PUBLIC/PRIVATE Principles Policies UNIVERSITY Topic Index
SCHOOL EDUCATION ADULT RESPONSE FORM
  1. How can the ability of children be assessed properly or fairly if some are being given far more, and higher quality, tuition than others? If some people are giving their children an unfair advantage it invalidates the whole system.
  2. Children with poor, poorly educated parents are unlikely to appreciate the importance of education until, in our current education system, it is too late for them to benefit from it. It is children from poor families who most need to be taken out of their family environment into boarding schools, not the children of the rich.
  3. All the members of the prosperous classes want to ensure that their children have the same privileged lives they enjoy and will go to extreme lengths to make sure that children from poor families are at a hopeless disadvantage throughout their lives. The education system cannot be fair and just as long as the rich can send their children to expensive private and public schools while the children of the poor have to go to under-funded state schools. This corruption mustn't be allowed to continue, the rich mustn't be allowed to buy a superior education for their children.
  4. Children's relative abilities cannot be properly assessed if they are educated in vastly different ways. The children who have prosperous parents have a huge advantage over those who do not, even if they don't go to better schools. They will get more help and encouragement, have richer and more stimulating lives, be better fed etc. etc.
  5. Children from prosperous homes have an enormous advantage in this society, ways must be found to level the playing field. Perhaps primary school children should spend their final year at boarding school to get them away from the limited perspective offered by their family circumstances for a while and broaden their horizons. Perhaps a better arrangement might be that every child over a certain age should spend a month at boarding school every year they remain at school.
  6. It makes more sense for the children of the poor to be sent away to special schools rather than those of the rich, ie to get them out of a no-hope environment. Too expensive?
  7. The main purpose of most Public Schools was surely to enable the children of colonial administrators, Army officers etc. to have their children educated and looked after in Britain; this role is now obsolete. The current role they fulfil is to give a privileged education and a better start in life to the children of the prosperous and privileged (ie a further unfair advantage on top of that of favoured parentage) so that they may become especially prosperous and privileged in their turn. A better and fairer arrangement might be to provide all children with a taste of public school life. Perhaps all children could have at least one year as a boarder at a public school. Their two sixth form years in the case of 'A' level students, their final year in the case of those leaving school at sixteen. The role of the public schools could become that of a sort of 'crammer' or finishing school. If this isn't feasible, they should be abolished. Does any other country with a legitimate claim to be civilised have the equivalent of our public schools? Do countries that are far more successful than us in most respects ie, the USA, Germany or Japan have them?
  8. The children of single parents to be sent to boarding schools to get discipline and to enable their parent to work.
  9. Most working class parents don't encourage and help their children with their studies to nearly the same extent as middle class parents, most aren't inclined or able to. This puts working class children at a severe disadvantage, this should be compensated in some way. By sending them to boarding school perhaps?

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