Last year, we were greeted with the news that our local independent and preparatory school, Malsis School, was to face closure due to the deteriorating number of students and the subsequent impact on their “cash flow”.
Personally, I was overjoyed. Although the loss of a school is something that should not usually be celebrated, I have always detested private schools. The morals that they stand for and the history that they were built upon no longer have a place in a modern and democratic society. It is high time they were removed and that they finally gave something back to the normal, tax paying, state education receiving, working people of Britain.
The fact that in the UK we still have children being given superior education because of their parents’ wealth rather than their own intellect astounds me. It instils in them a sense that they can buy their way through life, rather than the ‘work your way to the top’, meritocratic mantra that everyone else is expected to swallow. The attitude of the parents turns me off too. Often, they attended that school themselves and are keen to keep it in the family. Also, the division ensured by private v state schooling is inherently wrong: it’s the social separation of CHILDREN based on a family’s income. Such attitudes only further the elitism that private schools so fervently encourage, whilst simultaneously weakening the state education system.
The detrimental effects on the state sector are huge. With private schools sucking up the best teachers (because they can be tempted by longer holidays, higher pay and smaller classes), the best resources and often intelligent and hard working pupils, comprehensive schools begin to lose these assets. Not completely, but definitely significantly.
Moreover, private schools are a dirty memory of when our class system was in full flow and they were the training houses of the aristocracy. They represent a period in our history when we were repressive of the poor and indulgent of the rich. Britain should have risen above the class system long ago, yet the millstone around our neck is the private education system, holding us back. And while only 7% of school-aged population attend them, the consequences of the continuation of these outdated institutions have an impact on us all. Why do we stand for it?
Well – arguably because those who go to private schools (i.e. the rich) control lots of the decisions made in our society, and it is simply not in their interest to end this unjust system. One third of all MPs were privately educated. Almost sixty percent of the Cabinet were privately educated. Forty-seven percent of newspaper columnists were privately educated. These statistics are frightening, and prove the myth of meritocracy to be total bullshit – as well as explaining why the system has never been overturned.
And don’t even get me started on the “charitable status” that so many private schools have, for reasons that have never been made entirely clear. Independent schools are renowned for being insular and elitist, and to claim they are charities is laughable at best and abhorrent at worst. Not only do they not provide any of the services of a modern charity, but they dirty the very name. With this status, they are able to claim an 80% tax reduction, whilst state schools are expected to deal with continuing cuts to their funding. It is the classic conundrum of easing the lives of the rich whilst stretching the less affluent to breaking point. If we gave tax cuts to the most disadvantaged schools rather than the most advantaged, surely it would result in better teaching for the poorest schools, whilst the extortionate prices of private schools would be more than enough to keep their heads above the water.
Meanwhile, under the current government (whose Cabinet mainly comprises privately educated men, as you’ll be aware), private schools have been subsidised by up to £700m a year. As critics have suggested, we may as well subsidise five-star hotels. These are businesses, nothing more and nothing less, and therefore such subsidies are unjustifiable and, I believe, immoral. The only vague form of relief we see are Tristram Hunt’s (Labour’s shadow education secretary) plans to remove the subsidies that private schools receive should they fail to form positive, working relationships with local state schools. Sadly, this is not as radical a measure as I’d have liked, and does little to remove the arbitrary injustice of a government that favours those in the private schooling system.
Private schools represent the very worst that capitalism and the class system can create when they come together, the ugliest love-child you can picture. The sooner we remove these bastions of privilege the better, as it will also remove the last remnants of crappy society built on injustice. Nothing (save the rituals of Westminster) is as anachronistic as these institutions. It is time for our generation to start the fight against elitism, and fight for social equality; a value intrinsic to our sense of morality. Private schools, your time is up.
NGL I love the internet, it is a procastination heaven AWA obv exposing loads of stuff that would O/W be KITD and there have been so many internet success stories through dating sites, business pledges and political/social petitions, but srsly, have we considered the Internet/social media as an addiction?
I often find myself longing to have been a part of youth from another era – instead I am part of a guinea-pig generation. The growth of computers and the Internet is a blur to me, my most distinctive memory being the introduction of an IT suite halfway through primary school. Now, at 17, I am a pedigree Ebabe. I own an iPhone, installed with many forms of communication. Do I need this? Of course not, nobody needs so many ways to contact others. I’ve steered clear of BBM, Instagram, Keek and Vine. But use Twitter and Fb lots. I also use the obvious phone functions of calling and texting contacts. Convenient, (arguably).
