who agrees’??

Ha ha kp it’s all part of the fun.

As for “keeping on track” …. what track?[blink]

May God prosper you always.[biggrin]
Marc

I don’t have a lot of time to do the things I enjoy at the moment (ie read all the threads on this forum) but I’ve just read this from start to finish and I have dediced to add my personal experience rather than my personal opinion.

At the tender age of 4 years and several months my mother gave me the choice of attending either Padstow Park School (public) or …(am allowed to say) @#%*bank C of E (private) school. Sensing that this decision was of great importance to my mother I gave it weighty consideration and chose @#%*bank C of E school as I thought I’d far prefer to work in a bank than in a park (4yo logic for you hehe).

My parents scrimped and saved to send me to the private school. At first the most obvious difference between me and my peers was the fact that we (or our parents) supported different football teams. My mum dropped me off and picked me up in the old HR with the blue and white Canterbury Bulldogs streamers while most of the other kids had parents with Mercs or BMW’s with no streamers hanging off the aerials – the kids simply stated who they supported and that was enough to make me realise that I came from a different area. Football was big back then.

I stayed at that school from kindergarten to half way through year 9. I was never considered a local and I was not in the same socioeconomic league as my peers. I felt alone, isolated and out of place – never really accepted or part of the crowd.

Half way through year 9 a particular incident between myself and a teacher was the catalyst for finally changing to the public system with my parents (dissapointment and) consent. I refused to go to the local high school as it was co-ed and I was terrified of boys. I managed to convince the authorities that I would be better off at the closest Girls High School at East Hills. Life became a lot easier for me both socially and academically.

Socially I was on an even footing with my peers. This was a relief at the time. Looking back it also led me into temptation. I could not believe what these girls got up to and got away with. Both in school and out. They were my first real friends and I got involved in a whole heap of stuff I hope my own kids don’t.

Academically I was so far ahead that I didn’t need to take notes or keep books. The stuff that was being taught was revision. I had already learned everything that the public school was teaching. It was a source of grievance to my teachers that I refused to take notes in an exercise book but was able to achieve test results that placed me in the top couple of students for my year.

Draw your own conclusions. I can interpret several of my own from the experience and I’m stuck as to where to send my kids to school. I’ve only got a year to make up my mind though…

Nobody is perfect – even parents they (we) make the best decisions they know how at the time. The private school I attended was a curse and a blessing, just the same at the public one.

Cheers
Sonja

PS. Did you know that in some states in Australia preschool for 4 year olds (up to 2 days per week) is free (ie Govt. funded) and in others it is at the parents expense (some Centerlink rebates available depending on family income)? I am on the management committee at my daughter’s preschool (in NSW where we parents have to pay) and this was mentioned at the last meeting in relation to the upcomming election. Just a side issue that interests me at the moment…

Hi Guys,

great topic you have going…

but to be serious and honest.. im a public high school boy… and really proud of it… never really muched liked the way private school boys dressed, acted and played football… (and do please understand i did also attend 1 private high school – Actually 5 High Schools in total.

though, there is a difference in education, but honestly the biggest thing i’ve always noted is that the public students have more street sense and awarness, while private studetns are more aware of near future choices that are needed to be made…

but at the end of the day.. i truly found its not what you learnt at school or what your grades were, (actually i barely passed yr 12… i graduated and unfortuantely did not pass any subjects at all… except for Business and IT.)

but its how the student performs in the real world… and this i do believe is the real test…

honestly, back in high school i always thought it was a waste of time to attend and a waste of money…

today… the same students who i see who went to private schools, or public schools are no better than each other, but just equal… but the persepective in many of them, is that they think each to one, themselves is better than the other.

i guess now… lol.. you guys can now see, why im called “Sis”

Cheers,
sis

Wanna Talk About Stocks

Kay, I must disagree with one point you make.

You say that a kid that is not “academically skilled” will not improove regardless of money spent.

