Hey, I was just wondering, there seems to be a stigma in some countries about going to public schools and I never really got that here. I've always gone to public schools and usually the only people who go to private schools are there because they want religion in school.

public...although public schools are called state schools and private schools are called public schools over here...:S

PUBLIC <3

Although I don't like school, period.

Confusingly, here in England, "public school" means the same as "private school". "State school" is one funded by the government.
I went to a private high school, for two reasons. One, the state schools in my area are utter crap. I needed to go to a school for the gifted, or I would have just spent my time staring out of the window.
Unless I was getting beaten up, which bring me to the second reason. I had some problems in my junior school - quite frankly, I was psycho. I once threw a chair at a teacher, and I once assaulted a lunch lady. I'm really ashamed of it now, but basically my parents took me to a psychologist (I have the report around here somewhere, it's an interesting read) and it all comes back to my IQ. Basically, in a state school, I would have died. I needed to be around people like me.
At the end of the summer I'm going to college, re-entering the state system. I think I'm prepared for the real world now.

I go to a private boarding school of sorts. I suppose it's kind of an accelerated university program which lets highschool juniors and seniors take college courses and live there on the campus 2 years early...

It's selective by... well... intelligence and performance level... instead of by religious preference.

We have a few schools for the gifted kids in my province and some programs in the regular schools for kids who aren't quite ready for the gifted schools. They are only in the bigger centres and they're all funded by the government (public schools).

I never been to a private school. The only private schools here that I've heard of a religous, for parents that consider the child to gifted for public school. or for special needs kids.

I'm on academic scholarship, but people have to pay to attend my school normally... therefore making us privately funded... we were also started by completely private interests, and although we receive some state money, more and more funding is found privately.

I have been to both a paid "Catholic School" Elementary and State funded Public High Schools and now college...which is City Gov. subsidised ...eegh ...I'm tired already!! When will the insanity end????

ah -the horrors of public schooling.....especially in oregon. wretched really. now that i'm all colleg-ish....i have to actually pay for school. how messed up is that? rawr. 14, 000 a year. sickening. plus another 500-1, 000 for extra classes i want to take for the hell of it. since they don't offer psychology at my art college. booo on that. studying the human psyche is art. so i spend extra for psych and philosophy classes. garr.....me no likey.

I go to a state school and its hell. The school is supposed to be one of the top state schools aroundand still...

1)The fact that everyone is mixed ability makes it really had for the more able students (which apparently includes me) to get along. We dont get as much attention as the less able students, and the teachers aint as good (im comparing my school to a private school several of my friends go to).

2)Without in any way promoting myself here, i have one of the the highest IQs in my year, im in a "special class" for the top 15 pupils. And it still makes no difference.

3)The teachers have no control- which is partly due to the fact that they are underpaid and hate their jobs imho. I have been physically beaten up by a gang of older kids in front of 3 teachers, who did nohing about it.

Excuse the whine, but i really envy those people who have enough money to get to a private school. You're getting a better education, and a better life.

Oh and the university i want to go to wont accept lower than A*s in A level from state schools

i go to public/state school because i fear change ... i was supposed to go to a private school from third year in highschool onwards but i didnt want to. i was then supposed to transfer to a school for "intelligent" writery/arty/drama type people for fifth and sixth year but i was into science too and they had crappy resources ....

i actually prefer state school ... cause no one really gives a crap about anyone else and so i get left alone to succeed or fail as i see fit ... doesnt work out well for most but im doing fine i think there would have been too much pressure at private school for me to do well and i would have failed miserabely and ended up like my mother ...

Low funding

Overcrowding

This and more can be found at your state schools (public)

Yeah i'd go private.

ok i will admit that my school has a really crappy system that way too ... all the bad kids get herded off into a specific wing of the school and disposed of as quickly as possible, the rest are luimped together and the more intelligent have to go to these stupid meetings a few times a year that have no purpose but to make us even more of a target for dumbass bullies that havent been turned into stew by the dinnerladies yet ...

as for the teachers we used to have great teachers but theyve all left ... we only have a couple of truely good techers now which is just horrible ... ... im still in mourning for my history teacher ...

My tutor left this year after 26 years of service.

She was the most amazing PSE and RE teacher ever- i never once saw her make a mistake or get embarassed in class.

/salutes Mrs Heath

Both!

