Good schools become a private benefit

By Kenneth Davidson

Middle-class disdain for state education comes down to one thing: maintaining advantage.

THE aspiring middle class know that education is more important than money in obtaining position in modern society. They also understand the burden imposed by credentialism. Access to top jobs depends not only on the level of education, but on the level of education relative to other aspirants for the top jobs.

In a less competitive, less educated society, education provided the necessary qualification for the job. Now employers use education as a screening device.

In the race to the top, advantage can be gained by crippling the educational opportunities of potential rivals as much as by increasing the overall level of educational opportunity (which simply lengthens the race for credentials).

But what generates advantage for the individual is destructive for the society and the economy. The most successful nations will be those that construct an education system that harnesses the ambition of the middle class to a willingness to fund a superior education system for all, irrespective of wealth, class or race.

Public funding for private education - initially established because of the Catholic Church's insistence on having a separate education system uncontaminated by secular ideas that might undermine the authority of the Catholic hierarchy - has become the hatch through which the affluent middle class escape their responsibility for supporting a high-quality public education system. Why should they pay for a system they don't use and whose products potentially threaten the position of their own children?

It is not put this way, of course. Most of the middle class and middle-aged who now bag the public education system (and free universities) were, like me, the beneficiaries of an excellent public education system, which opened up a comfortable and fulfilling middle-class lifestyle.

Nobody wants to be known as the bastards who, having benefited from public education, now want to pull up the drawbridge.

Their interests are well represented by the Catholic bishops and Protestant clerics, like the Anglican Archbishop and former director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Peter Hollingworth, who seek to sanctify education exclusiveness and inequality behind phoney appeals to Christian values.

Of the politicians, the Liberals are relatively up-front about their commitment to inequality. Labor is more dishonest about its willingness to buy the aspirational vote at the expense of those forced to use government schools.

Labor refused to join the Democrats in the Senate last year in opposing the States Grants (Primary and Secondary Education Assistance Bill) 2000, which enshrines educational inequality, arguing it would be tantamount to blocking supply.

(The real reason was an unholy alliance between the major political parties and the Christian churches. Labor agreed not to oppose the provision of an extra $100million a year to Catholic schools - backdated to 1998 without assessment of needs or accountability requirements - in order to keep the Catholic hierarchy on side politically. The Liberals offered the handout to avoid public criticism by the Catholic hierarchy over the even more outrageous decision to hand over an extra $340million over four years to independent schools.)

Individuals advance all sorts of reasons for turning away from public education. The most honest are up-front about the advantage private schools offer over government schools, which are required to offer an education to everybody. (Despite superior resources, private schools' main advantage is their ability to exclude or expel problem children.)

The most vile, ignorant and dishonest excuse offered so far for ``buying'' a private education was the claim last week by Aboriginal activist and educator Professor Marcia Langton that she was sending her daughter to an exclusive private school because of the rampant racism in government schools.

The proposition is vile because it is a class-based slur on the character of 70per cent of the school population and their parents and teachers. Langton has also put her daughter into a difficult position with her peers, despite Langton's unctuous claims for her daughter's anonymity, which has been better respected by the media than the mother.

Langton is showing ignorance. She calls into question her professionalism as an educator if she really believes there is a correlation between socio-economic class and racism. Where is the proof?

Langton's argument is dishonest. She must know that the best way all the colors, classes and creeds that make up Australia's multicultural society will get on as adults is if they get to know each other in school.

This article was published in THE AGE on 26/4/01 and is reprinted with the kind permission of THE AGE.
Kenneth Davidson is a columnist for THE AGE and co-editor of DISSENT magazine