Sacrificing ND/ disabled kids and adults for 'principle'
Louise
Epiphanies Host
A lot of areas in the UK have very poor SEND provision, and a lot of private schools do much better there. I can't fault any parent of disabled children opting for the private sector given the shit-show in the state sector, particularly given the issues with Academy schools and ableism.
I don't think there's anything wrong with sending your child to private school while also working to improve the state sector. I don't see why that should be seen as strange or hypocritical. I don't personally think that private schools are inherently bad, I think the problem comes from privately educated people being disproportionately favoured by certain areas of society. The solution is to improve state schools to the same level, especially in access to the arts.
Leorning Cniht wrote: »There's a difference between the position "state schools should be better" and the position "the way to improve state schools is to force the rich to send their children to them". If you hold the latter position, and still send your personal children to a public school, you are indeed a massive hypocrite.
Nope I'm with Pomona on this one, ND kids die are badly harmed or are deprived of all education because the state schools system is not just underfunded but often deeply ablist.
I agree in theory that the state system would be better if the rich had to use state schools and state schools were better funded and if the old boy/ girl private school networks which affect the judiciary and media and other sectors were eroded but one-size-fits all education on the cheap can be deadly.
Similar decisions have to be made with health. I never ever thought I'd go private until NHS institutional ablism traumatised me and could have killed me by making me too terrified to get treatment for something that was likely to turn cancerous without it.
If principle means leaving a neurodivergent person to suffer hells neuromajority folk can't know from the inside for 'principle' - then there's something wrong with the principle.
Just recently I saw a crowdfunder for someone with really really bad ME whose life is apparently in danger because the person in charge of her case at the NHS hospital where she is subscribes to the old snake oil theories about it and she is in danger of a very painful death and people are trying to fundraise to get her out of there.
Ablism is a terrible thing and people die from it if means of rescue isnt available.
If we only have imperfect means of rescue, then that's what we've got until better provision is available than crowdfunding.
So I think you can be against the disproportionate influence of some private schools and think money shouldn't buy influence and against a private sector model replacing the NHS but in the meantime before the Revolution comes, so to speak, I think not letting people die or be seriously harmed by ablism has to be a more important principle and I dont think it's hypocritical for people in survival and serious harm situations to do what they have to to save their lives and stop their mental and physical health being destroyed.
Comments
My family was the target of a fair bit of nastiness when my father, a Labour councillor, agreed for me to take the entrance exam for a bursary (the full fees being as beyond his means as the stars are beyond the moon) in an attempt to get me out of a state system that was failing to deal with the bullying I was on the receiving end of (which decades later turns out to be pretty much classic outgrouping of an autistic student).
In the event it didn't actually help (because he didn't, and couldn't be expected to, understand the real reason I was experiencing the bullying was not, as he thought, because of academic differences).
So while I have reservations about the effectiveness of his decision, and his resistance to re-evaluating it when it didn't work as he expected, I will never condemn his unwillingness to allow politics to get in the way of making decisions in what he saw as being my best interests.
His view was that in a world where there was no private alternative, those with the power to improve the state system would be driven to do so. But we do not live in that world. We have to do the best we can in the world we have, not the world we would like.
Yes, I agree with you. And that's why it's hypocrisy. I am not at all advocating for socialist parents to send their children to a school that is actively harmful for them when they have the resources to put them somewhere better. I am calling them out on their hypocrisy if they do that whilst trying to remove the ability to do that from other people.
They're not. They're advocating for a situation where that option is available to everyone, not just those who can afford it.
The best thing they can do for their offspring may be to use the private system. But the best thing for the hundreds of other kids is to work for a situation where this is no longer necessary.
But where is the latter happening?
First as far as I can understand from members of my family, a percentage of children who need specialist educational care are attending private schools paid from the local authority SEND budget. I do not have the numbers to hand, but it is hard to take an ideological position against private schools when the state provision is a private school.
Second in general the ethics (as I understand the term) are murky for a socialist. The best state schools, which probably includes those with the best SEND provision) tend to be in areas of inflated housing costs. So in terms of finances one might well pay less for private education than for housing in a school catchment.
If one is prepared to pay extra for better food, I cannot see what is so different to paying for specialist educational provision for your children.
I personally am a big believer in girls' schools being beneficial for girls - particularly now with classroom misogyny at frightening levels amongst boys. This isn't about keeping girls away from boys in general (at least not for me) but avoiding misogynistic influences in the classroom, especially in STEM subjects. State girls' schools are increasingly thin on the ground - the one I attended is now a co-educational Academy school - so if I had daughters I would choose a private girls' school over a state co-educational school , if I could afford it. Boys don't benefit from single-gender education so that would not be important for any sons. However, I am also very opposed to Academy schools so I would choose a private school over one of those. This is all academic though since I have no children and wouldn't be able to afford private school if I did.
