Would you Abolish Eton?

[brynpoeth]

Being able to afford the fees is one thing
Thoyling them is quite another
..
I did brill in the eleven plus, got a free scholarship to a minor public school (boys only), suddenly I was a small fish in a big pool, things went downhill until I crashed out and went to a state grammar school (..)

For railway enthusiasts 'Schools' means a class of beautiful 4-4-0 locomotives named after the infamous institutions
Repton, Stowe, Malvern

[Tigerbiten]

Sounds like an ideal solution .........
Shut the private school and everybody goes to public schools.

But if I could easily afford to send my kid to a £40,000 a year private school and it got shut by the government, would I send my kid to a public school.
No, I'd just send him/her to a £40,000 per year private school somewhere else.

Why not as I can already afford it ..........

[Ben@Forest]

But if I could easily afford to send my kid to a £40,000 a year private school and it got shut by the government, would I send my kid to a public school.
No, I'd just send him/her to a £40,000 per year private school somewhere else.

And that's the problem. With no private schools parents who want to give their children education outside the state system will employ private tutors. For efficency and cost groups of parents will work together to get tutors to provide lessons to groups of their children. These will be remarkably like 'lessons' and the groups will become remarkably like 'schools' but without the legislation and oversight that goes with it.

If the government tries to stop this it will be interfering with personal liberty in a big way and will constantly be trying to plug loopholes.

[dodger]

The key is to improve state schools significantly, whilst removing any tax relief for privately run schools.
I know several people who struggle to pay private school fees because the only state school open to their children is of poor quality.
We aren't looking at elitism here, but a natural reaction to severe underfunding - a system instigated by (largely) politicians who had private education.
If the state system was properly funded and run, including scrapping the ludicrous "Academies" and their over-paid heads, then it would be a strong incentive for parents who would otherwise go private, to send their children to a state school.

[reohn2]

The key is to improve state schools significantly, whilst removing any tax relief for privately run schools.
I know several people who struggle to pay private school fees because the only state school open to their children is of poor quality.
We aren't looking at elitism here, but a natural reaction to severe underfunding - a system instigated by (largely) politicians who had private education.
If the state system was properly funded and run, including scrapping the ludicrous "Academies" and their over-paid heads, then it would be a strong incentive for parents who would otherwise go private, to send their children to a state school.

+1

[Mick F]

I agree they should not receive state subsidy (e.g. through their charitable status or through tax relief, etc.) but to just remove those benefits would result in fees increasing which would make them even more elite open only to the even wealthier.

So what?

If you could afford it and wanted to, you could send your children to any school you wanted anywhere in the world. Just coz Eton my be closed, it doesn't mean that expensive schools wouldn't exist somewhere else.

[Psamathe]

I agree they should not receive state subsidy (e.g. through their charitable status or through tax relief, etc.) but to just remove those benefits would result in fees increasing which would make them even more elite open only to the even wealthier.

So what?

If you could afford it and wanted to, you could send your children to any school you wanted anywhere in the world. Just coz Eton my be closed, it doesn't mean that expensive schools wouldn't exist somewhere else.

There is a difference between allowing it to happen in the UK and what can be done overseas. We have banned fox hunting but people can pay a fortune and go overseas and shoot endangered species. Does that you can pay a fortune to do something overseas make that right and mean we should allow it in the UK.

As I said before (you must have missed it) people sending their kids to public schools are buying far more than an education. The "old school tie" opens many doors in public & private sector and that is part of the elitist problem with such establishments. It should not be a matter of what tie you are wearing but your abilities & capabilities that opens doors.

If people go overseas to private schools so be it but they will not be buying the "open doors" to the same extent. We cannot control laws in other countries but that does not mean we should not do what is right in our own country.

Ian

[Mike Sales]

Abolish Eton and Harrow and Winchester and Shrewsbury and Westminster etc.etc.
Factories of privilege.

[Mike Sales]

We have not talked about the emotional damage that these boarding schools do to their pupils.

The Old Etonian John Julius Norwich, asked for a memory that he thought summed up the spirit of his school, offered the following: after a boy had killed himself “the housemaster summoned the whole house and asked if anybody could suggest a reason. The young David Ormsby-Gore put up his hand and said, ‘Could it have been the food, sir?’” This strikes me as appallingly funny; or funny and appalling. It captures – in its black bad taste and high-stakes insouciance – some of what public schools teach their students. Nothing is so serious it can’t be a joke – and the joke, as Alex Renton notes, both fences with authority and obscurely reinforces it.
In 2014, Renton wrote in the Observer about his experiences in the boarding prep school Ashdown House, describing how he was sexually molested by a teacher; and how, when his contemporaries complained about abuse, they were themselves savagely punished for sneaking. In response to his article, he heard from hundreds with similar stories.

Here is a wide-ranging inquiry into the phenomenon of boarding schools in the UK. Renton paints a picture of class-based groupthink, made-up traditions, contagious snobbery and – in Larkin’s phrase – man handing on misery to man, and it deepening like a coastal shelf. It is striped with pungent quotations from those who have been through the system and been hurt by it. What’s most odd is that parents who had themselves been deeply unhappy at school went on, generation after generation, to send their children to the same places. Renton suggests that “normalisation” – rationalising the pain by deciding that it was good for you after all, or that your parents knew best – may be the psychological mechanism at work.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/12/stiff-upper-lip-by-alex-renton-review

Perhaps this is why they inflict "austerity" on the rest of us so blithely.

[[XAP]Bob]

The issue with trying to ‘quota’ intake to public schools is one aptly demonstrated by Rugby school many years ago. Those kids who were brought in and funded simply didn’t fit and did not do particularly well.
Now, it was an exercise/experiment in extreme social mobility - the school does take a decent number of local kids, many of whom are on significant scholarships (academic/musical etc)... and they do tend to do well.

Get to uni, and the attitude of ‘must be equivalent proportional intake’ doesn’t really address the issues that public school students are far more likely to be able to afford (and therefore want to go to) university.
I am under no illusions that those who have had a private education are in any way better individuals, though many will have been better prepared, but there is also a vested parental interest which is shown to be massively influential - and the ‘attending a fee paying school’ is merely one facet of that that is easily measured.

The other serious issue is that people only think of the top few private secondary schools - the vast majority of independent schools are not charging £40k/year, and don’t have swathes of land.

I also happen to know that Rugby school was originally set up to educate the poor - how ironic - but still financially supports the local school down the road.
It’s not clear cut - except to assert that a blanket closing down is almost certainly the wrong move.

[Mike Sales]

I also happen to know that Rugby school was originally set up to educate the poor -

All the ancient "public" schools were. That is why they are called public. They were taken over by the privileged.

[jb]

You think the super rich will start sending their offspring to the local secondary school because Eton's gone?

Me thinks not

[Mike Sales]

You think the super rich will start sending their offspring to the local secondary school because Eton's gone?

Me thinks not

Me thinks nothing of the kind.

[[XAP]Bob]

I also happen to know that Rugby school was originally set up to educate the poor -

All the ancient "public" schools were. That is why they are called public. They were taken over by the privileged.

Or rather the state system stepped in, so they turned their attention elsewhere..

[Mike Sales]

I also happen to know that Rugby school was originally set up to educate the poor -

All the ancient "public" schools were. That is why they are called public. They were taken over by the privileged.

Or rather the state system stepped in, so they turned their attention elsewhere..

Do you have a source on public school history?