The Private Education System Should Be Abolished

Statistics prove time and time again that those individuals with a private education background have more education, job and social opportunities than those who were educated by the state. The ratio of private school pupils entering the most prestigious universities is substantially high considering the fraction of children who are educated privately; to the extent where these universities have been accused of discrimination.

It isn’t fair that just because some parents cannot afford to pay for their children’s education that those children should be disadvantaged on account of that alone. Education is supposed to open doors, not shut them.

Furthermore, private school creates a segregation between children and young adults in society, which can result in bullying in some cases. If we want our children to treat everyone in society as an equal, we must all start on an equal footing.

Oxbridge doesn’t pick on academic standards, what a farce! 99.9% of applicants have got straight As and A*s, of which a tiny proportion are picked. There are interviews and ‘certain’ applicants fit the role. These are usually non-state educated individuals.
Also Oxbridge colleges actually have a quota for the amount of state school students they take in. The more they take, the more funding they get. (not sure which side that point lies on but I wrote the first bit too so…)

In the melting pot that are universities a separation occurs between two classes of people from the various backgrounds them came from.

Those that are state-school educated often look upon their counterparts as elitist, stuck-up and posh. Those privately educated frequently hang around with “their own kind” and – often unconsciously – do activites separate and different from the rest of the population Because of the lack of knowledge a partitioning often occurs. How can you argue that creating a two tier, immiscible separation of our society is a good thing?

Once we’re out of school, all we seem to consider in our arguments is which schools give the best academic results. Yet most of us believe that many other things taken away from our schooling were far more important than an academic education. Values, outlooks, and life-skills stay with us forever, whilst a set of A-levels becomes merely a certificate – especially for those of us who only use our French GCSE in restaurants.

Yet what we consistently overlook when studying the league tables is the culture that is reinforced in maintaining private and state education. The social networks (extending into business, law, politics and so forth) that private schools can offer throughout life favour the life chances of their attendees a ludicrous amount. The private-state social divide is most often maintained at university, with different social groups forming around the basis of wealth and upbringing, and at some of the best academic institutions in the country, state school students who have had a harder time earning their place (statistics show this to be true) are very often made to feel inadequate and questioning their position.

Whether or not the practical difficulties of reforming the education allow it to be possible, private education almost certainly ‘should’ be abolished for the inegalitarian social networks which they create.

Arguments such as that opposite do not damage this point in any way. They rely on reductio ad absurdum tactics to portray a desire to abolish private schools, which offer unrivalled access to business networks, as a desire to abolish these networks themselves. This is simply not the case. If, as the argument opposite states, such networks and distinctions would exist ‘regardless of schooling’, then it would do no harm to these networks to abolish the Private Education system in the hope that we may keep both these networks AND ‘egalitarian ideals’: if this is not possible, then the argument opposite is self-contradictory.

Even though this point does not argue for the abolition of interpersonal relations in business (only a school system that gives unfavoured access to these relations), the opposition claim that businesses, deals and employment rely upon these networks is unsubstantiated and cannot in its present form be taken seriously.

If the well educated, affluent and motivated parents who currently send their children to private schools had no choice other than to send their children to the local comprehensive school they would become actively involved in raising the standard of these schools. Imagine the impact of all the funding currently received by the private sector in fees and charitable donations being ploughed into public education.

Education should be based on an individual’s hard work and not on a family bank account. If we look to countries such as Finland and Norway which have more than 95% of their students in public schools, these countries are some of the best-educated countries in the world. Statistics show that by allowing a two-tier system to continue to grow, too many ‘hard-working’ students are going to be unfairly disadvantaged. Education should be based on ‘hard work’ and our hospitals ‘need’.

In regards to a two-tier system, we have to ask ourselves: do we want our children to do well based on their ‘own’ hard work? Do we want an education system based on meritocracy or aristocracy? If more students begin to attend public schools, we will soon come to realise that the effects are not only extremely beneficial for the majority (poor and middle-class) but also for the minority (rich) because they enable everybody to become more socially aware and are a key to future economic growth as more people are given future opportunities to seek steady employment.

Finally, the points made do not favour the abolition of private schools, what they do place emphasis on, though, is the need to increase government funding for progressive public education, which would only come through private schools being disallowed funds. Government funding to private schools in fact contradicts the purpose of private schools being free from government intervention. It is extremely important that we respect people from all different types of backgrounds; this is why public schooling provides an overall better education than private schooling; public schools enable students to learn more about what being democratic and coherent actually mean; private schools establish the basis for further inequality.

Education should not merely be academic. Children need to be exposed to different classes and types of people. This is the sort of education that will decrease the wealth gap in Britain. If the more wealthier among us were educated with the least wealthier of us, people would be less prejudiced. This would result in the least well off people being accepted into higher class jobs instead of losing out due to the interviewer being prejudiced against people who were not so eloquent, but just as articulate. This is what we need for a meritocratic society.

It is an inevitable feature of democracies that the rich have particular access to politicians and policy-makers. While the rich don’t have a need for public education because they can pursue education for their children from other sources, they have no motivation to lobby politicians on behalf of the education system and a perverse incentive to remove education from political agendas in favour of their preferred issues and legislation.

Only by forcing the rich into the same situation as the poor can we expect to gain meaningful ground in terms of education reform, especially in terms of increased funding relative to national and municipal budgets. We cannot expect education will be a national priority until the entire nation has a vested interest in the good order of the system.

