Charity Schools

The Labour Party recently voted to redistribute the property of private schools to other schools, a proposal to reduce inequality that might make it into the manifesto for the next election in the form of, say, a pledge to end the charity-tax-status of private schools. However, the wealthiest parents already pay a lot of tax towards such things as general education (and the NHS) whilst paying for their own private education (and private health care). And what happens if private schools do lose their charitable tax status? As it is, the wealthiest people already have plenty of ways of avoiding paying tax. And the private schools might make up the difference by ending their scholarships to poorer pupils.

In a state of nature, parents educate their own children (the Baker children grow up in a bakery, naturally learning all about baking, and similarly for everyone else), with the children of the rich getting private tutors. Inevitably, each important extended family develops its own subculture. And eventually the important families feud. The Labour party is calling Eton and Harrow "feudal," but the idea of educating the children of the rich altogether (under the control of a national church, with a monastic ethos) is a way of reducing the kind of feuding that plagues many countries to this day (which is presumably why the posh private schools are called "public schools" in this country). After WWII, Labour reduced inequality with class mobility driven by better education for those from poorer backgrounds. But what if the consequence of that is a stupider working class (voting for Brexit and Boris) and a middle class full of people who are more interested in making money than morality?

The Labour party would say that that was not its fault: it wanted a different outcome. But would that not be like a gambler who lost all his money saying that it was not his fault because he wanted a different outcome.

And to prevent private schooling, you would have to stop people buying non-fiction books, so that you could only get them from public libraries. Otherwise, the children of the rich would grow up surrounded by their own private library. And you would have to stop people paying babysitters and tutors. You would also have to prevent people from sending their children abroad to get educated; indeed, since you cannot control what happens abroad, you would have to stop children from going abroad at all. And so on and so forth.