Ethically, is there any difference between buying a house in a good catchment area and just PAYING fees?

[Fillyjonk]

Seems pretty much the same to me

Both ways you are paying for an edcuation

Both ways the intake of the school is limited, one by catchment (local, expensive) one by just upfront paying fees.

Thoughts? Justifications ?

(this got posted in SEN for some reason. Not sure how. Apologies)

Oh yeas, and as for "understanding" other cultures stopping conflict, I take it you did history A level ? It is a good predictor of utter and complete ignorance of the past.

The nastiest wars and mistreatment of people have been between those who know and understand each other. (look at Iraq and Northern Ireland, the US and Russian civil wars).
Hint:The wars of the roses were not floristy competitions.

Ahm, Anna888, you've not got any proof have you.
As it happens I can think of several sites pith jobs varying from 50-500,000 quid for science grads. Banking pays this quite routinely.

Not exactly a MS word jockey role

DC - I haven't got A levels. I was at school outside the UK.

Of course, understanding other cultures also gives you the ability to manipulate them. But in so-called modern, civilised parts of the world, human beings generally like to avoid war (the EU being the most remarkable example of a treaty to prevent war).

DC - we live and work in different circles.

All my friends are multi-lingual and earn very respectable amounts of money international jobs. But not in the City.

English is the only language you really need in many companies. The French obviously have a thing about their own language but most companies I've worked with have English as the common language even in Sweden in the West. Even in India English in a sense joined up the country.

Xenia - not really.

My sister and brother-in-law just moved to Holland and both are undergoing intensive Dutch - my BIL can't function long term in his bank without it. You can't work at L'Oreal without French AND English and there are lots of companies like that. If you want to work in the EU institutions, UN, OECD, World Bank etc you need lots of languages. My partner, who speaks French, English and Spanish, has had to learn Italian to manage his Italian subsidiary. You just can't get to grips with business without that knowledge.

Never said there were no jobs, but they are few, and teaching of legacy languages far exceeds any plausible demand for the "French" that Brits learn.
Italian is not without use, but almost no Brits learn it at school, Spanish isn't common, and Russian nearly unknown.
One of my gripes with what's quite dishonestly called language "education" is that we all get taught the same ones. Neatly all kids do French, I say "do", not "learn", even though it's only of the most marginal use, and Terran's nearest competitor Spanish is far far behind.
If we are to waste kids time failing to learn languages, they should at least fail to learn a variety of them.

DC - I think you need to distinguish between:

1. the language teaching in British schools, which is poor, and leads to a grasp of modern languages that is insufficient for any real purpose

1. the very useful intellectual and practical exercise of learning modern foreign languagues to a high standard, such that one can operate in a professional context with almost the same ease as in one's mother tongue

1 is fairly pointless, 2 is extremely useful.

When I worked in management consultancy (in one of the big American consultancies) everyone bar the British and Americans spoke lots of languages. Very useful in that profession.

Incidentally, why is language teaching so bad in the UK?

And what's Terran?

As a languages graduate, I found that people with a languages degree were actually greatly in demand by many leading industries and firms.

Sometimes this was and still is for jobs that specifically needed a high level of linguistic skill, but in many cases it was because employers recognised the many different skills involved in becoming proficient in another language, and the calibre of the graduates who had achieved this.

Nearly 20 years later, many of my fellow language graduates are in very successful and highly-paid jobs. I don't know anyone who has found their languages degree a hindrance to finding a good, satisfying job.

Interestingly enough, it is the science graduates I know who have struggled most to find fulfilling jobs. And the high salaries in the financial sector apply only to a select few - I know many many more, even quite responsible positions, which don't pay much at all.

NKF - I'm sure there are a myriad explanations. Among mine:

• failure to accord sufficient importance to the learning of English grammar. Lots of children make their first proper encounter with grammatical structure when they learn their first foreign language at 11, so they have to grapple with two things simultaneously - grammar and a foreign language. If English grammar were taught properly in primary school, they would only have the foreign language to deal with

• the ubiquity of English as a second language so that it is quite easy to "get by" abroad in English - though of course one misses out on a lot by just "getting by"

• starting too late - I think all children ought to learn a second language from the time they start school. It's SO much easier when you are young

portonovo - I agree, lots of people who studied modern languages at the same time as me have gone on to great things without necessarily using their language skills specifically.

Lots of language graduates end up as glorified typists in London but not all by any means.

