will someone scold and spank me and remined me I am a stubborn socialist guardianista?

[twinsetandpearls]

I have always made my feelings clear about private schools but the family has been working on me again and have ordered a proespectus for a private school that I have been idly flicking through and I have fallen in love with it and even - and this is a big deal for me - looked at the website.

For me this is a huge step and I am feeling sick with guilt, so guilty in fact that I have just re planned all my lessons tomorrow for my classes as some kind of penenance.

I need other socialist guardianistas to take me in hand.

why are you all so worried about sending your children to the local school? i really don't get it

The school my dd attends is MY LOCAL school, it just so happens that it is independent, I would have to drive further to attend my local state school.

I am confident that the state school system can rock and with a bit of tweaking and rolling out of good practice is more than up to the job.

Division is rubbish for society. People should mix with others who aren't their clones. We're too lazy to do that as individuals- we seek out those most like ourselves in every way and don't challenge ourselves to jump out of our social comfort zones. So we need to set up society to compensate.

No division when I rule the world. We will start by taking twinsets' private school out of private hands and making it a state school accessible by all the local community. Boarding will not continue however, and it will also not be religious because lovely Catholic people have lots to offer and gain from knowing lovely hindus and atheists and muslims and anglicans and wiccans and others. Less fundamentally but still significantly, gabardine and silly hats will be confined to the nursery dressing up corner because they look crap. Boys and girls of all backgrounds and abilities will access the excellent facilities, get to know each other and get an education according to their needs from skilled staff.

Oh damn. I don't rule the world. So society still sucks. Should I therefore say fuck it, the twins of scum will go to private school because, like tsap, our nearest private school has better facilities than the nearest state one? I don't think so. My kids have learned so much from their peers at the nearest non religious state school. Unquantifiable learning. They know more in practice about diversity, different religions, social equality and status than some adults I've met because their school is full of people who are different from them and from each other. They can also read and write and count, as can most of their friends. They know that children go to school to learn. But they have come across children in their school who cannot (yet, in some instances) read because of learning disability or recent arrival in the country. They can tell you about electric wheelchairs. They can tell you about autism. They can say hello and thank you in Arabic and Polish. They can tell you that their best friend is a bit worried that they're going to hell and has asked his imam about it. I would choose this over academic polish and lovely facilities every day of the week. If they weren't there, or somewhere similar, they would miss out. And so would their friends.

Scummy...have I told you lately that I love you?

(Tis marthamoo...in case you thought strange moo-ish creatures were declaring love for you).

ditto.

I agree with you about not wanting to splot society however in this town the diversity is to be found by going private. By staying in the state sector you just meet other white working class kids with the odd polish child, The private school has kids from all over the world.

But scummy that point aside I agree with you you

But those kids probably all have money and academic ability. Diversity is not just about race.

they will all have money although some like us will be from normal backgrounds and others from more extravagant but their ability will vary. I am in agreement with you generally but I don;t think that state schools have the monoply on diversity.

Oh, does it take a lot of children with special needs, then? That's great. I had the perception that private schools tend not to (unless they are specialist in dyslexia or something like that). Maybe it depends on the area?

I won't pretend that it has the same number of chidren with special needs as the school I teach in or even the severity of needs but the schools strength as far as I am aware is its pastoral care, it is not overly academic or competitive and for that reason I have friends who have children registered as having SEN who have sent their children there.

The school claims in its literature to cater for the following

Physical Disabilities
Dyslexia or Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD)
Giftedness
English as a Foreign Language/English as a Second Language (EFL/ESL)

"But Xenia how will my dd be damaged by going to the loacl state school. Will they beat her? Will they refuse to teach her? No she just won't do latin and ballet."

Well as someone said below you give her choices so by the same token you deny her choices by not going there... Mind you the person I know who went to Stonyhurst I'm not sure it really did him that much good - I saw distinct boarding school disadvantage there, dislocation from family and I think he's probably had more trouble accepting his homosexuality than had be been at a different school but that's just a guess. Hopefully she could go as a day pupil.

My dd's going to a state secondary school in September and she will be doing latin and ballet!

Just catching up with last night's postings so I am back-tracking...
I don't understand this idea of allocating places by lottery. I do understand that it eliminates selection-by-mortgage but what happened to the ideal of community? If kids in the same street are bussed off to different schools then doesn't that destroy their cohesion? Can someone explain please.

Bussing forces integration. People tend to live near people like them by colour, religion etc It's a huge issue in lots of areas of the country where some children won't see a non Asian face in an average day. So like in the deep South US you achieve integration by forced bussing. It's a difficult issue. It's an issue for recruiters of jobs too because people tend to recruit people who are like them, who they'd like to be stuck at an air port for 10 hours with. It leads to lack of integration with people of different colours, classes, religions etc.

Agree with Twinset that state schools do not have a monopoly on diversity. Just looking at DD's class photo, and can count 6 asian, 2 chinese, 3 black, 3 mixed race and 8 caucasian. The same would be true of DS's class, except his school photo is upstairs and I am feeling lazy.

Precisely, Xenia. I thought that all those who supported the idea of a local comp wanted it for community cohesion. But now they are suddenly saying that they want integration across diverse geographical areas. You can't have it both ways.

There is a real problem about lack of social mobility. There was more social mobility when there were grammar schools, which seemed a perfectly reasonable idea to me, but were abolished. The assisted places scheme helped to address the issue but that got abolished. So we have literally no means of joining wealthy and poor through school-age education. That can't be good for society.

I don't agree, Quattrocento. I got into Oxford from a bog-standard comp and joined the middle classes by becoming a lawyer in the City. Whether that was a good idea is another matter entirely. But it is nonsense to say that you can't do it via the state system. I used to mentor in a state school in Tower Hamlets which was getting several children into Oxbridge and other good universities every year.

Didn't say you couldn't do it! But I was referring to recent news articles discussing this (see link) phenomenon

www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTru st_report.htm

What you achieved is getting harder now, apparently. Of course it is debatable whether or not it is desirable too.

It's not my field and I don't even begin to know how to address the issue. It's only tangentially relevant to the OP though.

Am going to go back to my original stance which is 'you can't fix the macro issues, they are too big, just cultivate your own garden'

TSAP - I had the same problem, 5 years ago as you.

ds1 was shown to have a musical gift, there was a specialist private school near us and we sort of fell into sending him there. In this school he has at the age of thirteen got to grade 5 in three instruments sung in the most amazing places and learnt a musical understanding that he would NOT do in a state school. His siblings have followed him in as well now.

I don't know, if, he had not come to this school, that he would have been unhappy, he may well have achieved other things and his musical gift would have stayed a pass time - the one thing I know is that the school did not recognise it.

So on reflection, I am glad the kids are at this school

the one thing I know is that the state school did not recognise it.

Twinsetandpearls asks will they beat her ?
The answer is of course, yes in many cases.
Many state schools have knife problems, and violence in general. There is often an aggressive anti-academic culture at some.

That make her flip remark about ballet and latin look like pure Guardianista posturing. Middle class types get their kids to a nice state school and claim smugly that they all are like that.
Entertaining that I've never, not once met a coloured parent who thought state schools were great.