High earners to pay for their children state schools

[Verycold]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25798659

It's wonderfully invigorating, getting the poor to work hard. All that wonderful energy and desperation.

rabbitstew

In China people are already saying that the children of those who have "made it" no longer show the kind of diligence that made their parents a success.

I'm not saying that it should go back to that here in the UK - but that China is in a completely different stage of where we are… and you can't compare the countries with one another.

Of course you can't compare the two countries, and yet people tiresomely and constantly do, generally in order to justify making life harder for the poorest in our own society and to accuse the population of being lazy and entitled, as though this is abnormal in a country which is, apparently, still a wealthy one.

And yet, with a growing divide between the richest and poorest, the richest and most powerful are, effectively, telling everyone they should be working harder for less like the Chinese, so as to increase the divide a bit more.

I agree that I prefer a society that has more humanity and I don't think it is that simple either. When Britain was having it's industrial revolution China had one of the most thriving mercantile economies the world has ever seen and those tradition's are now hardwired into their culture, into religion and other cultural practises. It is why you see similar values in the diaspora where they do have a more humane, democratic even, society. Deng Xiaoping knew he just had to take the lid off the pressure cooker and then try and keep hold of the reins somehow.

Whereas in Britain we are only a generation away from a 50s Labour government that was still seeing Empire as an asset to milk..... I see that sense of entitlement very strongly in this current crop of politicians, hence their love of "This island story"

China has also always had a colossal peasant population. And spoilt little emperors.

It had a colossal population of every sort but don't assume they were all wretched rural peasants, though some were in the marginal lands. On the whole they were part of a thriving village economy with plenty of people making money out of small scale industry. colossal numbers of SMEs as well, now and then

I think it's wrong though to suggest very very hard work is not rewarding. Many of those in the UK who work very hard indeed obtain huge satisfaction from it. I worked most of today and it can make you feel very good. Perhaps we are just lazy in the UK and need a kick up the bottom.

I personally have my daughter in private school and me and my husband not only work hard to keep her in there but struggle with it as well but rather than take lush holidays we pay for her education and to be honest I have done this to get her into a good grammer school and if that fails I will search for a high achieving state school , however if I did have to pay for that I'd rather struggle on paying for her education elsewhere ( which won't effect me either way as we earn nowhere near 80'000) but my point is that when people do work hard to do their best for their children why should they then have to pay out more as I understand there's a lot of decent poor people who also want the best for their kids but there's also a lot of poor people who are poor for the fact that they just sit and breed at home so that they can keep getting their benefits instead of even bothering looking for work coz they are too dam lazy and it's those people I defo don't and won't ever put my money into , so to be honest I think the answer is to widen the catchment area for the good schools instead of having them in a stupid 1.04 mile catchment area that only the children who live in the wealthy houses surrounding the schools can go to . Also I know a few people who do earn a lot of money and put their children in the local state school not for the reason so that they don't have to pay but because they want their children to be grounded and appreciate what they have and work hard like normal children have to and appreciate things in life and respect them .

I think you'll find it depends on what the very, very hard work is, as you yourself have previously acknowledged, LauraBridges.

I love my work : but I'm a highly qualified sociopath with a mahoosive yoga and swimming habit.
My clients are progressively 'breaking' - because they do hard physical jobs and its destroying their knees, hips and spines.
I just need a comfy chair and not too much booze and I can earn way over the average.
Many of them cannot.

^Please remember that inherent learning ability / capacity is deeply genetic
and can be predicted to the decile by fingerprint and earprint analysis^

those who paint walls will always paint walls
the people who pay them will always earn more

fascinating analysis in the Economist the other week that the 20th century was the anomaly, not the future and Georgian divisions between rich and poor may well be the path in future

fascinating analysis in the Economist the other week that the 20th century was the anomaly, not the future and Georgian divisions between rich and poor may well be the path in future

Weird - that's what I always used to say… that the last few decades might be the anomaly. But no one ever listened to me, and just rolled their eyes at the doom and gloom. Denial, I guess?

snowbells
watch when I ask to look at fingerprints / ears and predict GCSE grades .... then the fur will really fly

Or alternatively, there will be more Afghanistans, Syrias, Egypts, Iraqs, Sudans, etc, etc, and violent, selfish, greedy and stupid humanity will destroy itself. The rich and powerful can't protect themselves forever from the problems they fund: they'll be on the pyre with everyone else at the end.

What gets me about those who would call themselves educated or intelligent, is their readiness to believe the propaganda of the ruling elite,(an elite of whom they are not one.)

Blaming the idiots on Benefits Street for the ills of the country's financial situation, is like blaming them for the weather. This is the thing that gets me going, its just the total ignorance of some people, who just swallow the hook line and sinker of 'its all their fault', that keeps being pumped out of the TV.

