..except get off our back.
Steve Bettison at the ASI writes about independant schools advertising subsidised private education on adverts in London; this can only be a good thing.
My sister benefitted from such a scheme at a brilliant all-girls school in Yorkshire; having narrowly missed a total scholarship due to procrastination and a missed deadline she was still able to get a partial subsidy; it was hard going on our family but the options it opened to her even today have been worth it.
Education policy in the UK angers me; it is elitist, it is rent-seeking and it is destructive of the minds of the kids it churns through it; my wife, a teacher, tells me I'm imagining it, that stories like this are over-estimating a problem that is non-existent in her experience; I then have to point out that as her Catholic School is diocese-subsidised the overall resources have been increased for her pupils, and we should look at the experience of our youth group who go to some of the worst schools in Leeds, if they go at all.
She then sits, lips pursed.
We no longer ask the simple questions or debate the logic anymore; my belief is simple and can be summed up thus:
If private schools do better why not make all schools private?
This however needs to be expanded on a little - we tend to misinterpret the word "private" in this setting to mean "state directed, but privately controlled": again the premise is faulty; we are not providing a service to the state but are enabling our children to cope with the world and engage in independant thought- we should not be turning out drones for the state to bleed parasitically but free-thinking individuals who's strength and ingenuity is a benefit to all.
The road here is long and will only be climbed properly if we take the state out of education; out of the curriculum, out of schools and out of teacher training- if it needs to remain anywhere it should stick to funding it, not running it.
-- Post From My iPhone
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