AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE
DEFENCE OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
PRESS RELEASE 393
PUBLIC SCHOOL VOTE ABANDONS
THE MAJOR PARTIES
17 August 2010
Supporters of public education who
in the past have toyed with the Labor Party idea of a ‘Needs’ policy for mythical
‘poor parish schools’ are starting to wake up that State Aid to sectarian
schools is bad for public policy and even worse for public education.
In an article in the latest Dissent which was in part reproduced in
The Age of August 16 at page 13, Richard Teese the Professor and director of
the Centre for Post-Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning at Melbourne
University has finally admitted that ‘the
expansion of private schooling drains the public system of resources and
diverts scarce funds into a predatory sector.’ The DOGS have always claimed
that the sectarian sector was parasitical, living off the host, namely the
public Treasury and the public system of education. It is heartening to find a
well renowned academic going further to articulate in the media that sectarian
interest groups in
When dealing with the Labor Party’s mirror
image of Conservative policy, Teese notes further that
‘It is a failed vision of public
schooling that subjects the Labor Party to the indignity of scavenging on the
scrapheap of failed educational reform. The Greens, by contrast, start from the
premise that public schooling is intrinsically valuable and the best vehicle to
engage all children. They want a public system that is recognised as among the
best in the world.’
DOGS note however, that a
genuinely public system is one that is public in purpose, outcome, access,
ownership, control, funding accountability and provision and can never be
compared with a sectarian system which is only public in funding. It is because
Richard Teese and others who espoused the Labor Party Needs policy in past
decades have never confronted sectarian interests and questioned public funding
of these institutions, that the public
system is in serious decline. Too many in the public education camp have been
content to compromise on the State Aid and religious question in past decades.
Even now the silence from all except the Secular Party and a few independents is
deafening. DOGS are now in the
unfortunate position of being able to say: We told you so”.
Teese however, asks a question of
the major political parties with their bipartisan education policy:
‘What sort of consensus is it that
combines national testing, national performance reporting and a national
curriculum with a feudal mix of public and private schools, differently funded
and administered?’
DOGS have been asking this
question for the last fifty years. What is currently occurring in Australian
education constitutes a large stride back into the past, into a class ridden,
sectarian, feudal society. And for all the rhetoric about ‘the national
interest’ and the search for a ‘healthy economy’ our politicians are spending
billions and more billions on the duplication of educational facilities in
response to a sectionalist religious lobby.
One can only wonder whether behind the doors of insecure middle class
Australian parents being preyed upon by the religious lobby lurks would-be
aristocrats in disguise. Teese points out that, like the Coalition, Labor is ‘protecting those parts of the feudal regime
that are truly medieval – confessional schools serving church and sect, and the
grammar schools with their Episcopal or ecclesiastical patronage that barely covers
their corporate rears. ‘
Richard Teese is mystified by the
irrationality of the current bipartisan educational policy of the major
parties. Although they represent the modern state, public schools are now seen
as the sector of second choice. The Coalition criticizes them as ‘value free,
sub-standard and given over to ‘social engineering’. They initiated testing in
the 1970s but it is now the Labor government that is perfecting the testing
instruments guaranteed to impose market responsiveness.
Rather than a national treasure to
be preserved and strengthened, both major parties see public schooling as a
sector to be ’fixed’, and intend to do this from the one tool box – ‘ national
curriculum testing and reporting, payment by results, the market place and
school autonomy.’
Although Teese claims that neither
party sees that the harder they drive the privatization agenda, the weaker they
make the public sector. He spells out the simple fact that the expansion of
private schooling drains the public system of cultural and academic resources,
makes schools unviable in size and mix and diverts scarce funds into an
over-resourced and predatory sector.
He takes comfort in the fact that
the Greens start from the premise that public schooling is intrinsically
valuable and the best vehicle to engage all children. Recent ‘leaks’ in the
Greens campaign camp however, indicate that some candidates in
Teese is correct in saying that
Meanwhile, DOGS suggest that
supporters of public education put the major parties last on their ballot
papers and look for candidates that are strong enough to support public
education and advocate the separation of religion from the state by the
withdrawal of public funding for sectarian schools.
DEFEND
PUBLIC EDUCATION AND STOP STATE AID TO PRIVATE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS.
Listen to the DOGS program
3CR, 855 on the A.M. dial
12 Noon Saturdays
encouraged