First time poster, but I read all of this thread and felt compelled. It's probably a feeling I should ignore.
"Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them then that education has been wasted." - Alan Bennett
Someone within the thread mentioned that it is to the benefit of the truly wealthy to encourage friction between the working, middle and upper middle classes - that would seem to be a valid point.
Someone else pointed out that it makes more sense to tax true wealth more rather than fiddle about with punitive measures which likely have unintended consequences, that also seems to be true. It's to everyone's benefit, a more equal society is a happier society for everyone - even those at the top. I don't think anyone wants to live in a country where they have to move between gated enclaves, even if they are behind the gates. By wealth I mean obscene wealth, likely not anyone that receives a salary for actual work. Obscene wealth and the hoarding of assets is damaging in ways that are far reaching and often poorly understood.
I think we all underestimate how much cognitive bias there is at play when we attempt to make school choices, indeed any choice. People believe that when they pay for something, or pay more for something it must be better.
In the city we live in the private schools are all in beautiful buildings and the wealthier parts of the city - but their results aren't always fantastic. In fact, sometimes they lag behind the state provision, and had done for years when we were looking at options but people continued to fork out the for the fees. It was bewildering, and yes here I admit I briefly considered giving my own child that unfair advantage, but it turned out it wasn't necessarily an advantage at all.
As a child my husband received a full scholarship to a very prestigious school where he was bullied for being poor by the other students and the staff and left, giving up said scholarship, after a year. He went to his local primary, which was excellent and in a poor area, the two not being mutually exclusive, and he and all his class mates results far outstripped those of his peers at the private school. There is wild variation in both sectors, and I think sometimes we cloud our own decisions with value judgements we aren't even aware we're making.
This works in the opposite direction of course, we (collective we, society as a whole) undervalue things we don't 'pay' for, or assume things that are cheaper must be worse. It's often not the case, despite it all. I grew up in a leafy North London suburb, my primary and secondary were outstanding, did I value the advantage I had as I should have, did my parents? Probably not, they just picked what was closest.
It's a sensitive thing as the overarching feeling on the side of those who don't want to see this change is 'I pay my way, I work hard, why should I be penalised by those that don't do the same?'...I think if this half examined that feeling they would know they were being disingenuous. They would know, likely from their own experience, that there are plenty of people out there that work harder, are more intelligent perhaps even more qualified and less privileged, and indeed paid less. I know that there are people who are more able than me, who work harder than me, who are in a less privileged position. So let's let go of that one. I would also hope that nobody seriously believes just because a child or a family is less well off, that's a measure of their ability, intelligence or really anything at all - and vice versa.
I picked up in this thread on people arguing simultaneously that private education in this country produces better educated people, and those that tend to rule the country. In the same breath pointing out how unintelligent our leaders often seem to be, how stupid and unexamined and short term their decisions - sentiments I would tend to agree with - but you can't have both be true.
Is it not more possible that people who move within a section of society which is small and interacts little with other groups have a distorted understanding of their own abilities, an underestimation of those of other people and a misplaced confidence installed in them by the very system that made them this way? Maybe.
Also someone argued that our GDP demonstrates how our state education system is failing...I really don't have time to unpick that one. I do think there are failures in our state education, but I don't think they're what is borne out in GDP since 2008 and that a lot of these failings are down to the incompetence of a ruling class who are, as the posters themselves point out, often privately educated.
To throw a further cat amongst the pigeons, some Universities (likely older, wealthier) don't have charitable status but have Royal Charters so sit under neither bracket.
Someone quoted Shankar Vedantam on the radio this week. Shankar describes in one of the episodes of hidden brain, being out swimming one day in the ocean and believing he was a brilliant swimmer all of a sudden. He describes feeling that every stroke he took seemed to carry him further, and more gracefully than everyone else. He thought he was a great swimmer. He then realised he was in fact caught in an undercurrent and that is what had been carrying him, and that now he was far out and had to swim against the same current to return to land (a much harder, less graceful task.)
It's an excellent metaphor for advantage. There are times where the current has carried me and I have thought myself a much better swimmer than I probably am, equally there are times when I have found myself feeling far less capable than I am because the currents are working against me, to feeling like I am floundering and that every stroke I take carries me nowhere. I suspect we've all felt both of these sensations in life, and also know that there are people born swimming against the current who are better swimmers than we could ever be.
Perhaps rather than focus efforts on railing against measures that may or may not ever come into force, private institutions should step up to the idea of their charitable status and help far more of those children that, despite being excellent swimmers, find themselves swimming forever against the tide.