Re: Campaign Against Public Schools

Bruce Robinson (bruce.rob who-is-at btinternet.com)
Fri, 21 May 1999 19:04:17 +0100

> On Fri, 14 May 1999 MDLedoux who-is-at aol.com wrote:
>
> > Vouchers may not be the answer. Then again, they may cause the demise of
the
> > public education structure as we know it. None of us seem very happy
with
> > "business as usual." Maybe beginning over would be advantageous.
>
> Michael,
>
> Whose kids would you like to forgo their education while we begin
> to rebuild this 150-year old institution from scratch. Children of
> parents with means have never done without education, even prior to the
> fledgling public school experiments of the post Civil War era. By giving
> in to the reactionary cries to euthanise our ailing system of public
> education, we appease the privileged and betray the powerless.
> Ultimately we betray ourselves by openly accepting mass illiteracy
> at this most inopportune moment when the larger mass of productive workers
> are contributing to a postmodern economy not with plows and shovels but
> with words and numbers.
>
> Martin R.

I agree with this strongly - and also with what Ethel and Phil said - apart
from the last sentence. It seems to me that the educational system is being
remodelled precisely in order to create a polarised workforce with a highly
qualified set of graduates at one end (though in the UK a degree is no
longer a guarantee of anything on the job market) and a set of almost
totally unqualified people at the other, who can either join the reserve
army of the unemployed, do Mc Donald's type service work, sweep the streets
or peddle drugs. Less and less skills are necessary to do the kind of jobs
most school-leavers will end up doing. It's not even necessary to do mental
arithmetic to give change - the cash register does it for you. Hence neither
Labour nor Conservative governments in the UK seem to be worried too much
about the massive cuts which there have been in education since the 70s,
despite the rhetoric of 'education, education, education.' (What do I mean
worried, they've presided over them!)

I also agree we should not let concern about the quality of public education
be a pretext for the expansion of private or charitable interests. (In the
UK, both private, semi-private and state-funded religious education compete
with the standard state system, which itself still has a legal obligation to
give some form of religious education.) The UK government has continued with
the Tories' league tables which brand schools as failing on the basis of
exam results without any weighting for the social environment they draw
their pupils from. The schools with the worst results naturally lose any
pupils from middle class backgrounds, which serves to make them into
so-called 'sink' schools where only those without enough money or a loud
enough voice to get their kids into the better schools end up sending them.
(Hence the hypocrisy of Mr. Blair in sending his own kids to a Catholic
secondary schoool at the other end of London from where he lived.) These
'failing' schools are now to be taken out of democratic control and handed
over to private interests.

Bruce Robinson

>