Education Apartheid?
The British “Commission for Racial Equality” wants to re-introduce racial segregation into the British school system, ostensibly to help black kids “get better grades”. Anybody got any thoughts on this?
Filed under: General
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laurence, it looks like a cope out for an other wise broken system. I know 3 teachers who left SA for the UK expecting to make lot of money, two returned within months saying that the UK education system was many many many times worse then ours. What they need to do is overhaul the system, not try to patch holes by segregating students.
I guess they figured it would work better than simply changing the curve so much that passing is just a matter of showing up (IE, local schooling system).
I don’t believe they should segregate like that, I mean, what’s next? Putting gay/straight pupils into different systems so that they can get better grades?
I believe the entire schooling system, country irellivant, is flawed and possibly already quite broken. How we approach teaching our children should be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, with cues taken from home schooling and succesful private schooling systems and methods.
Isn’t it also shown that girls in single sex schools perform better as well?
Everyone seems to be going on and on about how overtly racist this is, but I’m not entirely convinced. While the consensus seems to be that this is a mistake of the highest order, I’ve got some sort of feeling that it might actually show promising results. Clearly, the existing system isn’t working – the facts support that conclusion.
I was also wondering that, Jian. My initial reaction was to simply dismiss the idea as so much racist silliness, but I thought twice and so phrased this post in an open-ended way.
Having thought it through, I agree that separate education might yield advantages for black students. However, on the balance, I think it’s not worth it: it would harm society in too many other ways. Separating students along racial lines would reinforce an “us vs. them” racial mentality among students, and prevent the formation of social ties that cut across racial lines.
Furthermore, if black students did start to get dramatically better results in segregated schools, it would lead to public suspicion that the curricular had been “dumbed down” for black students. Top-performing black students would want to go back to white schools in order to avoid the stigma of “black education”, and the government would have to let them. They couldn’t very well force black students to stay in black schools – way too many echoes of 1960’s Alabama in that particular scenario. But if top black students preferred “white schools”, it would exacerbate the problem, turning “black schools” into a second-rate, second-tier schooling system.
Basically, I think it would cause more problems than it would solve, and we shouldn’t go there. But I do kind of admire Trevor Phillips for being iconoclastic enough to make such an out-of-the-box suggestion.
I don’t suppose this has any scientific basis? Personally I can’t understand how this would improve UK’s abysmal education system. Unless racial violence is an extreme problem in UK schools…
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