Finland ranked seventh in the world in OECD’s student assessment chart in 2018, well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education
I think private schools should be banned. Too easy for the rich or even upper income class to gut public schools when you don’t use them. Everyone getting the same education chance is what I call equal opportunity.
Same for health care. If the rich had no other option but to depend on the public system, they’d be more likely to ensure it’s properly funded.
Finland does actually have a private sector for health care.
The difference tends to be in how fast you get appointments for non-critical health issues. If I have a cough I’m worried about, I can go to my employer provided healthcare and speak to a doctor via phone in literally 20 minutes.
The public system atm would diagnose me with an automated quiz and determine my case to be “non-urgent”. I would eventually get a doctors appointment, if I’m persistent and find all the right numbers to call, online forms to fill in, etc.
If the matter is urgent however, the public system takes things very seriously. And private sector doctors will even forward you to a public hospital in some cases, if they don’t have the staff or equipment needed to help you in a particular case. With concussions for example, I’ve just walked into the local ER and been taken care of right away. If you need an ambulance, you don’t need to weigh your life against bankruptcy.
The public system is also efficient (except when it isn’t). That means you won’t always see staff spend their time on bedside manner. Their job is to keep you healthy, not happy (unless you’re there for mental issues). In my experience the private sector has a higher standard for customer service, because you’re not just a patient when you pay for your care. Your satisfaction matters more since they actually care about getting repeat customers.
Meanwhile, public healthcare wold prefer you never come back, which is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes bad.
I use both sides of the system, and as I already mentioned, the two sides inter-operate in many cases. While it’s been a huge mess at times, Finland is investing in a patient-data-management system called APOTTI which lets you switch doctors and care-providers seamlessly taking your patient-history with you. I once got x-rayd by my employee healthcare, then got sent to a hand surgeon in the public sector so I could get the diagnosis from those x-rays the same day. I left the private hospital and walked into the public one like they were operated by the same company. It’s amazing.
Poor Finland.
Imagine if the funding being used so your employer could get you to see a doctor in 20 minutes, was available for everyone, as a public service.
Instead you’ve split your healthcare in two, and as such you’re going to have people poached away from offering the best care to everyone.
The system isn’t that split. In fact, it can work the other way around, in that a public doctor can send you to a private one when warranted, and the public system will then cover the cost.
In emergencies you can also walk into the ER of a private hospital and have the cost covered under the public system.
If you want to pay for a doctor to calm your hypochondria right now while small talking about something meaningless… Why not?
Also, my employer providing me with healthcare, isn’t optional, it’s legally mandated. If you have a job, you have the option of going to whatever private provider your employer has contracted. This is to make sure whatever sick leave you end up needing, is taken care of in a timely fashion so you can get back to work asap.
The only reason you can’t just walk into a public hospital and see a doctor the way you can with a private one, is that the public sector will actually make sure you need the care then and there before spending its resources on you. It’s triage, on a national scale.
The private and public sectors are integrated and inter-operable. This means the private sector hasn’t become a price-gouging insurance mine-field. Instead it’s more like an extension of the public system, serving as a more expensive but expedited channel, used where warranted.
I guess the rationale is that you give precedence to the people paying for the healthcare (middleclass workers) to get them back to contributing to workforce (and earning those tax euros) as soon as possible. Also the decision is done by the companies (trying to keep their employees in working condition, also a big perk when employees are comparing different employers) and not the government so you can’t just decide to move the money like you just described.
Companies are by law required to offer health care. So when you’re working, you can choose which to use. Often work place healthcare is for those more urgent, yet smaller things. If you get cancer, you go to the public system or pay for private care.
But everyone here can get free care, which is the key take. You can just get some things faster via the workplace, or you can also pay to get a team of specialists or whatnot.
I love my Canadian healthcare.
Well, there are edge cases for private schools that would not make sense being solved by public schools. I moved a lot in my life (still do), and having access to schools in one of my children 's main language is an important thing for them. Those schools are still following local regulations though
Amen and hallelujah! School choice is an excuse to defend public education.
Even if nationwide absolute mediocre student body was a goal banning private schools wouldn’t achieve it.
