On 16/01/14 19:07, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> 
> Didn't the UK try that already? Didn't that lead to a generation of
> people being labelled according to which type of school they got sent
> to, rather than anything they actually achieved while there?

Certainly, that was the case in the state sector up until the late
sixties. There's a good article on it in Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_System ) In the fee-paying
sector, the situation was and still is that pupils of all abilities
attend the same school but are streamed on entry according to their
perceived potential.
Which system is better is not a question I'm qualified to answer. The
private sector tended to have proportionally more university entrants
than the state sector, but that may have been down to the fact that they
had much smaller class sizes as well as very highly qualified teachers.
At my school ( www.shrewsbury.org.uk/‎ ) most of the teachers had
Masters degrees and there were a fair few with Doctorates.
Maybe, if more money was thrown at the state sector so that class sizes
could be reduced and the teachers were paid more (so that those who go
to the private sector for the money would have less of an incentive to
make that choice) then perhaps we would see an evening out of the system.
However, having said that, you would still have schoolkids forming their
own little cliques and judging each other's worth by some arbitrary
measurement. Stopping that is a whole other story.

John
-- 
Protect the Earth
It was not given to you by your parents
You hold it in trust for your children

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