10-16 I went to a private school

16-... well... I guess I'm still studying so until now! Government funded colleges/universities.

i used to go to a national awarded blue ribbon school. called carlinville high school top ten in the usa... but i droped out because i had problems with teachers (id ask questions they couldnt answer and get kicked out for being a smart edit) now im going to an a scoool (alternative) for drop outs like me... i would have been a 6th years seinor because if your kicked out of class in chs you dont get a assignment and if your kicked out more then 5 times you dont get a grade and have to retake the class...lets jsut say i was kicked out of class almost every day in almost every class(were also on block 8)

I've been to all sorts of schools, some much better than others. I went to grade 1 in Seoul, S. Korea, where incredibly enough, the teachers were bribed by the parents to favour their kids. I remember a time I forgot my reading book and getting yelled at by the teacher, while my partner, who also forgot his book but had his parents paying the teacher got off scotch free. Yeah, it was pretty screwed. And I still think the system is operating that way, sadly enough. Anyways, that was the main reason my mom took off with me and my sis to England, so we could get a better education than the one we were getting then. I went to a private girl's school from grade 2-3, and seriously, if I were to say my favourite thing about that school it would have to be the Shepard's Pie. (mmm...) Not to say that the school's education wasn't top notch. It wasn't bad. Then I moved to Canada (sigh) and went to public school, which isn't very bad compared to some of the other "state schools" you people described earlier. Currently I'm attending a public high school, and despite some recent budget cutbacks my school isn't in the extreme regions (as in, extremely bad or extremely good). I guess the whole point is, Shepards Pie is good. Oh, and that private school is definitely better.

Whats the bullying like in private schools? Cos in state schools like mine it is a serious problem, none of the teachers seem to be able to stop it.

Back in 1 to 6 grades in Catholic School, it was vicious, except everyone kept quiet and they waited for you to be alone to attack.

In 7-8 in "funded" schools the humiliation was public, even inside the room with the teacher present...

In college, it's a little of both... hehehe

::smile...your mouse is watching::

I'm moving this to Issues, as it seems to have gone beyond a simple tally into a full-blown discussion...

Continue on as you were.

western oregon, yes. schools over there are total crap...i went to em for 8 years..lol.

but in eastern oregon, the schools are really good. your side of the state tends to forget we even exist though, lol

i learned a great deal at my high school, and it had an excellent gifted program. plus i got to take courses that i really loved (i took a grand total of 15 english classes during the four years i was there ). and i have to say that my teachers there really DID prepare me for college, as some of them were even tougher than my professors are! (but they were good....they forced me to do my best.....wow i sound like a made for TV movie, don't i? )

but...because it's a public school, recently funding got cut (it did all over the state) and now kids don't have the option of taking the classes they really love anymore. but the teachers are all still there...well except for the best one, she retired early and began teaching one college class a semester. at my college! i've already taken 2 classes from her, lol.

my experience with public school was a great one...but they are quickly deteriorating in this area, and it's really sad to see.

i forgot you lived in eastern or. hmmm...could have sworn you live in milwauke or somewhere close to portland. near-er to me........

well i'm originally from molalla, where the schools are total crap.

i was home schooled my first semester of high school because i just didn't wanna go to the high school there.....it was awful. but then we moved here to eastern OR, and i was happy in the schools.

has anyone else ever been homeschooled? i hated it. it was really boring. i finished all of the work in an hour and then sat around waiting for my friends to get out of regular school.

public school, hugh christie technology college (tryu typing that when you're ptiised its hard)

yup technology college extra money...though it got burnt a little...i think it was a insurance scam....i wouldn't out it past the head person

heh, my school used to be a sports school but then we changed to a technology college.

St.Johns technology school and community college. <<<< FIND IT AND BURN IT!!! HA HA HA

nah it wasnt to bad. cept it was in two halfs.

years 7-9 was in the lower site called Savernake and years 10- 11 (and 6th form) were in the higher building called Stedman. thing is you missed half your breaks some terms cause you got shoved in a class that was based in the lower school cause the upper one didnt have the facilitys for DT. so your whole break was spent on a bus. :/ theyre moving it all onto one site soon tho. and it shall be massive. :/

we always used to go to the local private school when we bunked off tho. There was massive rivalry between our schools but a lil group of us were friends with the 'naughty' ones. so we bunked off with them. lol, i might still ahve some of there numbers actually. they were good times. lol.

I went to a public/state school. I didn't think it was too bad, there was some bullying going on, but none of it in my year. The teachers weren't too bad...they tended to get better and have more of an appreciation for pupils further up the school so if you were in 6th form things were good but in lower forms the teaching was pretty limited because of the number of pupils in the lessons. I really enjoyed my time there, I preferred 6th form though.
I have a friend who went to a private school, but I don't think that the standard of teaching was alot different there. I think alot of the pupils there had average A Level grades and my friend and I had exactly the same grades. I think the only good thing about private schools is that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge are more likely to accept you if you're from a private school. That's only my opinion though. My friend (from private school) got into Cambridge uni and I don't know of anyone from my school who got into it even though they applied.

