[Chuck Stone]

Got as far as about the 4th/5th mention of social engineering before I felt like punching the fucking screen.

Will the people who keep mentioning social engineering as if it were some grand conspiracy against the 'more resourceful' please explain to me how they have imagined that they exist outside a socially engineered system?

I'll save you the time. You don't.

[KarmaBaby]

Originally Posted by KyussBishop

I don't think there are other countries relying heavily (interpreting that as a majority) on private education; the closest would be some developing countries like India.

The U.S. and Turkey are two good examples. the private sector has a monopoly of education in Turkey, particularly at third level. I know because I've studied in Ankara. You also couldn't really classify education in Australia and New Zealand as "public" because of their ridiculous loan system which put many people in 6 figure debts. The less the state funds educaiton via the exchequer the more schools and universities invariable end up behaving like private institutions with a profit motive. In that sense they are only publicly owned in name.

[Valmont]

Originally Posted by KyussBishop

if it were to work even in theory (which is highly debatable, as the Libertarian discussions show)

How on earth does private education not 'work in theory'?

Extending your usual criticism, was the current system tested prior to its implementation? Did some institution 'empirically' test an entire system of part public part private education and then carefully measure the results before moving things along? What journal was the study published in?

In fact, what is the evidence in favour of the state providing education in the first place? Why shouldn't they make shoes or bread? Or the statePhone 4S?

[KarmaBaby]

Originally Posted by BOHtox

Not at all. Currently, what we're doing is by having a state curriculum, we limit the knowledge a child can learn. Most children are suited to a state curriculm. I wanted to do Economics, Business and Accounting in school. I couldn't due to number. A guy who did his leaving cert with me is in Rathmines college repeating. He has classes of 5 or 6 for some subjects. So in private education, I would have been able to have my choices and I'd be doing something I like instead of being forced to do Irish or another subject I didn't like.

We cannot tar all children with th eone brush. By having a state curriculum we limit what children learn and this is only suited to some students.

It's not just economic but it makes educational sense!

This is an amazing contradiction in your post.

You wanted to study primarily Finance/Business related subjects, but the state curriculum meant you got a more diverse and balanced educaiton.

Your choices would have limited your own knowledge to one area from a young age.

It is important for every child to have a balance that includes arts, science, languages, history, geography and so on. and it is also important in the make up of society that people are well educated in all areas.

There is a time and place to specialise in order to choose your future career. It's called college.

[K-9]

Originally Posted by Permabear

I don't follow. Can you explain?

I think the figures quoted are about 80% of the education budget goes on pay so a taxpayer sending a child to a private school is getting 80% of their tax contribution back through the state subsidy.

From your previous post:

This also implies that the parents of a private-school child pay twice over for education — once in the form of the taxes they pay toward funding our €8.5 billion public education system, and again in the form of tuition fees so that their child can attend a private school.

They aren't paying twice over as the state pays a subsidy back to the private school to pay salaries.

Private schools have most of their wage bill paid by the state. They can, at their discretion, hire additional teachers who are paid from tuition revenue.

Tuition fees don't include teachers' salaries. As a result, Irish private tuition is modest by international standards. The Irish Times article linked above states that the average private tuition in Cork is €3,350.

Exactly. The parent isn't paying for education twice over as you seem to think though. They are getting the majority of their tax contribution back.

[dsmythy]

Why does equality always involve dragging people down rather than pulling them up? Would shutting down private schools improve public ones?

[K-9]

Originally Posted by KarmaBaby

This is an amazing contradiction in your post.

You wanted to study primarily Finance/Business related subjects, but the state curriculum meant you got a more diverse and balanced educaiton.

Your choices would have limited your own knowledge to one area from a young age.

It is important for every child to have a balance that includes arts, science, languages, history, geography and so on. and it is also important in the make up of society that people are well educated in all areas.

There is a time and place to specialise in order to choose your future career. It's called college.

Indeed, I had the option to take 3 Business subjects for my Leaving and I took 3, I wouldn't recommend it tbh.

[Permabear]

Originally Posted by KarmaBaby

...private education--which is only available to the rich--reinforces the class divide, ensures that that minority remains in power, and that the state is run in their own greedy interests...

The claim that private education "is only available to the rich" is not supported by the facts. The Independent reported last year:

Increases in student numbers have been reported in Mount Anville, Belvedere and Wesley College.

Fees for a privileged education average at around €5,000 a year for each child.

If fees for "privileged education" average around €5,000, putting a child through five years of private secondary school would cost around €25,000. We're hardly in the realm of the super-rich here. Any middle-class parent who starts saving early and regularly can afford this.

If a couple spent €25,000 on their wedding, that would be considered par for the course in Ireland. But if they saved that money and put it toward education for they child, they would find themselves accused by people like you of rending the fabric of society asunder, perpetuating a class divide, and keeping the political establishment in the control of a privileged minority.

