Joined: Oct. 2005
You do raise a lot of good points. far too many to answer in a single post. But I will give a few points of view.
The teachers you mentioned you claimed where good. Fine, they would never have been the problem. I can remember a few bad teachers from my school days, 1 maths teacher in particular belonged in gaol rather than school. The unions made it impossible for the head to sack him. That is wrong.
Admission standards. If you are for them it means seperating students of ability/determination from others. If you are against, it means lumping "bad" students in with "good" ones.
Out of that choice I would opt for school standards and removing disruptive pupils. Give everyone the same oportunity, but remove those that would abuse it and drag others down.
As you have a Chemistry degree you are one of the elite, like it or not. You have a degree that is difficult to obtain and actually is usefull in real work.
A target of 50% University education is pointless though. Especially as most of those degrees will be pretty pointless. How many people with degrees in media studies do we need?
I cynically believe that the government wants the 50% target just to keep employment figures looking better.
A tiered school system is something I would like to consider. Not every pupil is suited to accademic life. Why waste their time and have them disrupt classes? Some students would be better off learning more practical things from an earlier age.
Don't get me wrong here. They should still be taught a broad education and should they decide (later on) they wish for more accademic studies, then it ought to be available.
Testing right now seems to be taking away a lot of teachers freedom to teach. But I suppose it employs a few people in NGOs.
Church schools: In Wigan a lot of the best schools are run by various churches. My sister moved house and started to atend church in order to get her daughter into one. It insists that parents play an active part in their childrens education. Apearances are that this alone improves standards. They do not require a child to pass tests, rather the parents have to do this. Not written exams, but a willingness to assist the school and play a part in the childrens education.
Historically education only relatively recently became a matter of state. All the really old schools were either paid for by parents (public/UK...private/USA) or established by churches.
Oxford University IIRC started as a theological teaching establishment.
Anyway I have rambled on for long enough. This is a very large topic with an awful lot of facets.