Affortable Hotels In California | "There's no such thing as a free education"

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In the latest Spectator I describe one of the most enjoyable weeks I've ever spent – four days as a guest teacher ("writer-in-residence") at my old school Malvern College. There's a convention one is supposed to observe when writing about such things: you have to make out that teaching, a bit like nursing, is the noblest professional calling there is and that really teachers ought to be paid at least as much as hedge fund managers for the shockingly demanding and matchlessly important work they do.

Actually, I part-agree with this. Teaching well is extremely demanding and quite fantastically exhausting. At the end of every class, you feel totally satisfied and exhilarated – but also so drained it's as if you've just had a whole month lopped off your life. It seems to me entirely proper that the most dedicated and inspirational teachers (and I met many at Malvern, particularly the young men and women who run the various boarding houses) should be incentivised and rewarded with higher salaries or bonuses.

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At the same time, though, teaching is a vocation. If you're in it for the money, you've made a bad call. When you're standing up there, engaging with a bright, enthusiastic or just amusing class you think to yourself – at least I certainly did – "This is the best job in the world." And the reason it's so good is not because of the long holidays or the use of the school gym or the pension rights but because teaching, when it goes well, is pure joy.
Most teachers, I think, even the many whose politics are diametrically opposed to mine, would secretly agree with me. The most important thing of all for a teacher is – or should be – to be placed in circumstances where you are properly able to teach. That means, at minimum: a strong academic ethos; a firm disciplinary structure; commitment from the pupils and parents. Without all these, what you're doing is not teaching – it's riot control or social work.
Now the first two of these necessary conditions are up to the school itself – as you see demonstrated in most private schools, grammar schools and our better comprehensives. But the third condition is largely beyond a school's control.
How, though, can you possibly teach well if the pupils really can't see the point of being in your class and there's no back-up from the parents? You just can't. And this, I believe is where our education system has gone wrong both in Britain and much of the rest of the world where it is considered a "right" not a "privilege." Of course, everyone should be able to have an education – I'm not quibbling with that. But what I do believe is that, as with the NHS, when you have a service offered by the state free at the point of delivery the value of that service is cheapened in the eyes of the consumer.
It's not unlike with one of those all-you-can-eat-buffets, where the food is so cheap you no longer see it as a dining-out treat but as something almost contemptible.
We need to restore the connection in parents' heads between the service their precious darlings receive (everything from childcare, heating and food to exercise and enlightenment) and the value of that service. Education is not free. Teachers need salaries, pensions; schools need upkeep. That money has to come from somewhere, yet it's clear from the negative attitudes of many parents that they don't appreciate this. If they did appreciate this, maybe they'd be a bit more demanding in the standards they expected of their children's schools and also in their expectations of their children's behaviour. Maybe in turn children would work harder. Maybe too, if parents were liable to some degree for the cost of their progeny's education they would think that bit harder before having more children than they can afford: the strivers already have to, so why shouldn't the scroungers too?
I admire Michael Gove's educational reforms but they don't go far enough. There should be no such thing as a "free" school. Education's too important for that.