Why are we so bad in the UK? Not sure. Even my children who started at 5 or 6 at school in French adn then do German and latin too adn could choose Spanish and Italian at their school and even things like Japanese and Mandarin they haven't really grasped foreign languages with any enthusiasm although some of their friends are good. But their freinds who are most good are the huge numbers of their friends who have a parent who always speaks to the children from birth only in their native tongue so they are bilingual and also a lot of them are off atn Hebrew or Polish or indian languages school on Saturdays too.

It's a long time ago, but I recall the EU trying to find out why Brits were so crap at languages.
Apparently at that time the UK spent more per head than any other country on languages.
British language teachers are on average better qualified than their counterparts in most countries, many achieving a level where they can pass as a native in their adopted language.
By contrast , most science teachers could not pass themselves off as scientists, and very few teachers of maths could be classed as mathematicians, many would be challenged to prove they had a degree in any subject.

British textbooks are regarded as a class act, to such a degree that they are exported to other countries for profit. This compares well with France where the state subsidises them.

British schools have been early adopters of the latest technology, from video to language labs and no country is better equipped.

Their explanation (and mine) is that British kids are taught as if it were an "intellectual discipline", which apparently is used in all seriousness to describe a minor technical skill.
Europeans in my experience see languages as utilitarian, they are born in a place not fortunate enough to have Terran as a first language, so make the effort.
British kids can't see the point, not unreasonably because there isn't one.

I use the word "Terran" as opposed to English. Naming Earth's language after a region that isn't even a country, and has less that 5% of it's speakers seems absurdly nationalistic.

One day on a school and this thread has spun into orbit...

I have never found my knowledge of languages a hindrance. As a child educated entirely in French until the age of 18, I never found being bilingual anything but a distinct advantage, for the reasons outlined below by Anna.

As a qualified languages teacher, I fully support her statement regarding the lack of aptitude of the British for languages- in my experience, and until very recently, the first time an 11 year old needed to know what a verb was is in their first year of languages. This piecemeal approach to own language acquisition does not lay down the intellectual connections needed to compare one's own language with the foreign language being taught, and means that pupils are essentially (and in yet another subject) learning a disjointed set of facts with no obvious link between them.

I always found the "communicative" approach to language learning, vaunted as far more approachable, to be actually a patronising attempt to enable people to order their egg and chips in French instead of loud English.

Needless to say, I teach grammar, and I teach it well, until they understand. Many end up understanding more about English as a result.

BTW, DC, I am intrigued by your constant references to "legacy languages". What the deuce does this mean?

school trip . I obviously did not spend the day on a school...

Legacy languages ?
Languages in terminal decline. The French spend serious money trying to defend their but are failing. Their attempts to keep it pure are one reason it's mindshare is dropping hard. Slowly, even the artsgrad fools who "run" our education system have worked out it's a mugs game and are trying (incompetently) to expand the range of languages. But rather than focus on what might be useful to kids, again we seem them trying to "build society" and sticking in nonsense like Urdu.

snort

Just want to agree totally with Anna and Duchesse re the teaching of languages and the lack of teaching of our own language. I remember the first time I came accross the concept of declining a verb was in French and I had never heard of 'dative' and 'ablative' until I did German. I also think it is a huge loss to our understanding of language that Latin became outlawed by the '70's progressives as too 'elitist'. My 7 year old is fascinated by words and their derivation and we often need to tell her about Latin to fully explain some meanings to her. My DP was lucky enough to go to Public school where Latin was alive and well - I was stuck with crap comp and only managed to be taught Latin during lunch break when in the 6th form (even then they were too scared to timetable it for fear of offending the left-wing faction).
Also conscious we are hi-jacking this thread somewhat - sorry.
We pay for dd to go to French club at school but she has to give up half her lunch break to go; it should be as compulsory as the literacy hour imo.

Xenia - girls with law and history degrees also end up as secretaries and receptionists or working in shops. A first degree is more and more often not enough to get on to any kind of proper career path.

For law or medicine you go on and do the next course required. With a French degree you then have to choose what you want to do and those with a first from Oxford might well go and work for McKinsey but your 2/2 from Middlesex University with BBB A levels might well mean you end up doing secretarial work.

All my children's schools still do latin. It's very much alive. I think there was also a London primary school introducing it.

Yes Xenia but as we all know you only use the private sector - in the state sector it is very rare and the rot set in with the widespread introduction of comprehensives in the 1970's.