Tonight's discussion is simple enough: is private education better than public education? Moreover, for whom is it better? Is it better for everyone to have public education? Is it better for a country to have only privatized schools?

It is widely held amongst the first world that education is a fundamental human right. Does this hold, or is education dispensible in favor of something else?

The reason I posit this is that an article which asserted that, compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. education system is far from the best. I took it upon myself to check out the site for PISA, and found this to be confirmed.

Of particular note was the fact that the differnece in competance between private and public school students here in the states was more pronounced. Private education is improving, this much is true, but is it improving at the expense of public school (after all, if your kids are in private school, why would you bother to vote for any taxes to improve public schools?)? Moreover, is this a correct trend? Should the children of the wealthy have an increasingly exclusive access to better education because their parents can afford it, or is the state obligated to provide an equally excellent education to all children? Does this trend towards privatization benefit our country on the whole, or does it only benefit the offspring of the wealthy?

Note that this only applies to primary education (K-12). The university system in the U.S., both public and private, is the world benchmark, so please restrict your discussions accordingly.

Vouchers. Give everyone vouchers so they can afford to attend good, Christian schools.

Private education is improving, but not at the expense of public education. I live in Tennessee, and I go a private school because the public schools are so absolutely worthless here. When I lived in Toledo, OH, the public schools were good enough to make private education almost unnecessary. When I moved down to Tennessee (in about the 6th grade), the material was easily a year behind that of Ohio's.

Private schools are forced to improve in order to market themselves either against good public schools or other private schools. Public schools get bogged down in their lack of funding and decent administration and in many places have no reason to improve.

I think both systems have their advantages and disadvantages.

Well, maybe not so much with american college. It costs a lot to get the same education you'd get elsewhere... Either way, I don't know the details, so I'll stick to what I know.

Being pretty much the only one going to college in Quebec, I can relate of the rather unique setup we have here. The so-called K-12 is in fact 11 years, divided into elementary school (6 years) and high school (5 years). The majority of the education in elementary schools is public. I can't say I've even heard of private elementary schools. There are a few private high schools and, generally, they seem to benefit from higher grades than the public schools around. But even so-called private schools here receive a considerable part of government funding... So they'll be better off than public, without being too expensive.

On the more advanced level, there's university... Absolutely all universities here are private. But again, they receive some funding from government as well... And they have a maximum tuition fee set for Quebec citizens, which is roughly around $1.5k per semester. Foreign students not paying taxes here, they don't get the government cut... For them, it's roughly $10k... Which is still less than most american schools.

What makes Quebec special, though, is we have another type of school between high school and university, called CEGEP (Collège d'Enseignement Général et Professionnel, or general & professional teaching college). This is what we call college here, and in theses CEGEPs, as their name says, you have the choice of general or professional formation.

If you go for the latter, you usually get a 2 year formation in broad programs like Natural Science, Art or Human Science. This by itself will be pretty much useless, but then you can go to university with usually a broad range of choices.

The professional formation, on the other hand, will land you a job once you're done, though the jobs you can get with a professional degree will be much lower level than ones with a graduate degree. For example, someone with a professional CS degree will know how to put together a computer, install OSes, or networks and program in C but not necessarily how it all actually works. The guy with university CS degree will be taught the workings of the computer, and from that he'll be able to understand the rest.

This extra school, along with shorter "K-12", means most bachelor's degrees will have one less year than elsewhere. There's probably a rough equivalent to this outside Quebec, but the difference is here it's mandatory here, rather than an alternative.

The best thing about it all, however, is that programs in public CEGEP schools are entirely funded by the government, so long as you're a full-time student. So you'll end up paying no tuition, only administrative fees and the like, no more than $100-200 on average. As you might've guessed, this means you can get a professional degree and go to work with this degree without shelling out 40k+ on studies.

It's rather a nice system, I daresay, however much I dislike it personally. It's frustrating if you already know what you want to do in university and don't care to get 2 years of completely general formation to get there. I for one wanted to go in Computer Science, and didn't want to have to complete chemistry and physics classes to get there. Of course, doing that is kind of a no-no, considering the calculus classes mandatory to any CS bachelor's are all taught in CEGEP.

I eventually burnt out on CS and the Applied Science program as a whole, dropped out and only went back this year to do Art... Having already completed my Calculus classes, I could still go in CS in university if I feel like it once I'm done. If not, I can go in graphism, fine art, music, history, or whatever... But enough about myself, yah? This is just to say the primary advantage of this here system is probably its versatility -- you'll always have lots of choices, however frustrating it is to cover these choices for those who've already made up their minds.

My 4cp.

Edit: I kind of overlooked the no-university bit, but to that I'd be very enclined to disagree. How "superior" is your university system when undergraduate students get into more debt than they will then earn in many years hereafter? University in the US is ridiculously expensive.

Asha'man fucked around with this message on 12-13-2004 at 10:35 PM.

It's not exactly the difference between private and public as it is... how much the school actually cares about certain things.

I live in TN also, and I agree with Tat. I went to a private school from 1st to 6th grade and swtiched in the 7th because of social unrest with the class of 23 I had been stuck with for most of my known life.

