On October 29th 2007 I referred to government-financed “science” and its propensity to create and perpetuate myths (such as “the world is flat”). Junk science, or more accurately just junk.
Surely nowhere is this clearer than in State “Education”, a test-bed for increasingly potty ideas under the flag of “social engineering”, introduced and abandoned over several generations of the intensification of the Welfare/Warfare State. As Per Bylund says (here) all central planning increases central power and when the expected results do not materialise, we get yet more central planning.
The latest junk comes from the Universities of London and Sheffield. The former, in the shape of Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally, tells us that
“Some aspects of primary education are geared in favour of helping higher income groups…..policies favour parents which…. know how to use published information….but can also afford to choose exactly where to live”.
Let’s hope that too many millions weren’t spent on a statement of the obvious (relating to State education).
The latter’s chief adjudicator Philip Hunter says
“Parental choice in the market leads to segregation”.
What market is this? Not education, that’s for sure. Even if it were, he’s wrong; Chapter 8 of my book points out that in the USA a genuine cause for concern, racial segregation, is considerably less pronounced in private schools than state schools. And both here and there, many state school teachers (to say nothing of the pols) prefer private schools for their own children.
The market, Mr Hunter, provides a permanent race to the top under the incentives of improve or die. Prices for all goods are initially high and the market is small, but the search for efficiency provides a virtuous circle of reduced prices, mass production, and continuous improvement (consider motor cars).
But the reverse applies in the “public” sector. (Imagine what a lottery would do for supermarkets, sports teams, computers, and so on.) As hooligans colonise every school, standards will plummet – to those of current government care homes. Already hundreds if not thousands of West Indian parents in the UK are sending their children back to the Caribbean for a better education; under lottery placement (from which politicos will be exempt of course) the exodus will be enormous.
No prizes for guessing what happens next in the name of “social justice”. Private education will be banned. And after that, forced marriages (currently and rightly under attack by the politicos) will become the last desperate throw in the battle for “equality”. Wealth must marry poverty, brains must marry brawn, and beauty must marry ugliness. The return of eugenics with a vengeance.
You think I’m kidding? Let’s hope so.
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