here
It continually stuns me how we are supposed to believe that private education is so amazingly fantastic for The Country, how we should all revere and support it- when the reasons include the widely held beliefs that, for instance:
-State schools must learn from private schools (um- like how to ensure your quality by excluding 93% of possible candidates due to lack of money? By interviewing each and every child and their parents? Like making sure there are no SN DC in a class, with 'oh, we couldn't provide for them so they must go elsewhere'; Like providing scholarships to ensure you can poach the best academically performing DC from the state sector in order to boost your league table position; like providing small classes filled with the similarly abled DC of like-minded families- NOT overlooking the tremendous 'social diversity' brought in by Chinese (middle class) children, and Indian (middle class) children, of course....). Yup, I reckon my DSs school could do very well if it were permitted to choose its intake.
-That it is an affront to the natural order of things, that somewhere along the line, Russell Group unis have had to recognise that 'well-tutored' doesn't necessarily mean 'The Best'. It may have been politically engineered (being allowed to charge £9K p.a), mind, rather than altruistically minded.... but they are having to recognise some hard truths.
I am genuinely mystified as to why it is that such clever, so often privately educated themselves commentators cannot see how stupid they come across as when they decry that of course the RG unis must only choose on raw A level score (plus more or less professionally written Personal Statements) coming from brimmingly confident 17 year olds well tutored in interview technique, often by (moonlighting?) university admissions officers in order to ensure they get The Best students whilst also acknowledging that that many, many DC from these private schools may very well be B grade students hand-fed and nurtured, and tutored, and guided towards that A, therefore may not necessarily be 'as good' as the A grader DC from an 'average' comp who had to sit through 5-7 years of low level disruption, a very mixed class academically, 30 DC in that class and so forth.
I would actually have far more time for these people if they came right out and said "I am angry that my DC on whose education I have lavished quarter of a million pounds cannot be more or less guaranteed a Russell Group university place that will, in turn, guarantee them a well paid, influential job that will provide for them the power that will ensure their own offspring benefit, regardless of their actual ability or worth to society".
I have a good friend who plucked her DC from an average state Infant School at 7 to send them £12k p.a. private. Her reason? "I want my children to have the best leg-up in society they can possibly have, we have money, I want to buy them advantage. I want them to shine above other children so they get the opportunities that will guarantee them a comfortable life, a life that allows them to be in powerful positions of choice, an education that buys them confidence- and so be it if others regard that as arrogance"...
"My DH works hard" (presumably unlike the rest of us ) "to provide this, I expect my DSs to benefit from this so that they, too, have all life's choices before them, and if you (putative- she is my friend!) don't like it, well, work harder and send your children private too." She doesn't work, as an aside .... However, she wants to send her DSs to a top-performing state 6th form to maximise their RG chances, incidentally, and is in direct conflict with her DH who feels such spoon fed privately educated boys might disappear sans straight A*s in the maw of the teeming state 6th form thus wants them to continue private to 18.....
I don't like what she says, I don't like her openly playing the system but I have far more time for the blatancy of what she says than this ridiculous 'We must all love private schools because they apparently educate the best which makes us all competitive in the 'global market', etc etc.
Actually, as an aside, I think there'd be considerable less of this apparent anti-private school 'bias' that is allegedly rife if our esteemed 'leaders' weren't proving to be so spectacularly out-of-touch with most peoples lives and weren't all from the upper ends of the private sector themselves!
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37 replies
Erebus · 18/02/2013 19:26
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