Well, no, sorry, but I can use my own eyes thank you, the piggybank was raided by the pigs, they have all its contents, and they are getting away with it. The poor still have nothing, so it couldn't have been them.

gaba

But doesn't it annoy you when someone who does not work or even comes from a family where no one has worked for generations get free housing and money for doing nothing?

The problem has to be tackled both ways. You want us to blame the 'ruling elite'… who do you think are they anyway? In this country, most politicians are VERY MUCH slave to their voters. They may as well not have their own opinion, and just do what the Daily Mail tells them to do. We need a politician like Merkel - listens to her voters, but also manages to sometimes do what they don't want her to do for the sake of what she thinks is right.

It's very difficult to blame those who have a LOT of money - you don't get a lot of money for doing nothing. Someone is WILLING to pay them that much (clients, consumers, etc.). It's like that saying that a house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Obviously, they have that money because someone, somewhere wanted something they could provide/had.

… and I don't mean people who lost their job and need help. That's absolutely understandable. But people who have been unemployed for a very long time, and have no plan to enter the workforce again.

look at the ears and fingerprints ....

we either have to provide people with jobs or benefits, or leave them to starve
they exist
they will shag and have more kids
IMHO finding jobs for them is cheaper than benefits, but it goes against current elitist education policy

There are no jobs for a certain strata.

In the past you could do the minimum amount of schooling and go to a job in agriculture/in a factory/mine etc etc and make an acceptable living. Where the hell does an uneducated person find a secure job now? There are no opportunities for the illiterate. Benefits are more secure. Without a broad base of low-skilled jobs the country will have to keep on paying benefits. Or there has to be a sea-change in expectations: young men wil have to work in care homes/light agriculture.

look at the ears and fingerprints ....

Could you provide me with a link to this research, please?

Snowbells and does that matter? As happiness is not related to material success and materialism if someone has more than someone else then so what? People will always have more than I have but I couldn't care less. Jealousy just eats people up and makes them unhappy. Happiness comes from things like enough sleep, eating well, rest, peace.

Agree money does not bring happiness if you are not inherently at one with the world or yourself however it does bring choices....but real lack of money in the form of grinding poverty and having a level of debt you know can never pay off is truly miserable ......The best is to feel comfortable enough that you can adequately provide for yourself and your children, where you feel you are contributing to the world, with a sense of purpose, and feel you are playing a part in society at large. It is important to have enough money to at least have decent choices in life...to have a job with enough autonomy that you feel you can be empowered to make decisions. Those things can contribute to happiness. That extremes i.e. having so much and using it to pursue a life of materialism or hedonism is unlikely to bring real happiness or true friends in the long run.

lainiekazan

Without a broad base of low-skilled jobs the country will have to keep on paying benefits.

But aren't there some available, but immigrants are more likely to take those jobs???

LauraBridges

I am not getting what you are saying. I didn't post anything about happiness and material stuff, and someone having more than me, etc. My last response was to challenge Gaba's views.

SnowBells - doesn't it make you feel sad that some people have such miserable lives that they can't really cope with doing much more than living in a dingy, dirty house, doing nothing and being looked down on by the world around them?

As for how you can make a lot of money - it doesn't have to be through doing anything more beneficial than not for society (particularly if you are also minimising your tax bill or actually living off the proceeds of crime); it doesn't have to be through working harder than everyone else; it doesn't have to be because people willingly pay you what they pay you - or do you joyfully pay your electricity bill every month and delight at executive pay rises and bankers' bonuses?

I do think that some people confuse earning lots with contributing lots to society. I see only a tenuous connection between "deservedness" and wealth, and value to society and wealth or income. I think we sometimes forget how reliant we all are on each other: we can see that those at the very bottom of society are reliant on us, often quite tiresomely so, but what about some of those arrogant t*ssers at the top who THINK they contribute a colossal amount, but who wouldn't actually be where they are today without having benefited from millions of others all along the way - from the infrastructure others have provided for them, the education, the health care, the food, the shelter, the funding, the low paid workers underneath them, the support and approbation? And often, also, the pre-existing blue-chip companies they worked their way up through, having not actually created anything new, themselves? It's a shame more of these people don't have a bit more of the Quaker philosophy about them... but I don't see many companies these days looking after their workers; not when they can get them cheaper in countries with poor infrastructure and buildings liable to fall down on top of the near-slaves working inside them...

(I was just commenting on the fascinating point someone had made that usually over history there are big differences between people's wealth, that we had a few decades of socialist experiment which failed and now we're going back to normal with a bigger difference materially and making the comment well does that really matter? As long as people are fed and happy if someone has more than someone else so what?

Most of the major religions and even moral codes of many atheists suggest jealous and envy and comparison to others is not a great way to live a life and also doesn't make people very happy. Were we more contented in the days of that hymn our children sing every harvest - the certainty of how life was, the comfort of that certainty.

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.