goes to a Catholic school and she obviously is getting a good education, sometimes there are other things involved in sending your kid to a private school).

There is also the issue of Charter Schools in the US, something I don't know much about.

I have no bias against someone who went to a private school for primary/high school education. But private school in my vernacular and experience does not equal rich snobby kid.

My heart bleeds.

Needless to say the unhappiness ruined my chances of excelling academically.

This isn't to say that fee-paying schools are bad for everyone, and quite a lot of people I like attended them and seem to have developed into far more well-rounded individuals than I did (I have no idea what became of most of my school mates). Just didn't work for me, but I doubt the alternatives would have done either.

Yeah yeah, alright.

My only point is that cash isn't the only consideration. For better or worse, my parents decided to prioritise my education and that of my sisters, to the extent that they lost a business and a house in the process of financing our schooling. At the time, I had no idea this was happening. Now, I think it may well have been something of a waste of effort on their part. I went to two schools filled with sometimes obscenely rich people - descendents of two former prime ministers, all that shit - but while they may as well have had solid gold houses and rocket cars for their leisure time, I, er, had pretty much nothing. But it wasn't my fault I was there, y'know?

Many muddled points in there. Needs more thought. Yes.

I dunno, my sisters have a healthier attitude. They're not really pro-private edcation either, but they still hang out with old school friends - despite all the coaches arriving from Beckenham and Blackheath, Alleyn's does have a thriving local scene, and all their mates still seem to be hanging around Dulwich, Brixton, Peckham etc. That's what I used to think a private school robbed me of, but it was my own fault really.

My social circles have always contained about 4 or 5 people.

You know, none of you in fact knows what it's like to have extremely high property taxes foisted upon your household when you're just barely making it while going to a "fee-paying school". You might think that the only "fee-paying schools" are the super-expensive private schools that only the super-rich elite send their kids to, but in reality, "fee-paying schools" are also those religious schools you so conveniently forget about. (xpost: jel, I apologize for the snide tone here. You aren't to be one of the people that's directed to.) You did not go to the schools I went to. At the schools I went to, we did have to pay tuition and we did have to wear uniforms, but you saw a wide variety of differing socioeconomic levels represented within. In fact, I had much more of a diversity of classmates going to the all girls' Catholic high school I went to than had I gone to the public high school I would've ended up going to. And the tuition there was only about two times the amount my parents ended up spending just on the property tax allocation for public schools alone.

Did I get a fantastic education at the grade and high schools I went to? Oh hell yeah, or at least I think so. What's interesting to note here is that as of 1998, i.e. my last year in high school, funding per student at my Catholic HS was only about 1/3 that of the funding per student with the public school district I live in. Even at the posh Catholic HS that it seemed a ton of doctors and lawyers sent their girls to, their funding per student was only about 1/2 that of the funding per student at this same public school district. So where's the disparity there?

Oh yeah, and CarsmileSteve, I am seriously angry at you for presuming to think that my family and I should've been heavily penalized for my having gone to a non-public school. Like I said earlier, we were just barely making it; we scrimped and saved and were practically miserly in our spending habits just to make sure that we never touched the money we devoted to our family's savings account. We never went on any exotic vacations, never spent on expensive clothing or jewelry or shoes, never ate at fancy restaurants, always went to the movies when they did the matinee special, always used coupons, etc. I shouldn't have to be treated as if my family came from wealth and prestige when it didn't, not when it comes to higher education, and really, just having to pay the regular tuition at the university I went to for the first two years of my collegiate career (i.e. when I was earning my first bachelor's) was more than enough. Even with a scholarship, I had to take out loans, and even then, the amount of those loans was increasing so rapidly that it scared me, and when my family started experiencing a medical crisis, I knew then that I had to transfer out to our big public university, and I was grateful for the fact that the in-state tuition rate was reasonable enough for me to work with. Without that special rate, I would've had to have left school with only two years of college under my belt, and I really can't do much of anything with that.

Apologies if I've missed anything in this thread. I had to stop halfway into the thread and post something because I became so fed up with what I was reading and felt like I needed to add something to the discussion.

