An article by “Dr Adam Swift”:http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/stafflist.asp?action=show&person=92 in the “Telegraph”:http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/11/12/tefswift12.xml&sSheet=/education/2003/11/12/ixtetop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=181438 (registration required) suggesting private schooling in the UK should be banned has inspired an interesting debate on the always-interesting “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/ weblog. As so often is the case it seems clear to me that the left and right wings of the case arguing in the comments to the original posting will never agree because they have fundamentally different ethical premises. For me, Spock (and most of the left-wing commentators) ‘the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one’. For the right wingers, parents have an absolute right to do what they can to better the lives of their children, whatever the harmful effects might be for society at large.
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14 November 2003
