- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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?
- The children of single parents to be sent to boarding
schools to get discipline and to enable their parent to
work.
- 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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