Private (public whatever) schools are something I have a real problem with. Also religious schools in fact - when I finally get made emperor they are one of the first things that I will do away with. I really don't like the idea of separating people at a young age for any arbitrary reason and bringing them up as different. I think that private schools are horrible in that they do give the people who attend them a huge advantage with their education. A lot of people think that the teachers are better which isn't really true as they are all drawn from the same pool and trained in the same places, but the advantage lies in having better facilities, smaller classes, less disruptive classes and so on. In many inner city London schools the first class you join when you start at primary school will be bigger than the private equivalent and it will have a huge range of abilities including (most likely) several students who don't speak English which means that there is no "right" pace to teach the course, it will inevitably be too fast for some and too slow for others and so already those students are losing out compared to students in a smaller group of roughly similar abilities as in a private school. And this will just carry on through all the years of education. One will simply have better targeted learning taught to them more personally with better facilities and less disruption and of course the same student will do better in the better environment (and in the same way, the teacher in the better environment will preside over better results and then peopel will start to say that they are a better teacher).
But to me that's only part of the story; as well as the privately educated student receiving a better education they will also meet and mingle with people who are likely to be successful later on and willing and able to give them a leg up should it be needed at some point.
That's all very obvious of course, we all know it. The thing for me though is the fact of the privately educated people getting a better education is their advantage, but from what I've seen it comes at quite a price. I've met - in fact known - quite a few public school boys over the years, I guess we all have, but with growing up in a posh village and having had a girlfriend who did her phd at Oxford, I reckon I'm well above average in terms of posh kids known - and I really feel that at private school, as a rule, you really do miss out on part of the education about life you're supposed to get. It's hardly surprising but alll the people I knew who went to a school with no girls tend to act really weird around girls - or even more weird than the rest of us do! In fact in my experience most of them generally don't know how to interact with normal people, they've learned more in their classes and got better qualifications but a lot of them seem to have missed out on learning how to be a person.
Of course that's a gross generalisation, most people manage to pick those things up outside school or in some other way - I know a lot of you lot are public school and most have managed at least some autodidacticism on this aspect - but my point is, although on the face of it pubic schools n seem to benefit the posh and punish the rest, I actually think that overall it's a bit like sexism in that even while the sexist system is run for the benefit of men at women's expense, living under that kind of inequality is in fact a bad thing for all of us.
I really think that the public school system is a terrible thing that separates people, unfairly disadvantages the less wealthy, but also fucks up the rich who supposedly benefit from it. I found out a few years back that Mum and Dad really wanted to send me to a private secondary school but - thank fuck! - they couldn't afford it. That was a lucky escapen cos i was so shy and, I suppose, socially awkward when I was young and I really reckon it would have done me a lot of harm and I can't imagine that i would have ever been... I dunno, normal, or whatever.