We must end free education for the middle classes

[outofteabags]

Did anyone see Anthony Seldon's article in the Times on this? www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article3645129.ece
I am very interested to know what people think about it especially as I happened to hear a particularly heated debate on this at a party.

In our town its the schools in the deprived areas which are being closed due to low numbers. These schools have a high concentration of SEN children which causes them to have low results. There is nothing wrong with the teaching.

If less popular schools had diliberately small classes (which were limited to say 15) then these schools might become more popular.

Schools at the top of the league tables are often artifically high because there are lots of pushy parents who make sure that little johnny does his homework as well as attending Kumon.

Yes, it's a policy at the moment to allow popular schools to expand, supposedly. The ones closing here are all in the deprived areas too (with one notable high-profile exception which has been the subject of a raging controversy in Sheffield).

All about "choice", as if education were a marketplace. Misses the point, of course - I can choose Kellogg's Corn Flakes without depriving you of the chance to buy a packet, but if I "choose" to send DD to St. Cuthbertina's then I use up a place, meaning there is one fewer.

"To be fair to the oft-misquoted Maggie" UQD you are positively obsessed with the misquotation of this quote.

as usual screw the middle class families. But who is exactly middle class?

dadada- To be honest,I am! Because people still always get it wrong!

I think sometimes it's acceptable to read between the lines, as actions can speak louder than (or in this case add weight to) words.

UQD I largely agree with MT's sentiments in her 'no such thing as society' speech but it goes against the principles of emergence theory.

"Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference." (Lewes 1875)

individuals, collectively find the best solutions for problems imposed upon them by an unpredictable, complex and changing environment? And that bundles of stupid nerve cells, which function according to physical rules, develop into an intelligent brain that ultimately reaches self-awareness? The book takes on these and many more stimulating questions, and Johnson shows that a small number of rules can create 'global wisdom' in complex systems. In detail, these rules are: (i) take a huge number of individuals, (ii) make each of these individuals relatively simple, (iii) let them interact on a random basis and (iv) tell them to pay attention to their neighbours.

These rules are easy to understand if we apply them to systems that obviously demonstrate emergence. An individual ant has a 'micro-performance', but a colony exhibits a 'macro-behaviour', which cannot be predicted on the basis of observing a single organism. The entire system has to be observed at work to discover the global behaviour. Ten thousand 'dumb' ants collectively become smart, calculating the shortest routes to food supplies without any choreographer who can see the bigger picture. This has been attributed to 'swarm logic', a strategy now successfully applied in designing computers. And swarm logic is also the

Ignore the last two paragraphs - I didn't mean to paste those.

Oh good, I'm glad we're back to Maggie's speech - I wanted to comment on this last night but the discussion seemed to have moved on.

It is an amazing piece of work - it's no wonder everyone loved her. I disagree profoundly with the sentiments however, and seeing it in context made me think that the popular interpretation of that phrase "there's no such thing as society" is not very distant from its original meaning at all.

She said that society is made up of individual actions but acknowledged that those individual actions would be based on the "duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour". The speech suggests that if you give people the freedom to act in this way, society takes care of itself.

For the reasons Swedes has outlined (via Lewes 1875) this does not work. If you rely on individual self-interest (even if that self-interest optimistically extends to "our neighbour") to create society, the result is unpredictable and chaotic. Surely the policy of "choice" in schools that we are all debating here is a prime example of this. Or for an even more extreme example we have a financial system which actively encourages the short term self-interest of bankers whose increasingly cavalier actions have resulted in thousands of people losing their homes and worldwide economic chaos.

Government has to act as a buffer against the effects of rampant self-interest, otherwise the "tapestry of living men and women" starts to look very ugly indeed.

I think all of the above over-complicates my point, My understanding of it is a) people thought she was aaying "there is no society", and that's the way it's always quoted, but b) she actually is saying we are society - and that you therefore can't blame this thing called "society" for social ills, because that means you are blaming Us. The "men and women and families" referred to.

She was making the distinction between an abstract notion of "society" as something to blame, and a more concrete notion of "society" as being made up of individuals.

Yes I see that, and I won't keep harping on, but if you say that society is merely a collection of people acting in their own interests, then there really is no society in any coherent sense.

I see what you mean, but I don't necessarily think it's about people acting in their own interests. Is that really what Conservatism is about? (I know it's what its detractors say it's about, but sensible Tory commentators do their best to persuade us otherwise.)

Well they would, wouldn't they?

Acting in one's own best interest includes cooperating with others where necessary. None of us get very far in isolation.

Britain has a long history of philanthropy. I think it's a shame if people believe we only act in self interest.

UQD I have only ever been on a tram in Germany, in spite of living all over the UK. Sorry if me finding the idea of a tram amusing was offensive.

A lot of philanthropy is pretty self-interested, though