television
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I have no firm view on the merits of privatising public services. Can you explain why you think it is bad? As far as I'm aware in parts of Canada the public are given credits to buy their health care from private operators. It appears to work for them. Doesn't a regulated private sector where competition exists benefit the consumer.
the aim of private business is to maximise profit as efficently and cost effectively as possible. I have nothing against that. Schools however are not businesses they are places where the community try to create caring informed citizens who want to make the world a better place and yes add to the economic good of the community. Idealistic I know but thats the beauty in working in education you try to give the kids you teach a sense that they can change the world. Privatise education and what your going to get is the languege of business "targets, competition, profit, strong survive weak fail".
1. utlimatly schools run with a business agenda /ideology will promote subject choices that are seen as important to the knowledge economy i.e science/business at the expence of the humanities which are seen as irilivent.
2. . A Business model will look to quantify i.e Move towards league tables to distinguish between so called good bad schools ignoring the fact that it is impossible to quantify valuable things that go on in state schools every day. under a privitaed system these valuable things would be marginilised.
3. Under budgetary constraints schools will tend to want to employ cheap, less-experienced teachers over older, more experienced ones.
I could go on but I will be here all night.
Believe if you want in the powerof the business model to make education better. The business model will train our children to work in call centers and as lackies for microsoft and google but it will not educate them.
One final thing. Do you really want your kids to be "Consumers of education". There is something very philosophically worrying about that.
"There can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucious, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comensius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montissori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or social idea that must be advanced through education...Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling ambiguities"