In any case, the latter claim makes little sense. I don't know the figures for the current Dáil — but in the government that left office last year, just 18 of 166 TDs had attended a private school.

[KyussBishop]

Originally Posted by Valmont

How on earth does private education not 'work in theory'?

Extending your usual criticism, was the current system tested prior to its implementation? Did some institution 'empirically' test an entire system of part public part private education and then carefully measure the results before moving things along? What journal was the study published in?

In fact, what is the evidence in favour of the state providing education in the first place? Why shouldn't they make shoes or bread? Or the statePhone 4S?

Regardless of the origins of the current education system, it obviously has a lot of empircal evidence backing up how it functions where an all-private system doesn't.

What is not obvious with an all-private system, is how it would resolve the social segregation issue (proponents usually say social segregation is not an issue); that is one of the big practical hurdles of private education, that no resolution to that appears to exist, and proposed solutions to that are not tested.

[KyussBishop]

Originally Posted by Permabear

The claim that private education "is only available to the rich" is not supported by the facts. The Independent reported last year:

Private education disproportionately favours the rich, particularly as the fees do not scale based upon income like taxes do.

People with high incomes find it disproportionately easier to send their kids to good private schools than those with low incomes, so it it creates an inherent and automatic imbalance; a greater percentage of low-earners wages go to school funds, and a much smaller percentage of high-earners wages.

[seamus]

Originally Posted by KyussBishop

What is not obvious with an all-private system, is how it would resolve the social segregation issue (proponents usually say social segregation is not an issue); that is one of the big practical hurdles of private education, that no resolution to that appears to exist, and proposed solutions to that are not tested.

An idealised public-only system is incongruent with a free society.

Naturally people will congregate into communities of their peers. Middle class people will live in middle class areas. Working class in working class areas and so forth.

If you force schools to only accept people from their catchment areas, then the rich kids will all attend the same schools. If you have no enforced catchment areas, the schools themselves will be required to come up with their own fair system for allocating places which will undoubtedly conclude that those living closest to the school have more fair right to a place than those living far way.
Otherwise you have a ludicrous situation where a local child is forced to attend a school far away for no reason other than he failed to be selected in a lottery for any of the local schools. That in itself is contrary to the idea of a free society.

So ultimately you end up with the same problem no matter what you do - rich kids attend the same schools, poorer kids attend the same schools.

You could argue that the standard of education is uniform - and that's true to an extent - but as we all know from having been in school, the quality of any education is highly dependent on the quality of the students. A class with better students will learn faster than a class with poorer students.
Which means that the rich schools, whose kids will be attending extracurricular activities and whose parents have a higher regard for education, will perform better than the poorer schools where the kids go play football from 4pm to 10pm and the parents are less enthused about education.

[KyussBishop]

Originally Posted by seamus

An idealised public-only system is incongruent with a free society.

Naturally people will congregate into communities of their peers. Middle class people will live in middle class areas. Working class in working class areas and so forth.

If you force schools to only accept people from their catchment areas, then the rich kids will all attend the same schools. If you have no enforced catchment areas, the schools themselves will be required to come up with their own fair system for allocating places which will undoubtedly conclude that those living closest to the school have more fair right to a place than those living far way.
Otherwise you have a ludicrous situation where a local child is forced to attend a school far away for no reason other than he failed to be selected in a lottery for any of the local schools. That in itself is contrary to the idea of a free society.

So ultimately you end up with the same problem no matter what you do - rich kids attend the same schools, poorer kids attend the same schools.

You could argue that the standard of education is uniform - and that's true to an extent - but as we all know from having been in school, the quality of any education is highly dependent on the quality of the students. A class with better students will learn faster than a class with poorer students.
Which means that the rich schools, whose kids will be attending extracurricular activities and whose parents have a higher regard for education, will perform better than the poorer schools where the kids go play football from 4pm to 10pm and the parents are less enthused about education.

There are a lot of good points here, but I don't think catchment areas need to be a part of this new system, and even if there is still a locality-selection process for the schools, that is a different problem to what my OP tries to address.

Lets say all the problems you point out there stand: things then change from an issue of social segregation due to wealth, plus neglect of the public system (through the wealthy and politically influential being able to bypass it), to an issue where societal problems in poor areas affect the quality of the schooling.

This is an issue that exists even in the current system, so that is still a net-benefit, as at least in principal it affords everyone a more balanced level of equal opportunity, even if individual circumstances at certain schools affect that.
You also curtail the worst effects of private schools being able to cream-off easier to teach students through selective admission (as they would not be allowed to discriminate on who they enroll, even if locality is allowed to be a factor), and the wider issues of social segregation enrollment discrimination could aggravate.


