why dave bergman is neat

roger scruton has an interesting post on various forms of education (public, private, home) over at right reason. there has been a fair amount of discussion on the home school movement at right reason in recent weeks. scruton writes:

I should like to add a British perspective, since we have experienced the same disaster in our ‘public’ school system but have on the whole chosen another remedy. We don’t call it the ‘public’ school system, since that word has been reserved for the network of private schools that arose during the middle ages with the intention of serving the general public, as opposed to the aristocracy, and which have become the preferred form of education for those parents who can afford it. Schools that Americans call ‘public schools’ we call ‘state schools’, thereby identifying the true heart of the problem, which is the incompetence of the state to manage the institutions of civil society.

scruton introduces a heglian tripartite division of the spheres of a given culture (family, state, civil society) and argues that education is best conducted privately at the local level (as opposed to education either at home or in state schools). this type of education corresponds to the sphere of 'civil society'. he contends that this third term has been too often left out of the debate, giving rise to the problems in british education which he bitingly diagnoses thus:

Our education system has been colonised by egalitarian activists, who have had one purpose above all others, which is to break down the structures of privilege, and to make all children equal, even if, in the process, this means making them all equally ignorant and equally unfit for society. Those who control our state education system have been outraged by the response of middle class parents, which has been to take their children away from the state schools and send them instead to private schools. Hence there is now a movement to penalize children from private schools by not admitting them to universities. This is possible because the universities in Britain are all controlled by the state, though with pockets of civil society like Oxford and Cambridge, controlled, however, by people who in the American context would be called ‘liberal’, i.e. people deeply offended by liberty in hands other than their own.

take a look if interested.