All education should be free, but the equivalent of 'public schools' and other private schools should exist, in a limited way, only as far as needed - in the form of special schools for the gifted. We won't even need 2 or 3% of the private school infrastructure in place to do this as most of Britain is very mediocre - at my 'public school' St Paul's more than 90% of students there were exactly as mediocre as most of the rest of the country, meanwhile very gifted children in poverty and 'the wrong' races and backgrounds - never get near private schools, let alone the 'best of them'.
We need a system where the minority of mediocre white students don't have special status over the vast majority of other mediocre white and nonwhite students - just because of the name of the school they went to regardless of how bad their grades were, how much their teachers had pained looks on their faces and in their hearts when going through work and grades with such students. Most people at my old school were very mediocre but will get much better jobs than other mediocre white Britons.
So there is no justification for the private school system - but there is a need for the best students from such schools, and the best in society in general, even among those who 'cannot afford' to buy 'good schooling' - a need to be educated with the same brilliance as some percentage of such students are able to experience currently thanks to private schooling - the only useful function of private schooling really, so their infrastructure and extremely high standard of teaching really aren't needed beyond that tiny population of genuinely above-average Britons - most students of private schools do not deserve the privilege in society their school name on their CV gives them - they are not being judged by the content of their character or their true ability, their advantage over others is both unfair and anti-survivalistic - the proliferation of mediocre people at the top ranks of our society is one of the biggest reasons the disaster of 2020 we have experienced has been so ineptly handled and why as 2021 closes, we are still up to our necks in the disaster which kicked off at the end of 2019.
It is not just the tory government and captains of industry who are to blame, it is not only them and the Labour Starmerian opposition with its craven subservience to the tories and captains of industry, it is the fault of the many, the millions of Britons who either see themselves as superior to others simply because (like the example of my old friend Tom I will show you) they have fallen for their own sales pitch (if you have a good school on your cv, even if you know you are a moron you may eventually think you're cleverer than the cleverest unperson you know) or they are the ones who see the fact that the perceived intelligence of those others (like my friend Tom) is a charade, ie the people who oppress them pretend to not be stupid but ARE stupid, and so they then believe that this means there is no such thing as 'better' and everyone is entitled to anything they want, using jungle law, whether through capitalist corporate power or plebiscitic 'union' power. None of them strives for a meritocracy, all of them perpetuate nothing more than sophisticated reworkings of simple bestial jungle law. They see the human as a beast, needing controlling. As Chomsky articulates so forensically, this dogmatic view flies in the face of the truth about humans, about what we're really like. Other American thinkers like Robert Pirsig and today the writer M.G. Piety have articulated much the same thing.
It is not the case that the fact that all these privately educated privileged cretins are cretins means that the gigantic swathe of people without that privilege are NOT cretins - you are too, mostly. That's why most don't ask for the right solution - they don't say "we need special education for the minority of very gifted Britons" - they don't even accept the existence of that minority. The stupidity of their masters makes Britain's worker movements demand that ALL stupid people be given power, not just a few.
Once Britain's best have what they deserve and need, the rest will then have a very powerful engine helping THEM stop being cretins and even, as time goes by, helping them become intelligent and slowly but surely on a par with the minority of genuinely intelligent Britons who, today, are surely less than 1% of our population and are mostly 'non white'? (If the average white person, through racial preference, is given to believe themselves more than they really are, then as time goes by less and less and less of them are genuinely intelligent and today a LOT of that time has gone by.)
I imagine the gender spread is 50/50 - British women are no less stupid than British men, as I was once banned from facebook for saying (on the grounds, according to the genius who banned me, that I was discriminating against either women or Britons - more evidence of the mediocrity of the minds of Britain and America's decision makers).