From: "Trent W. Buck"
Russell Coker wrote:
There are real benefits to private schools. School sucks generally, but if you are going to send kids to a school and can afford it then a good private school should be better than most government schools.
That's a very Melburnian mindset. In WA, the only people that go to private schools are religious wonks. In VIC, the entire middle class goes to private schools.
I went to private and public schools and my daughter also attended both forms. In both cases the public schools were superior, with one exception I will mention later. The reason in both cases that the public schools were better was not better teachers or smaller class sizes, but the peer group at the public school. In my case there was only one high school in the town and no private school. so the only private alternative was boarding school. This meant everyone from doctors' children, children of academics (local CSIRO research station), and children of successful businessmen all went to the same school. So it was a very vibrant and diverse peer group and the level of academic competition was high. My parents then sent me to a private school which was largely full of the sons of farmers. The largest clique proudly called themselves "the animals" and behaved accordingly. Doing your homework or doing well in exams was regarded as an act of treason to be punished by bashings. My daughter went from year 9 to Mac.Robertson Girls which is a selective high school, having previously attended various private schools. I did not find the peer group at the private schools very inspiring. There was a very strong culture of entitlement. Once in year 8, two girls were having a chair fight at the back of the class, when the teacher asked them how they would earn a good living if they did not do well at school. The reply was that they would marry a rich guy like their mothers and spend their time playing tennis and shopping, duhhh. In contrast, at Mac.Rob, my daughter was pleasantly surprised to find that you were not regarded as a loser geek if you actually paid attention in class. When parents talk about "good schools" this is often code for a good peer group. The book "The Nurture Assumption" by judith Harris is a fascinating exploration of the importance of the peer group and of the surprising lack of importance of parents in terms of the development of personality and intelligence. As far as I can tell the research on schools suggests that class sizes don't make much difference within wide bounds. Fancy facilities don't either. Having capable teachers really does seem to make a difference (eg high IQ). Financial incentives for teachers have failed everywhere they have been tried - if people were primarily motivated my money they would not be going into teaching. As discussed above the peer group is very important. Efforts to redress social disadvantage by pouring more resources into education of disadvantaged children have produced very disappointing results. Unfortunately there are elements of the zero sum game with the peer group. Arguably the talented students at Mac.Rob benefited from being with their peers, but the children they left behind probably suffered from the loss of the Mac.Rob girls. Streaming had similar issues. The exception: My impression is that my daughter's time early on at a Montessori school did make a big difference to her ability to concentrate and to stick to a hard task. This seems to be a result of the way the Montessori method works, by way of progressive small increases in difficulty, which always rewards effort. As an aside, after 12 months of apparently useless swimming lessons, I employed the Montessori method to teach her to swim in a couple of weeks. I started her with an inflated vest and flippers and got her comfortable moving around. I gradually deflated the vest until she was just using the flippers. Then some smaller flippers and then no flippers. In two weeks, with no tears, she could swim. Amazing. Tim Josling