From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2001 - 22:22:08 MDT
> James Rogers wrote:
>
> > After doing some research a while back, I basically went
> from agnostic to
> > being firmly in the anti-public school camp. The track
> record of public
> > education in this country has been disasterous for the most
> part, but the
> > problem is that so many people are used to sucking off the
> government teat
> > that they are unwilling to exercise their right to something better.
>
> This is not scientific, only my own experiences and opinion.
>
> For a couple of years in my life I lived in New England and
> met many people
> who went private schools, to chi-chi college prep schools and then to
> Harvard-Dartmouth-Yale and such colleges (this was my exposure to a
> different tradition than that to which I was exposed, i.e., a
> middle-class
> West Coast public school life).
>
> And how different did I find the "Top Ten" East Coast crowd
> compared to the
> people I'd known before? Not different at all. More snooty,
> definitely.
> Many of the young men spoke with a uniformly affected whiny nasal
> inflection - and that very well may have been the biggest
> difference, right
> there. The private-school crowd were just as smart, and just
> as dumb, as
> anyone I'd ever known before. The fact that many of the East
> Coast crowd
> seemed to think of themselves as "anointed" compared to the
> rest of the
> world's population was somewhat vexing to me. But one
> incident, especially,
> still stands out in my mind: I overheard several young wives
> talk about
> another young wife who stuttered a little (all the respective
> wives had
> husbands who were graduate students at Tuck Business School),
> tsk-tsk'g
> about what a liability the wife with the stutter would be for
> her husband.
> But this was a generation ago. Maybe things have changed.
>
> But I still don't think private school students get a better education
> compared to students who go to public schools, generally. What is
> "education," anyway? Maybe children who go to private schools become
> culturally deprived, in a way. I know my own kids benefited from the
> diversity of people they found in public schools throughout
> their school
> years - they've actually expressed this to me.
>
> Olga
I hope not... my daughter is in a private school (Montessori, not one of
those weirdy status schools).
I think you are missing James' point, Olga. I'll give it a go...
I went through public school. Basically it sucked, but then school does,
yes? School is school... 30 kids, one teacher, boring presentation of ideas
performed mind-bogglingly slowly over a course of 13 years. But we survive
it, hopefully learn something despite it all, and that's that.
Except that turns out to not be the whole story. As an adult, in the
situation where my daughter was coming toward school age, I had to make a
decision about education. My daughter was beginning to read and write at age
2. So, do I send her to public school (beginning with pre-school), knowing
what she has in store for her as a gifted kid (wasting many years of her
life, coming out seriously jaded about institutions, etc). Do I send her to
a private school, going with the starched collars and snotty attitude, and
slant her toward the pumped-up prat end of the scale? Or do we home school
her, and turn her into one of those weirdy home schooled kids (apologies in
advance, people :-).
It turned out, after some investigation (fueled by an inspired experience
with a private pre-school) that there is more to private schools than meets
the eye. The problem is with the Australian connotations of "private school"
(means over-privelaged snotty little twerps). When I applied the more pure
(libertarian? good grief) sense of "private" to "private school", I
discovered that it just meant an educational institution run by someone else
than the government.
It turns out that there are (some few) alternatives in education going down
this path. We've picked Montessori as a best fit for my daughter - excellent
academic orientation, not too much marching up and down the square, no
uniforms, treats kids like humans (rare!).
Not that I'm suggesting this is right for everyone. The point is that
different methods of education exist, and that they can be right for
different people.
So I've come to a point where I strongly support the availability of private
schooling. The one problem I have with it is that it is so expensive (even
when it's as cheap as they can manage). And I agree with the libertarian
crowd (gosh again) that state funded public schooling is much of the
problem.
Basically, we pay our taxes, some of which pays for school, and can either
get free, under-resourced schooling from the state, under the homogenous
state education system, or we can pay for school *again* to get private
schooling. This seems to have bred a system where we have two classes of
schooling; either spend stupidly large sums of money to get choice, or take
what you are given, no choices. Thus, the major groups of schools available
are private, status oriented schools, which parents seem to choose for the
same reasons that they might buy a BMW, and public schools, indifferent
inflexible institutions that most of us have had to put up with. There are
also catholic schools (which I don't know anything about), and then a very
small (very small!) group of fringe private schools which exist because
their founders and the parents of their students think education is so
important that doing it well is necessary, even if that means bearing
unreasonable costs.
Actually, I think the private schools here do get state funding as well,
although I'm not sure of the level of funding. But what I'd like to see is
funding available such that a private school could be set up to provide
"free" education, relying on the same level of funding that public schools
receive; not glamorous, I'm sure, but able to do things differently to the
norm. Also, there could be a whole slew of alternatives available, which
would go from costing parents a little bit extra, up to costing a whole lot
extra.
I think I'm proposing something different to James, which is that I think
the public school system should probably be privatised, while government
funding remains intact. But what we are both saying is that the decision to
fund only a single style of school, "public schools", makes it very
difficult for alternatives to exist, unless the target market of those
alternatives are not sensitive to price (or in fact use the price as a
status symbol).
Emlyn
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