Thread by @bmay

Thread 🧵

One of my kids is at the age where there’s a need to start thinking about secondary education. Having grown up abroad it’s proving quite the revelation. I can barely believe what I’m learning about our education system & it explains so much about what’s wrong here. 1/

Option 1. Do nothing & end up with a state education that by any international standard is sub optimal. Cut off many routes for his future.

Option 2. Submit him to selective testing and the stress of it, tuition programme etc, so that he gets in (if he passes) to a grammar. 2/

Option 3. Pay 30,000 a year for him to be privately educated. There are two more siblings one year behind so that’s nearly 100k/year for several years, to produce English public school boys. Not an enthralling prospect.

But option 4 is the absolute banger, coming up next…3/

Option 4. I love this one as it’s so carpet bitingly insane in a modern society. I can pretend to be a practising Christian, attend church for 3 years, ‘befriend’ the local vicars, make a donation or two, and he will get into a really good state school. 4/

…after which I need never attend church or act out that nonsense again. Do vicars seriously not notice large numbers of 40 somethings suddenly becoming born again Christians just as their kids turn 9? Utterly hilarious. 5/

So, either sacrifice your child’s prospects, force them into divisive selection and risk their self worth, pay absolutely outrageous money for exclusive facilities many brighter kids can’t afford, or feign a new found love of the Tory Party at prayer for a few years. 6/

This system is idiotic to the core. No other civilised European democracy would tolerate it. People abroad are mystified by it. Yet it explains so very much about the state of everything.

Here endeth this thread, although the lesson has not even begun. / 🧵ENDS.