Blackrock College, Blackrock, County Dublin
About that Ninety Million in public funds that went to private schools last year…
Via today’s Irish Times:
Letters published in your newspaper in recent days, justifying State subsidies to private schools, have based their arguments on economic grounds.
The perhaps uncomfortable reality is that such subsidies are perpetuating privilege. If it were not for the extra facilities and social capital such schools offer, why would parents and teenagers choose them? And who would blame them?
As with health, we want the best for us and our loved ones. The State, however, must consider what best serves the common good.
A primary aim of any education system must be to empower all children. Perhaps equity, rather than equality, should inform our educational policies.
Dr Shane Bergin,
School of Education,
UCD.
Fight!/WEDGIE!
Subsidies for private schools (The Irish Times letters page)
Related: Private schools receive €90m in public funding (Carl O’Brien, The Irish Times, July 30, 2019)
What could possibly ooze privilege more than a PhD from Trinners. Is it not equitable that all schools get funded by the state and then if some wish to top up with fees then good luck to them? From the point if view of the state, it’s treating everyone the same.
That’s equality rather than equity.
Sorry yes, equality is where everyone is treated fairly but equity is the one where if we are playing basketball and I’m taller than you, you get to cut my legs off because I’m exploiting an inherited height privilege to which I have no right
Yes – if two sets of parents have same income and one sends kids to public and one private, see no reason why should state’s contribution be less for one child that the other. Let’s say state outlaw private schools and everyone is on level playing field – parents will just funds grinds etc. in lieu of fees and it will still be a 2 tier system.
Except it would go some way towards eliminating the ‘old boy network’ which sees ‘jobs for the boys’, depending on what school you went to
Jobs for the boys is far more prevalent in the those systems that have attempted the “equity” experiment. You didn’t get onto the politburo through competence and working hard.
The biggest old boy network in Ireland is the GAA, with jobs for the boys aplenty. Eliminating private schools won’t stop wealthy people from forming networks either (already do in the golf club etc). Making more places available, with tutor support, in college would likely help disadvantaged into the old boy network, as there will always be one.
In most places I have worked, jobs are more likely to be doled out based on family ties than school ties.
What makes someone who goes to Trinity more privileged than someone who went to UCD?
A vastly outdated belief that Trinity is for rich Protestants and UCD is for the rest.
Innate intelligence and elegance.
Wasn’t it also said that if you couldn’t get into Oxford or Cambridge, there’s always Trinity?
Probably decades ago. I’d be very disappointed if my child chose any English college over an Irish one. Even with the faults in our education system, its far superior to England.
The reason for state funding of private schools in this manner is to ensure the continued viability of the provincial Protestant boarding schools, necessary due to the diffuse nature of the Protestant population. It is an old practice that was instituted in an attempt to convince the Free State’s Protestants that the new state was not instituting policies tantamount to ethnic cleansing.