In Defence of Private Education

Dear friends,

Firstly, let me express what personal interests I have in this topic. I have attended three provate schools in my life, two of them international schools while I lived abroad, and the third in Birmingham, which I attended with both a bursary and scholarship, meaning that when the maths was worked out they ended up owing me money. They never paid up, the rascals. Furthemore, I have recently taken on a student who I am to be privately tutoring in Latin (which I will have to learn a lot more of first), history, French, sketching, philosophy and the ukelele.

I have several lines of argument in favour of the legality of private school education. Firstly, better education is better. Secondly, we ought not sacrifice the futures of bright children in order to raise minima. Thirdly, we are right toe be concerned about inequality of material things and opportunity, but attacking private education is an unhelpful distraction from tackling the root causes. Fourthly, it is unsanctionable to forbid people to take part in activities which lead to the betterment of our civilisation. Finally I will lay out my ideas about how to tackle the problems that people see associated with private education by means other than banning private schools.

Better education is better. If parents have a choice between free education and education they have to pay for, in the context of the full-time education of minors, they have no reason to pay for education unless it is better than the free education. Therefore, if people act sensibly, parents paying for education for their children leads to better education for many young people. It is true that this is a benefit that cannot be enjoyed by all, but there are ways of getting around that, such as by making private schools' charitable status contingent of the provision of sufficient bursaries (which are available only to those with low parental incomes, and are not dependent on ability) and scholarships (which do not take into account parental income but are dependent on ability), therefore incentivising the best schools to help the least well off. The most common objection to this point is that allowing bright children to go to good schools lowers aspirations in less good schools as they do not have the benefit of bright children setting good examples. It is this point that my second line of argument seeks to address.

Firstly, the objection is based on a classification difference between bright children and less bright children, which is a distinction I had hoped to avoid in this discussion, but the objection to my first point cannot be made without said distinction and so I am forced to consider it. I know it is terribly vulgar, but I must resort at this point to personal anecdote as a flawed form of argument. Classification according to ability is acceptable given sufficient flexibility is present within the system for the inevitable times when promising students disappoint and disappointing students show promise. I was a largely indifferent student for much of my life, but in my later years of school I began to acquire some momentum. I applied to two schools in the UK, one a good grammar school and the other a private school. The grammar school was unwilling to admit me on the back of my increased abilities, the private school gave me a scholarship. I mean to suggest that, in fact, private educators are often better at recognising previously undiscovered talent and bringing it in, and the state mechanisms for doing this can often be too unresponsive. Perhaps the state discrimination between students with more or less potential is too inflexible to be any good, but private schools are more able in responding to these differences.

Now that we have dealt with the idea of bright children and less bright children and children who change between the two, let me turn my attention to the sacrificial lamb argument. Banning private schools, assuming they were benefitting some children, and making those children go to state schools, is exactly like using those children as sacrificial lambs for the benefit of other people. It is treating a person, a child in fact, as means to some other ends. I don't think is fair, we should allow people to do what is best for them. Related to this point is the idea that there is some conflict between equality of education and excellence. I think there is a chance that a conflict of this nature exists, and it is up to us as a society to decide where in the scale between excellence in education and equality we want to stand. I would not sacrifice the futures of a million children for on Einstein ("By the age of nine I had mastered differential calculus"), but I think there is an argument to be made that some sacrifice might be worth making in roder to produce an Einstein, and this may require some small sacrifice in the form of state-educated pupils having fewer role models in their classes. In the end I think this a question of means and ends. I wonder if it is any coincidence that the architects of modernity, Leibniz and Spinoza, were both privately educated in excellent schools. I don't subscribe to a "great man" theory of history, but in the world of ideas we do rely on the cultivation of exceptional minds to progress.

There is a way to frame the "sacrificial lamb" argument in Rawlsian terms. It is true that according to the difference principle Rawls can support taking the resources of the most well off in order to help the least well off, and with things like wealth one can see how this is a good idea. But Rawls advocates the priority of liberty before equality, and what freedom could be more important than the freedom to learn? Appraised in some ways, one cannot think of a scarier thing to forbid than learning. It seems almost like the strongest form of oppression, an oppression of the mind itself. I do not think that I am guilty of using hysterical language here, and I would find it very troubling for somebody not to think that these are legitimate concerns.

This bring me to my third line of argument, that people attacking private schools as the source of inequality are missing the root cause. Private education isn't the cause of massive inequality, it is better described as a result of it. It may be the case that it is one of the mechanisms by which that inequality is perpetuated, but it is hardly the worst of said mechanisms. In factit is probably the best, since as well as meaning inequalities are perpetuated accross generations, it also means that some people are better educated than they would have been. The real culprit in the UK when it comes to inequality is a cowardly tax system that does not tax wealth. Inheritance tax is low, and council tax is a regressive abomination. It is true that private schools are a powerful symbol of privelege, but serious thinking about policy should not consist of trying to knock over mere symbols. I must further contend that even if we were to ban private schools, people could still have private tutors for their children, which in fact many of us who have learnt a musical instrument at some point have had. Educational inequality is here to stay. We should not let debates about private schools distract from teh more important conversation about how to make the state education system, which brings up the minima in education, as good as possible while taking into account other uses of public money and limits to our willingness to tax. On this point, I am sure that it is less important to spend more money on education and more important to spend it more wisely, and to deal with the economic hardship that is at the root cause of much educational disadvantage and which banning private schools would do nothing to change.

As to the charitable status of private schools, it has always seemed to be to be a peculiar thing to be bothered about with private schools. I agree with the argument that private schools which are just out to make a profit should probably not have charitable status, but I conclude from it that private schools should have charitable status only if they are in fact charitable. As a recipient of private school charity myself, I must say that they can be very charitable indeed, and in fact charity law in the UK favour education as one of the most uncontroversial forms of charity, and much to my annoyance the things least likely to be awarded charitable status are those which are at all political, a real problem when one is trying to win funding for a community organising group for young people.

I believe my fourth point has in itself been a recurring theme throughout this letter, but I do not think it can be overstated. I believe in a civilisation that raises its eyes to the heavens, not one that cowers in the dust. It is true that there is much misery in our society, an inequality is the cause of much of it. But some of it just comes from us being the kind of people that we are in the kind of system that we are in. We cannot let our quite appropriate seriousness about the problems we face prevent us from thinking about those things that make us so exceptional: the worlds of philosophy, culture and science, of exploration and advancement. Institutions that aid us in these things should be encouraged, and, indeed, mimicked, not destroyed.

We should encourage brilliant schemes like Teach First, and pay teachers more to raise their prestige in teh eyes of this society. We should prevent abuses of the tax system, and tax wealth and inheritance more severely. We should try to foster a culture of equality and not of anti-excellence. We should consider alternatives to our psuedo-meritocratic market capitalist system, and find a way to reward those who strive without punishing people who fail or just make the mistake of being born in the geographic and economic conditions. The greatness we can achieve transcends economic systems and tax law. Many private schools have a longer history than neo-liberalism and should not be seen as part of the same problem. In fact, through their nurturing of inquisitive minds they may just end up producing the solution.

Caleb