Next you would have to ban tutoring companies, after that you would have to ban test prep, after that private tutors, after that you would need restrictions on funding for all schools (which wouldn’t work since not all schools have the exact same funding needs), you would still have advantages. One kid is closer to the library, one kid has a parent who was a teacher, one kid has a stay at home parent with the resources to help them with homework, etc.
Nothing short of an absolute police state of fairness would be able to achieve this.
Next you would have to ban tutoring companies, after that you have to ban test prep
Lol no you don’t have to. Nice slippery slope. You do what the government can do, which is fund schools. This is really easy, but you want to slippery slope that it must lead to all these other fearmongering things which it doesn’t. Like lol at, sorry to say, your absurdity.
So back to schools. You fund them all the same. Where I live all public schools are funded the same in the whole province. This is really easy.
It isn’t a slippery slope. It is me showing you what is needed to achieve the goal. A slippery slope is when someone argues that if A then B must follow and hasn’t justified it, it is not at all the same as me saying if your goal is X you will need to do what you just said and more.
You fund them all the same.
I highly doubt your province is doing that because it doesn’t freaken work. This school has more kids that have special needs, this other school has more kids whose parents speak a different language at home, this school needed a major boiler upgrade last year, this school has poor students so needs to provide more school supplies, this school is more remote so they had to pay extra to get X, this school is more urban so it needs to pay all teachers a bit more, this school had an unusually low number of 2nd graders this year…
No government is so fucking stupid to try to do what you are saying. You can start with a baseline funding number and modify it as needed but you aren’t saying that. You are saying the equivalent of lawful stupid alignment for accounting.
Dude it’s a slippery slope, you literally went off how you “have to” ban all these other things. And the answer is simple, no you don’t have to ban those other things.
Oh I see what you’re doing, you’re making a bad faith argument ad absurdem. That it must be 1000000% equal, no adjustments for anything, ever!!! Wow and lol. If I really to spell it out, you fund based on number of students of each ____. Yes repairs and maintenance are funded as they are needed lol. Yes you have baseline funding for small schools.
In the small chance that any of what you say is good faith, you seem to be stuck in this it must be 10000000000% equal!!! mentality. Ban everything!!! To make it 10000000% equal!!! mentality.
Dude, this is really simple. Fund public schools well. See above. Peace.
Nope. I told you what you need to accomplish your goals and I pointed out your lie about how funding is happening in your province.
Yeah let’s pull exceptional students down to the baseline. Every child should be forced to go through the government approved curriculum, nothing can go wrong with that.
Private schools are based. Much better education than public schools. Obviously I don’t want public schools to be gutted, so let’s make laws preventing that rather than preventing children from getting a good education that public school will never be able to provide.
People here are way to authoritarian.
Look at the Netherlands for a good example then. Private schools aren’t banned but public schools are so good even the princesses go to them. You’re just so used to public schools being underfunded that you think they can’t work. The reason you’d want to ban private schools is because it creates an incentive for the rich and powerful to fix your shitty public schools.
Why do we need to ban private schools if Netherlands was able to create good public schools without doing so? There is a limit of how good you can make public schools when you have no selection criteria. Private schools are based. I like that there is an option outside of government run institutions.
You have gifted programs in the public school. Your thinking shows the exact problem, that public schools can only “pull students down”. You can only see public schools as bad instead of, you know, funding them to be good. How about funding them so they pull everyone up, huh?
Then you go on to conspiratorial thinking to vilify, gasp, public schools.
A genius being around average people will pull them down. It’s a good thing to concentrate our smartest children in an environment that lets them learn with equally intelligent peers. There might not be enough hyper intelligent kids in a geographical region to warrant the resources required to fully support that minority of students. Nothing I said was conspiratorial.
There are over 160 selective secondary state/public schools in England. Being state run does not prevent the existence of selective schools.
And they were able to do so without banning private schools
I’ve not suggested otherwise, so I don’t know why you felt compelled to point that out.
The thread you are replying to is about banning private schools
Dude, gifted programs. Advanced classes. They are together. This is really easy. Any reasonably sized school will have enough to fill out an advanced class.
And this ensures all students can live up to their potential! How about that? Instead of only the ones that can afford stupid high tuition. Who have to pass screening, and wait times, and wait lists, and then long commutes. If you want more advanced people in society, the way you do that is opening the doors to more people, at all points in their life, right where they live.
And what the other guy said about selective public schools.
