Yes please, post away. Obviously, education is a topic I am always interested in reading about. I have been toying with posting about how and why we home school for a while now.

I can feel a new post on public education coming on… I don’t know what state of Australia you’re in, but here in Victoria, the Baillieu government is cutting $360 million from state schools and giving $245 million to private schools. Madness.

We prefer to blame the systems that have failed our kids rather than address that there is a whole recipe of things that have failed our kids. We can’t blame it all on the curriculum, the teachers, the systems. At some point each child has to be accountable for their own learning and each parent has to be accountable for giving their children not just opportunity to learn but to also encourage and nurture that desire. Kids have a natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge (it doesn’t discriminate between the classes either. ALL kids possess this trait regardless of the socio-economic status of their parents) ….where, how and why do they lose it?

As a military family we move around so much I began to really see the gaps in schools and curriculum across the states (and between the sectors of public and private. There’s enormous room for improvement on both sides). We’ve been homeschooling now for three years. We will never look back. I am very fortunate that I am able to take the time to educate my children myself and lucky that this works for us. (It doesn’t work for every body)

Government funding for non-government schools seems a little redundant. Although, if a school is struggling, then sure, a hand up is a good thing. But not at the expense of the public system.

Non-government schools that are turning a profit should not be receiving any government money at all and since most non-government schools are religiously affiliated, then why aren’t those schools exercising their “christian” duty to use those profits to help their struggling brother and sister schools. Or better yet, show true christian charity and use the money to fund a reading or breakfast program into the local public schools. Or how about donating books for the local public school library?

A lot of Catholic schools are really big on sponsoring orphanages in East Timor and projects like that. Well, why not use those profits and bring the charity closer to home and sponsor an underprivileged and underfunded local public school?

Ah the reality in my head…can be such a lovely place.

Of course the reality is that Altruism is dead and the private sector will never dip into it’s frightfully deep pockets to toss a coin at the public sector.

And so education across both sectors becomes a causality of the class war.

Fantastic Hendo! A person from our fundraising group is getting a list of alumni to come to our school and do just that.

Personally, I went private in Adelaide to year 9 and then public in (semi) rural Victoria, well, outskirts of Melbourne, to year 12 and my performance at the public school skyrocketed. I’m not really sure why but it certainly coloured my opinions later!

Oh and I went to one of those public highschools (in coastal NSW) which doesn’t look particularly pretty from the outside, but once you get in the gates you find highly experienced teachers (when I was there a ‘junior’ teacher had an average of 14 years’ experience), prizewinning bands, good sports programs, pioneering courses (aviation and marine studies) among many other awesome things. It wasn’t just my highschool, the area has a reputation for very good public high schools.

I’m also dubious that having a ‘prestigious’ high school on your CV gets you that much further in life.

At the same time I know the opposite ideas to me prevail, and that coming from a low socioeconomic area people often have low expectations, so I go back to my highschool every couple of years to talk to students there and give them an idea that there are lots of exciting things they can do with their lives, starting from their solid public highschool education experience. I usually make it a point to talk about not just me (public servant about to get a masters and have spent the last year volunteering overseas) but also my brother, who left school at 15, has never left the area and has built a very good working life for himself as a motorbike mechanic.

Sorry this is long but the public education debates get me really CRANKY because for me the issues seem very obvious!!!

” … a hell of a lot of the over-washed middle classes send their kiddies to non-governmental schools because they think they are buying advantage. ”

Too damn right they do. That’s pretty much the major reason. That and a constant boat-load of press whining about how bad public education is.

They’ll do anything to get ahead, including working in shitty jobs they hate so they can lay a guilt-trip on the kids in later life

I went to the local high school, and then went on to Uni and managed 2 degrees. Not bad for a snotty little git from the ‘burbs. At uni I was quite out of place – public educated kids were in the minority, and this is 20-mumble years ago.

Neverhteless my kids go to the local public school(s). We did, in a fit of worry, check out the more affordable private schools hereabouts and found that, actually, the facilities, lessons, standards, blah blah of the public school were better. The MAJOR difference seems to be twofold: perception, and the fact that the private school teachers are not forever trying to go on strike.

(Speaking of which – public education’s #1 worst enemy is within: its own teachers love to tell of how TERRIBLE things are in order to make a case for getting both control and a bag of cash.)

US families do seem to be relieved of spending a lot of money on high school education, the pay off being that they need to spend heaps on university (aka ‘College’) education. Here in Australia it’s a bit the reverse: families will spend heaps on high school, to get their kids into university where the costs (by US standards) are then quite modest.

But I’m with you on your overall point: in liminal or gentrifying suburbs, the fact of middle class flight makes the degradation of public schooling a self-fulfilling prophecy

thanks for that! (And the link to the Maribyrnong leader doesn’t seem to be working).