I went to a state school. In the catchment area where I lived, I had four choices:

One public school, wi high entry requirements (which I coulda made easily) but was too expensive.

Three state schools, the nearest of which was in the middle in terms of quality. The next nearest was the best one, but me folks weren't prepared to send me all that way...

I got a good O level education in spite of the crap. I think I studied cos I had no friends or life or anythin like that. I did worse at A level partly cos the place wasn't up to teachin A level standard, but also cos after siftin out the 98% of morons, I was left wi a suitable peer group. At which point I made friends an stopped studyin so hard.

From what I've heard from people in the profession nowadays (an judgin by the school near me), it's a LOT worse than it was; kids as young as 8 usin strong language, smokin is rife, fightin is common... I even heard a group of 13 y/o girls talkin about givin head!!! If I ever have kids, I'm payin for an education for them, cos I dun wanna leave it up to chance in one o those places...

haha, funny story, my mate got asked for a fag by some girl in the park, so he got cocky and asked what its worth....she gave him head for a FAG! ....she wasn't 13 though...musta been at least 15....i hope

You jest, shurely!?

Good lor, some girls today really have no self respect... I mean, doin that in exchange fer a ciggy??? Good lor...

theres this new thing at my school among the 3rd years (14/15 yrs old) called getting "booked" basically its like getting fixed (for all you who dont know this is a flimsy excuse to make out with random people without dating ... a one night stand for the preadolescent)

only with booking the guy asks the girl to "get booked" and if she says yes she is promising to go out that night and give him head ... and her name goes in a book so she cant back out of it ... im not sure what happens if they refuse but my littlest sister is a third year now so if she gets all air-brained again ... gah ... i'll kill them all!

Well, I went to Private school (gets stuff chucked at her) basically because I wasn't taught anything in my state. Spent fouror fives years in a remedial class, then got bumped up into the right class, became and egg-head, pissed off the popular pupils, became their favorite target. They were never violent to me, just vicious, rumours, bitchyness, being rejected by them and all that stuff. I'm glad I didn't get bruised, but they made my life hell. I still remeber the time they stole my science book for a laugh, and teacher refused to believe that I had packed it.

As far as i can remember, all those six weeks ago, my teachers (except for one, excelent, excelent English teacher) hated their jobs at my school and took it out on the pupils most of the time. According to them we were all going to fail miserably. Our class was hell to them, and they were trying to get their revenge on us. We constantly were underfunded, we literally had to bring in *a* rasin, (not plural, singular rasin) for science because they couldn't afford it.

By fourteen mosty of the class had got drunk at least once, if not every weekend at the local club, one had lost her virginity and most of them had given head at some point. Except me. Oh well. I hated it, got depressed, grades went down, teachers bitched at me, not really realising that all I wanted to do was go off and cry than face another day their, being their whipping girl.

I left as fast as I could. If you are considering sending your child/sister to a school called St Catherines near Pope Grottos in Twickenham, England, please don't.

The moral to this story? Well, Private Education has only had two advantages for me. One English teacher and no physical violence. Our schools had the police in, money stolen every week and general mised ability classes that slowed down more able pupils (believe it or not, I was one of them). Okay, it was a catholic school which claimed to have 'a loving atmosphere.'

My arse.

Apologises for my first post being a stupid rant, but I hated at my school, and I just think it's an interesting departer from the normal - "private school was great!" stuff. But I noticed someone say that Oxbridge likes Private pupils more than state. Newsflash - No they don't. They have a quota on how many they can take.

i go to private university here in the philippines, and i hate it because it's a catholic school and they are so attached to their religion, we have to start every class with a sick prayer.

Unlike most of you commoners, I go to a private school. It's actually really good, all things considering.
We have a few idiots, and sometimes some of the boys are a little too physical (not in that way, except one, which worries me a little, but not too much ), but mostly its great.
Most of the teachers are very competent, there is minimal bullying, there is an excellent work ethos.
My year is not amazingly sociable; we all seem to slip into cliques, but its no real problem.
Hooray for private education!

Some of the public schools in my area are pretty damned appalling - one school gets several bomb-threats a week, and the rest have appalling grades, terrible bullying, etc.
The best public schools in the area are well-established single-sex schools; they are on a par with the private schools, so its not all bad.