MerciBeau wrote: Why abolish public schools? Just make them compelled to have say, 25% of their intake from more ordinary backgrounds on scholarships/bursaries… Giving smart kids from poor backgrounds access to better quality education would be great.
This doesn't solve anything. Just gives a leg up to a tiny minority of kids lucky enough to go a public school. What about the kids from poor backgrounds that don't make the cut? Unlucky for them.
Also, defining 'ordinary backgrounds' is near impossible itself? The more savvy rich will find loopholes in the system to define themselves as 'ordinary'. Just look at a country which has rules like this which are known to all to be a joke.
"I am a company director of a £10m+ turnover business. I pay myself £8k a year. I'm not rich, I'm
ordinary"
MerciBeau wrote: I went to a bottom 10% Ofsted ranking utter shithole of a state school - and the overwhelming majority of the kids there were indeed thick, but there was also a significant minority who were loads smarter than the kind of privately educated kids I went on to encounter at uni and in my career yet they never managed to realise their ability cos the thick kids dragged them down.
Just give up on the thick kids. Fuck 'em. Ever wonder cause vs effect? What if these kids are 'thick' because of shit teachers that can't be arsed teaching them and give up on them? Do we expect all kids to come into school and be smart as shit from the get go?
I've worked in a professional corporate environment, and the smarter, state school-educated kids are consistently outperformed (rising up the ranks) by their public school counterparts. Largely because of soft skills (e.g. they knew how to speak to their seniors) that the state school kids were never taught. In all careers (apart from those which require massive technical knowledge), these soft skills will help climb the ladder much more than book smarts.
Also, I will never understand this argument:
"I managed to make it despite my against-all-odds upbringing. Why can't everyone do it too?"
EDIT: the country with the quota is India
EDIT: I went to a grammar school