OrangeRKN wrote:For example, bursaries can be granted, fees can be means-tested. In combination with other regulation private education institutions can exist without being beholden to the state, but while also being accessible to students from all backgrounds.
Eton already offers a few bursaries. Every year a select few petit bourgeois children win the prize of a bourgeois education, to allow the institution to market itself as progressive and inclusive to centrists. I don't think this meaningfully attacks any structural, hierarchical problem with Eton. Even if the government mandated there had to be a dozen or two-dozen previously-privately-tutored middle class children at every upper class school it wouldn't make the quality or opportunities of private education accessible to working class children, nor would it change the fact that this is a society in which a privileged elite can simply monopolise the best education.
OrangeRKN wrote:All schools maintained by a local authority are required to follow the national curriculum, and in doing so the history that they teach is dictated by the state. Unsurprisingly, a lot of this history is uncritical of Britain and deliberately ignores topics that the state does not wish its citizens to be educated on. Thankfully our system is open enough that some of this has been mitigated (look at some of the criticism of Gove's reforms when he was leading the department for education, which did lead to some change) but I think it's still very much there to see.
Sure, agreed. So what's the logical conclusion of this? You said---
OrangeRKN wrote:Of course private education has no guarantee to do better, but that choice should exist for parents to make
---and let's say private education really does do better (it probably doesn't on the issue of racist history that you raised, but it's obviously far better in many other respects). It is still true that only bourgeois parents have the "choice"! It doesn't matter how much a proletarian parent cares about the quality of their children's education, they have no choice at all.
If the freedom to choose something better only exists for a privileged few, then that isn't freedom, it's simply another form of hierarchy between an elite and the masses. Bourgeois education as an institution---its existence and its implementation---serves to advance bourgeois class interests. Dismantling the economic hierarchy between the rich and the poor, which serves as the primary mechanism of control of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, is at least as important as dismantling state apparatus of control.
(It's right there in
The Internationale: "freedom is merely privilege extended,
unless enjoyed by one and all.")
What do you hope to
actually achieve by retaining the institution of private education? If it's a fail-safe for a potentially corruptible national curriculum, why not advocate for reform to the national curriculum? You could grant control of the national curriculum to a politically neutral not-for-profit, you could limit the scope of the national curriculum and allow schools more power to interpret it, you could widen catchment areas to create more overlap so all parents had a meaningful choice of schools, you could devolve all or parts of the national curriculum to local authorities. Lots of routes that don't involve a profit-motivated educational stratum.