don_quixote
Trent End
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999/apr/24/guardianletters
here, bizarrely commented on by future masterchef star john torode
here, bizarrely commented on by future masterchef star john torode
mixed_biscuits
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The very best public schools and state schools are highly competitive - you would need to be 11+ standard or (far) above to get in. The top students at these schools have scholarships which may pay a large proportion or the entirety of their fees (in other words, you can be poor and a student at Eton).
Many of the ppl I knew at Oxford or Cambridge paid little or nothing for their elite secondary education: smarts got them into a top public or state grammar school, before then gaining them admittance into university. It is the not-so-talented children's parents who will pay through the nose to send them through the private system as, in their parents' eyes, they stand to lose the most by missing out. These students make up the majority of a public school's cohort, but not necessarily the majority of those that they send to the top universities.
It is no wonder that a minority of schools dominate when these schools act precisely as Oxbridge does but at a preliminary stage: exacting entry standards selecting a choice crop of pupils for an education that, being academically demanding, plays to their strengths. They also profit from a virtuous circle: their success attracts a widening pool of applicants, whose increasing talent brings ever more glory come A-Level time.
That said, prep schools offer far more support to children gunning for public school scholarships than state primaries do! (Though many schools use reasoning tests for entry, which are quite resistant to training).
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It's interesting to consider the subset of private or grammar school educated pupils who are encouraged to apply to Oxbridge, and the further subset who are successful. How do they stand in relation to their classmates? You have a tranche of pupils whose social position is fairly (not entirely) homogenous, with some on scholarships/bursaries or government assisted places (although I think the latter scheme, from which I benefitted, has since been discontinued) but probably a majority on neither, with families from the professional middle and upper-middle class. What distinguishes the Oxbridge candidates from the rest? Are they simply the most affluent, those with the most cultural capital in their family background (my parents were primary schoolteachers, who got their teaching diplomas at Bognor Regis college of higher education - but I should also disclose the aunt who went to Oxford on a choral scholarship)? What other factors - sheer luck included - might be involved?
I appreciate that for everyone outside this particular circle of privilege a reasonable reaction might be "who cares?", but if you want to understand why the Oxbridge set tend to think that something other than their social privilege sets them apart, you might want to consider what - if anything - sets them apart from others with the same kinds of social privilege. It may for example be an advantage to be slightly maverick (relative, let me underline again, to one's peers in an already socially/academically selective educational setting) and slightly less comfortably-off, if this makes one appear alert, ambitious and eager to get on.
I appreciate that for everyone outside this particular circle of privilege a reasonable reaction might be "who cares?", but if you want to understand why the Oxbridge set tend to think that something other than their social privilege sets them apart, you might want to consider what - if anything - sets them apart from others with the same kinds of social privilege. It may for example be an advantage to be slightly maverick (relative, let me underline again, to one's peers in an already socially/academically selective educational setting) and slightly less comfortably-off, if this makes one appear alert, ambitious and eager to get on.
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don_quixote
Trent End
have i ever mentioned how much i hate private education
Just private, or selective in general? Woodhead's class/genetic determinism came up in the context of an argument about grammar schools - the notion being that selection was good for the smattering of mute-inglorious-miltons whom it "lifted out" of their class, while comprehensivisation was bad because it imposed a watered-down academic education on people for whom even that was essentially inappropriate (disclaimer: the foregoing is intended as a precis of that cnut's argument, not a statement of a position that I hold, or am remotely interested in defending).
mixed_biscuits
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I am - differentiation is unquestionably pedagogical good practice; grammar schools are part of a differentiation writ large; so grammar schools are good.
The top students deserve an education that is geared to their rate of understanding. This is not necessarily a 'better' education than the comprehensive one; the poor student would find grammar school teaching utterly unsuited to their need for thorough repetition and multimodal delivery.
Would you be against selective university entrance by the same token?
@don Quixote: would you ban home schooling or block any other attempts by the individual to remove their child from the over-arching apparatus of the state educational system?
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Fuck, if someone had told me that I could get in to Cambridge on 'social privilege alone' I wouldn't have bothered revising like a bastard for my A-levels, bricking it over STEP papers and all that sort of stuff. But then I'm a champagne swilling moron so I guess I didn't know any better.
Grammar schools are a bit of an odd one (I went to one, fwiw) - obvious massive down sides but they did at least give some interruptions of the middle class hegemony that seems to have come out of the selection-by-expensive-postcode system we've got at the moment. The obvious answer is forking out for an education system that's universally good, but I guess that would be a bit too easy.
Grammar schools are a bit of an odd one (I went to one, fwiw) - obvious massive down sides but they did at least give some interruptions of the middle class hegemony that seems to have come out of the selection-by-expensive-postcode system we've got at the moment. The obvious answer is forking out for an education system that's universally good, but I guess that would be a bit too easy.
