can't talk about individual cases, lekki and you can't draw conclusions from one case, particularly if it's your own. One can call anything education. A life time of Bible Studies is called education yet I see it as a grotesque waste of time and an educational abomination. One has his/her own personal criteria when it comes to education. What you've said about your Year 7 child might or might not be true, again depending on your criteria. Not all children develop in the same areas at the same time. Some are extremely slow to begin with -and I mean all the way till their early twenties- but shoot up into excellence in a wide compass almost overnight. Others go through years of "Private Education" and end up being low lifes.
Yet, you would be a bit hypocritical if you "believe" as you say, in Public Education, yet support the Private (oh-so-focussed) Education!
A country should have both but both should be supported financially and spiritually to as great a degree as possible.
The "good results" come from the dismissing of "slower students" (usually the poorer) from the school and from allocating students private tutors who go over and over everything the student does. Quite often, if the parents are wealthy enough and are pushy pains-in-the-butt to the school, the student need do the absolute minimum to get a high mark. Then he gets to Uni and again, with up-front payments, he can get in with lower scores! And so it goes on right through his Education!
Make education absolutely free, have smaller classes, free up the teachers from all the meetings and interminable forms they have to fill, create a reasonable syllabus, provide good facilities, like libraries, chemistry equipment, sporting facilities, good, educational excursions, well educated teachers and Principals who were also good teachers (instead of financial drongos) some good youth workers, pleasant grounds -these are only a few basic things on my wish list- and you'd see your son and daughter exhibiting their greatest potential. Businesses are not schools for a wide curriculum. They deal only in numbers: Cost per Grade.
