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Can ‘privilege’ schools help the public good? Our history says yes
Privilege, whether associated with individuals or groups, is a popular topic now, and the word has taken on a new negative connotation. The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the video of Covington Catholic High School students interacting with Native Americans after the March for Life launched many discussions about privilege in connection with private high schools and colleges.
Societies grant privilege to individuals, either by custom or law, because society recognizes the benefits accruing to the general welfare when a privilege is extended to certain individuals in specific circumstances. For example, in the United States there is a privilege of privacy surrounding communication between spouses, between patients and physicians, between attorneys and clients, and between penitents and confessors. This privilege holds even against claims of urgent public necessity. The penitent may voluntarily confess to the police what he has told his priest, but unless the penitent waives his privilege, the priest must stay silent. Individuals benefit from such privilege, and so does our society at large.
But when we read about students enjoying privilege, usually in reference to their education at private high schools and colleges, some questions arise. If this is privilege, is it opposed to the public good or in furtherance of it?
The education of youth has long been recognized as in the public interest, irrespective of the personal benefits that the child or her future children may derive. Statesmen from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan have noted the importance of literacy and education to the functioning of democracy.
Our nation has long been committed to taxpayer-supported education. There is ample evidence that its results vary significantly across school districts and states. That is a serious problem for our democracy and a vast impediment to economic mobility. But our public good—our general level of literacy or educational achievement—would in no way benefit from eliminating our nation’s private high schools, colleges and universities. The frequent references to such institutions as “elite,” though intended to be pejorative, affirms their quality.
Private educational institutions have long been held to be in the public interest. Two centuries ago, the Supreme Court affirmed in Dartmouth College v. Woodward the right of individuals to associate themselves by forming private educational entities and to appoint trustees who own and direct the school. The court also acknowledged the public benefits accruing from an institution devoted to “the promotion of religion and education.” The court went further: “These eleemosynary institutions do not fill the place which would otherwise be occupied by government, but that which would otherwise be vacant.... They are donations to education, donations which any government must be disposed rather to encourage than to discountenance.”
Many of the institutions today considered to constitute “privilege,” among them Harvard, Princeton and Georgetown universities, were originally formed primarily to educate future clergy. Others were established to provide education to those excluded from mainstream or public schools—such as Native Americans (Dartmouth College), blacks (Oberlin College, Howard University), Catholics (St. Louis and Villanova universities), Jews (Yeshiva University) and women (Vassar College, Bryn Mawr College).
We might well hope that today the best private institutions are available to academically qualified students irrespective of their families’ financial condition. To that end, a growing number of private schools and colleges are substantially reducing or eliminating tuition and fees for students with limited financial means. This ensures that people of all social and economic backgrounds can, in their adult years, exercise a strong influence on our public policy choices, thus strengthening our democracy. To deliver that financial aid, private schools and colleges rely upon philanthropy from alumni and others. This, too, is consistent with the social principle of subsidiarity. Let every such student access the social and economic uplift often associated with graduation from these institutions. Today thousands of students from low-income families benefit from attending such schools.
Martin Luther King Jr. benefited from his matriculation at private Morehouse College, Crozier Theological Seminary and Boston University, which had its origins as Newbury Biblical Institute in 1839. His mother had acquired an excellent education at Spelman College, which was financially supported by the Rockefeller family. Booker T. Washington enjoyed the benefits of graduating from the philanthropist-supported Hampton Institute. W. E. B. Du Bois learned from his time at Fisk University, the founders of which were sponsored by the American Missionary Association. He went on to earn a Ph.D. degree from Harvard.
Condoleezza Rice attended St. Mary’s Academy, a private school founded by Catholic Sisters of Loretto in 1864. Madeleine Albright attended Wellesley College on scholarship. Sonia Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx and went on to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton. Barack Obama attended Punahou Academy, founded by missionaries in 1841, which he describes in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance as a “prestigious prep school” and “an incubator of island elites,” before attending Occidental University, which “filled me with the idea that my voice could make a difference.” Today the former president is funding the Obama Scholars Program at Occidental, completing that pattern of alumni giving back to help others.
Individuals no doubt benefit from the privilege of private schools. As these examples demonstrate, so does our nation.
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What to do about Britain’s private school "problem"?
Amusing: The author below, Miranda Green, is herself a product of a privileged education. The private schools can even capture their critics! She offers only vague criticisms
Two books tackle the segregation of pupils at a young age — and its consequences
In 1948 George Orwell, the old Etonian socialist visionary, wrote that his alma mater represented “a form of education that is hardly likely to last much longer”. The UK’s private schools had at the time managed to swerve out of the line of fire of the great postwar social reformers. And having survived all major interferences from the state since its foundation in 1440, Eton College and the rest of the fee-paying sector have continued to prosper pretty much undisturbed to this day. It is now an internationally attractive service industry offering a golden ticket to a valuable university degree and a rewarding career to a fraction of British youth and the offspring of high-rollers from across the globe.
"Engines of Privilege" is a fresh dissection of what its authors deem “Britain’s private school problem”. But in this richly detailed account of Britain’s educational castes, insistent in its calls for change, the historian David Kynaston and education economist Francis Green lapse into a contagious weariness — why are we still discussing such egregious inequities when they might have been dealt with any number of times?