Very academically-focused pupils are generally correct in their perception that the kind of education offered by the state secondary system isn't well-suited to their needs or abilities. The question is, whose needs and abilities are properly addressed by that system? And are its inadequacies with respect to the academically-inclined specifically due to its being not specially tailored to them, or simply facets of a larger problem experienced in different ways by everyone who remains within it?
mixed_biscuits
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I would guess that a standard comp would be geared towards the middle ground, with both the very able and least able losing out due to provision being, inevitably, targeted at the average pupil.*
There has to be a critical mass of very able students before providing suitable teaching becomes viable. It's hard to differentiate effectively for the top 2 or 3 in a comp. class - gather these odd students together to comprise a full grammar set and gearing your teaching to their needs becomes an imperative.
* This also applies at grammars themselves with the very best students often easily besting their teachers.
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matt b
Indexing all opinion
Late to reply to this thread, so I'm having to go back a few pages first...
All this talk of 'intelligence' is stupid in practice, because that is not what the school/education system are measuring/looking at most of the time.
Indeed, as we have discussed many times before, there is no meaningful way of measuring intelligence. Academic success measures someone's ability to be academically successful (ability to sit exams), not intelligence.
So, what university admissions tutors are actually looking at is an individual student's cultural capital and their ability to express themselves (indeed, some tutors have argued that they would prefer a student who confidently knows nothing over a correct but less self assured candidate).
Those students are far more likely to be middle class, because educational institutions are middle class and the knowledge they favour is middle class knowledge.
Of course this is somewhat of a generalisation- it is a multi-causal process, but genetics has very little to do with Oxbridge success
All this talk of 'intelligence' is stupid in practice, because that is not what the school/education system are measuring/looking at most of the time.
Indeed, as we have discussed many times before, there is no meaningful way of measuring intelligence. Academic success measures someone's ability to be academically successful (ability to sit exams), not intelligence.
So, what university admissions tutors are actually looking at is an individual student's cultural capital and their ability to express themselves (indeed, some tutors have argued that they would prefer a student who confidently knows nothing over a correct but less self assured candidate).
Those students are far more likely to be middle class, because educational institutions are middle class and the knowledge they favour is middle class knowledge.
Of course this is somewhat of a generalisation- it is a multi-causal process, but genetics has very little to do with Oxbridge success
matt b
Indexing all opinion
So, according to this logic, Prince Harry's and Paris Hilton's access to £££ means they are more intelligent than a poor person by definition?
matt b
Indexing all opinion
I love your use of 'obviously' here- do you have any evidence to back this up?
Well, here there's a problem. There really isn't any such thing as the average pupil. If you start measuring aptitude (or whatever it is you think you're measuring) through standardised testing, you get a curve of normal distribution which gives you a sort of image of a large rump of people who are fairly alike with small numbers of outliers at either extreme; but this should be regarded as a fact about statistics rather than a fact about people. (For instance, if you set a multiple choice exam and everyone just guesses the answers, you'll still get a curve of normal distribution, because there are many, many more ways of getting about half the answers right than there are of getting three quarters of them right, and only one way to get them all right).
If you study what actually goes on in an environment where people are learning (not necessarily a classroom), you'll see a lot of variety where you'd expect there to be a homogenous "middle ground"; particularly if people are working together, pooling their strengths and dividing their cognitive labour. There are reasons why it's difficult to get that kind of dynamic going in a classroom full of UK teenagers, particularly when the task at hand is as unengaging for most of them as a lot of schoolwork is, but when it does work it's a force-multiplier for everyone's "intelligence".
The other reason people tend to think there's a large rump of "average" pupils, is that people tend to look a lot more like each other when they're bored and not trying particularly hard. It's amazing how much more alert and interesting some teenagers turn out to be when you meet them outside the classroom.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
two things, in my experience, one good and one bad -
(i) a general interest in issues and thought, going beyond whatever subject is applied for;
(ii) gobshite levels of confidence - sometimes justified, but often not.
Edit: Must admit I haven't read all of this thread, but my personal irritant re discussions of univerisites, is how people often miss the point by criticising Oxbridge for being elitist, whereas it's the fact that the whole fucking univiersity system is elitist (and certainly not in an academically meritocratic sense) that is the real problem.
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mixed_biscuits
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So, according to this logic, Prince Harry's and Paris Hilton's access to £££ means they are more intelligent than a poor person by definition?
No - they could well be less intelligent than the average poor person but, given two random people - one rich and one poor - the rich one is more likely to be intelligent.
matt b
Indexing all opinion
oh, ffs
D
droid
Guest
mixed_biscuits
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Well, because the mentally disabled, for instance, would be far more likely to be poor than rich. This in itself would drag the average down.
mixed_biscuits
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The very slow - those with learning difficulties etc - are not going to live lives of independent means, unless they are very lucky.
Similarly, those in bottom sets of comprehensives (<80 on reasoning tests, perhaps) would have real difficulty holding down a job with any real complexity.