And yes you’re on about government approved education dogwhistle and authoritarianism. Dude, you’re right down conspiratorial thinking.
Almost every good private school has extensive financial aid programs. At the private school I went to, they had blind financial aid, meaning you got accepted first and if you couldn’t afford it, you would get in for free, so there was no discrimination against poor people.
I’m not against gifted programs and more resources being allocated to public schools. But private schools play an important role in this imperfect system and getting rid of them “because it’s unfair” just brings people down.
It’s not a conspiracy to suggest that public schools abide by a government approved curriculum. You are way too sensitive. You can improve public schools without making private schools illegal, is my point.You know what’s even better than financial aid? Not needing it in the first place! Because you have excellent public schools. Which works for everyone, at all times, in all locations.
Had a bad year and couldn’t get the grades to make it to private school that one year? Well now you can pay attention to the excellent teachers you have in public school.
Can’t take the 1+ hr bus ride to a school far away? Well you can have an excellent school 10 minutes away.
And this all also starts in grade 1. Or Kindergarten if we get that sorted out. So you have good education before you ever have marks in any substantial way. This starts wayyyyy earlier than you’re portraying. How do you think someone can develop at later stages when they don’t have good schooling to begin with? Really I can’t emphasize this enough. Smart people don’t just pop up out of the blue and then we whisk them away to private school. How do you think people become smart or capable in the first place? We need good, public, accessible, education from the very start.
m “because it’s unfair” just brings people down.
Oh you’re still stuck in your mentality that public schools “bring people down”. I think you have this because that’s all you’ve ever seen. You can’t seem to conceive of good public schools, that have gifted programs, that don’t “bring people down”, that can in fact bring people up.
When rich and upper class don’t use the public schools, there is zero incentive to make them work. As seen by the current state of the US. It’s so bad that, like I said, you can’t even seem to conceive of a public system that doesn’t “bring people down”. It’s so bad that you’ve defined the public system as “bringing people down”. That it must “bring people down”. You’ve said it multiple times.
And yes saying “government approved education” is a thinly veiled dog whistle. If there was any doubt it was gone when you said authoritarianism. You just don’t like that I called it out, so you have to say I’m “way too sensitive”.
I’m not saying the public school system indiscriminately brings people down, but for the intellectual top 1% of kids it definitely can. stop thinking in absolutes. I think it’s a good thing for smart kids to hang out with smart kids. Believe it or not, different degrees of intelligence require different needs to allow children to reach their full potential. I believe that private schools are great in making sure that potential is met. It’s up to the schools themselves to allocate funding rather than a government bureaucracy, which is notoriously inefficient and frankly always will be, especially at scale. Advocate for improving funding to public schools so private schools would be unnecessary instead of making the choice on behalf of people.
The gifted program at my kids school is based on a single standardized test and practically speaking there is no way to appeal. It isn’t some perfect system.
So… marks. And I assume you can enter at most times.
So NOT ability to pay $$$, and ability to live in a certain area, and ability to have parents with pull, and ability to pass subjective screening (oh you went to what school before? Well this other student went to this other school we like more).
I don’t know why you are assuming when I am right here and you can just ask. Well okay I know why you are assuming I am just going to pretend that I don’t.
It is one standardized test given once a year. Kid is sick during it? No appeal. Kid had a bad teacher that year? No appeal. One single thing goes wrong on a single day of an entire year and your kid lags behind for at least another year. No teacher recommendations, no gpa, no retest, no other options. Maybe next time ask before you assume.
Oh and it isn’t some great equalizer either. I see tutoring places bragging that they can get your kid a better score on the test. If you have the money and the time you can get your kid in the program.
Dude I’m assuming because that’s how I’ve seen it work. Once a year, cool. Pretty much what I thought. I don’t know why you’re trying to turn this into something else. Boy and you run with that.
So your argument is more criteria. Ok cool.
And see my previous message about all the things that it’s not about. It doesn’t need to be 1000% equalizer for public schools to be a pretty good friggin thing.
Now
Once a year, cool. Pretty much what I thought
Before
And I assume you can enter at most times.
Keep your story straight instead of assuming.
There absolutely are private schools here what the fuck
Edit theres literally a set of laws surrounding public and private schools https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1998/19980634
Do journos even do research anymore?
The headline is whack, the article talks about the private schools.
