Here's Why

Class Rooms

The Australian government, whichever party is in power, funds private schools with public funds, but fails to fund public schools with private funds. The result is that public schools are seriously under-funded and many are using photocopies of texts because they can't afford to buy books. All new funding is for infrastructure only. Strangely, private schools get more public funding than public schools.

This double-funding of private schools at the expense of public schools has been justified by the argument of "freedom of choice". Two freedoms are invoked. The argument runs that religious schools must be funded by public money because this supports the constitutional freedom to choose to be religious. However it was established in the High Court in 1981 that Australians do not have this freedom. The High Court established that the "establishment clause" of the Australian Constitution means that there is no separation of Church and State. Of course the other legal principle is that pupils in schools do not have the freedom to choose whether to be religious, or which religion they will practice. They have few rights at all. Their parents effectively own them as chattel, and are legally able to choose to have them attend compulsory religious instruction at a public school or a private school. The sole purpose of private religious schools is to indoctrinate children in the faith of their parents. There are no freedoms exercised here.

The other freedom claimed is a "freedom to choose a school". Lets break this one down and see what freedoms are being argued for. Who can exercise this freedom? A private school will have high fees which only wealthy people can afford. Are people arguing that poor people should be given extra money to pay private school fees? No, they're arguing that private schools should be able to charge any fees they like. So the real argument is for freedom of wealthy families to choose a doubly funded private school over a single funded public school. Worse, the government has chosen to fund private schools at a higher rate than public schools. The rich families are getting more school services from the government than poor families. This is justified by the "entitlement argument". Its asserted that wealthy parents pay more tax than poor families, therefore they are entitled to receive more government services than poor families. They are saying that wealthy parents should have more privileges in our egalitarian society than poor parents. Rich and poor are not the same before the law. The Coalition and the Labor party agree.


The real choice that wealthy parents are demanding to exercise is for their children to get better privileges than yours. Its whispered that if you send your children to a private school, that unlike you, they will do better than children who go to a public school. By attending an elite school it is hoped that your child will join the elite classes in society. How could this happen? Its been shown that the teaching and curriculum are the same, as they have to be by law. If you push a parent on why their child must go to a private school, you're told that its because of who they socialise with. The children of the privileged classes go to your child's school, so your children will befriend them, and be known to them when they are inevitably raised to positions of power. Your child will network their way to a higher class. Unfortunately this doesn't take into consideration the reality of school society. All the kids know how poor your Mum and Dad really are, and they know what their background is. Class is everything. So your kids won't get real leg up from socialising with children of the ruling class. The best they can hope for, is that they will have an accent to their English that reflects the wealthy suburb of the private school and the rich kids that attend, instead of the accent of the parents that aspire for a higher class for their children.

If the only true benefit of going to a wealthy private school is gaining a new accent, then I suggest that we train kids in public schools to speak with the accents of the posher suburbs. This way they can have a good education without driving their parents bankrupt, and still be treated as if they come from a higher class when they graduate.

The only choices on offer in the public school versus private school debate is for the wealthy, which is against any fair democratic principles. The only choice on offer by religious schools is for parents to indoctrinate their children before they are old enough to give consent.

I can't see any reason for private schools to exist. If the funding were put into public schools, then they would have all the resources our children need to take their place in society as good citizens. They could read books instead of photocopies of books. They could be trained to have a posh accent, so that they weren't be discriminated against. Any indoctrination in a religion of the parent's choice could happen after school hours, unless we set an age of consent for indoctrination, to avoid taking advantage of children.

Then perhaps we can either recognize that the same families get elected to govern each century, or we could create the equality so that this doesn't happen anymore, and create a genuine meritocracy.

References:

[PDF] AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT FUNDING TO PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Private School Funding: Time to Fix the Inequity -- John Kaye

Public funding of private schools | newmatilda.com

Green Left - Issues: Private schools: no government funding

Tim Matthews | IQ2 debate | no excuse for funding private schools

Private school myths

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here

Posted by iwoolf at July 28, 2009 4:13 PM | TrackBack