I have
just read about Steven Kinnock's decision to privately educate his
daughter at Atlantic College. The fees according to the blogger Jac
“o “the North are close on £30,00 per year. My first thought was
about what that sort of money could do if that same amount was
spent on each school child per year throughout Neath and Port Talbot.
eh Steven? Kinnock represents a constituency massively in need of
money being spent on building first class education. I remember
watching a hustings at the Aberavon Beach Hotel during the general
election as Mr Kinnock defended Trident and claimed that he had the
links for the large international companies that would come and
create wok in Neath and Port Talbot. The cost of Trident would
enable all of the school students in the area to have an education
that would be provided to the standards of Atlantic College. I
believe that all students should have the best possible education and
that it should not be restricted to the children of the ministerial
and the officials of international business class .
In 1940
George Orwell argued “that there
are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a democratic
educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the
public schools and the older universities and flooding them with
State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability. At present,
public-school education is partly a training in class prejudice and
partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to the upper class
in return for the right to enter certain professions. It is true that
that state of affairs is altering. The middle classes have begun to
rebel against the expensiveness of education, and the war will
bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for
another year or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor
changes. But there is a danger that some of the older schools, which
will be able to weather the financial storm longest, will survive in
some form or another as festering centres of snobbery. As for the
10,000 ‘private’ schools that England possesses, the vast
majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply
commercial undertakings, and in many cases their educational level is
actually lower than that of the elementary schools. They merely exist
because of a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in
being educated by the public authorities. The State could quell this
idea by declaring itself responsible for all education,
even if at the start this were no more than a gesture. We need
gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of
‘defending democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of
birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the
education it deserves. For sixty years
the Labour Party has turned a blind eye to private education ..but
now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Gorge
Orwell has been dead sixty years and private education thrives. Those
who live in the international world of big business and the rulers of
the polical economy are replicated, reproduced and sent out with the
world view of the Kinniocks and the Princes and Princesses of the
blairite Cabal . And before you accuse me of hypocrisy I was educated
at an English prep school its probably stunted me in many ways
psychologically and given me strange eccentric habits but its left
me with an abiding dislike of the elite and of English snobbery. My
education did not thrive till I went to Dynevor Senior Comprehensive
in Swansea and I gew wings, confidence and political understanding.
There is reselction coming Steven Kinnock its caused by boundary
chamges..and yet there are very few corbynistas in Wales..lets hope
there is a mighty judgement is coming but I might be
wrong...........
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