Which is why you double check your AI’s output.
Its not whack, its lying
Lying is whack, and so is crack
Don’t copy that floppy!
Hmm. What’s a better, non-misleading title? Or is the article BS in general? I’ll delete this post if it’s false.
“5 years ago finland did aight in education but since then we reformed the system and now we’re plummeting like the rest of the western world”
It doesn’t matter. Truth and journalism don’t relate. The only thing that is real is our outrage.
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I don’t know if something got lost in editing, but perhaps it was meant to say “no fee paying private schools”? I don’t know if it’s more accurate or not since the article is paywalled, I’m just speculating off the URL.
There are fee paying private schools too. The only honest difference is that private schools can’t generate profit, money going in has to go out. That just means that private schools here are proportionally even more luxurious than their public counterparts.
But how do they separate the rich from the peasantry?
Private schools are a privilege for the upper class and a symptom of the unjust social inequality in capitalism. In an egalitarian society with good public schools, private schools are obsolete and every child has the same chance to get good education independently of their heritage.
Private schools grant an “out” for the wealthy (and by extension, powerful). If they can pay for better results, they’re actively incentivised to lobby to defund public schools. If the private option doesn’t exist, they’re incentivised to lobby to improve public schools (the ones with kids, in any case).
I’m afraid if private schools were removed the really wealthy would just send their kids to study in another country like they already do, and the middle class would lose this option, and we get worse as a whole
If there is one thing that my experience living in the UK (having lived in other countries of Northern and Southern Europe) has taught me is that private education as well as non-meritocratic access to higher education are a key component in suppressing social mobility and “keeping people in their place” across generations: in that country the rich and high middle class have this well established path for their children through very expensive private schools (curiously know over there as “public schools”, in the same sense of “public” as “anybody can spend a night in the Ritz if they have the £400 to pay for it”) and then an “interview” selection process for Oxford and Cambridge where selection criteria are arbitrary such as for example “having attended the right school” (as an aquaintance of mine was told he hadn’t, as reason to refuse his application) so that people who popped out of the right vagina and were sent to the “right” (£30k a year+) “public” schools are guaranteed to get in and come out of the other side with a diploma from an “elite” (not quite when it comes to pupils, but definitelly can and do hire some of the best researchers and lecturers) university.
By the way this all continues into their career, since “public” school educated types leverage the connections acquired there (and mommy and daddy’s contacts) to literally step into highly paid sinecures purelly on cronyism.
In the UK Education is very much part of a red carpet for life if you were born in the “upper” classes.
My impression there was eventually that, had I been born in the UK to the kind of poor working class parents I was born to, instead of having gone into Physics at Uni thanks to my very high grades at high school and 98% score at the entrance exam (though I ended up switching to and graduating as an EE) and having a successful career across various countries of Europe in Engineering, I would’ve at best been a car mechanic because the education system in the UK is not at all meritocratic and is designed first and foremost to preserve class membership through the generations.
All this to say that Britain is a perfect example of a very well establish use of private education to maintain the lowest level of social mobility in all of Europe.
PS: Oh, and don’t get me started on how “public” schools are “charities” (kid you not!) and thus pay no taxes. It’s the very definition of “adding insult to injury” or as they would say over there “really taking the piss out of everybody else”.
Interesting, thank’s for the elaboration!
I’m from a working class family in the UK and my experience has been the opposite of yours. Three of my 4 grandparents are immigrants. I went to a normal comprehensive catholic school and I was the first in my family to even go to college, let alone get A levels. I got into a Russell Group university (equivalent of Ivy League) based on merit, and although I felt poor as fuck compared to the majority of other students, I loved it and did very well. I went on to win a highly competitive full scholarship for a masters and then PhD. Admittedly, the people I’m still friends from my university days tend to be the people I met while working to support myself through my undergraduate - some enrolled at the university, some not. I haven’t kept in contact with any of the super wealthy or middle/upper class people I met there, we just didn’t have enough in common. But as a child born in the 80s to working class, uneducated parents, the system worked very well for me. Same goes for my brother. He has a pretty important job in Westminster now. My late- grandfather an Irishman, the 11th child of a struggling diary farmer, couldn’t believe the success his grandchildren achieved coming from such a background. He planned to get business cards made up saying “Mr X, grandfather to Dr SomeoneElse, PhD” to hand out to his friends back home 😂 unfortunately he died before I completed my studies but the thought still makes me laugh!