Any kid possessing all his thinking faculties intact, can be in theory be tought to become any profession you like. You cannot make him brilliant, but you can make him a functional doctor, solicitor, dentist, vet, plumber, carpenter, and even a musician, writer painter or sculptor.

The difference is purely economic. The brighter the kid is, the easily he can do it by himself and costs little money. Some kids would cost more to make and other will cost a lot. So it is exclusivley an economic decision.

The education system is made for the average and caters for the average, the brilliant and the challeneged fall by the side. Yet both can be made into whatever we want if we have the resources and choose to use them for that purpose.

May God prosper you always.[biggrin]
Marc

How so? If money is no objection you can have private tuition from year 7 onwards in order to achieve 100% no problem. That is not my opinion by the way it is fact.

The ONLY issue is cost, and this cost is not only money.
I agree that it would be impractical and absurd to train every single high school kid as a professional, so because we need trade and employees we allow “natural selection” and the survival of the fittest in a primitive and inefficient education system.

Nevertheless if you are determined for your kid to become an astronaut, this can be done and it is just an economical issue.

May God prosper you always.[biggrin]
Marc

Aussie, you make a few good points, however…
we are mixing the subjects even further.

I think that success must be defined in order to have a debate about what it is.

We may want to define success as the achievement of a goal. So… if my goal is to become a doctor, the day I have my graduation ceremony I have succeeded. If my goal is to be happy, the day I am happy I have succeeded.

The point about private schools is that they give the kid additional tools to achieving a goal that they would otherwise be ill equipped to achieve.
In this restricted definition they give tools for success.

Now if you are talking about some ill defined “success in life” and see then professionals who having succeeded in acquiring some social and financial status now fail in your eyes because they drink or are unhappy, I am afraid you have now broadened the scope of school far beyond it’s reach.

If you expect a private or public school to produce happy prosperous successful people, with the curriculum we have you are dreaming. No such school exists, not private nor public.

Just like you make some examples of unhappy doctors or layers, I see every week scores of unhappy and suicidal tradesman and employees that cannot make ends meet. Becoming a plumber is no guarantee of happiness (if happiness is the measure of success and that has not been defined yet) as it is not to become a doctor.

Yet I can state without a shadow of doubt that you have much more chances to be happy as a doctor than you have as a plumber, and this is just laws of average.

But who says that school is to make happy people?

We are failing to include the family of this hypothetical kid here, and it is such entity, conceded not very p.c. this days of attempting to make mum and DAD fade into oblivion, that needs to be considered as the forge that will produce with the help of school a new individual.

Balanced and adjusted or not, as a product of a long process that started at birth and continues all his/her life.

So to the original debate about why private schools I say: Why? Because you want to give your child all the tools he can have to achieve.

To achieve what, you say?
That is another entirely different matter.

The setting of goals is personal and so someone may go to King School to be a successful plumber, another will go to become a successful doctor and a third perhaps to become a successful criminal. All will succeed in achieving such goals because the King School is designed for precisely that.

Now later in life we come to know that the plumber cheats on his wife and the doctor steels Rohypnol from the pills cabinet, whilst the criminal is in gaol.

Should we blame it on private education? Too much pressure to achieve?
I don’t think so, a person’s balance and happiness is a goal in itself, so it is the goal setting process that has failed.
If a person has set a goal of becoming a doctor but has forgotten to plan for happiness and balance, he has succeeded in one department and failed in another. Is the school to blame? Probably not, and the blame is most likely on the parents.

What happens sometimes is that people do plan for happiness but mistakenly think that they can only achieve one, and become either an unhappy professional or a happy nobody, and choose the “happy nobody” The point is that one can succeed in more than one aspect and success in a profession must not come at the expenses of happiness in life.

I could add that the choice of the “happy nobody” is aided greatly by the popular wisdom that poor is spiritual and rich is evil but made that point already clear in other occasions.

