Is it time to scrap state education?

On Thursday, Britain’s wonderful, hard-working teachers go on strike yet again and again and again. I’ve written before about the odd situation where our teachers are forever going on strike for more pay, more pensions, more holidays, more everything www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/9788

Yet while our teachers want more, more, more, Britain’s educational performance (as measured by the PISA study – see link above) keeps falling further and further behind the countries with whom we compete. Moreover, due largely to the utter failures of state education dumbing every child down to the same pathetic level, there are massive skills shortages across the country which have to be filled by educated immigrants, largely from Eastern Europe.

Oh, and as proof of this dumbing down, here’s a question from a maths GCSE paper taken by 15-year-olds in Britain:

I imagine that in China or Singapore, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria or wherever, nine- or ten-year olds would be able to answer this ‘difficult’ mathematical problem.

State education is failing. But most people can’t afford to send their children to private schools, can they? Of course, they can’t afford to pay for private schooling when they’re also already paying for state schooling through their taxes. But what if people didn’t have to pay so much for state schooling? Let me explain:

The typical cost of each of our nine million state school pupils is around £7,000 a year. For a private day school, the cost averages £12,700 a year. Now, what if all parents were given vouchers for £4,000 to be used to pay for private education? Then an awful lot more parents would be able to send their children to private schools. If, using these vouchers there was a massive expansion in private schools and say three million children could be taken out of the state sector, then that would save taxpayers £3,000 per child – an incredible £9bn a year. Then the Government could use this £9bn – an extra £1,500 for each of the six million children left in the state system – to improve educational standards (providing our leftist teachers would allow our children to be properly educated). That would provide a massive boost to our economy as our schools started to churn out more educated children and fewer functionally illiterate and innumerate, useless, X-factor infatuated, unemployable ignoramuses.

What’s not to like about that?

Then each year after that, more and more children could be removed from state education leaving ever more money to improve the teaching of those left in state schools.

The teaching unions will never allow state education to be reformed. So it should be replaced.