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
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
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.