Fuck the tories, and fuck a lot of British culture/society, but I’m immensely grateful for the excellent (free) primary and secondary education I received, the excellent (subsidised) tertiary+ education I received, and the lifetime of free healthcare I continue to receive.
Private schools are a privilege for the upper class and a symptom of the unjust social inequality in capitalism.
Same issue with private health insurance in the US vs. universal healthcare in most other developed countries.
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With private schools you can choose what you pay for (at least in theory), and with public schools you take what you’re given.
Since school education involves lots of contention by different parties over which exact kind of indoctrination and\or mustering and humiliation will the kids experience, I’d say private schools are a good idea in this particular regard.
However, I live in Russia and here both the concept of private schools isn’t quite existent (there are some, but they are very expensive and at the same time not very good, and the prestigious ones are all public, and they’ll have the same standard program anyway) and I haven’t studied in one.
At least somewhere about 9th grade they gave up trying to make me not sleep at all the lessons.
My father went to one of the oldest English “public” (i.e. private) schools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latymer_Upper_School He didn’t talk about the academics, which is surprising for an academic- he talked about the antisemitism he faced every single day from kids, teachers and staff. I’m sure it didn’t help that his parents were poor and he was there on scholarship.
I went to a private school in the U.S. for elementary school. I was bullied every day, not just by the kids, but by the only teacher I had from first through sixth grade, and he terrified me so much that my parents didn’t know until I was an adult and my mother ran into another kid I went to school with who talked about how sorry she felt for me.
My daughter goes to an American public school. She is bullied a lot too (we’re an eccentric family), but at least the teachers are mostly on her side, and if one isn’t, I have someone to complain to about it. I wouldn’t even think of risking her in a private school.
Your family is not eccentric. It’s exceptional. There is a big difference. Unfortunately people are afraid of that,that seems different to what they are accustomed. When they cannot do something the other can, they ridicule it. Being bullied feels like shit. Be there for your daughter and help her steam out all the feelings she has. Help her make alliances with other kids in the school. let her choose to do sports or art she likes. teachers may take her side, but don’t imagine that they’ll do something, no mater how much you complain. I hope my response has some meaning for you
I’m sorry you experienced that, but to be honest it’s entirely circumstancial. There are a lot of teachers in certain districts who normalize teasing students.
Not a huge bar to clear. UK education has been slashed to the bone.
Two out of three teachers I know personally have gone abroad to teach instead. If the teachers hate it what chance do the kids have?
The problem with private schools is that they have to sell themselves to the parents enrolling their children in it. You don’t sell yourself by putting down those important to your customers. Private schools are pressured to give an impression, not an education.
Paid for schools sell themselves to parents with their exam results more than anything else.
They may have a lot of equipment and resources that state schools don’t have, but it’s pretty irrelevant if they don’t have grades to back it up. Paid for schools I’m familiar with will often measure their results by what percentage of pupils are successful Oxbridge candidates, particularly if they’re studying classics.
The gimmicks such as laser cutters, 3d printers, green screens, recording studios, gym and sports facilities, personal laptops, art supplies etc etc. are pretty good for pupils who were never going to be accepted to a highest level university regardless of education. So you have selling points for higher and lower ability pupils.
They get those results by excluding dumb kids. Public schools don’t have that “luxury”. It’s all an illusion.
Government sure is trying to fix what ain’t broke with their funding cuts, tho. For now, schools seem to still be doing their thing, but I’m not all too certain on how long that will continue.
No country is safe from the “we shouldn’t educate children unless it’s profitable” and “women only exist to have said children” situation, unfortunately. You would hope that examples like this would push forward a universal agenda of better public schooling anywhere, but instead the agenda coming off it from the rich is generally “oh no, we don’t want everyone to be well educated, just my children, who will specifically act like me as they age and increase the gap”
Never-mind that that a lot of the upsides of living in Finland, even as a member of the upper class, are thanks to the extremely high average level of education.
Where exactly do these people think all these highly competent workers able to fuel highly profitable and innovative companies are coming from?
But because the return on investment of education is paid back over a life-time, not quarterly, I guess it doesn’t count. I pray these dinosaurs die off and allow new generations into government before it’s too late. Luckily, that IS slowly beginning to happen.
