I wrote about the way that public education in the UK had been dedicated to reinforcing class divisions, in the article ‘Where they Teach You How To be Thick’ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10254/
Doug: ‘But what's your alternative? Child labor?’
As the article explains, historically speaking public education was the ‘alternative’ – it was brought in with the express purpose of preventing the many and growing socialist schools organised by Chartists and Ricardian Socialists.
Granted that in today’s circumstances there is little likelihood that socialists would organise their own schooling.
But I think it is important to see the school system as what it is: part of the problem more than part of the solution.
As we reform society to make it more equitable, so too we need to reform schools, to stop them being what they are, engines of social inequality.