If you can afford private education but remain in the state sector...

[TheseJeansHaveShrunk]

It's going to be hard to avoid this becoming another state v private thread, but what I'm interested in is a slightly different take on that debate. It's not "which is better?" but "if you think state school is better even though you could afford private education, then why is that?"

The question is based on the assumptions that the DC in question is/are reasonably bright (so might benefit academically from academically selective education), that the state school is non-selective (as most people don't have access to grammar schools), and that you hope for your DC to go to a good university (to make the £££££ fees worthwhile!)

I've been mulling this over ever since I heard some maths professor from Cambridge talking on the radio about the age-old private v state inequality of Oxbridge admissions. He was all for improving access for state school applicants but said that the simple fact was that for maths, even the best state schools generally teach only to the A-level syllabus, whereas the best private schools take their maths/further maths A-level candidates well beyond the syllabus and so the state school applicants are at a huge disadvantage - they simply don't have the starting level of knowledge required for the course.

This made me wonder: with this sort of unequal playing field, if you have the choice of private education, what reasons might you have not to take it?

Would be interested to hear from those who've made this choice - how it's working out, or if your DC have finished school now, how did it work out? Did they go to good universities/get good jobs, etc? On the other side of things, if you paid for private schooling but now regret it, why?

My DC go to a state school by the way.

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Deliberately obtuse is a fab phrase

Very good for describing the mind set of people who refuse to acknowledge the undeniable fact that giving more privilege and choice to the already privileged is just wrong. On an individual and a societal level.

Deliberately obtuse is a fab phrase for describing those who refuse to acknowledge that life is unfair and that by trying to make it fair, you punish the deserving and those who, given the opportunity, are able to create the value that subsidises those who never will be.

Never will be - deserving?

Just to clarify. Am probably being a tad obtuse, but....

Sorry - very bad sentence. "Never will be able to create value."

I've always found the whole getting into Oxbridge thing a bit of a bizarre way of measuring equality or a school's performance since Oxbridge is by definition elitist and will only ever allow access to a minority. Oxford and Cambridge are bastions of privilege and typify the importance of class structure in this country. Getting a few more working class kids into these universities is likely to simply absorb them into the elite minority making precisely no difference to anyone else and certainly not narrowing the gulf between opportunity and achievement between rich and poor.

In terms of pushing for equal opportunity, it seems to me a bit like trying to marry off our daughters to prince Harry instead of suggesting that the royal family might be a tiny bit outdated.

I agree, fivecandles. However, i think of "getting kids into Oxbridge" as a sort of code for not closing down children's choices because of their background. A school which is prepared and able to support a child having a shot a Oxbridge entrance will probably have high aspirations in other directions as well.

Then you are laughing at your own joke, seeker.

And, yes, it is punishing the deserving when clever children are denied the educational opportunities they require to develop to their full potential on the basis that to let them excel is "unfair" to those who could never achieve as much. This is a subject with which I am sadly all too familiar, as the French education system does this systematically. And has, indeed, created a whole industry of psychologists specialised in helping les enfants surdoués adapt to the mainstream

And how on earth are you defining 'creating value' Bonsoir? Sounds to me very much like you're defending the structures which keep people in their place. People used to say much the same thing about women and black people you know.

'Life is unfair' is a pathetic argument really.

Let's make it less unfair rather than accepting that's the way things are.

And have you noticed that people only say that sort of thing when it advantages them?

People tend to be less accepting of life's 'unfairnesses' when it's their kids being denied a better quality of education or medical care or whatever and quite right too.

'it is punishing the deserving when clever children are denied the educational opportunities '

And who or where are clever children being denied educational opportunities?

It's a vile mindset that resents disadvantaged kids having opportunties or even a leg up on the basis that this will somehow erode the privileges their own well off kids have.

"In terms of pushing for equal opportunity, it seems to me a bit like trying to marry off our daughters to prince Harry instead of suggesting that the royal family might be a tiny bit outdated."

