Sikiza Asemacho Tajiri huyu Warren Buffett kuhusu
Elimu:
"What if I
said to you that the solution to the problems in our education system would be
to "make private schools illegal and assign every child to a [state]
school by random lottery"?
Ungesikiza
tusemacho masikini sisi hapa Bongo na viEnglish Medium vyetu, ungezimia kama
sio kufariki kabisa.
Soma makala ya Mehdi Hasan kwenye
the Huffington post.
Warren Buffett Is Right: It's Time to Ban Private
Schools
Posted: 06/09/2012 00:00
What if I said to you that the solution to the
problems in our education system would be to "make private schools illegal
and assign every child to a [state] school by random lottery"?
That's the view not of Karl Marx or the Chinese
Communist Party but of the billionaire US investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett. The "Sage of
Omaha" has been a longstanding campaigner for equality of opportunity and
social mobility - and sees the existence of private schools as a major barrier
to both. For Buffett, the fact that a tiny minority of wealthy families can
choose to opt out of the state sector, and send their children to expensive and
elite private schools, has a negative impact on the overall education of the
vast majority of students whose families cannot afford to do the same.
Full disclaimer: I went to private school from the
age of 11 to 18. So did my sister and many of my closest friends. My wife wants
to send our own kids to private school.
But I'm with Buffett. Private schools are a blight
on our society; they are divisive and corrosive. Here in the UK, we don't like
to talk about such schools or discuss their excessive power and influence. It's
one of the biggest taboos in British politics; the educational elephant in the
room. Too many politicians and pundits would much rather argue about the
challenge of grade inflation, the future of "gold-plated" A-levels or
the role of the teaching unions than address the reality that, in the words of
the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the "great rift in our education
system" is "between our best schools, most of which are private, and
the schools ordinary families rely on.
It is should be a national scandal that private
schools educate only 7% of the school population yet former pupils of private
schools dominate the upper echelons of British society and public life: the
City, the media, the courts, the civil service, the arts. Two-thirds of the
coalition government's ministers, more than half of the Cabinet (including, of
course, Clegg himself) and a third of all MPs went to private school. The
number of Old Etonians elected to the Commons jumped by a third in 2010.
Is this - dare I use the word - fair? Can such
blatant and profound inequality be morally justified? In December 2011, a study
by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)
warned how British private schools were entrenching a form of "social
apartheid" and promoting a ruling class drawn from a "segregated
elite". Private schools, the NCSR concluded, "produced Conservative
partisans" with a "sense of superiority bonus" and less concern
with social inequality than their state-educated counterparts.
So why not heed Buffett's advice and shut them
down? Why not follow the example of Finland, which doesn't have any
private schools and yet regularly tops the various international education
league tables?
Banning private schools would be a controversial
but crucial first step towards building a truly meritocratic society, in which
all of our children are allowed to start their educational race from the same
spot.
The Buffett proposal - shuttering the Etons and
Westminsters of this world and redistributing their pupils to local state
schools via a lottery - would also drive up standards across the board by
forcing rich families to invest - emotionally, physically, politically and
financially - in a state school system that, currently, they resent having to
pay for (through their taxes), their children do not use and they themselves
deem to be inferior and substandard.
"How fast would it take to turn things around
[in the state sector]?" asked the US education expert James Kamras in an interview in March, in which he discussed the
impact of forcing private school pupils into the state sector. "Five
minutes? Ten?" He continued: "I'm not suggesting this is realistic,
or that it's the right way to approach the problem. It's just a provocative
thought-experiment, designed to demonstrate that until every family sees the
fate of our [state] schools as their own problem, we may suffer a lack of
urgency and prioritisation when it comes to education reform."
This isn't, incidentally, an issue of "left
versus right". In 2010, the then chancellor of Washington DC's public
(i.e. state) schools, Michelle Rhee, a darling of US conservative education
reformers, admitted that a ban on private schools would
"see a faster moving of resources from one end of the city to the other. I
also guarantee we would soon have a system of high-quality schools."
In May, here in the UK, the Conservative education
secretary, Michael Gove, used a speech in front of private school headteachers to
decry the "sheer scale, the breadth and the depth of private school
dominance of our society" as a "deep problem in our country".
And, in July, Stephen Twigg, the uber-Blairite
shadow education secretary who has controversially softened his party's stance
on free schools, hinted that a future Labour government might legislate to
ensure that private schools deemed not to be serving the community would lose
their charitable status - saving the taxpayer up to £100m a year. In an
interview with the Guardian Twigg acknowledged that private schools
were "a major barrier to achieving a more just society and greater social
mobility".
However, such political interventions are rare. And
despite their rhetoric, the likes of Gove, Clegg and Twigg remain unwilling to
consider the Buffett proposal and remove this "major barrier" to
social justice and social mobility. They are petrified of being accused of
engaging in "class warfare" or the "politics of envy". And,
in the clash of values - between the liberty of parents to educate their
children where they wish versus the need for social equality in a divided
society - they opt for liberty over equality. That's why we have this rather
surreal situation now in which politicians both on the left and the right
bicker over grammar schools, free schools and city academies while the
"great rift" in our education system - between the state and
independent sectors - is left unexamined and untouched.
Shamefully, the rest of us also turn a blind eye to
this grotesque educational apartheid in our midst. As the Observer's Kevin McKenna
observed in 2010, "Not enough of us find it strange that a cartel of elite
schools exists solely for those privileged children born into wealth and
power... and the few dozen proles they deign to admit for the purpose of
preserving their wretched charitable status."
Let me be clear: this isn't an attack on private
school pupils or their families, or on the difficult choices that each
individual parent has to make for their son or daughter. For the second time in
recent weeks, I find myself in agreement with Clegg, who has argued that he doesn't "for a moment
denigrate the decision of any parent to do their best for their child, and to
choose the best school for them. Indeed, that aspiration on behalf of children
is one of the most precious ingredients of parenthood." But, he says,
"we do need to ensure that our school system as a whole promotes fairness
and mobility."
He's right. As I said, my own parents paid for me
to be educated at private school. I understand why they did so and there is no
point in me pretending that I wouldn't be where I am today without the (unfair)
advantage that their investment provided me with.
Yet there is no escaping the big picture: a
two-tier education system produces a two-tier society, divided between the rich
and the rest. It is morally and socially untenable.
Our schools should be at the forefront of promoting
civic solidarity and guaranteeing social mobility; private schools, however, do
the opposite. They produce not a meritocracy but a plutocracy, in which a tiny
minority is able to entrench its power and privilege. Thus the inconvenient
truth is this: if we genuinely want to create a level playing field for our
children, and ensure equality of opportunity and social justice, there can be
no place for private schools. It is time to abolish our educational caste
system.
chanzo: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/warren-buffett-is-right-ban-private-schools_b_1857287.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
