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发表于 2018-1-15 12:29
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We'd all miss out if selective schools were dismantled
Grace Leung is an infectious diseases physician.
In the past few days, critics have painted a dark picture of selective schools: elitist children becoming depressed while simultaneously inflicting damage on their comprehensive school peers by leaving them behind. Reference is made to immigrants, lumping selective schools into an issue of race – that selective schools are harbouring an excessive number of them (with the xenophobic inference that we don't like immigrants to gather in numbers) and that these evil parents enslave their children into tuition in order to get them into these schools.
I went to the selective Sydney Girls High School. I grew up in a socially disadvantaged background, and travelled for an hour-and-a-half each way, every day, to get to Surry Hills and back. I sat the exam, got in, took a while to settle in and make friends, had my ups and downs, but I never attributed any of the negative experiences to the school itself. I received a phenomenal education, surrounded by girls who wanted to learn, who were not afraid to speak up because they would not be shot down for being bright, or for having an opinion. I never feared being teased for being a nerd, or wanting to do well.
Encouraged by my chemistry teacher, Elizabeth Davis, who I saw as a mentor, I got into medicine. Because of the way the HSC is scored, dragging scores up if your school did well (and vice versa), I would never have gotten the mark I needed to get into medicine if I had stayed at my local comprehensive. If I was not given the leg up through selective school, I would not be a doctor today.
While in Oxford for a fellowship, I understood the value of this opportunity when I saw how little social mobility existed in Britain – a country that had largely abolished selective schooling in the 1970s. There was a notable lack of medical students from poor families, because only privileged private school kids got into medicine at Oxford. I understood this again in Africa, when I met exceptionally intelligent patients who could only find work on the streets or the fields, and wondered what they could have achieved for themselves and their country, if they had been given the chance for a decent education.
Is that what we want? Do we want to make opportunities only available to those whose parents can pay for it? Do we want to take away opportunities for children because of a fear that competition might harm their mental health? Is it easier to blame selective schools for the problems in comprehensive schools, rather than to actually invest in ideas and resources to make local schools better?
Imagine that within a school there is a fantastic swimmer. He has great potential, clearly faster than everyone else, could maybe even make it all the way to the Olympics. Is it wrong to "tutor" that child by putting her into swim coaching, or does that cause division? Is it wrong to recognise his talent and offer him an opportunity to develop that, or should we keep him with the others in the hope that keeping them together will make everyone else swim better? Swimming ability is not contagious, that much is obvious, but somehow the popular opinion seems to be that keeping smart children with other children will lift everyone's game. The reality is that smart children have to hide their potential to fit in, not get teased, and they miss out on the opportunity to fully develop what they can do. |
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