Life after school

Last week we were introduced through the media to a team of Chinese teachers who had come over for a short stay to teach kids in a Comprehensive School.
Listening today to a program discussing the comments made by the teachers about their findings regarding the pupils and the relationship between the pupil and teacher was absorbing if not a little sad. According to the Chinese teachers the children were disruptive, lazy, they showed no respect, and didn't want to learn. 
We feel in our bones looking at the poor behaviour amongst young adults that somehow we have failed so many of our children. The concept of "instilling" education has been lost in favour of trying to convince the kids that they should take notice of what is taught. The incredulity that we don't allow the children a semi free hand on the basis that too much interference with the intrinsic make up of a child is bad and that it is more important for the individual to flower naturally, was the response not only of the "program presenter" but by many who called in.
Of course we are talking of State Education, not the Private Sector Education since in the Private (Public) school system, discipline is accepted as an educational component along with competition amongst the pupils in terms of "inter-house, inter-school, and importantly academic success. This ethos of a Private School is one of comparison and achievement and it sets the pupils on the path to handle the rigours of life in the workplace.
The touch stone, when the Grammar School and the Secondary Modern School were merged into Comprehensives, was to give an opportunity to children who hadn't passed the entrance to Grammar Schools a second chance. Unfortunately hand in hand with that laudable aim, two things happened. General academic standards dropped to the disadvantage of the clever student who was no longer challenged plus the ethos of the school changed towards focusing on the less academic student. The concept of finding the "special attributes" which it was believed every student had meant the teachers job became as much that of a social services function as it was to be a teacher.
The pupil was judged not as person who would absorb the academic subjects which the teacher was trained to teach but as someone who needed rescuing and rehabilitating, turning them into someone who could progress into society in general. The average and below were the benchmark and we have suffered "as a nation economically" from the ideological game shift which occurred in the 60s.
This is not to dismiss the achievement of giving many individuals a second chance but at what cost.
If society is bent on rescuing all and sundry, as it should, it would do better to devise ways and means that do not rely on making the mistake of judging everyone as equal in their ability to grasp the importance of education. I am a firm believer in not only substantially increasing the expenditure but also develop better ways to educate the average and below average pupil. 
With the Internet and the use of electronic pathways into the school, richer more relevant subject matter could be developed (Open University Style) and piped in to capture the imagination of the street wise kids. Lower class sizes should be the norm for the less well equipped kid so that they receive the specialised attention they need but above all we must never loose sight of the aim of the National school system. To teach a curriculum based on life after school.