Australia’s schooling system is among the most highly segregated in the OECD. Public schools educate the majority of disadvantaged students, while there is concentrated advantage in private schools.
This situation can be attributed, in large part, to our school funding arrangements.
A really informative article that explains how we got to where we are and what we can do about it. Australians must demand a fair and more intelligent system.
We fix it by taking back 100% of the tax-payer funded money going to private schools and giving it back to the public schools where it belongs.
If you want to send your kids to a private school or a religious school, then the financial burden should fall squarely on the shoulder of all people sending their kids there and not a singular cent should be brought from the tax pool.
It’s beyond immoral that these elitist parasites send their filthy spawn to special schools that aren’t accessible to the general public to get a “better education” yet have our taxes fund it.
The private and religious school systems should be dismantled and their assets and property should be restructured into public schools. Reclamation without compensation - and if anyone complains - public hanging.
Agreed. Always thought this, never understood why private schools get anything from government. How’re we funding private education but whingeing about stuff like the NDIS or the public school system suffering? I’m going to guess that public school teachers are leaving the job at a higher rate than private so maybe the money could help retain some good teachers and resources that support them to be able to stay in the job without burning out for the scummy public kids (/s)?
Absolutely agreed.
All the best teachers leave for better pay (who wouldn’t in this fucked economy) and it’s the public schools that are left to suffer.
The wealthy fear an educated public, thats why there has been decades of coordinated political attacks against the public schooling system through underfunding/defunding, mismanagement, and archaic schooling systems/structures that haven’t been functionally updated in centuries.
And now the working class has seen what the wealthy are doing with their ill-gotten gains and we need to put a stop to it. Putting a 99% wealth tax on them would pay for the singular best education system in the globe ten-fold over. Imagine what else we could do if the wealthy and their companies were taxed fairly.
What we’ve seen happen is by design, and everyone’s had a gutful of it.
Buh buh buh but whhaaayyy should their taxes fund schools their kids aren’t going too whaaa?!
Do you want little johnny poorperson to be educated and working as your office drone or illiterate johnny poorperson smashing in your window and stealing your TV for meth
I think they want little johnny poor person working crappy low-skilled, low-paying jobs. For the economy!
They care about the immediate effects of tax on themselves and extrapolating indirect benefits is beyond their mental capacities in spite of their fancy private education.
I sent my kids to a catholic school. I hate catholocism.
But the alternative is educating them alongside the spawn of drug addicts. I’ve been there, and it’s so much worse.
There are valid exceptions.
There are students who live in isolated rural towns that can’t easily access secondary school in particular, who need assistance attending a boarding school or the like and all of these are private. The government offers this assistance as Isolated Childrens Allowance, which is delivered in two parts, a direct payment each term to parents and there’s also a boarding component paid to the school, if the kid is attending a boarding school.
This includes those who live on grazing properties and farms. Quite often primary school is done by distance ed with a tutor employed on the station to help with classes. It exists for secondary as well but there are social costs; most opt to send kids to boarding school if they can.
To offer a true public option around that where these could attend a public school, more regional public schools with boarding capability might be required, perhaps in larger towns which already have public schools.
So yeah in the bush it’s not cut and dried.
My only argument/retort is that with a wealth tax of 99%, it would completely, thoroughly and spectacularly fund for the production of large, public boarding schools with twice enough teachers to have low teacher-student ratios, other staff to assist with hygiene and food, etc so that the children were put into exceptionally good boarding schools.
Even if this hypothetical school cost $500M per year to run, it would be worth it to make sure absolutely no children are left behind and with the assistance and means to pull themselves out of poverty.
Collectively, we could be raking in hundreds of billions of dollars per year for these schools, free tertiary education, free public health. We don’t need to divide ourselves between imaginary lines of difficulty when making sure our children are educated.
Yeah look no argument here, at least not in funding public schools over private.
But yeah, that’s one that is necessary, however it’s cut. If we were to take the private out of that problem, it’d mean investment in the same type of boarding school they provide.
When wealth dictates whether your child gets a “good” education or a “better” education, there is a serious problem with the system that needs dire attention…
Absolutely.
My experience says money is used either for good education or indoctrination. I feel that religions should have no place in education, not just stripped of public money but banned.
It’s as John Howard set it up. It’s what we got with bible bashing John.
As bad as he was, I think he was the last competent Liberal prime minister. I really don’t understand how that party still attracts votes.
The public funding of private schools was around before him.
Howard’s big legacy is GST replacing sales taxes
True the GST probably was the biggest but people remember gun control more and the CGT discount not at all.
Ah yes, the announcement he made wearing a bullet proof vest
Why are private schools getting government funding at all?
(I summarised the following explanation from Quora and it sounds pretty accurate)
The main reason most people think is to prevent a revolt at the ballot box by upper-middle class voters.
The first non-govt large scale school system in Australia was set up by the Catholic Church. Many of Australia’s earliest colonists were Irish-Catholic and poor and so the Church set up a school system for them.
When the first public school system was set up, it started by appropriating a large number of Catholic schools. The Catholic school system survived, however, and has remained powerful in Australia.
In the past, the main purpose of governments providing funds to private schools wasn’t to keep the Catholic schools open, but rather to fund an Anglican equivalent for the children of English settlers - particularly out of fear that the Irish-Australians might have an advantage over them. Catholic vs Protestant factionalism is largely dead in modern Australia, but our current school funding system owes a great deal to it.
Nowadays, whenever politicians start pointing out that it is a bit crazy that the states pay for public education but the federal government also gives large grants to private schools, they encounter massive opposition. The last time this was suggested, many upper-middle class parents spoke out loudly, saying they were concerned that the funding to their children’s schools was the “only thing they got back” from the large amounts of tax they paid. They are very wrong about this, but it seems to be a widely held belief.
So, the system of using public money to support private education in Australia started for historical reasons that are no longer relevant, but continues because a powerful bloc of voters more-or-less demands it do so.
To put dates on it (though South Australia is different) from colony onwards Australia was mostly Catholic, then the £5 poms came after the second world war, 1940s
Adelaide had a Protestant population of German heritage from early colonial days
The Australian colonial ‘ruling class’ was predominantly Anglican even though many in the convict class and some of the lower army ranks were Catholic. There were also other protestant denominations. In the early days of the colony, in NSW and Tasmania the children of Catholic convicts and all orphans under the care of the colonial government were brought up as Anglicans. As the population grew and more Irish convicts and migrants arrived the Catholic population also grew. If you’re interested there’s a great summary of the Christian churches in Australia have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Australia
Can we also bring back gifted schools, special needs schools and juvie lite too?
There are public selective high schools in all Australian states and there’s also other specialised ones, see https://www.australianschoolsdirectory.com.au/
Special needs schools have been thought to not be beneficial for children. I am not arguing for or against.
I wish I had gone through the public school system, the shit the Catholic system left me with and all. The men who I went to school with who I recently reconnected with are the most sexist and racist people under age 60 I have ever met. My circle of public school friends are much more progressive.
On the good side, that Pet Shop Boys’ song really resonates, though I avoided the internalised shame
I also had a Catholic education (all-girls) but it was not as harsh as yours sounds like it was. Nevertheless, I rebelled in high school and asked too many questions (I was given a warning) about the religion. I’m not in touch with any of the people I went to school with but in the early years after school they were a very varied bunch, nuns, divorcees, and non-marriers but that was a long time ago. One thing that I do value about the Catholic education is the social justice aspect which is strong.
You’ve made me wonder what happened to all the girls I went to school with. Most of them would be grandmothers now.
Mine was all boys, my sister went to a girls only school. We were certainly treated differently.