My house is sandwiched between two schools. To my left, and as it happens slightly down the slope, is the state primary school. Turn right at my garden gate and there is a private school a little up the hill.
Two different ideas in education, and as such I suspect they never meet up much. No reason why they should: they are just kids of people with different priorities even if as kids they are probably much the same in their interests and activities.
If I had lived in the house where I now live I know that going out of the garden gate as a fresh-faced ten year old say, I'd be turning left to go to the state school. I probably wouldn't even have looked up the hill: my parents had little money so I went to the place with the tall rooms and the tendency to make us line up for our morning milk. Yes, that's right: I was of the generation that had morning milk (seeing the third-of-a-pint bottles lined up on the radiators on a freezing morning and us all trying to poke straws through the icy block of milk to get a drink was a sight that will stay with me) so you can see I went to a state primary school when I was little, shortly before my wife went to a private school. Sometimes I tell her about the horrors of schooling where I went and she responds with the horrors of education where she went. Together we can conclude that being a kid in school can have its horrors, relatively speaking.
If I look at the downhill school each morning I see the road outside it (and spreading up the hill) full of cars disgorging their kids. If I look up the hill I see the road at the top (and spreading down it) full of cars disgorging kids. The ones at the top have uniforms (and interestingly no matter what religion the girls so far follow the rules of the school and wear skirts and dresses with no headscarves) but the ones lower down the hill can wear what they want, and do.
By and large the cars allowing kids to get out on the road side into traffic are much the same either at the bottom of the hill or the top, and by and large the parents are much the same even if the state school does have more of one ethnic group and noticeably more of one gender than the private school does. But kids are kids and as they struggle out of the backs of cars into the flowing traffic they have, top or bottom, to listen to their parents give them last minute instructions about lunch and so on. Instructions from parents who can't be arsed to get out of their driving seat as their kids try to make it to the pavement in one piece.
Some of the parents will park in the worst place they can at both schools, and at both places of learning some mothers shepherding their little darlings look weary before the day has even begun. It was ever thus, at least about the weariness if not the parking.
Well, that's kids and parents for you wherever they are headed.
There is however one thing that unites the parents of all these kids: they all pay for a state education. Both groups of parents (if they work) are taxed by the state to provide for their child's education whether they pay privately or not.
That's the thing about private education: the parents are in fact paying twice for their kid to go to school. You could argue, in a happy-I'm-a-socialist way that this then is penalty incurred on those who don't want for whatever reason to send their offspring to a state school. Paying twice is an example of some sort of left-leaning justice, an idea of which animates the hard-of-thinking 'intellectuals' in their eternal quest for fairness solely on their terms. It is also possible to argue that the ones who send their kids to a private school are thus making the load lighter for the state school system by removing their kids from possibly already crowded classrooms, and making a contribution to the costs of educating other children.
Whatever you argue or feel about private education, the question arises why there are parents who want their children to go elsewhere -- at a cost -- to be educated. As it happens, I know a family whose child is currently in a private school and they tell me they have no problem with paying taxes for education that they essentially don't use (though this is taxation for you: we can argue many of us pay taxes for things we don't directly use such as nuclear weapons, well-paid 'comedians' at the BBC and buying personal jets for tyrants in other parts of the world, and so on) but think their child will benefit more from a private education.
The child in question does seem to be getting a good education and is developing interest in all sorts of things and gaining skills in a variety of areas. It comes at a cost but the parents feel it is money well-spent. They have to make sacrifices in order to pay for their child's private education but they accept it is part of the deal. If they want their child to have a chance in future at a shrinking number of jobs and opportunities, they think this is the best way.
Others may feel differently about their money and want to spend their hard-earned cash in other ways while their kids are taken care of by the state. So it goes, and each to their own.
But one thing makes me think about this, putting aside the moral or political questions of how we want our kids educated and what it costs, and it is something I see every day I take the dog for a walk. It's a little thing in the great scheme of life and while it may be wrong to blame kids, I have to say this: there is far more litter such as drink cans and sweet wrappers and gum on the pavement outside the school down the hill than at the top.
Whatever they teach in these two schools something happens to the kids more at one than the other. It may be sheer numbers (the private school is smaller than the state one) but somehow at the private establishment the kids there seem to understand that the world is not a litter-bin.
For all I know the fact that kids are making an effort to be smart in uniform and looking at a greater variety in school or aware that their parents are paying for it all -- or perhaps the teachers have more time or more inclination to make the point -- but the kids at the top don't litter the place anything like the ones at the bottom. But then, talking to someone in education, the problem is often that kids in low income families go to school with their breakfast in the hand, consisting of crisps and a can of fizzy pop (apparently the sight of a child chewing gum and eating crisps at the same time while swigging cola is amazing, and revolting) and so breakfast's remains end up on the floor outside the school.
Perhaps in the act of paying for education, a lot of those parents make an effort to get their children to eat at home and not on the road. It's small thing, but just one of those little differences you get to see when it comes to argument between state and private schools.
Maybe it all comes down to the different ways of parenting: a choice of feeding the kids crisps at home or letting them feed themselves crisps on the street.
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