"If mothering is a luxury, it's children who pay the price."

It's not often I agree with this lady. What she said about Fiona MacKeown, for example, disgusted me. But this week, she's said something worth saying about motherhood and I'm glad she has.

This blog post recently put me onto this book which, although it's written about the situation in the US, covers factors relevant to the UK situation as well. The most interesting of these (to me) was the reason it gives for the exponential rise in house prices which the authors (Amelia Warren Tyagi and her mother Elizabeth Warren) blame on the state of the school system. Families, they contend, will pay everything they can possibly borrow for the premium of sending their child to a decent school. This fact in itself has led to both parents needing to work full-time in most American middle class families, which in turn renders them more economically vulnerable than if only one worked.

I'm still reading, but am yet to find mention of what seems to me to be the obvious solution - don't use the schools? Instead, they advocate a system of school vouchers so that parents don't have to buy the house to get the school place. That might work as well, I suppose, but I'd like to see school vouchers as well as optional attendance. I think we'd get some really decent educational provision from our schools if that were the case.

It's an idea I first heard from Roland Meighan and it makes perfect sense to me, as does everything else I've heard him say.