Partly, as the authors admit, this is because these enclaves for the affluent, attended by the children of only about 7 per cent of UK families, are a different, luxurious planet, far removed from the state sector experience of most British families. Their very otherness has allowed the gulf between how different parts of society are educated to endure and even deepen. But the persistent gross over-representation of privately educated pupils at top universities and in the professions makes the success of these institutions far from irrelevant in their effects on the rest of the nation.
It wasn’t always this way. As both Engines of Privilege and another new book on the top tier of private schools, "Gilded Youth" by James Brooke-Smith, explain, the origins of England’s famous boys’ “public schools” was as charitable foundations set up to educate the poor of their locality. As they became destinations for first young aristocrats and then the moneyed middle classes, eager for grandeur by association, the pursuit of learning fell back to a distant second place — the main objective was to turn out a certain type of gentleman, fit to conquer and administer an empire.
Sadism and conformity became the norm, only to give way, patchily, to the muscular Christianity that fetishised sport and “manliness”. The obsession with character and masculine virtue took over, as Brooke-Smith explains in his entertaining and rather racy history of subversiveness at the great public schools, after a rash of rioting and pitched battles in the late 1700s.
The details are glorious and told with relish; this book dwells on the “privations and idiosyncrasies” of public schools as stimulants to rebellion through the ages. At Marlborough they burnt the headmaster’s manuscript on Sophocles. At Winchester they took the warden hostage and flew the Phrygian cap, symbol of liberty, from the school roof. The rebels at Harrow nailed a copy of the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man to the noticeboard. At Eton they took a sledgehammer to the desk of “Flogger” Keate, a particularly unpleasant headmaster, and daubed Floreat Seditio (rather than Floreat Etona, the school motto) on the walls.
Ironically, the ringleaders often went on to high office, notes Brooke-Smith. These destinations were guaranteed even once the relative anarchy of this era gave way to “the Victorian mania for surveillance and control”. After the government-inspired Clarendon Commission had, in the 1860s, examined the role of the nine “great” public schools, their position and future was secured, as was that of several hundred endowed schools, which have ever since provided the next rungs down on the ladder of reputation and expense.
Green and Kynaston lament this and many subsequent lost opportunities for reform, speculating that they failed because so many of the public schools enjoyed — as they do to this day — loyalty in useful places. The sector also proved brilliantly adaptable to evolving aspirational tastes: both their public image and the reality on the ground went from “cruel, repressive, reactionary and generally antediluvian”, with “cleverness” positively frowned on, to “modern, caring, cultured and socially liberal — while at the same time, disciplined and ambitious”.
Where Brooke-Smith confines his study to investigating the “hex” that public schools cast over individuals, society and even popular culture, "Engines of Privilege" concludes with lengthy policy prescriptions. We can expect the manifesto-writers at the next general election to pass magpie-like over these chapters in search of eye-catching symbolic proposals. But the authors want more — action to break down the social strata laid down over centuries of segregated schooling: “It is surely time for the waves — of discussion, of regret, of outrage — to start pounding relentlessly . . . on Britain’s deeply embedded rocks.”
Many readers do not see private schools as a problem and will quarrel with the premise. Plenty remain enthralled by what Brooke-Smith calls their “mystique,” and there is no dearth of parents who want to buy the positional advantage they confer on pupils. I was bemused by my private school but it certainly has not hurt my career.
Others admire a model that, at its best (and most expensive), offers sports and arts facilities of a professional quality alongside specialist academic teaching to university standard — this is, after all, a successful export, with over a third of all private boarding school places now taken up by non-UK students. On the left, the bias is still towards building up state schools in the hope of marginalising the independent sector. Outright abolition comes up, as the authors admit, against freedom of choice.
But ignoring the distorting effects of such a socially selective elite looks increasingly perverse. The “profound and systemic unevenness of the great British playing field” as Green and Kynaston describe it, may not enhance the nation’s post-Brexit future.
Even if the ideas for rolling the pitch in "Engines of Privilege" vary in their political usefulness, the appeal to act is heartfelt. As the conclusion to such exhaustive histories of these peculiar institutions and their evolutionary genius, it’s a persuasive case.
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Australia: Leftist fanatic victimizes kids he is supposed to be teaching
A teacher at one of Australia's most prestigious schools ripped up drawings made by his Year 4 students during a lesson on Aboriginal history.
The Knox Grammar School teacher was giving his nine-year-old students a drama lesson when he asked them to draw their background, heritage and families.
Once completed, he then collected the works and proceeded to tear them up in front of the class.
His aim was to put his students in the shoes of indigenous Australians, claiming they felt the same way when everything was taken from them, The Australian reported.
A spokesman for the well-regarded school, which charges students up to $45,000 a year, said they did not support the teacher's actions.
'When the school became aware of the matter, it was immediately investigated. The teacher was extensively counselled and disciplined. The teacher has apologised to the students.
The spokesman went on to say Knox supports the teaching of indigenous culture and heritage, and will continue to delve into these matters in the classroom.
The manner in which this is undertaken, however, will be further examined.
The school said they will continue to strive for these sensitive subjected to be explored in an appropriate manner.
NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes also weighed in on the matter, stating he believed the school handled the situation correctly.
'Those sorts of things are clearly not age-appropriate and can be very distressing for young kids,' he said.
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