



Rise of private schools marks return to 19th century waste


Marion Maddox

When I started school in the 1970s, local Australian schools were free, compulsory and secular. We all went to the local public school, or almost all of us. The Australia we knew was proud of being egalitarian, and relatively free of religious conflict. The main issue was privilege: some wealthy private schools, more or less religious, could claim to provide an education superior both to the public system and to parochial Catholic schools.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson.

The pursuit of ''choice'' by our politicians since the 1970s has widened the gap between the wealthy and the rest, and also hammered in religious wedges. Now about 40 per cent of Australian secondary students attend private schools, including new low-fee Christian schools scattered around the country, with significant government subsidies. Meanwhile, conservative Christianity is increasingly being served up in public schools in the form of school chaplains and other programs designed to support ''traditional values''.

Ironically this new emphasis on religion in Australian schools took off just when church attendance and religious adherence were collapsing. The end of Australian secular education does not parallel any desecularisation of Australia's population - quite the reverse. Since the late 1970s, the religiosity of Australia's school systems and of Australia's population has run in pretty much opposite directions.

This seeming paradox has a ready explanation. Handing over ever-larger parts of Australia's schools to religious private operators, and of welfare and values education in public schools to religious enthusiasts and volunteers, reflects the broader pattern of ''outsourcing'' public services to private providers. Beginning with the Jobs Network that replaced the Commonwealth Employment Service during the Howard government's first term, religious agencies have proved successful players in the market for contracts for what were previously government services. This was not necessarily because the services or the clients who used them were inherently religious.

As long-standing providers on the margins of the public system, religious agencies have the experience and infrastructure ready to expand when the need arises. They are also used to working with volunteers, and their paid employees often share elements of a volunteer ethos, including typically being among the most under-unionised in the workforce, meaning religious organisations can undercut public services on price. Conveniently for cost-cutting governments, religious organisations are able to draw on their employees' motivations of love and service - and perhaps evangelical zeal - to compensate for anything missing in the way of salary and conditions.

The usual public justification for outsourcing government services, apart from cost-cutting, is to provide greater choice. But, in the case of schools, many parents feel that their real choices are limited, since ramping up the private sector has been accompanied by progressive underfunding of the public alternative.

One of the 19th century arguments in favour of secular education was that state aid led to duplication of services and waste of scarce public resources. Moreover, once the problem of duplication arose, fairness implied that religious choice should extend almost indefinitely.

Examples of duplication can now be found all over Australia, such as in the Sunraysia district where the borders of Victoria, NSW and South Australia collide. Mildura Christian College teaches 67 students from prep to year 10. It follows the American Accelerated Christian Education program (ACE). The school advertises its ''mastery-based learning'', using the sex-free, evolution-free ACE lesson books. This school boasts that its low fees keep it accessible and, at less than $2000 a year in 2013 with a 40 per cent discount for parents with a healthcare card, the college with the vineyard is a far cry from elite ''schools with pools''.

Its public competitors for prep to year 6 include Mildura Primary, Mildura South Primary and Irymple Primary. Of the four, Mildura Christian College's students come from the equal-highest socio-educational background. Given this, you might expect that the private college would receive less public funding per student than its poorer, public neighbours. Not so. In 2011, Mildura Christian College topped them all.

However, that does not exhaust Mildura's religious education smorgasbord. Trinity Lutheran College and three Catholic schools round out the city's private alternatives.

Fees at Mildura Christian College are certainly modest, but it receives more per student from the government than nearby public alternatives. It is hard to imagine, without the $11,445 from governments, that the school could educate children for less than $2000 from parents. As an ACE school, it specifically caters to families who want to separate their children from the public system, including for its unconventional curriculum. The application form for prospective teachers asks questions such as: ''In what sense do you understand God to be 'Creator'?'', ''What is your understanding of the 6 Days of Creation described in Genesis?'' and ''Give your understanding of a Biblical world view and how it applies to teaching''. While questions such as these emphasise to potential staff the school's distance from the public system, even the obligatory statement of democratic principles specifies that the government's ''right to prescribe programs and teaching practise [sic] of schools'' is acceptable ''provided that those conditions do not diminish or remove our right to teach in a manner consistent with our shared religious beliefs''.

The question here is less the specific amounts allocated to each school than the fact that governments appear to be supporting multiple establishments at considerable cost, some for only small numbers of students and within a short distance of several other schools, and some that accept considerable sums of public money while going out of their way to emphasise their refusal of academic standards for such matters as scientific fact.

The idea that religious schools are bound to provide more morally uplifting and value-saturated environments than public schools carries an eerie echo of 19th century fears that secular education would lead to unruliness and, ultimately, criminality. Among the most commonly cited reasons parents today choose private schools are those such as ''better'' teachers and facilities and a ''disciplined environment'', which could roughly translate into frustration at underinvestment in public schools, and a preference for schools that can exclude students deemed disruptive.

At least in Mildura the evangelical and Catholic smorgasbord is supplemented by numbers of public schools, but some other entire postcode areas lack any comprehensive public secondary school. Students in those areas either face a private school's waiting list and fees, or negotiate sometimes complex travel.

The duplication of government-subsidised private schools, coupled with significant gaps in coverage of comprehensive public schools, marks an uncanny return to the 19th century problems the public system was established to address.

Marion Maddox is an Australian Research Council future fellow at Macquarie University. This is an edited extract from her new book, Taking God to School, published by Allen & Unwin.

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