The education difference was drastic.

I believe one of the biggest factors in my education was the faculty, and not the material.

Private schools have extensive interview processes and resume reviews, while I've seen my public high school fire 3 teachers in the past year alone. I was unfortunate enough to have one of those 3 teachers. This teacher was not qualified to teach. Teachers at private schools are handpicked because of their excellent communication and teaching methods.

On a brighter side of things I go to a city school instead of a county school.
City schools in TN are usually better than county schools due to funding issues and differences(so I've been told).

Now material.
The books private schools use may be considered advanced, but that's only because the books some public schools used are the "dumbed down" version. Private schools step it up early with their curric.

Public schools offer A.P. classics to gain college credit. I'd say a private school's version of regular physics would be just a notch below an A.P. version at a public highschool or on the same level. I know for a fact our school had in it's possession 3 different physics books.

Disclaimer-
I may be completely wrong with my examples, but all of my views and opinions are based off of conversations with school board members, teachers, and administration.

I didn't check for spelling or grammer, so sue me I'm lazy and saw this and felt compelled to make a post.

I have to say, I felt my teachers were mostly top-notch in my public school, but the area is more or less held by the school (constant influx of the yuppie types come to get their students enrolled). However, during my second semester senior year I had 4 AP classes, and I got an A+ in everything except an A in English. It seems to me that public school is too much of a day care in many ways. They need to step up the difficulty cross-wise, not by introducing a few projects here and there like they are trying. The overall difficulty needs to go up. Even with my enriched course load, I feel now in college that high school did not totally prepare me for the difficulty and work involved.

Depends.

Private schools tend to offer better teacher/student ratios, but that's not by design. If everyone could afford to send their kids to private schools, the private schools would be just as flooded as the public school system.

Private schools also tend to have an additional agenda, usually religious. If you're okay with that, it isn't a problem. If you don't really mind, or are willing to take a little agenda with your education, it isn't a problem. If you don't want the agenda, though, you have to deal with public schools.

On the flip side, public schools can't have any sort of agenda, and are altogether often so concerned about being cast as part of an agenda they end up shooting themselves in the proverbial foot as far as keeping vital. Likewise, because they're part of the bureaucracy, they're beholden to monetary limits (what the taxpayers and policy makers are willing to spend on them).

A happy middle ground are non-religious private schools (there was one down in NC) or township schools like they have here in Indiana. Still technically public schools, but they have all the benefits of a private school without having the life and joy sucked out of them like the IPS schools.

Well, the private school that I went to (same as the one Tatsukaze currently attends) has religious affilition, but outside of the forced chapel sessions (3 out of 5 days of the week, which generally aren't that big of a deal even for an atheist to endure) they generally stick to teaching secular thought. That is, they don't try to mix in creationism with, say, basic biology.

I did K and 3-8 at private schools, 1-2 home schooled, and went to public school 9-12.

Private School Pros

- Have to be competitive
- No over-sensitive shying away from any religious topic
- Better teacher screening
- Less profane atmosphere
- Less violence
- Actual punishments
- Can kick people out without a big hoopla

Private School Cons

- Stuck with the problem cases from public schools, sent there as a last resort
- Expensive, plus still have to pay school taxes
- Most are religious
- Coddle students from the reality that other people suck
- Single people have more power, and can abuse it
- Smaller social group

Public School Pros

- Show kids what real people in the world tend to be like
- Bigger social group
- More extra-curricular activities
- No agenda past humanism
- Test scores and class credits easier to transfer, more standardized
- Nearly free

Public School Cons

- Teaching to the lowest common denominator
- Oversensitivity to religious issues leads to stupidity about teaching many subjects, especially history
- Profanity
- Violence
- Few standards
- Unable to truly punish anyone

There is a belief that the current educational system is the result of the Industrial Age and the influx of immigrants in the early 1900s. The goal of education at the time, as put forth by a newly created education board, was to be able to provide children with basic skills that will allow them to contribute to a vocational workforce. Ideas like liberal education for all was not considered a goal for everyone, just the privileged few.

Perhaps what we are seeing in modern schools can be summed up as follows by Mortimer Adler in this speech:

quote:

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The three main objectives of schooling are: preparation for earning a living; preparation for intelligent fulfillment of one's civic duty, to be a good citizen of the republic; preparation for fulfilling one's moral obligation to lead a morally good life, enriched by the continuation of learning after all schooling is terminated.

Of these three objectives the first may be partly accomplished in K-12, but it is mainly accomplished in colleges or in the extension divisions of our great universities; the second should be accomplished in basic schooling and, if not completed there, in college; the third cannot be accomplished at any stage of schooling, in youth or in adult years, but only in that interminable phase of education, the phase that is genuinely adult learning after all schooling is terminated or completed.

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• An over the top slam on the public school system from a former teacher (and unfortunately most readable, least academic, text I can currenty locate).
  
• See also: John Dewey, John Calvin, Adam Smith, Mortimer Adler, Roosevelt
  
• For a whole host of information, there's always google.