Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children
inews.co.uk
Finland ranked seventh in the world in OECD's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education
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Private schools are a privilege for the upper class and a symptom of the unjust social inequality in capitalism. In an egalitarian society with good public schools, private schools are obsolete and every child has the same chance to get good education independently of their heritage.
Private schools grant an "out" for the wealthy (and by extension, powerful). If they can pay for better results, they're actively incentivised to lobby to defund public schools. If the private option doesn't exist, they're incentivised to lobby to improve public schools (the ones with kids, in any case).
I'm afraid if private schools were removed the really wealthy would just send their kids to study in another country like they already do, and the middle class would lose this option, and we get worse as a whole
Nah just pay for after school programs. I wasn't happy with the level of progress I was seeing with my kids on certain subjects. So after a few attempts to push the schools I gave up and hired tutors. I am not really in the financial position to do this but the alternative is worse.
On the one hand, a significant number of people are motivated to improve public education. On the other, a handful of billionaires' kids move overseas. That's an insignificant trade-off, isn't it?
Countries that invest heavily in public education have the best education standards in the world - see Finland as one example. Even assuming a couple of billionaires aren't better off, why would I care - especially given the massive benefit to the broader population.
What I think would happen is that I would lose private education for my kids and the public ones will still be shit, like all public services in my country
Why would you think that given the fact that this is more or less what the countries with the best education standards in the world do?
We have and had services that have no private option and they're invariably horrible
Why don't they work - bear in mind that we're addressing funding issues, and getting the decision makers more staked into the outcomes.
Dunno, I live in Brazil, I'm used to things not working. Getting from here to what they have in Finland is unlikely
For better or worse, I get the impression that an increase in social spending isn't something you'll need to worry about under the Bolsonaro government.
The problem with this solution in Brazil isn't the solution itself - it's the fact that you have an austerity-focused right-wing government that wants such investment to fail so that they can kill it.
Oh, Bolsonaro is gone, now we have Lula, moving from the extreme right to the extreme left. He wouldn't kill public education, just intensify the communist propaganda that already happens there
My mistake. This policy is socdem stuff though, so leaning in the general direction of communism, and it's been shown to improve educational outcomes better and more equitably than just about any solution out there while massively improving social mobility, and by extension, the concept of meritocracy.
If a government has no interest in rolling this out properly or ability to do so for whatever reason, of course it'll fail - but that's not so much a failure of the policy - it's a failure of the government. If they're unwilling or unable to roll out good policy, I think it's worth asking why.
Government doing everything works better when the government has enough money for it, our taxes, with an already high tax burden, makes about 100 usd for person/month IIRC. There is no policy that will work around that
If there is one thing that my experience living in the UK (having lived in other countries of Northern and Southern Europe) has taught me is that private education as well as non-meritocratic access to higher education are a key component in suppressing social mobility and "keeping people in their place" across generations: in that country the rich and high middle class have this well established path for their children through very expensive private schools (curiously know over there as "public schools", in the same sense of "public" as "anybody can spend a night in the Ritz if they have the £400 to pay for it") and then an "interview" selection process for Oxford and Cambridge where selection criteria are arbitrary such as for example "having attended the right school" (as an aquaintance of mine was told he hadn't, as reason to refuse his application) so that people who popped out of the right vagina and were sent to the "right" (£30k a year+) "public" schools are guaranteed to get in and come out of the other side with a diploma from an "elite" (not quite when it comes to pupils, but definitelly can and do hire some of the best researchers and lecturers) university.
By the way this all continues into their career, since "public" school educated types leverage the connections acquired there (and mommy and daddy's contacts) to literally step into highly paid sinecures purelly on cronyism.
In the UK Education is very much part of a red carpet for life if you were born in the "upper" classes.
My impression there was eventually that, had I been born in the UK to the kind of poor working class parents I was born to, instead of having gone into Physics at Uni thanks to my very high grades at high school and 98% score at the entrance exam (though I ended up switching to and graduating as an EE) and having a successful career across various countries of Europe in Engineering, I would've at best been a car mechanic because the education system in the UK is not at all meritocratic and is designed first and foremost to preserve class membership through the generations.
All this to say that Britain is a perfect example of a very well establish use of private education to maintain the lowest level of social mobility in all of Europe.
PS: Oh, and don't get me started on how "public" schools are "charities" (kid you not!) and thus pay no taxes. It's the very definition of "adding insult to injury" or as they would say over there "really taking the piss out of everybody else".
Interesting, thank's for the elaboration!
Same issue with private health insurance in the US vs. universal healthcare in most other developed countries.
With private schools you can choose what you pay for (at least in theory), and with public schools you take what you're given.
Since school education involves lots of contention by different parties over which exact kind of indoctrination and\or mustering and humiliation will the kids experience, I'd say private schools are a good idea in this particular regard.
However, I live in Russia and here both the concept of private schools isn't quite existent (there are some, but they are very expensive and at the same time not very good, and the prestigious ones are all public, and they'll have the same standard program anyway) and I haven't studied in one.
At least somewhere about 9th grade they gave up trying to make me not sleep at all the lessons.