Well, I don´t have a problem with being considered politically incorrect.It's not contradictory to have a state-run boarding school. There just aren't any in existence, at least not in the UK.
The point that my old teacher was making was that the home environment of a lot of children counteracts the positive effects of education. There is not enough support from parents, and their family situation may be stressful and unstable. As a result, children have difficulty with basic literacy and numeracy; they feel left behind and let down by the education system, and leave at 16 or earlier with no qualifications and no life skills.
Of course, nobody would ever seriously sanction state-run boarding schools for children. The Daily Mail readers would be up in arms about paying taxes to feed and lodge poor people's children, and the Guardian would sob its little heart out at the snobbery behind the assumption that poor people can't look after their children properly. However, the fact remains that children from poorer backgrounds - particularly from travelling families - are statistically the most likely to wind up involved with crime. Unfortunately, it would just be too politically incorrect - not to mention prohibitively expensive - to set up state-run boarding schools and send children from disadvantaged backgrounds to them for free.
Just recently I did a musical rockband project for a "Hauptschule" (which is the "lowest" and shortest school career in Germany).
What I had been told from everyone (including the teachers) were things like "social hotspot", "young criminals", "lost cases", "no chance", "these kids have no social competence", "you mustn´t think of them like of normal kids, they can´t concentrate, they have no willpower, they have next to no self-esteem", yada yada.
What I found confirmed was that they already thought and spoke of themselves as those who have lost before they had even really started their lives. They were very aware of how the people around them thought of them.
Everything else I didn´t find confirmed in my experience. They did have social competence (they were very aware of the needs of others in the group; even long animosities between some of them were put to rest), they were extremely attentive, extremely persistent in their attempts to improve, extremely respectful towards me (a person who doesn´t even demand respect), open, willing to reconsider when problems came up, reliable, determined to overcome their doubts and limitations, etc. etc.
It was one of the most touching experiences.
In the end of the project (after three half days of work) those kids who had never touched an instrument before, performed a song for their fellow pupils (I mean, it was not exactly what I find musically enjoyable, but that´s not what it was about, anyways).
They were successful, their self-esteem (as well as the reputation they had in their environment) went up quite a few notches, and for many of them it was the first time they experienced that "I can do it".
So please nobody tell me I am snobbish in wanting better chances for these children. I truly admire them (way more than the students I usually work with: upper or upper middle class kids of mostly academics).
This is about the future, and I would not really know what our tax money could possibly be spent better on than giving these disadvantaged kids what they deserve.
On another note, I definitely don´t think that only children from a lower class background would be better off with such a solution.
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