As I've said, I've been to all sorts. Yes to the last pair of matters, without doubt - classes of 20 rather than 35, more facilities of all kinds, books, lab space and apparatus, sporting facilities. I'm not sure the teachers were any better (I had good and bad ones in both), but there was far less opportunity to get lost in the smaller classes, you couldn't get away with saying you'd left your homework at home (that was 100 yards away), and you had supervised (until the sixth form) 'prep' time for a couple of hours every evening, so you did more work. On top of that, the number of people with a contemptuous attitude towards academic achievement and intelligence was far smaller than in the state schools I attended, so the cultural difference helped there. I think these factors and the challenge/opportunity of a new school made a big difference to me, educationally. I had been coasting somewhere in the middle of a three-class top stream (I said upthread why I had become so uninterested)(but in what I knew was my final term there, I came top in five or six subjects), but I ended up with the best A Levels in a goodish public school, and getting into Cambridge - I think that probably wouldn't have happened in my local comprehensive, though sadly I didn't have a control Martin Skidmore to leave behind to test this belief. This fits with Matt's good point: my parents chose to pay for a new school for me because I had strongly demonstrated very high intelligence before my demotivation, and they rightly guessed that this could solve the problem.

I did get some stick when I started at the public school: I was plainly the most common kid in the school, with the strongest local accent. Even one teacher took the piss out of my accent. Maybe that was a motivating factor - proving I was cleverer than the posh kids who thought I must be stupid, not that there were too many of them or that took long. It didn't take me long to fit in - I was very clever, one of the best at football (not an official school sport, typically of posh schools, but still the one we cared most about), out to the pub with the tough kids on a weekend, enthusing about John Peel-type music with others, and being funny, especially at the teachers' expense - none of this was a pose or stratagem, and I've not much changed since.

I see no reason why abolishing fee-paying schools would stop us paying the best teachers better money. At the moment, if public schools do pay better, the teachers they will want will only be the best in the sense of teaching to motivated and (generally) fairly academically able kids; I'm not at all convinced that that is better than a teacher who can get the best out of demotivated kids without any great head start, or that it deserves more money. Obviously there is more than one kind of very good teacher (and many kinds of bad teacher), and it may easily be that the present system only rewards some of them, if it does.

I'm not sure whether confidence is a result of going to a public school. I remember learning that my wife, from a poor working class background, had grown up with very low expectations of life: leave school at 16, who cares what qualifications you get, work in a shop or factory, get married, have kids, if you're lucky your husband will have a job and not hit you. My middle class background (and maybe my very early signs of high intelligence, I'm not sure) meant I grew up kind of assuming that I'd stay on after 16 and go to university - this was true even before I went to a public school. It took a lot of time and gradual development before my wife realised that she could do something like attending a university - it had never seemed an option to her. She did, eventually, and was in the top tenth of her class all the way, and turned into a successful and well respected professional - she had never conceived of such a life. I mention this as a lead-in to saying that I'm not sure how much it was our family and class differences that led to our different assumptions and expectations of life and education, and how much the schools had to do with it. Given that the differences existed when we were both at very similar local comprehensives (about ten miles apart), and it was the expectations that led my parents to send me to public school, it makes sense to me that a far higher proportion of kids who would anyway grow up with the uni/professional kind of expectations would send their kids to public school than the other group. I do think that the segregation then reinforces this - at public school nearly everyone had those uni expectations, whereas she was surrounded by people who didn't. Mixing that up should change that, and maybe make the breadth of options rather more visible to people from families who wouldn't dream of such things.

Gareth and others, I don't think the pro-con division here is based simply on what school you went to. I had the majority of my secondary schooling at a posh school, and I'm utterly opposed to them.

Also, I liked being able to air my perfectly legal views on abortion without fear of detention. Yay my school!

School you

and US: Public v Private high school?

Oxbridge: Classic Or Dud? is interesting, too.

Ideally, state schools will be so great, that parents won't want to send their kids to a public school for a chance of a decent education. Unfortunately this will never happen. Even in public schools teachers are generally paid quite poorly (my mum teaches in quite a posh prep school, and it seems the school is constantly trying to find ways to pay her less). Some of the best people for teaching, will probably be quite talented in their field, and will probably end up working in the city/or some better paid job, than going for teaching. Therefore even public schools (let alone state ones) will never be able to employ the best people to teach.

And I don't think going to a fee paying school is really a class thing. Public schools get automatically associated with the really posh ones, like Eton etc, but not every fee paying school is like that. I went to cheap one (that was started originally to give decent education to the daughters of dons in Oxford), and the fees were about £1000 a term. Which is managable for most families to save up (like mine.. we never had expensive cars, or annual holidays to somewhere warm), to give their children the best start in life. This is one of the things that really annoy me about this country. Just because I went to a public school, and I'm studying at Oxford, people have this impression that I'm posh, and like wearing pashminas etc, and that my family are well off.

