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.


Agreed, but that's only a hand full of schools, Eton, Rugby,
Winchester et al. Grossly unfair never the less.

Some public sector schools are also "well connected" with the best
universities.

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


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

Smaller classes, yes, in infant school whilst learning to read. OTOH
My daughter goes to lectures in Uni which have "classes" of 200.

When I looked around provincial schools about 8 years ago, public
sector and private were equipped with identical sets of kit, topic by
topic.


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

It's a symptom, it's not the disease. The disease is the British
attitude to the people that do the actual, tangible, productive work.

DG