Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>It seems to me that the essential difference between state schools and
>private schools is not the money. (There *is* a huge difference I grant
>you, but that is mainly due to historical reasons and, if there was a real
>will on the part of governments and civil services, then this could be
>corrected over a period of time.) The real difference is that state
>schooling involves a large degree of central control. State teachers have
>little more influence over their schools than factory workers have. (It's
>no wonder that teachers have now almost totally lost the respect that they
>used to have.) However, an independent private school depends mainly on
>good leadership by the head-teacher and supportive staff. By and large
>they're not answerable to anybody else other than the parents and children.
I disagree generally with this characterization. _Public_ schools (I
realize there is an unfortunate historical confusion in Britain regarding
the phrase "public school", but the term is more appropriate, in its north
american meaning, than "state school", which seems to acquire a pejorative
connotation whenever Keith uses it), at least in my part of the world, are
no more constrained than private schools when it comes to results:
the universal test results must show an acceptable level of comprehension,
or heads will roll, regardless of organization. If a school is
turning out miseducated fools, it will be fixed, by whatever means
is appropriate: for public schools, administrators will be replaced,
if private, it will lose its permit to teach. Within that constraint,
schools are free to achieve their results by whatever means they find
effective. The curriculum of skills and knowledge fields is determined
by the province and applies equally to all schools, of whatever stripe.
Private schools may add distinctive material in the elective portion
of the curriculum.
[...]
(EW)
>So I see no variance between "sensible selfishness" and a wholesome,
>caring, sustainable society. Mrs Thatcher was famously misquoted as saying
>"there is no society". Well, there isn't in the sense that there is a
>uniform mass of other people out there that we're able to help or with
>equal claims upon us. For each of us our "society" has a span that tails
>off with varying degrees of remoteness according to the function that we're
>talking about. If I am blind and want to cross a busy road I can't expect
>"society" to help me, but I can reasonably expect one or two nearby
>individuals to. For the moment, they are my society and they know that if
>they were blind the chances would be high that I would help them.
This enfolds a pernicious tenet of the sociopathic worldview embodied
in right wing rhetoric and chicago school economics: that the individual
is an independent agent uninformed by the character of their society.
I say bull. The behaviour of the "nearby individuals" will be
fundamentally influenced by the nature of the society in which they live.
The degree of social responsibility practised by the government of
their society will affect their sense of the nature of society, their
identity, and their level of expectation of behaviour for themselves
and others. In a society where compassion is a primary concern for
the government, and ingrained as a valued quality in the citizen,
these "individuals" will have a different range of likely behaviours than
in a society where the accepted norm of both government and citizen
is "get what you can and screw the next guy, it's every man for himself
here".
>The task of modern government, as I see it, is to more clearly define what
>the various "spans" of society are, according to the function that are
>involved.
I believe the primary role of government is to set an example for
the norm of decent, acceptable behaviour, and the range of concerns
which should be held as universal, for the promotion of a civil society.
> Problems arise when governments define the span as stretching out
>over the whole country (the span of which was determined by military and
>transport functions more than anything else.) rather than truly functional
>spans. And, getting back to education, this is the trap that most modern
>governments have fallen into. They treat education as though it was a
>similar activity as providing an army, for example.
In many ways it is. There is a wide range of possibilities for how
either of those things can be realized, however.
>So I see no fundamental difference between the economic market and the
>social market. They both exist by means of exchange. The practical
>difference is that economic exchange takes place by means of instantaneous
>transactions, and the social market by means of transactions which are
>difficult to quantify and take time to balance out in a way which is felt
>to be reasonable and just.
>The irony is that our present "egalitarian" approach (by all political
>parties) in the field of education is increasingly producing a set of
>outcomes between the best and the worst schools which is far, far wider
>than the varied outcomes of independent schools. Education is a wonderful
>candidate for almost complete decentralisation of its functions.
I guess the process varies with jurisdiction: putting a requirement
on acceptable product seems to do a fairly good job of keeping the
output uniform here. Of course, we haven't been subject to sociopathic
right wing idealogues seeking to gut the public sector for the last
decade.
-Pete Vincent
