Private schools should be banned - they're a monster destroying fairness in our education system
Jennifer Horgan: "Our education system divides us, and certain political parties further and deepen that divide." Pic: Larry Cummins
When I was nineteen, I got into a row with my English cousin.
My Leaving Cert history course had made me a nationalist – there was far too much bitterness on my side. His education had bestowed upon him a belief in the benefits of empire – there was far too much ignorance on his.
We were products of the systems we’d gone through and so, could no longer see each other clearly. Our systems had deprived us of compassion – in the words of Yeats we looked at each other “with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.”
I’m quoting The Second Coming as it was often quoted by Joan Didion, one of my favourite writers, who died last week and who was famous for not just seeing the world but for seeing through it.
We need to see through our current education system. It divides us, just as myself and my cousin found ourselves divided, and the most potent way in which it divides us is in terms of class: the haves and the have nots, the deserving and the undeserving, the good and the less than good.
We need to see, see through, the impact of private schools on Irish society.
As somebody who went to a private school, I’m continually hurt by comments levelled against those who attend or attended them. I hear friends tarring the communities with the same brush. “They think they’re so great.” It’s as if the Victorian assumption that poverty implies moral bankruptcy has flipped. If you go to a private school, if you’re not from a working-class background, there’s something rotten in you. You’re outside the tribe, other.
I understand that anger. It’s well-founded. I’ve seen the gross belief in meritocracy among those who’ve been to private school. The ugly lie that they’ve earned their wealth and status through nothing but their own efforts when their childhood cots were lined with prosperity and promise.
And I know all too well that students from certain parts of my city have far less access to the privileges I took for granted every day of my life. Our system values, lauds, and invests in certain lives over others. How could anyone not feel resentment, being born on the wrong side of that equation?
But I’m not my school.
Our education system divides us, and certain political parties further and deepen that divide. If we’re ever to really see each other in Irish political and social life, we might need to sit next to each other in Irish classrooms. It’s possible that we need to change our system, ban private schools, to give our humanity a fighting chance.
This might take a referendum. So be it.
Enrolments in private schools are currently hitting the highest levels on record; they are now over-subscribed with lengthening waiting lists.
The rise in their popularity might indicate prosperity for some, but it’s symbolic of a wearing down of our social fabric, bringing with it further divisions, and future resentments. As Didion wrote, again quoting Yeats, the Second Coming will be a beast of some kind ‘slouching towards Bethlehem.’ I see this private school system as a beast, the waiting lists are scaly tails or tentacles squirming through our society and the eyes of the beast are yellowing and narrow.
So narrow, in fact, that private schools see injustices where there aren’t any, so ignorant are they of what it’s like to exist beyond their walls. The system, the way it’s set up, makes them that way, insular and unseeing.
Last week they claimed the state was being discriminatory by providing them with less funding. The Joint Managerial Body (JMB) now demands that Minister for Education Norma Foley commission an independent review of State financing for the private sector positing that it is currently unconstitutional.
Conor O’Mahony, Government Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, believes that any constitutional issue quoted by the group ‘is not a real constitutional issue.’ He goes on to explain that ‘Parents have a right to establish private schools (Art 42.2), but not to be provided with State funding to support such schools.’ The monster cannot see. The system is draining the people inside it of humanity.
In the words of Yeats, again echoed by Didion, it is inevitable that ‘things fall apart’ when you set them up to do so. We must all, always, try to see each other. Myself and my cousin should have recognised our individual biases and conceded some ground.
But we were also victims of systemic failures and sometimes, it’s no great failure to say that we need systemic change to save us.
