I caught Joan Bakewell on the telly today, emitting a particular Fixed Quantity Fallacy, in this case the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy.  (Here‘s a more generalised version of the same principle.)

What she said was that if the educational private sector were totally nationalised, all those wonderful private sector facilities – sports grounds, science labs, swimming pools, great teachers, and so on – would all become “available to all”.

No they wouldn’t.  A lot of these places and facilities would simply disappear, crumble, be shut down.  What now makes private sector schools superior is their Rules (see the previous posting).  Nationalising them would change these Rules for the worse.  These schools would become harder to work in, less fun and less easy to teach in.  Many of the teachers would give up, teachers who don’t now just teach, but who now look after sports grounds, science labs and swimming pools, tasks which would become much harder and more stressful.

On the other hand, changing the Rules of state schools for the better, towards how the Rules now are in private sector schools, would increase the quantity of education available, for all.