There are loads of people like me. My family saved up to give me andmy sister the best education they can. And this means that we're probably poorer than some of our neighbours who sent their kids to state schools, but bought a new car every year, and jetted off to exotic holidays ever year.

In Hong Kong, pretty much all the kids are in the state system,but it works there because of the discipline that the students have, and how (i guess) at least 80% of the students want to do well academically and go on to further education. There were 42 of us in our class, but I think I learnt more in one year (this was in grade 1) there than I did anywhere else, until I got to 6th form over here.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA! co-incidentally, that's exactly the phrase that popped into my head when you typed

What makes you think that ALL people deserve or want or even NEED a first class education?

and when you contributed to that thread on why the working class have such a problem with the middle classes...

of course! i was wondering where they all were.

this thread has reinforced my view that private schools should be banned. also we were talking about this last night, and i realised i would definitely ban religious schools too. would anyone else?

have we ever talked about private healthcare on ile?

Feel free to use the above as a setup line.

Ps - Private healthcare sucks ass too.

I do not want to subsidise any religious schools with my tax payments.

For fucks sake, I consider myself to have had a middle class upbringing and there is no bloody way my parents could have afforded to send me to private school. And it wasn't that my parents spent lots of money of foreign holidays and fancy cars like those oh so feckless parents who didn't want to give their children the best start in life. We never had a new car until I was 11, and that was a mini metro for a family of five, and went on exactly one foreign holiday until that point (and that was only because we got reduced train travel in Europe on account of my dad's job). Our telly was rented. But we were definitely in the richer half of the village I grew up in.

I am beginning to feel like Gareth.

I'd be interested to know your reasons for this, Suzy, not least because I don't think it is a widely held view. I think there are a lot of ppl who are not religious in the least who choose to send their kids to religious state schools coz they regard them as better schools. There's a world of difference between "I don't want to subsidise religious schools which are extremist and encourage the kids to hold illiberal views from a religious perspective" and not wanting state funding of religious schools at all.

Is the perception of UK ILE as a private-school boys club skewed here because so many of our Great Working Class Heroes are currently on the other side of the Atlantic having fun as opposed to sitting in an office arguing about state education?

What? Thwacker Ewing and co.?

Having said that, a friend of mine had a bit of a problem. Her Asian parents were both IT lecturers with socialist principles, and their incredibly gifted daughter did not get into Latimer, the selective state school nearest her, and none of the schools had a right-to-sixth-form plan for a girl who was Oxbridge material. She instead won a small bursary to attend Haberdasher's Girls and when she got there, was pleased to discover a more multicultural mix than she would have had at her state school choices. The bad news was the mixture of intimidation and entitlement, where they were told at assembly that they were the best and told in discipline situations that there were a hundred kids who'd gladly have their place if x continued. Her parents nearly fell out with the school over the way their daughter was being discipined and singled out, as she was, despite being near the top of her class, considered too rebellious. Her parents also did not say they had a daughter going private when asked by their colleagues etc.

I agree I guess but the idea of schools not being religious seems very foreign to me.

I had no such perception since until I read this thread - somewhat of an eye opener I tells ya. And having read this thread I'm now more against private schooling than I ever was. I wouldn't ban it however because I don't believe in banning things.

Conflating church and school seems like the best way to kill two unpleasant birds with one stone

but surely if your parents are religious you're going to have to go to church outside of school anyway, and if not then you won't ever have to?

(xpost N OTM)

N. - exactly.

I mean I'm not religious really at all but I guess there were intelligent priests in my school, who gave religion a good spin. I say I'm not religious and I'm not I guess but I think I've been indoctrinated to some extent. I don't like to think about it really, I don't know, you don't see your granny saying the angelus twice a day without it having some effect I suppose.

I mean I don't go to mass, I stopped when I was 14 or so, and I'm not exactly catholic, but then I do sometimes think in spiritual terms. Maybe I just do too many es.

It's less necessary now - there's not anti-catholic stuff really anymore, so that reason disappears. I suspect a larger part of why I like my school was that I was in a time of falling birthrates amongst catholics so there were only 400 kids in my secondary school, so pupil-teacher ratios were great.

