Quote:
Originally Posted by delphidb96
Free education? I hope you're talking university-level education here. Because education is a given, and government-paid-for, to every child between Kindergarten and 12th grade here in the US. Yes, parents *can* choose to pay for private schooling, but they don't have to.
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Best we don't get into the difference between "public and private schools" in the US and UK. Stephen Fry described it best in his autobiography Moab is my Washpot.
From
Moab is my Washpot - Chapter 1 (New York Times)....
There may be some reading this who are hazy (and proudly so) about the precise meanings of "prep school" and "public school."
A prep school is an establishment designed, as the name implies, untypically for a British institution, to prepare a child. In this instance the preparation is for public school. Public school, as the name decidedly does not imply, very typically for a British institution, is wholly private. Public schools undertake to guide, mould and instruct pupils aged between thirteen and eighteen. Prep schools accept their intake from somewhere in the region of eight, nine or ten years old, and prepare them for the Common Entrance Examination, a test recognised by all the public schools. Different public schools are satisfied by different CE results. Thus Winchester, which has an interest in only the cleverest boys, would expect CE marks way above seventy per cent, while Malvern and Worksop and Monckton Combe, by way of example, might be content with percentages in the nether fifties or upper forties. There is, it follows, no absolute pass mark in the Common Entrance. Public schools can decide whom they take according to their need to have a fully pupilled and profitable school roll, according to their own sense of academic reputation, according to a candidate's athletic, musical or artistic qualities, or according to his status as offspring of an old boy or a Great, Rich and Desirable Parent.