Government contributions to private schools

This is a hoary Leftist whine below.  Typically of Leftism it looks only at superficialities.  The underlying point that parents who send their children to private schools relieve the public sector from educating them is overlooked.  That is a big saving for the public system so the Australian Federal government reimburses the private schools part of what their kids would have drawn from the public system. Monica seems unaware of that point -- a point that is something of a "third rail" in Australian politics -- As Biffo Latham discovered when he tried to cut it back.  It is in other words fair and seen as fair

American conservatives would wonder at Australia's system. Where they struggle to get voucher programs going, the Australian Federal government has for decades done the equivalent. They directly give all private schools substantial taxpayer money!  And that gives wider choice. Where such programs get up in America, it mostly means parents get the chance of sending their kid to a poor Catholic school.  In Australia you can send your kid to the top private school in town and only pay part of the costs.  So 40% of Australian teens in fact go to a private High School

Monica Dux

It is a myth that elite private schools are entitled to all the bells and whistles they enjoy because parents have paid for them. This quickly falls apart if you think about it. Private schools receive huge sums of money from the public purse; very nearly as much money as government schools. If that money was being used to keep struggling private schools afloat, then it might be justified. But in many cases it is in fact used to fund the educational "excellence" that we hear about in private school advertising campaigns – state-of-the-art sports grounds, pools, outstanding facilities of every kind. As commentator Jane Caro recently observed, one school is now providing on-site baristas, subsidised by our taxes.

The myth that underpins this – that parents are simply making a choice, and are themselves funding that choice – serves to obscure the gross inequality at the heart of our education system. The implication is that parents who send their kids to state schools should stop complaining about the under-resourced, overcrowded public system because they have chosen it. They weren't willing to pay, so their kids deserve what they get.

As a teenager I was acutely aware of this divide. It was first pointed out to me in grade 6, when one of my classmates informed me that the high school I'd be attending was a "dog school", the crap Catholic school where no one really wanted to send their kids.  She, on the other hand, was going to the superior private school with hats, pressed uniforms and various state-of-the-art facilities. 

Naturally, I was upset by the revelation that my school was for canines, as I'd naively assumed that my parents had chosen to send me there because it was closer to our home. But my classmate's spitefulness put me in my place, reminding me where I was from and what my parents could afford. 

I don't know whether my nasty classmate got a better education than I did, but I'm pretty sure she would have come away with a greater sense of entitlement, and the self-confidence that typically goes with it. For entitlement grows naturally out of the myth that justifies the system. Her parents paid for her superior education, made sacrifices to afford it, so she was entitled to the benefits that it brought her.   

Yet once you recognise that the taxpayer is footing a very substantial part of the bill, and that elite private schools are effectively siphoning away funds that could have gone into the state system, you see the equation very differently. Far from being entitled to anything, children who benefit from expensive private educations are in fact indebted to the ordinary taxpayers who subsidised their swimming complexes and their baristas. It's everyone else who made the sacrifice – sending their kids to underfunded state schools, while the private sector hogged the education dollar.

As we grow older most of us stop believing in myths such as citizen's arrest. When will Australia grow up and see through the education myths that are doing a disservice to all our children?


1 comment:

  1. Monica needs a corrective monocle. She is one eyed, and still a disgruntled teenager at heart. She says, "As a teenager I was acutely aware of this divide. It was first pointed out to me in grade 6, when one of my classmates informed me that the high school I'd be attending was a "dog school", the crap Catholic school where no one really wanted to send their kids. She, on the other hand, was going to the superior private school with hats, pressed uniforms and various state-of-the-art facilities."
    ... then says, "When will Australia grow up and see through the education myths that are doing a disservice to all our children?"

    Yet she is still in an immature teenage resentment and jealousy driven mindset. She hasn't grown up. Perhaps she stunted her maturity by too much pot smoking in "jernalist skool"? or perhaps she just worships emotions like other bitter and twisted lefties. Emotions impinge upon intelligence and diminish reason so that could be her problem. The Australian system is different to the U.S., we are not as polarised. Their non-compulsory voting system discourages from voting much of the central bulk that are less politically interested and encourages the more politically savvy and the extreme to vote. That polarises politics, individuals and society because it becomes a self driven loop. Much flows from that through all societal institutions because their is a societal need for congruence or it all gets messy and fragments. Our own funding and management of our social services, medical, education, transport systems, ...etc is roughly how it should be for us, is in keeping or congruent with our voting and government systems and the general expectations and preferences of individuals. The US left-right divide is wider and more stark than ours, on every level of their society, and that is good for the western world to have the US that way, it serves a required role, but Australia does not need to be that way. It is best for us and other western nations for us to be the way we are. Lefties though, like Monica-Monocle, are always trying to polarise issues to their widest degree, and that is in keeping with how they are - emotional, resentful, jealous, bitter,... and to hide it and gain power and control ie influence over other people's freewill, they are always trying to look good and caring, because in a Christianised society that values goodwill and consideration for others, destructiveness has to present itself as caring if it is to have influence, gain the approval it needs and the power it wants.

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