The school got 2/3 of the budget from the LEA and one-third came from the diocese.

but why is that the case, that people think that these faith schools are better. if they are better, why are they better?

to me, this is totally shit! why the fuck should you be able to a school where you dont give a shit about any of the things that underpins the school?! how is this justifiable? so that the 'system' can be bought down from within!??

sorry, but whenever i hear people totally railing against religion, i am always reminded of 'disgusted of tunbridge wells', sitting behind a net curtain complaining about immigrants, gay people etc etc.

billions of people in this world ascribe to a certain religion, many people in this country do as well (and that number is growing, though it is still a minority (isnt it?)), so deal with the fact that they are there. whether they should be allowed to set up a school that introduces their beliefs into a curriculum.....well, is there really no civil liberty element to this?

as, matt says, they shouldnt be funded by the state, if you are going to separate yourself off from the state, then you shouldnt get funding from the state. (although, to be brutally honest, i dont agree with religious schools existence at all, children should not be taken out of the state system, they should be able to go tia religious school on saturdays or evenings, but no one should have the right to opt out of the state education system)

Yeah, act of worship is compulsory. Which is completely farcical.

is this definitely still true? i had a feeling it had changed a couple of years ago. i could be wrong, though.

ok so my rant was kinda pointless, but what i wanted to say was, what does "anti denominational schools" mean? do you want to ban them? it seems on this thread that people are talking about fee-payin, and now faith schools, in a totally theoretical, i-wish, way, but when confronted with what is the logical conclusion of their wishes, bottle out. there is loads of 'well i dont think fee-paying schools should exist, but i dont like the idea of banning things'. what about the practicalities?
that is why i mentioned my stereotype amil-reader. he is the guy who, wants all non anglo saxons to be removed from the country, and all gay people to cease to exist somehow, but he is flying in the face of what is happening outside his window, where the society he is so against, is established, probably irrevocably so, and just getting on with it. this is why his rants are so impotent, because they are so wishy washy.

enough with the hesitancy people! no more 'I think I'd be' conditionality. N, what would be the circumstances in which you think that you would be against anti denominational schools? if that is what you think you would be, what are you now? (nb i am not getting at you, it is just a good example of the kinda indecisiveness displyed on this thread).

a key issue here to me is that many problems with state education stem from the fact that they are managed so badly (and that policy is heading in the wrong direction). Teachers are swamped with bureaucracy, playing fields are sold off to developers, the curriculum is becoming optimised so that all work done, no matter whether it be maths, english or art, ceases to become something that requires judgement (by a teacher), and onyl required to fit into certiain boxes that can be ticked (preferably read by a computer come exam time).

is there not a case that private schools, aside from better resources, selection policies etc etc, often provide better results because they are (to quite a large extent) free from the whims and (frequent) foolishness of those that decide education policy. if general studies is a waste of time, then they can ditch it. RE can be taken or left, teachers dont have to submit feedback reports after each lesson detailing how they think thier performance went.
there is money/resources available in the state sector but it gets trasehed before anyone actually linked with an school can use it on what is patently needed.

like, lets buy a computer for every school child! get them on the net! er, that will be really good for no specific reason!
good one TB.

best headline i saw in barcelona - "Terrassa city government report that computer usage in schools is 0%"

on a side-note, anyone see that 'secret diary of a teahcer; in private eye? that was pretty depressing.

It would help if the middle classes were prepared to pay taxes to improve the education system (you know like they do in the rest of Europe?) instead of spending ever more money to make sure their sons and daughters end up as professionals no matter how intelligent or well suited they may be to be in those professions. Long sentence.

I'm totally against fee paying schools.

Damn lot of msgs to wade through. . .many heated.

My answers to orignal question:

should fee-paying schools exist?

sure, unless you live in a socialist/communist society. Otherwise, freedom, rights, blah blah.

did you go to one?

nope. went to some of the crappiest public (american) schools in a state that ranks 48 out of 50 in terms of quality of schools and then went to the largest state university in America. Thanks to an elite honors program at the latter my college education was far, far above what the average state uni student receives, however.

would you send your kids to one?

absolutely not. I'm a socialist at heart and while I recognize the right of such schools to exist I personally don't believe in them nor like the idea of them.

do you have a knee-jerk prejudice against people who went to them?

I try to avoid knee-jerk reactions in general. not too smart. I might be suspect of someone who went to a private (US) school and think perhaps they've missed out on a lot of real-world life experience. But that's more of a reflection on my ideas of poverty vs. wealth and not all private school children are wealthy.

bullshit republicans. . .

I'm against divisiveness, and I think religious schools promote that, besides the argument about separating state and religion, with which I also entirely agree.

As for these arguments about saying "I'd ban them if I were in power" being impractical, well we on ILE plainly can't change national policy. Translate this if you like to "I would give full support to people in power putting forward this policy."

After three years of teaching in a complete hell-hole example of American public schools I have but one, hyphenated, word: home-school.