A private school is a very institutionalised, artificial environment where the child will be exposed only to children of their own socioeconomic background. Added to this, there are less safeguards in place to assure the parents that the children are being taught from the same curriculum as a state school and are not being abused, especially if it is a boarding school.

They will spend their time after leaving school trying to earn their Fathers love and therefor not being true to themselves. They will go for money for example and not choose a career that will be compatible with who they truly are. This will lead to unhappiness, depression and hyper sanity (through intense education – learning too much too soon).

The problem’s of inadequate education on the state could easily be resolved if the government were to invest more resources or else copy more successful models abroad. Just because at the moment the alternative is not palatable, doesn’t mean that this always will be the case.

Paying for your education does not guarantee a good education. Private schools still have an significant number of inadequate teachers.

“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.” [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26.i.]

Does the marketisation of education not contradict the universal right to free education? If education is important enough, it should not need to be marketised and competitive in order to progress. The marketisation of education, reinforced through institutions such as private schools, may also be having an adverse affect on the education itself. More and more teachers in both private and public education find themselves swamped with boxes that their students have to have ticked (Key stages, standardised lesson plans, SATs etc) in order to prove that their education is efficient, value for money, etc. The idea of education for its own sake is thrown out of the window. In less abstract terms, subjects that don’t get enough popular support are thrown out rather than improved – it’s no longer compulsory to take a language to GCSE, nor to sit an aural exam if one is taken.

Competition does not mean better education, it means standardised education and teaching students to jump through hoops. As private education has much better means to do this, e.g. much smaller contact groups and excellent revision resources, state-funded education really has to pull out all the stops to keep up, including rejecting independent thought in favour of ‘exam skills’. Competitive education is not a human right, it’s a travesty.

Choice doesn’t have to be between a state and a private school; an effective choice can exist between neighbouring state schools. Schools often now specialise in certain areas – sport, technology and so on – and so provide a choice for parents and students alike as to where a young person receives their education.

what sort of choice do people from council estates have whether they can go to a private school or state run? It’s choice for the rich, not for anyone else.

The bottom line is, one’s prospects in life do not significantly differ by having had private education, rather than a comprehensive or gramar education.

I am a student at the University of Durham, where a significant proportion of undergraduate students have come from ‘Public School’ backgrounds. There are also a lot of students who have attended both grammar schools and comprehensive schools.

My argument is that all of these students have progressed successfully through their schooling, regardless of which type, and have arrived at Durham having been accepted on to a degree programme. The type of secondary education which one has had makes absolutely no difference.
All students have arrived and are in the same position and are ALL equal!

The Ferrari argument is absurd. Of course people should be able to choose what car they drive. If someone wants to spend that much money on a car that is their prerogative. However, education is a sensitive matter, especially compared to cars! Just because someone has been born into money, why should they be given an education that offers them more opportunities? Cambridge and Oxford boast that “only” 50% of their students are from public schools, but this is no achievement when the percentage of pupils attending public schools is far less than 50%. (1)
(1)http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/05/schools.oxbridgeandelitism

The ideals of the multifaceted country can not be generalized as Capitalist or Socialist. Education is a priority to becoming not only a contributing American citizen, but a global citizen as well. For every privtate institution with million, even billion dollar endowments, that could be spread, prioritized and effectively raise the standard of education on a national basis. What more reason do you need?

Private schools do not provide all parents with an alternative – only those who can afford it. Such schools perpetuate social inequality, as a better education tends to lead to a better-paid job, which in turn enables one to send one’s own children to such a school. Consequently, equal opportunities are denied to the children of poorer families. With the patronage of wealthier parents, private schools attract resources far higher than state schools. Moreover, with the (often academically selected) children from more affluent backgrounds, greater resources and smaller classes, these schools are unsurprisingly more attractive to teachers than state schools. We have a situation where state schools are potentially deprived not only of able pupils, but also very able teachers, thus compounding the inequalities. Such a state of affairs is socially divisive, and must be avoided.

State schools will never improve if, instead of funding them, government pays thousands of pounds in assisted place fees in the private sector every year. Furthermore, the bursary system does little more than improve private schools whilst depriving state schools of some of their most able pupils. Another factor is that whilst a small proportion of children do get in on academic ability with bursaries, they are a small minority of those similarly able and disadvantaged, whilst less able children from more wealthy backgrounds benefit. And children of average or lower intelligence are excluded from these institutions of small classes and more individual attention, from which they may benefit, on two counts: their ability, and their parents’ incomes. This should strike any observer as deplorably unfair and discriminating.

It is true that many of the problems facing state schools stem from within them, but the existence of the private schools outside hardly improves morale amongst staff. It is not as simple as saying we need more money to improve state schools. Since state schools’ funding comes via the government, which gets its money through taxation, then an increase in education expenditure – if it isn’t to cause cuts elsewhere – inextricably leads to higher taxes. It is the Government which makes decisions over education funding. What is more, the existence of private schools must necessarily diminish the social diversity in state schools. Thus, until private schools are banned, and more social groups are forced to take an active interest in funding issues for state schools, there will not be a sufficiently broad-based, united lobbying force to impel Government to take the action it fears now would make it unpopular and spend the necessary money. Indeed, the funding problems may more quickly be resolved if a few more prominent and powerful politicians had children in state schools.

Not all private schools operate that way. Not all private schools are small and not all private schools hire the best educators who will always be helpful to pupils just because they are in close contact.

It is as if to say that quantity of time with children equates to quality of time with children.