Jo, the point I made before that anyone can be trained to become whatever we want and that such is only an economical proposition is a simple as it sounds.
It is not practical for many reasons but that does not take away fromthe fact that any kid can be trained to become almost any trade profession or art form we desire, it is only a matter of time and money. Extreem? Yes, but not wrong.

May God prosper you always.[biggrin]
Marc

Here’s an email on the topic that I got sent last week- it’s doing the rounds. I think some of you may enjoy it- it’s cute )

kay henry

____________

The bottom of the class war

September 16, 2004

MY dear Mr Latham,

I understand you’ve eschewed crudity since defeating that lovely Kim Beazley chap, but absit invidia, you are a beastly, beastly man.

Advanced Dressage classes were hopelessly disrupted this morning as word spread of Labor’s communistic plot to target needy students in decent schools.

Nobody could calm the horses and my friend Quentin might have been seriously injured had Wasim, his valet, not broken the fall.

Uneducated people who exercise their democratic right not to send their children to schools like ours imagine everyone around here is spectacularly well-heeled.

Ignoratio elenchi.

I have a pal (to avoid embarrassment, he shall remain anonymous) who is driven to school in an Australian car. Most mornings he tells the chauffeur to drop him around the corner to avoid the shame.

Another friend’s family, Mr Latham, is actually eligible for your fair-dinkum-ease-the-squeeze tax relief. Admittedly, his daddy is a sugar farmer who owns 5 per cent of Queensland, but they employ a smashing accountant who insists all the government subsidies – sorry, incentives – don’t need to be declared.

And that lovely Brendan Nelson man is right. Many families make enormous sacrifices to send their darlings here. Pa has at least five jobs – he’s on the board of Qantas, Westpac, Coles Myer, News Limited and Rio Tinto – and Mummy cut the St Moritz ski-trip to one week this year. Admittedly, we spent the rest of the break at Euro Disney.

Everyone here is furious about your callousness, and intent on taking up arms in your pathetic – and, to be frank, psychopathic – class war.

A school rally is being organised, it’s just a matter of finding a spare evening. We have sailing on Mondays, bridge on Tuesdays, Latin on Wednesdays and real tennis on Thursdays. Friday’s difficult for the next few weeks. It’s impossible to reschedule the school ball – Tom Jones and John Farnham have been booked for more than a year. And representatives from Christie’s and Sothebys, as well as the Saatchi brothers, are flying in from overseas for the charity art auction.

We’re taught to believe the best of people, Mr Latham, so I’ve enclosed an invitation from Headmaster to visit our school and see for yourself the damage Labor’s policy could do. There’s a map as well – if you park near tennis court 12, walk across the eight cricket fields and past the 10 rugby grounds, you’ll see a massive six-storey building. Don’t stop there, that’s the gymnasium.

Head for the boatshed, veer through the six soccer pitches and you’ll be at the rifle range. For you’re own safety, don’t linger long there, Mr Latham (that’s a joke!!), but head for the information desk on the fourth floor of the library/theatre/hospital complex. They’ll direct you to the school monorail, and it’s a 15-minute ride to the principal’s office.

Quaere Verum, Mr Latham,
Yours not very respectfully,
Name and address withheld.

Kay, the e-mail you passed on is well thought and truly funny.

Yet it is more interesting to analyse why it is funny.

Imagine you change the situation and write a similar story but reverse the roles, it is about a poor school and poor kids who get the visit of Mr Howard, change the car story to a push bike and the horse riding to touch football.
The fun is gone, no one would laugh, why?

Because we are trained to see the rich as ridiculous and faulty characters self centred and obscene, dishonest cheaters and tormentors of the rest of the virtuous inhabitants of the planet.

That is what makes the e-mail funny, that is what made Titanic a success, that is why most heroes in the stories are orphans, poor or unjustly persecuted.

Don’t get me wrong, I laugh too. I added the above just to point out at how deep seeded some antivalues are, and to make the reader think about our subconscious programming and how it may affect our decisions and plans.

May God prosper you always.[biggrin]
Marc