At 09:06 26/06/01 -0400, Ed Weick wrote:
(Brad McCormick)
>> I think vouchers will probably be used by "conservatives" (to be
>> distinguished from conservators, as I have previously noted!) to
>> subject their children and others' children to more "fundamentalist"
>> schooling than bureaucrats trained in hotbeds of
>> liberalism like Columbia University Teachers College would
>> ever consider subjecting young persons to. Vouchers will in
>> practice probably serve to help the right-wingers stop
>> neo-pinko followers of John Dewey from being able to
>> earn a living influencing the values of the next generation.
(Ed Weick)
>The right-wing Government of Ontario has recently introduced a tax credit,
>to max out at $3,500 in a few years, to better enable parents to send kids
>to the private schools of their choices. The public system will, of course,
>continue, though it is already struggling and will be further weakened.
Presumably, what this means that only those parents who have earnings well
into the higher tax bands will fully benefit from this. A pity that the
Ontario Government couldn't have given an honest full-value voucher to all
parents.
>What bothers me is that the tax rebate is not based on broad study or public
>discussion of what an education system should be like to meet present day
>needs (i.e., what mix of public and private, what mix of arts, sciences and
>technical subjects, etc.), but on neo-liberal political philosophy.
Well, I wouldn't criticise the Onario Government for this. Governments (or
indeed anybody else) have long since realised -- at least in England --
that they cannot possibly forecast what jobs will be needed, even a few
years hence. 30/40 years ago we had Skill Centres in England which gave
gave superb re-training to older adults in a variety of engineering skills
then in short supply. By the time it was set up and in full swing, most of
those jobs were overtaken by NC (numerically controlled) machine tools. I
think that the skill training laid on by schools and universities should
reflect demand by the students. The latter will be influenced by their
parents who are much closer to the changing job scene than any
government/expert forecasting body.
>It will
>introduce "competition" into the education system, and to the true believer,
>competition (whatever that is) is naturally good. Despite serious
>underfunding, growing teacher shortages, and perpetual labour turmoil,
>competition from private education will make the public system smarten up
>and thus become a better system.
>
>What is more likely to happen is that, with further damaging initiatives
>from the government, the public system will become run-down to a point of
>being unable to provide quality education. Parents who want to send their
>kids to wealth or religious based private schools will then have a much
>better reason for doing so than they now have, and neo-lib politicians will
>be able shrug their shoulders, walk away and feel that the market has done
>its job.
I'm afraid I disagree strongly here. Ed's argument is precisely the same
that has been advanced by the Labour Party in England for the last 50 years
and was at its strongest about 25 years ago. Indeed, at that time, certain
eminent Labour Party Ministers such as Anthony Crossland (otherwise a
benign Oxford educated philosophy don) was actually pushing for the total
abolition of private schools on the grounds that they deprived the state
schools of the brightest students. Thankfully, this totalitarian step was
never taken.
However, at the same time, I was myself a strong advocate of the new crop
of state Comprehensive schools. I'd been to an independent fee-paying
grammar school, Bablake (founded in 1344 by Queen Isabella), which I'd
disliked because of the snobbery there (I had passed a scholarship --
otherwise my parents could never have afforded it) and when two spanking
new Comprehensive were built within a couple of miles of where I lived by
the time my two eldest children came to take their 11+ exams I was pleased.
These Comprehensives were not only superbly equipped with far more
facilities than Bablake, but they were also fully staffed with energetic
idealistic teachers who were tremendously motivated by the great socialist
development of Comprehensives. (Also at that time, state schools had plenty
of science and maths teachers. Today pretty well every state school in the
country is desperately short of these. In fact, recently the Government has
offered Golden Hello bonuses of about US$10,000 for new science teachers --
but very few are taking this up -- morale has already sunk too low.)
My own children also passed the 11+ sufficiently well to get scholarships
to Bablake and also the equivalent independent girls grammar school in my
home town. However, my wife and I decided that they would be happier and
receive a better education at the Comprehensives. I bitterly regret that
decision. I'd disliked the pretensions at my old school, but at least I
received a good education and made some good friends among other
scholarship children who, like me, came from poor districts. At the
Comprehensives my own children were quickly selected to go into the higher
streams but suffered from a great deal of nastiness from those in the
average streams. The whole tenor at those Comprehensives (and elsewhere in
the country) had changed. Clever children were disparaged. Education had
no longer to be striven for. It had to be handed down on a plate from the
teachers. And if it wasn't easily assimilated in the minds of the student,
then it was the teachers'/school's fault, not the student's.
And this is the nub of the problem. Unless the parents, and in turn the
children, are motivated in order to work conscientiously at school, then
education just becomes a passive consumer product. It has become a "right"
that parents demand. They hand their children over to a state school and
expect that their children will automatically become well educated without
any effort. What my children experienced 30 years ago has become far worse
since.
(It is very interesting that the accounts I've been reading recently of the
new voucher-driven charter schools in America, even of those in the worst
run-down school districts of the large cities, all say the same thing. The
teachers work the children hard. The children enjoy it. The parents support
it. Most of the children are at least two years ahead in reading and
arithmetic than the state-run schools. The motivation behind these new
charter schools is really recapitulating the early decades of the new
schools in the industrial cities of England when working class parents,
themselves miserably poor, actually paid for the education of their
children -- and almost all went. Both parents and children were motivated.)
(Ed Weick)
>neo-lib politicians will
>be able shrug their shoulders, walk away and feel that the market has done
>its job.
At the risk of being labelled a "neo-lib" I feel sure that the market
*will* do its job. The free market rapidly rapidly eliminates inferior
goods and services -- why shouldn't parents eliminate the worst schools and
stimulate the better ones to do even better? I'm baffled to know why not. I
think that, privately, the Ontario Government politicians know just as well
as Labour Party politicians in England (privately), that state education
has been going downhill for the last half-century and that there's really
no hope of rescue even though they dare not say so openly. (Tony Blair, our
Labour Prime Minister, is one of those politicians who knows this. Despite
trumpeting great things for the wonders of the state education system, he
sends his own children to independent schools.) (There are, of course, some
state schools which are excellent and fully up to the standard of the
average independent grammar and private schools but they are very thin on
the ground indeed [maybe two or three score in the whole country] and only
exist in leafy superbs with very demanding parents who would otherwise send
their children to private schools.)
Keith Hudson
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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