Private or public schooling
August 12, 2010
Dear Sir,
A recent correspondent in these pages, on August 13, a "competent, committed and capable educator with experience, exposure and expertise", demanded that Bermuda should privatise public education because the existing model was established, historically, on a "racist foundation". She contended that "We must…establish a just and equitable system of education for all of Bermuda's children regardless of their race, creed or colour". Her contention, or at least implication, was that privatised education for all school children in Bermuda would achieve the goal of equality of education for all.
The validity of this argument depends on its assumption, first, that the quality of all privatised education would be as high as that of the quality of private education today, by comparison with public sector education today. That, I would suggest, is an unsubstantiated leap of faith for which she gives no evidence. Just because government schools are privatised does not necessarily mean that they will guarantee to achieve the standards of existing private schools; it is the school itself and by that I mean primarily the educators within it rather than its status as private or public, that determines the quality of education it delivers, especially when it has the freedom to articulate its resources in the most effective ways it can.
The other assumption the writer implies is that a wholly privatised education system would "establish a just and equitable system of education for all of Bermuda's children". The implication is that private education delivers equal high standards to all those in the private school system. I might suggest, on that reasoning, that a wholly public education system could also deliver such equality; indeed, it would deliver greater equality because the Ministry of Education would (or at least should), by the nature of its constitutional inclusivity, be committed to an equal distribution of the resources at its disposal. Furthermore I see no reason why, if the Ministry of Education did its job properly, all public schools should not provide the very highest quality of education for Bermuda's children. Why should it be assumed that public schools are generically of poorer quality than private schools? That might be the case now, but it most certainly does not need to be so.
What I assume the writer is implying is that if the quality and standards of teaching, resources and curriculum of Bermuda's private school system were inculcated into a wholly revised privatised system, then the standards and quality of ex-government schools would rise to the same or similar levels as private schools today. But I cannot see the logic of how it is necessary to "dismantle the Ministry of Education" and privatise public schools in order, ipso facto, to achieve as high or even higher standards in public education as in the private sector.
What is necessary to achieve that is for the Ministry of Education to aspire to and, more important, execute superior standards and quality of education, deracinated from the principles of racial or social inequality that, according to the writer, has been the historical foundation of public education in Bermuda. The genetically re-engineered and upgraded system might then be newly replanted on the more equitable grounds of cultivating a well educated population without regard to racial, social, gender, ethnic or financial status and distinctions, which is the hallmark of a truly democratic, prosperous, humane and just society.
One last point: a truly private school system, that is independent of government financial support needs to finance itself wholly by its own means (at least that's what I understand by the term "private education".) I have no idea what it costs to educate a child in Bermuda's private schools, but I am pretty certain that there are many families in Bermuda who could never afford the cost of unsubsidised private education. What then, I ask your correspondent, of equality of education for all?
GRAHAM FAIELLA
London, UK
