Friday, November 26, 2010

How would you explain this to the children?

Have a read at the article, here.

I'm not going to quote it, but a summery would be "A women describes how she's doing all she can, up to breaking down because of running out of petrol, because she's afraid she doesn't have enough money in the account. She's doing this to send her two girls to a private school, at the cost of £8,000 a term - but she has (at least) 3 children. One of them is a boy in a state school."

Now, she does try to justify this - girls do better in single sex schools, they'd love to do the same for their son by they just can't afford it. That it's the most critical years for the girls now.

But what I'm trying to get my head around is, how will she explain to her son that for most of his life he's been relatively poor - if she can't afford petrol, that's relatively poor.

He's been relatively poor for his entire life while is parents have spent everything they had - house included - at a rate of £24,000 a year (3 terms a year, 24K a year) - on his two sisters.

That's £24K a year for 5-18...that's £24*13 = £312,000. Not including university.

How could any one explain that to their youngest child?

1 comment:

Jen said...

So wait - she's not doing it to get them a better career? She doesn't care if they never use their education and yet her argument for keeping them there is primarily that girls do better in a single sex school with small class sizes?

Break it down another notch - she also says that the fact that they're happy there means she'll keep them there - she also says her son is happy in his school and that's why he's staying there. She seems to value current happiness over the long term value.

Also she says her son only reads to an adult once a week - is she not an adult? If she wasn't trying desperately to make ends meet wouldn't she have time to give all the kids the one on one time they admittedly can't get much of at state school?

Doesn't she see that she doesn't have another house to lose when the next round of bills come in? It's great that she wants what's best for her daughters (not even touching that her son doesn't get the same), but something has got to give eventually and no matter how you look at it private school is a luxury.