For activists, history is a way to illuminate and understand present day problems.
The problem we wish to illuminate would not be regarded as a problem by 36% of those supporting private religious schools in Australia, but it is certainly a problem for those who believe in a free, compulsory and secular system – the public system which deals with the other 64%. The public system is only 176 years old in Australia, and the problems inherited from the dual system, the denominational and national, the private and the public, are still alive and well. And, with funding inequalities, the public system is becoming a wastebasket system as the society divides its children into the haves and the have nots.
For many Australian educators the history of the current education system appears to start in 1973, the year of the Karmel Report. This is a pity, since there is much to be learned from the nineteenth century experience. That history is a contested one, littered with ideological versions and interpretations.
The Present Day Problem
Jane Caro, a public school advocate writing for the Saturday Paper, goes back to 1973 and defines the current problem as follows:
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has declared this country will need 80 per cent of the population to go on to tertiary education, including university, if we want to remain internationally competitive. However, another of Whitlam’s education policies has made that figure much harder to achieve than it needs to be: namely, the recurrent public funding of private schools. He did it to finally resolve the split with the Catholic anti-communist Democratic Labor Party that had kept Labor out of office for 23 years. It worked politically, but it has become a long-term disaster for Australian education.
Australia now has one of the most socially segregated school systems in the world. We are second worst in the OECD for the increasing concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools, which compounds their disadvantage. Far from our schooling system helping to narrow the inevitable inequalities visited upon every child by the lottery of birth, our system uses public money to turbocharge them.
In a more recent article in the Monthly entitled ‘Class Warfare’ she quotes the principal of a comprehensive public secondary school:
“We ask public schools to compete against private ones, but we do not give them the funding or resources to do so,” says the principal of a comprehensive public secondary school.
“We then fill them with the most disadvantaged – and so most expensive to teach – students, including those rejected or expelled from publicly subsidised private schools.
“Then we blame public schools for struggling.”
“No wonder so many of our principals and staff despair.”