Beyond that, there is plenty of room for redefinition of and tweaking of the enrollment process; you could provide a quota that (depending upon demand) a school may have to allow for 10% of students to come from non-local areas, which would be more of a lottery situation.

If demand is high in an area such that you would have to turn away local students to do this, then that would call for a new school in the area.

[Madd Finn]

Part of the frustration with this thread is that the OP takes a comment pertaining to a situation in another jurisdiction and then tries to apply it to the situation here. Apples and oranges don't mix, or at least not in a way that complements one another.

For example there are various references to "private" and "semi-private" schools. What the hell is the difference? In Ireland, so far as I can gather, all fee paying schools are "semi private" in that they are partly funded by the state anyway by virtue of the fact that it pays all teachers' salaries.

The OP seems to be holding up the notion of semi private education (I'm guessing he/she is referring to the British situation here) as being preferable to completely independent privately funded schools. But that is precisely the system we have here, and one of the most vociferous arguments against it is that fee paying schools are being subsidised by tax payers, including those depending on non fee paying schools. Because the state pays the teachers.

"If people want to send their children to fee paying schools," the argument goes. "They should pay the full cost of it".

(NB I don't subscribe to this bonkers argument but it is widely expressed, not least by the main teachers' unions.)

So we already have what the OP seems to be proposing.

One of the differences between non fee paying schools here and in Britain is the selection process. Here, a school can determine its own criteria for selection. This means that among the most coveted schools in Dublin are those non fee payng schools with good reputations. Of course people will send their children to a school in which they have confidence, especially if they don't have to pay extra for it. We're not stupid!

The upshot is that nobody turns away more kids than the good non fee paying schools. And they also spend a lot of money defending themselves legally against challenges from disappointed parents.

In Britain, the critical factor determining who gets accepted to a school is proximity. You live in the school's catchment area; you're in. Period.

This leads to a situation, perfectly accepted over there, whereby parents of kids approaching secondary school age naturally attempt to move to the catchment areas of "good" state schools.

Some close friends of mine are in precisely that process at the moment. These are typical of many people in the middle class in Britain who are generally supportive of the welfare state and wouldn't dream of investing in private health care or sending their children to private schools.

But they're not going to send them to a bad school either, so instead of spending (I'm guessing at fees of £20k a year) £140k over seven years to send their kid to a private school, they will spend half a million quid over 15 years to guarantee their place in a good state school. This is a normal rite of passage for many people in the welfare-state supporting British middle class.

This naturally leads to social stratification and ghettoisation between rich and poor areas. The presence of a good free school pushes up local house prices. And you say you're concerned with avoiding privilege and stratification!

What next? Nobody with a child over ten years old can move house until that child has reached 18. By order. It's to promote "equality".

The simple argument against "banning" private education is that it just cannot be done in a free society. You cannot ultimately tell people how to spend their money. They will kick back and circumvent the system in a way that undermines the effect you are trying to achieve. In some instances they will do so partly JUST to react against a state diktat.

People are like that.

[Eliot Rosewater]

The article author's theory that banning private schools will spurn on the public school system to improve means that at least in one sense his motives are good - but ultimately I think it's a naive view.

In all public education systems there are special interests working directly against better schooling. In Ireland these are public sector trade unions (who are, understandably, against more meritocratic policy) and the Irish lobby, who see Ireland's children's education merely as a means for promoting Irish. The government have their own vested interests - giving the impression, for instance, that certain Irish people are "knowledgeable", even if they're not.

The notion that individual parents, or a group of parents, can successfully challenge these vested interests on a large national scale is a little fantastical, in my opinion. It all goes back to the Public Choice Theory insight: the benefits of certain mediocre schooling policies are concentrated among a very small group of people (school employees, Gaelgoirs, politicians), whereas the costs of them are borne by all of society. Many parents care a lot about the education system but they will never care as much as the INTO do, as members of the INTO derive their living from it. The way it's set up, special interests will always be willing to fight harder for their side than, for instance, parents, who have a whole rake of other things to care about as much as the education system.

[KyussBishop]

Originally Posted by Madd Finn

...

To me, semi-private means that the school is privately administered, but cedes a certain amount of control to the state as an obligation for accepting public funding.
A fully private school, would not cede any amount of control to the state; thus, if a school is to be fully private, it should not receive any funding from the state.

I accept that the situation in the UK does not apply here (or at least, to a much leser extent if it does); the segregation through private schools there is much greater. Also, I don't accept the idea of catchment area's; that isn't a necessary prerequisite of the system in my OP (though a lot of posters seem to assume so).

Also: To make the change to this system, would likely require a referendum due to the constitution, so there would not be a public revolt against it as it would need public approval in the first place