In France, there are three kinds of schools: public schools, private (usually Catholic) schools under contract with the state, and private schools out of contract. While they're not within everyone's means, schools under contract are fairly affordable for many fairly modest families (about €1500 a year, not including the canteen and such).
There is no question to me that my son's situation has been better managed in a private school (under contract). The first year my son was entitled to his own classroom assistant, he only had twelve hours a week. It is very hard if not impossible to find anyone competent who's interested in a contract for so few hours. A private school has more leeway to manage its own employees, and so my son's school created a job where the person both worked with my son and supervised the lunch break/playtime. This added up to 20 hours a week, and they were able to recruit someone who did a great job. This simply would not have happened in a public school.
With the right support, my son is doing very well (he was joint top of the class for reading last year). I don't see how I can justify sacrificing that in the name of principles. I wish dearly that he could have the same provision in a public school, but it currently isn't possible.
This means that finding a good school for a child with "special needs" takes a lot of close examination, and that's true whether you're looking at private or public. In my experience some supposedly "poorer" schools are often better at supporting "diverse learners" because they're more willing to invest in kids who struggle, as the world reckons it. But the important thing is to know ahead of time which schools to try to get your child into, because "your mileage may vary" is a gentle word for it. It is kind of an insider system. A little insider knowledge goes a long way.
And this is working from a big city public school system where there's a lot of competition among public schools because of the way cities run things. Small towns are a different story, since in smaller communities it's common that everyone in town goes to the same high school. But I expect in any community with multiple schools, there will be some kind of competition. America seems to thrive on that, I'm not sure how this compares with other places.
Generalizing about the pros and cons of public versus private is genuinely dangerous, I think, because either system can be good or bad, it depends on the individual school, even the individual teacher within the school. Buyer beware, as they say.
I certainly have heard that view and from Doctors. It takes many good doctors out of the NHS so giving poorer service to those in it.
As a recipient of all-girls education in the state sector, you'd have to work long and hard to persuade me that it is a better option! In my particular case, the misogyny just meant they did not make provision for girls like me within the school because we (girls who are good at maths) did not exist, although they knew I existed. I was forced to redo two years of maths because of this! If I had been in the co-ed where I did A-Levels, I would simply have sat O-Level maths two years early. They did that sort of thing.
Co-ed is supposed to be good for boys, but which of us who has a choice in the matter would want to sacrifice our daughters' well-being for them?
They certainly do - Lorna Slater the Green MSP and former co-leader in Scotland who is autistic was widely attacked in the press for having private healthcare.
I finally cracked a couple of years ago and got a private GP so I could see the same person each time - someone I feel safe with who understands neurodiversity - at a time when I'm functional ( I have sleep problems - and sleep deprivation makes me much more unable to cope as an autistic person - prone to meltdowns, more quickly overwhelmed, less able to mask well). They have a quiet waiting room which doesn't overwhelm me and receptionists it doesn't terrify me to have to deal with. As a result a serious health condition I didn't know I had was found and treated and I can actually access routine health care again. I know other people dont have this option and I won't when I retire and wont have much money any more.
If the NHS tackled accessibility and understanding for ND people I would move back, and for an emergency I'd just have to do or die in the NHS and try not to go mad.
( When my husband was in hospital I struggled just visiting him because the noise and chaos on that ward was overwhelming- I was having to sit there with noise cancelling headphones on which rather defeated the purpose. Thinking what it would be like to be stuck there with no safe space or safe food frightens me)
I dont have at my fingertips the figures for UK public (by which we mean elite private) school's disproportionate dominance of various professions and I dont know to what extent other countries like France and the US have or don't have a similar thing but it is a genuine problem.
Maybe there are other ways to come at the Public school dominance problem but it is a thing.
Meanwhile the problems in SEND in England seem about to get worse, and the pitch is being rolled for that by attacks on autism and ADHD diagnoses to strip more children of what help they get under the current system. There's a crank Prof emerita I mentioned on another thread trying to turn the clock back, and right wing and centrist papers are running with her anti- autistic views (By the way, big name TERFs like Kathleen Stock have got on board with this - there's a noticeable overlap)
So it really is a mess and I feel like there need to be fixes for the ablism and underfunding in the NHS and education first before attacking ND people for desperately seeking alternatives. We're not talking 'Oh but I want to get little Sandy/ Jemima into my old Oxbridge College' or ' I dont want to mix with riff-raff in the waiting room' but people going under trying to seize anything not to drown and yes the Devil takes the hindmost who dont have money.
The NHS and free public education was meant to stop that but right now it isnt. Austerity and ablism have seen to that.