Sir, – Ciaran O'Neill has got it in one ("Paying for privilege", Education Analysis, October 21st). What fee-paying schools offer is "polish".
When stripped out for variables such as family and class background, there is no particular evidence that these schools add much educational heft to their customers. Their essential raison d'être is to supply narrow socio-economic ghettos, where PLUs ("people like us", à la Ross O'Carroll-Kelly) won't have to mix with hoi polloi.
While Dr O’Neill’s academic emphasis is on Roman Catholic schools, it should be noted that Protestant schools in the Dublin catchment area have benefited considerably from this rush towards the snobbish. Without it, many of these institutions would have simply run out of their traditional customers. As Catholicism as a religious force has weakened, Roman Catholics who seek out PLUs have increasingly turned towards these “Protestant” schools – to the point where their “Protestant” ethos is close to a puzzling anachronism, given that so many of their students, and a very significant proportion of their teachers, are not Protestant, whatever else they may be.
The schools, incidentally, are very coy about making public the breakdown of students and staff by religious denomination, or none. What does that tell us?
Private secondary education is a pernicious purveyor and perpetuator of hereditary class privilege. It should have no place in a modern republic. If it’s good enough for the Finns to do without, it should be good enough for us.
But even if we accept its existence as one price for liberty and freedom of choice, let’s stop the hypocrisy that it has some purely educational value. In that context, it should not be the function of the State to offer it financial support at the expense of citizens who cannot access it. Yours, etc, –
IAN d’ALTON,
Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge University.