I agree, the dinosaurs need to go
Except there have been a ton of studies that show it IS profitable…in the long term. But it’s profitable in that it saves a ton of money in things like prison systems. So it’s not profitable to the right people. If we spend money on education, private prisons get less money and oligarchs have to actually pay people a living wage to make their clothing and street signs.
Finland’s schools are really good for a number of reasons, I’m not sure that private vs public is the only reason worth attributing it to, although i understand the context of the article makes it especially relevant.
For example, Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. The state subsidizes parents, paying per month for every child until age 17. 97%* of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Student health care is free.
(* a decade ago, not sure if numbers and strategies are still accurate, I lifted it from a Smithsonian article from 2011 because I couldn’t remember specifics. Please correct me Suomi friends)
When you don’t allow rich people with the most resources to create special areas for their precious babies to get ahead, they suddenly care about funding public education … from which the rest of that stuff you mentioned flows.
People need to realize that if the rich are boarding a different ship than you, they’re actively sinking yours for profit.
I totally agree with public education and not funding private schools with public money - I’m not a fan of segregation. I also don’t think that’s its necessary to ban private schools before implementing other helpful policies, like maternity leave or health care. My point is more that these things all combine to create good public education rather than pointing at just one part and suggesting it is the fix. I think ignoring the other components leads to disappointment when the single-solution proposals fail to deliver the expected results.
To be totally real, I also wanted to tell people what specific things they can ask their elected officials for in their own communities as a way of achieving more equitable outcomes globally. There’s no reason not to copy Finland’s homework. Except that Finland doesn’t set homework.
Edit: clarification
If you want to copy Finland, learn from and copy their election system first.
Don’t bother asking your elected officials, because evidence shows that they don’t represent their voters, they represent their donors. This is due to American’s electoral system, specifically first past the post voting combined with electoral college. This prevents more than 2 parties, which prevents real competition in politics, which makes it easy for the richest people around to buy up all the representation.
Such is our reality now where they can say ‘Sure, democrats and republicans are clearly on the take, but what are you gonna do about? Vote 3rd party and waste your vote?’, and they’ll be right. Election laws protect the 2 parties, because they’ve slowly changed them over time to do so. Even party primaries are a new addition.
So anyone wanting change in the USA needs to attack their safe seats and open up the playing field so we can have real representation again. Then you can ask your reps for stuff.
Neither I nor the article am American. If you feel that pressuring your elected officials in the US is not worthwhile and that certain things need to happen first, I understand, and I wish you luck in your efforts. For those of us who aren’t from the US, I hope the knowledge of Finland’s social policies is useful in your context. Keeping an eye on how others are succeeding can be helpful.
Ah, sorry for assuming. Although it sounds like England uses FPTP as well in some elections if you’re from there. I assume thats why we got Boris and Trump: idiot twins.
Not English or a FPTP system citizen either, I’m afraid. If it is any consolation, we have elected unfit leaders using a ranked voting system too. It’s part of the reason I advocate for multiple-front approaches to social betterment - all parts of all systems can be compromised by bad actors.
I’m also I’m not familiar enough with how Finland’s election system works to make a direct comparison there, I only have experience in public education policy, not electoral systems.
Ironically, Finland uses an election system that was once proposed by Thomas Jefferson, ‘American Founding Father’ - the ‘Dhondt method’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D’Hondt_method. (it was also independently re-invented by D’Hondt in Belgium)
I would think Americans may want to emulate that
Article 7 of the German constitution:
(4) The right to establish private schools shall be guaranteed. Private schools that serve as alternatives to state schools shall require the approval of the state and shall be subject to the laws of the Länder. Such approval shall be given when private schools are not inferior to the state schools in terms of their educational aims, their facilities or the professional training of their teaching staff and when segregation of pupils according to the means of their parents will not be encouraged thereby. Approval shall be withheld if the economic and legal position of the teaching staff is not adequately assured.
