Teachers Want to Nationalize Private Schools

(Manchester, England) Imagine for a moment, dear readers, that you are given a proposal to evaluate.

You are confronted with a bushel basket of rotting apples surrounded by a large number of individual, crisp and nutritious apples. Now, the proposal is to place the crisp and nutritious apples into the bushel basket with the stated reason of seeing "some urgent improvements" in the condition of all the apples.

Good idea or not? You make the call.

Okay, now change the apples to public and private schools, respectively, and I contend that the proposal is an example of unfathomably irrational thinking and it comes from, not surprisingly, a teachers union. Using their logic, we could sardine a bunch of healthy folks into a tuberculosis ward and overall health would improve.

The new head of Britain's biggest teaching union has called for the private education system to be nationalised.

Bill Greenshields, incoming president of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said such a move would improve state education and make it fairer.

The NUT, the most left-wing of the teaching unions, has long been hostile to independent education and to Labour’s programme of setting up academies with private-sector sponsors to replace failing schools.

But Greenshields's comments to the union's annual conference in Manchester yesterday went one step further.

"Let's consider our own direction of travel -- from private to public, towards bringing all schools into the state sector," he said. "Then we would soon see some urgent improvements in our state system."

And this guy was chosen as president of the organization! It's hard to picture what the more extreme members of the NUTs have on their minds. By the way, you have to give the group credit for coming up with a most apropos acronym.

Companioned at Education Watch.