shuggy's blog
I take it that a fair number of those "middle-class lefties" also use private tutors of an evening, though? It wasn't only the Blairs, was it?
There does seem to be an obvious flaw in the reasoning "Private schools are better than public schools therefore let's abolish the private schools".
"Old Labour was predicated on the pursuit of equality of outcome. The result was a steady narrowing of wealth differentials between the 1940s and the 1970s,"
I find that statement entirely risible and dishonest. Old Labour sought the equality of opportunity for all. They dropped the ladder. And ordinary working class folk worked like stink to climb the ladder and achieve the resultant parity of success.
The concept of equality of outcome came later, and served to squash the aspirations of every cohort since 1976. They were not needed to aspire to join the middle class, they were used to smash it.
School Vouchers.
This is always a thorny issue. Some friends of mine seem to take the line that the very existence of private education, or indeed Grammar, or even selection, disadvantages working class pupils.
I must say It does not look like that to me. It seems to me that the truly diabolical state of some state schools, combined with often low expectations from teachers of pupils or their chances of success are the real reason. I am a ‘beneficiary’ of comprehensive education.
Much of this may be masked by the apparent massive widening of the goalposts of academic success, witness that they were talking about no longer requiring pupils to actually be able to speak French to pass an exam in it.
I suspect that one of the main crimes of private education is to highlight how much more effective education can be. It is certainly quietly popular with many Labour MPs when it comes to their own offspring..
The fact is that people are not equal when it comes to academic ability, physical prowess, reaction time, strength, endurance, manual dexterity, artistic ability, etc. We are all different and all have our strengths and weaknesses, our advantages and disadvantages, handed out at birth.
True fairness in education lies in ensuring that the opportunity to develop, as fast and far as possible in whatever directions are possible, is available to all. The opportunity to maximise whatever potential the pupil has.
One advantage that so called ‘posh’ or even ‘middle class’ kids have is that they are encouraged to do well and given support in doing so at home. This is the equivalent of a fish swimming downstream.
Children with no such support are more like fish swimming upstream. It is more difficult to swim upstream, some can fight the current, but only some.
Maybe instead of playing the educational dogma game if kids were assessed and given targeted education in a series of categories (do I hear screams of streaming and selective education?) to maximise their potential, including where appropriate countering lack of parental support.
I suspect that there are compatible groups of classifications that could be housed in a single type of school. They should not be too different and likely to engender the idea that one is better than another. It would be interesting to work out how many types of school it would require to cover everyone...
Maybe then you might be getting towards real equality.
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