Public versus Private School Debate.

Subject  > Social Science Essays  > Education

The notion of equality within the institutes of education suggests that all participants have equal rights and opportunities to excel, succeed and gain social mobility through a system that at surface level is seen to provide all its users with opportunity for equitable outcomes. A deeper investigation suggests otherwise, as we only need to look at the ever widening gap between the private and public sectors to understand that the social field of education has its way of reproducing social class and inequalities. At its very heart, its participants are being governed by conservative practices within a system that continues to label, pigeonhole and mould students into categories that are socially stratifying and oppressive to the already disadvantaged .The main ...

... practices are attempted to be modified to better suit the needs of disadvantaged students, but these alone will not contribute to equitable outcomes. In this society certain knowledge is valued while other knowledge is excluded and unvalued, making it difficult to create significant changes to social mobility. In order to make any real impact on student learning outcomes and address disadvantage, the wider structures in place within the education system need to be challenged. If standardised testing and benchmark results continue to be used as tools to sort and sift students, then we must consider whose terms they are being sorted by and for what purpose, and then challenge these ideologies to make any significant

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