I have been on Facebook since I was twelve, and although six years does not seem like a very long time, it makes up a third of my life so far. My generation is the first to have their development from child to adult widely recorded and published online, and despite clear advantages to our astounding technological advances, I have to ask myself whether this tracking has been healthy for us. Is it really “convenient”? I have come to the conclusion that social media is damaging to relationships, achievement and health. I can see that the over-communicated teen is a new species despite being a self-confessed one. On many occasions I have sat in a room with friends and we’ve all been on our phones: checking Facebook, replying to texts, posting pictures, watching vines, googling celebrities − the list goes on. It’s boring and a waste of time, but it’s often unstoppable. Could it be that social media, eventually, actually hinders communication − real communication, or communication “IRL”.
TBH social media dilutes feeling.I have moved school twice, had friends in different areas of the city, country and world. I can’t, however, honestly say that I have missed a single one of them. This is not because I dislike them, or don’t have time for them, or even because I’m #cold-hearted. It is because I don’t have the space to miss them. It is impossible to miss someone who posts videos on Snapchat in the same day that you’ve seen their breakfast, lunch and dinner on instagram and your twitter feed is crowded with their 140-character thoughts.
It’s not only relationships that I see as at risk here though. It isn’t unknown that the boom of the Internet and social media has fed insecurities and both physical and mental health issues. Anorexia and bulimia are growing problems widely affecting teenagers. Research in from 2013 by Nadia Micali’s team concluded that eating disorders have risen by 15% since 2000. This is not to say the Internet is a sole contributor to these illnesses, but in many cases it can be seen somewhat as a catalyst. I had a Tumblr account when I was fourteen and fifteen, and it was in no way difficult to find what is known as “thinspiration” − images and posts dedicated to encouraging dieting. And that was just the fringe. “Pro-Ana” websites and blogs have been established for a more extreme but similar purpose. There’s a deep and dark irony to these sites, whilst they claim to “inspire”, in reality, they are a form of torture. They inflict pain through creating guilt about ones imperfections and promote direct comparisons between individuals and streams of “perfection”. This comparison is unhealthy and can often transfer into everyday, offline life. Individuals could inevitably see themselves as images lined up in a row, flaws being annotated and overtly discouraged. Whilst these blogs may seem like an utter extremity, they are reinforced and backed up by milder forms of communication. Facebook allows a study of other people’s pictures, faces, and bodies. Instagram often shows a record of what people are eating on a day-to-day basis. Young people can see what their favourite celebrities are eating, what exercise they are doing, they can Google what they look like in underwear, and be highly disappointed when they don’t look the same. There are even websites that have records of the heights, weights and measurements of different celebrities. Why? So that anyone can compare himself or herself to anyone else? This may be an issue for everybody online, but what I feel more strongly about is the way that these problems are affecting those who are supposed to be growing up, those who are being moulded by what they see; the #young #naive #oftenvulnerable.
T/A years are monumental in the development of individuals: the influences and exposures I have had since starting secondary school have shaped me more consciously than anything previously, mostly because the start of my teenage years marked the start of my independence. The Internet is another platform for one to develop, but should we be developing with the help of the Internet? We don’t yet know all the effects the Internet has had and will have on the development of my generations to come; those who have lived with the Internet all of their lives are not into adulthood or close to grown up. The Internet is a growth of a new culture and will inevitably have dramatic implications. It is undeniable that some changes the Internet has bought about have been very positive: online petitions, exposure of worldwide issues, and communication with distant loved-ones. But have we really delved into the scars the Internet might leave future generations with? Scars of low self-esteem and skewed views of “real-life”, scars of cyber bullying, and online harassment − something that is close to impossible to get physically away from.
I would like to say that I could delete my Facebook right now and it’d be fine, but it’s simply not true. So much of my E/D life revolves around the Internet − from group homework to parties. I’d just be out of the loop (OTL in case you were wondering). I detest my dependency on something that in many ways hasn’t really been tested. This dependency isn’t even through any individual fault, it’s an evolution that cannot be ignored; it surrounds me: used in my schooling, relationships and leisure time. It is for this reason that every time someone from an older generation says to me something along the lines of, “you just can’t imagine what it was like for us growing up, we had to bring change for telephone boxes and actually stick to arrangements!” I don’t feel lucky, I feel irritated at my dependency. Yes, my generation can’t live without technology, but then again, we’ve hardly been taught to have we? And maybe, being these guinea pigs/digi-babes acc sucks, IDEK.
Scuffle 