This is certainly very true, but it’s also true, and in the case of the continuing boom of juku in Japan, very true, that parents are susceptible to unfounded beliefs about public policy just like everyone else. Once a widespread perception, for example of a decline in academic achievement, takes root, this perception has a much greater impact on decision-making at all levels, than any evidence supporting or contradicting this wide-spread perception might have.

t seems to me that so-called supplementary – nearly always private – education is quite a big story around the world. Huge amounts are written by educational experts, many of who are in mainstream public education and they normally write about public education.

I am surprised to see that you think that there are huge amounts written on this topic. Within academia at least, there is very little that’s written on this topic. My sense that this is in part because most of my fellow academics who work on schools don’t consider juku to be part of their domain and thus ignore it. Further, scholars who focus on lifelong learning don’t do research on kids, so they generally don’t look at juku, tutoring services, etc. Add to this that in places like Japan, the existence of juku is still regarded as something unfortunate by most academics and policy makers (as it is interpreted to hint at failures in conventional schools) and thus not an issue that young researchers, until recently, were eager to pick up.

But there is another world out there and parents in many places are voting for it with their wallets.

Absolutely, and that makes the apparent global growth of supplementary education an important phenomenon to study.

We have entered a make-believe world in which all education has to be institutionalised – otherwise it isn’t education. This is how the educational establishment extends its influence and control by picking up on any perceived educational shortcoming and obliging us – by law – to submit ourselves to the power of professional educators – even when they themselves have been responsible for the shortcoming (whether perceived or real) in the first place.

While typing this I’m listening to a discussion on BBC Radio 4 (Women’s Hour) in which a parent is expressing puzzlement at an OFSTED report on her child’s school in which, as a reult of measuring different things from last time, the school, which had previously been rated ‘good with outstanding features’ is now failing in spite of being judged to have improved since the last inspection.

The whole business of measuring academic prowess in pupils AND in measuring ‘schools’ (how you can measure the ‘performance’ an inanimate institution I’ve never been able to understand) is so flawed and based on such appalling generalisations about what a particular young person ought to be able to do at a particular age – and on a particular day as to be absurd.

That is why I advocate that formal schooling should end at the age of 14 or so – when the pupil has passed a School Leaving Certificate – a certificate of competence to deal with the adult world NOT of academic prowess, and real education begins. [See 'Wot No School: how schools impede education' by Jonathan Langdale and John Harrison].

Read the highway code.

I had to laugh when the French MEP threatened to look again at our Rebate because we hadn’t shown enough ‘solidarity’. Fair enough! ‘Bring it on’ chumly!!
Perhaps he needs reminding that we’re a net contributor – as opposed to his own begging bowl country?
What would you think of your own ‘friends’ if they were only friendly (and showed ‘solidarity’) with you if you bought all the rounds in the pub each week and did what you were told?
Imagine how this little French guy would squeal if we stopped paying in and his country, and most of the other 26 in his ‘solidarity club’ had to pay their own way instead of leeching off us?

Of course they’ll want to keep us their their matey drinking club – even if it’s just standing outside in the cold, listening at the door – so long as we pass our tenners through the window, so they can carry on drinking and having a nice evening.