On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 12:02:00 +0000 (GMT), John Cartmell
wrote:

In article ,
Andy Hall wrote:
It's far from misguided to send a child to a private school. The
results in terms of educational and other outcome are plain to see;

Most of the benefits are because of inappropriate fast-tracking of ex-public
school products - and this is certainly not in the public interest.

Public schools are but a small part of the private education sector.

I was talking about the individual and the educational benefits.
Unless you have actually experienced use of both sectors personally,
it is difficult to appreciate those.

Other
benefits come from the freedom available to private schools to exclude pupils
and have other sanctions not available in the public sector.

All schools should have the ability to exclude pupils under certain
circumstances. This is how things work in adult life.



Only then do the benefits of small classes and better equipment step in.

The benefits of small classes are apparent from the outset in terms of
the attention that each pupil gets and the accelerated speed of
learning. Again, unless you have been involved in and seen the
results personally, it is not easy to appreciate the benefits.


I'd like to see all private schools closed because everyone appreciated that
the public sector schools were clearly better;

Who is this "everyone"? The trouble is that public sector schools
have been in decline for a generation or more. Not their fault by any
means, but as the result of being dicked around by the political and
social experiments in education carried out by successive governments.

The benefit of private sector education is that it has, to some
extent, been insulated from some of the worst excesses of that.


the mere existence of private
schools puts a charge on the public purse that is difficult to calculate but
is probably very high - it has certainly contributed to the bad state of
management in UK industry.

The existence of private schools (and I mean in general, not public
schools) has been to retain a quality in education despite the worst
efforts of successive governments to destroy it.

The bad state of UK industry has been for numerous reasons,
predominantly related in one way or another to government
interference.


--

..andy