The headmaster at The King's School, Tim Hawkes, is absolutely correct when he justifies why governments should fund schools such as his on the basis that ''our students do more''. Independent schools are creating the leaders of tomorrow and are required to provide a far higher level of cultural, sporting and extra-curricular support. Funding these extra activities with taxpayers' money is undeniably a sensible investment in Australia's future. Re-allocating these monies towards children in comprehensive government schools who are content to do less both in school and in life, would be a waste of money and a win for the forces trying to destroy Australia's prospects and culture.
Greg Boston Manly
I am seriously hoping that Greg's tongue is firmly ensconced in his cheek. Tomorrow's letters should be....er....educational.
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3 comments:
his statement "creating the leaders of tomorrow" begs examination, ie define 'leaders'.
leading racing identities?
I have years of experience of government and high-fee schools and can assure any doubters that it's a crap-shoot either way.
apropos 'education', check RollingStone online for their profile of the late Owsley Stanley.
a taste:
'When Owsley was eight, his parents separated and his mother took him to Los Angeles. Three years later, she sent him back to Virginia to live with his father. Owsley says that psychological problems made him "unmanageable in the public-school system," so his father enrolled him in Charlotte Hall, a military prep school in Maryland. The headmaster later told High Times magazine that he remembered Owsley as "almost like a brainchild, a wunderkinder, tremendously interested in science." Even then, Owsley was possessed by what he calls "this rogue, get-high nature of mine" and was expelled in ninth grade for smuggling alcohol into school during homecoming weekend, getting virtually every student on campus "blasted out of their minds."
When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where the poet Ezra Pound was also confined. "I was just a neurotic kid," he says. "My mother died a few months into the experience, but it was there I sorted out my guilt problems about not being able to love my parents, and I came out of it pretty clear." After leaving the public high school, where his physics teacher gave him a D for pointing out that she had contradicted the textbook, he attended the University of Virginia for a year. "I never took notes when I was in college," he says. "During the first week of the course, I'd buy my textbooks and read them all through. Then I'd sell them all back to the bookstore at full price as if I'd changed classes, because I never needed to look at them again."
Over the course of the next fourteen years, Owsley — known to his friends as "Bear" because of his prematurely hairy chest as a teenager — enlisted in the Air Force, became a ham- radio operator, obtained a first-class radiotelephone operator's license, worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and served as a summer-relief broadcast engineer at TV and radio stations in Los Angeles. He married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. He also studied ballet, Russian and French."
pls forgive the length. I loved him when he said he quit acid the moment he realised he was inside the minds of dogs (I identified).
I read the obituary also. Just slightly envious, except for the him being dead bit.
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