I very much agree with this. It is also interesting to look at schools such as Eton, where a high proportion of pupils get to Oxbridge. A lot of them get in to read very arcane slightly outdated subjects for which entrance is not nearly as competitive as entrance to more modern subjects at "lesser" (universities).

Creating value only has one definition in a business sense, fivecandles. All our Western economies carry a lot of non-value creating people who cost our economy money. We will never, ever get over this, but we need to ensure that the value creators can get on with what they do freely in order to carry the non-value creators.

"And, yes, it is punishing the deserving when clever children are denied the educational opportunities they require to develop to their full potential on the basis that to let them excel is "unfair" to those who could never achieve as much."
I agree. That would be a bonkers thing to do. You just tell me who has said that's a good idea, and I will tell them off very severely.

Interesting, thought, that you think it's OK to deny clever children the educational opportunities they require to develop their full potential on the basis that they were born poor and/or disadvantaged.

Since you consistently argue for fully comprehensive education, which is proven to disadvantage the cleverest, that is you I am pointing my finger at, seeker.

Proven by whom?

Disadvantaged by how much?

Do you ever read the studies produced by the OECD or by US universities, seeker? There are good French studies produced now too, with the benefit of hindsight of nearly 40 years of fully comprehensive education to age 15.

My comment about the numbers being statistically insignificant was to do with the numbers being so small that it is difficult to find a single reason why A sends more than B. When you are down to handfuls of numbers very specific factors may sway application and success.

The reason why school A sends more than school B may be different from the reason why school C sends more than school D.

If it were possible to identify the undelying reason (rather than the one the head automatically quotes about!) then it might be possible to identify a pattern.

Genbuine question:

Are the 'most academic' in society (ie those who obtain qualifications that either could, or do, admit them to elite 'traditionally academic' universities) those who create the most value?

On the one hand, are the most successful entrepreneurs, company founders, inventors etc disproportionately educated at such institutions (I realise that many board members of established companies may be, but it could be argued that such people do not create value, they merely sustain value that has already been created)?

Or, taking another approach, is it better (to create the most value for society as a whole) for EVERY citizen to be educated to the point at which they will create the maximum value they are capable of or to extend a tiny elite to the absolute maxumum while not seeking to improve the value that others in society can add?

Seeker and I would probably espouse the first scenario, whereas I presume Bonsoir would espouse the second.

Summarise.

Bearing in mind that I am talking about the UK. I don't know enough about either the US or the French system to comment.

My understanding is that completely mixed ability teaching, as I think happens in France, does slightly disadvantage the brightest. Are there studies showing the same for comprehensive schools that, like most in the UK, set their students?

I personally think the super bright those with a IQ of 140+ are disadvantaged.

I dont see why comprehensive education has to disadvantage the cleverest children or am I being dim?

If a comprehensive school is big enough to have subject setting then why does it matter that a lower set is being taught French/Maths/English down the hall? So far as I am aware lack of ability in a subject isnt contagious.

'Creating value only has one definition in a business sense, fivecandles.'

I am thankful that this is NOT the way I perceive human beings.

You sound for all the world like Scrooge so I am minded to reply with a quotation from his nephew, Fred,

'"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

A link to A Christmas Carol for your edification: www.stormfax.com/1dickens.htm

(I have posted on other threads about the 'special education' model of education for children at the very extreme of the high ability range, that very tiny percentage [almost certainly far less than 1%] who (like the small proportion of highly SEN children who receive the best education for them in special schools) cannot effectively be educated in mainstream comprehensive schools. We could, I suppose, regard Oxbridge as a natural extention of this due to the low percentage of the total cohort they take - so they could become 'special further education' universities.)

Why are the super-bright disadvantaged though? Or is the issue not the super-brightness but underlying SEN which makes mainstream schooling inappropriate.

Again - comparative dimness does not seep through the walls from one class to the next.

x-posted with teacherwith2kids