(5) A private elementary school shall be approved only if the education authority finds that it serves a special educational interest or if, on the application of parents or guardians, it is to be established as a denominational or interdenominational school or as a school based on a particular philosophy and no state elementary school of that type exists in the municipality.(Emphasis mine). Private schools over here are generally either confessional, follow different pedagogic approaches (e.g. Waldorf, Sudbury) or, last but not least, serve a national minority, e.g. there’s plenty of Danish schools in northern Schleswig-Holstein which are, legally, private schools but teach to the Danish curriculum (in Danish) while making sure that kids also get German graduation papers. And yes they generally all receive state funds. Can’t find proper numbers right now but ballpark 75 to 85% of what public schools get per student.
Weird fact: In 1875, Karl Marx ripped what became the SDAP (which eventually through mergers and name changes became the SDP) a new one when they argued for state-provided education, and argued that rather than people getting an education from the state, “the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)
In the same section he argued that the then-US model of private or locally run education to publicly set standards was far preferable.
Of course, this was at a time when the German/Prussian government was deeply authoritarian, something Marx and his family had experienced first-hand, so I’m sure that coloured his views of state-run education.
State provided education is ancient in Germany, though, but implementation was spotty. Luther (yes that one) called for universal education in 1524, calling for six hours a day school for boys and one for girls, all learning to read and write and the boys maths and physics and stuff (the girls would be taught home economics at home). Pfalz-Zweibrücken were the first to introduce universal and mandatory public education for both girls and boys in 1592, not just in Germany but the world. There had been separate curricula for boys and girls until 1970, alas they largely threw out much very useful stuff in the unification process. Like home economics. But I digress.
As said though implementation was spotty (and way worse in Catholic areas than Lutheran ones), there initially also was resistance from the population, but it took up speed after enlightenment. In 1816 Prussian statistics said 60% of kids attended school, raising to 82% in 1846. This is approximately the context that SDAP demand is to be understood in: They wanted proper universal education, seeing the difference it made. It doesn’t really matter where you learn to read and write, it’s still learning where to read and write. Universal secondary and higher education were still way off by then.
All in all this is rather rich coming from Marx, himself very much part of the educated elite: He studied law at university, whereas a significant portion of workers didn’t even visit primary. Engels, you know, the bourgeois fat cat, actually had a way better grasp on the Lumpen than Marx: His family was pietist and as such he spent his childhood years visiting a public (not private) school and playing with worker kids, despite his elevated socio-economic status.
Which actually brings me to another particularity of the German system: Visiting a school is mandatory. There’s been cases of US-influenced fundamental Christians wanting to homeschool because “public schools teach witchcraft” (you know the type), every court they appealed to didn’t give a rat’s arse about the parents opinion but ruled that the kid has a right to attend school and be exposed to the majority population, even if that’s to learn to valiantly stand firm in the subculture their parents want them to be part of. They ultimately seeked asylum in the US, where they’re a playball of the culture war there – they could’ve just moved to, say, Austria, and wouldn’t now face deportation.
Thanks for the interesting overview.
To be honest, I mostly like dragging that quote out because it confounds people’s expectations.
Marx certainly wasn’t arguing against universal provisioning of education - that had been a demand in the Communist Manifesto for example - but against state control of the curriculum, which really must be understood in large part I suspect as a direct outcome of his own personal experience with the Prussian government repression before he left, and fear it’d end up used for government propaganda, rather than any kind of objective assessment of quality.
But that was very much a product of a very specific time, and quite possibly personal resentments mixed in. I suspect had he seen the relative state of the US and German education systems today, he’d certainly have preferred the German model.
this is just the age old addage “if everyone has to use it then there is an incentive for the gov to make it not garbage”
Force rich people to use the bus and suddenly the buses are going to get better.
Finland has great schools.
They’ve also solved homelessness. (Minus 1000 or so people who are willfully homeless, but that’ll happen anywhere.)
Cold Winter takes care of the homelessness.
I wish that PM Sunak was right about the result of this, because a class war is exactly what the UK needs. Unfortunately, his track record tells me that he’ll be wrong about that as well.
Also, I always lol at the rich trying to appropriate class warfare language to mean that the poors will make fun of, or bear greater resentment to, the ruling class.
It’s like saying that global warming is actually environmental terrorism, and that the rain must be held accountable.
Might as well cite Singapore, but we also have our negatives. I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to private/public as the main source of education problems.
Duh?
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You moved there?
Nope i live there and i saw when the fall of the schools started.
Wait are you telling me that as the country moved away from ethnic homogeneity that social structures began to fail? interesting
LOL… crickets 👌
