CLARION CALL TO SUPPORTERS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

PUBLIC EDUCATION DAY 22 MAY 2003

President of the DOGS Ray Nilsen stated that :

We need supporters of the Public School Education to give focus and resonance to the actuality, potentiality and aspirations of Public school Education.

We need supporters that trumpet the virtues of Public Education and therefore the Public Schools particularly in the present climate when there is a retreat from the funding of public services, a glorification of the market place jungle, and individual choice, and a privatism that limits and sometimes negates the public or common good.

We need forceful and repeated statements of the ideology and benefits of a Public Education system that is public in purpose, public in access, public in control, public in ownership, public in support ,public in accountability, and public in benefit.

We need supporters that take a strong stand against the detractors of public education and supporters that proclaim that the ideal of public education is still a great one providing a splendid and liberating vision of a nation sustained by enlightened citizens and leaders.

We need supporters that are prepared to tell the Churchmen and promoters of private church education that we have enjoyed the Enlightenment since the Dark and Middle Ages, and that one of the institutions which has proved most fruitful for the heterogeneous and democratic new nation states has been the public schools - and it is a precious possession worth fighting for.

We need supporters that tell the politicians, the public, the pressmen and the priest and pastor as well as the professor that the church school faction is a corrupt and corrupting force in society.

We need supporters that proclaim that private education based on particularisms - on ethnicity, localism, regionalisms, religion and tribalism not to mention social or economic class, is no way forward. It is the way back, way back past the tensions of colonial Australia to an unjust, divided and war  torn Europe. Private church education based on a selfish individual pursuit and particularisms was tried and found wanting in Australia. This approach is what the founders and their successors in the public education system sought to replace by their proposals for a public education system that would be universal, free, secular and compulsory.

We need supporters that are not caught up in fawning me-to-ism, and careerisms; supporters who are not ashamed of the people and children the public school assists. We need supporters that will articulate and not mumble; ones that will state issues rather than create fog through economic rationalist jargon. We need supporters that are not ashamed to oppose aid to church schools.

Above all we need supporters who uphold the principle and value of Separation of Church and State and Religious Liberty .