It's a side-effect of a social system in which people have property and some have more than others (as opposed to a naive interpretation of "property is theft"). People can then choose what to buy, and some have more choices than others. Somehow it's easy to accept that some people can buy diamond necklaces, but more difficult to accept that some people can buy better education for their children - I suppose this is because we tend to feel that the children, having no responsibility for the wealth or otherwise of their parents, shouldn't be affected by it. But it's impractical to make that so, without getting rid of a property-based social system altogether. A society could ban private schools, but then people who cared very deeply about education and could afford it and thought the public schools near them wasn't good enough would buy a house near the best public school, or homeschool with the best tutors, or move to a country with a less restricted education system, or afterschool, or enrich with expensive educational trips, or... You can't prevent parental financial resource having an effect on the opportunities available to children. (And of course, more important than money is parental attitude - there are plenty of rich people who *don't* spend their riches on optimising their children's education!)
What you can, and IMO should. do is aim to make what's provided out of taxation good enough that everybody is getting such a good education that the difference between what the richest people can provide their children with and what everyone else can is only frills, not the important stuff.
I don't think the UK is anywhere close to that ideal, and here too it's often when you look at provision for gifted children (although we don't use that term much here) that the phenomenon is most starkly obvious (to get back on topic for the board!). The government here has recently abolished the obligation for state schools to identify their most gifted students; they've never had an obligation to do much for them, though of course there are schools that do. There are no specific state gifted schools here (there are a few selective "grammar schools", a few of which are "super-selective", as a remnant of the old system of grammar and secondary modern streaming at age 11, but only in a few areas of the country). Because state spending on schools is under very severe pressure here at the moment, provision for gifted children in state schools is only going to get worse for the foreseeable future; unless your child is fortunate enough to get a fantastically dedicated and talented teacher, prospects are very bleak.
At the same time, the general economic difficulty makes it harder than it was for parents to afford to send their children to private (including "public" in our confusing UK terminology) schools, some of which provide fantastically for gifted children. Most of them are charities and have an obligation to make some provision for funding places for children whose parents can't afford fees (this has been under scrutiny lately, but let me not go there...) but inevitably this is adjustment round the edges - the bottom line is that here too, if you take two children with identical needs, one of whom has wealthy parents and one of whom doesn't, the first has a statistically better chance at a good education.
It's a live issue for us: at the next stage of education, we probably can't afford the school that would be best for DS. We'll be looking at all our options and choices and doing the best we can; we can do no more.
