The case for educational veganism

I live in a part of Sydney with a strange selection of high schools. We don't have a local co-ed public high school - what we have is 2 public boys' schools (one with a good reputation and one with a bad one), a public girls' school, a 100% selective public school, a partially selective public school, a visual arts public school, a performing arts pubic school, about 4 Catholic schools and a couple of very expensive independent (religious) schools. Thus, it is written, that whenever two or more parents of primary school children shall gather together, they shall discuss Which High School Are You Sending Your Child To? Yesterday's instalment involved a number of people advocating one of the very expensive independent religious schools, and I realised (and of course tweeted) that I am an educational vegan. I believe that private schools are morally wrong, and I probably can't get past that.

I believe that private education should not only not be funded by the state, but should be banned completely. There's not a lot I want to ban in this world, so it's an unusually extreme position for me, but I really don't think there is an ethical way to run private schools.

This is not a question of choice, because only wealthy people get to make the choice. Also, the choice they are making is to segregate their children on the basis of class or religion (or both). The closest private school to us costs $30,000 a year, per child, in year 12 (it starts at about $18,000 in year 3). The argument that such a school can provide better resources for your wealthy child is a very weak one. Imagine how much better any local public school's resources would be if all the families who could afford that kind of money donated even half of it to the school and sent their kids there? By allowing children to be stratified based on parent income, we are ensuring that wealthy children have access to more resources than poor children, and thereby reducing the choice and options of the most disadvantaged kids in our community. That's wrong.

Australia makes claims to multiculturalism, but allows kids to be segregated on the basis of religion for 13 years of their young lives. Understanding is crucial to successful multiculturalism, but it's hard to achieve if you have little contact with people from differing backgrounds. School is the primary source of social interaction for most kids, and should involve a diversity of people. If we're going to live together, we should be learning together.

Private schools promote themselves as a better choice, providing a better education. The truth is that the range of educational experience is as great in private schools as it is in public schools, however I've never heard a public school graduate argue that they would never consider sending their child to any school other than the one they attended. There is a fine line between pride in your school and the smug belief that your school is inherently superior to all others. I'm not arguing that all private school graduates believe this (I know that is patently false), but a system in which schools are competing for students is going to breed an increased rate of superiority complexes.

Educational outcomes are highly variable across both the public and private sector, but the private sector faces a significant roadblock to good education - they are a commodity. Parents are paying for education as a service, and as such are far more likely to demand the outcomes they want, as opposed to those that their children have earned. This happens in the public sector too, but the demanding parent doesn't have a financial hold over the teachers and the school. Education is too important to be caught between a teacher and the finance department.

Education as a commodity also has the potential to undermine education at the systemic level. If schools are competing for the educational dollar, it's in their interest to make their school look the most attractive. A tried and tested method to do so is promoting year 12 examination results, but to do that, a school needs results that look good. One way of doing so is to only allow students to take courses they will do very well in, rather than those in which they may be competent, but not outstanding. For example, a student working at a fair to middling level in an advanced level maths course may be required to take the intermediate level course so they get a high mark in lesser course, which looks better on the school's published results. I am certainly not arguing that all private schools do this, but some do, and it wouldn't happen if education was not allowed to be bought and sold.

Other systemic problems can arise from a school's marketing department. A great way to get good exam results is to teach students how to pass exams. While I understand the usefulness of that skill, it should always be secondary to learning how to learn, fostering a love of learning and promoting independence. We don't spend all this public money on education for exam results, we spend it to have an educated society that is able to continue learning their whole lives. These qualities, however, are very hard to measure, so it's easy for a school to claim to promote such values, while spoon feeding their students to pass exams really well and make their self promotion that much easier. Same caveats apply - not all private schools do this, quite possibly some public schools do this, but if education was not a competitively sold commodity, it wouldn't happen. Public schools are explicitly told they need to compete with private schools and market themselves to the community. This is wrong.

Perhaps the most abhorrent argument in favour of sending a child to a private school is that they'll make connections that will make it easier for them to get ahead socially and financially. It's probably also the most accurate - at least for the very expensive schools. Schools should not be a government funded and sanctioned process for ensuring rich people look after other rich people and maintain the divide between rich and poor. I really would have thought that was self evident. Of course, our government is largely made up of people who have benefitted from that process, which probably explains the bipartisan support for maintaining the status quo.

This is one of the greatest issues of equity in Australia at the moment. It gets no press. Occasionally there might be mention of funding, but it's quickly swept under the rug (how many media owners went to public schools?), and nobody ever questions the continuing existence of education as commodity. It's not an impossible dream (however unlikely), Norway (brain fail) Finland did it. They have no private schools (and almost no standardised testing) and they consistently rank in the top 3 education systems in the world. The changes they made were driven entirely by equity, but in the end, they didn't just bring up their tail end, they improved education standards for every kid in the country. It's not a zero sum game, there doesn't have to be losers.

Accessible schools - echoing Lauredhel

Lauredhel wrote this piece on accessibility in public schools. Read it, because she's right.

At our school today I watched the awkward maneuvers of a child and carer trying to get the kid and his chair up steps and through a too narrow gate. It's an old school, there's no doubt it would take a bit of creative thinking to make it accessible without making a mess of it, but I think that kid alone is worth that creative thinking and some well spent dollars. Of course, he isn't the first and he won't be the last. We either fix the problem, or we're saying that kids, their carers, volunteers and teachers with disabilities don't deserve equal access. We're saying that there's no problem with them being excluded, or having their independence reduced because we can't be bothered thinking laterally and spending the time and money on making the places accessible.

We need to make some noise about this, and I'm reproducing Lauredhel's list of people and places to direct your shouting at.

Find a link to your state or territory parliament here:

http://australia.gov.au/topics/government-and-parliament/state-parliaments-and-legislative-assemblies

Find your local Greens member/senator/candidate here:

http://greens.org.au/meet-us

If you'd like to make some Federal noise too:

Find your federal electorate here:


http://apps.aec.gov.au/esearch/

Find your federal member here:

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/mi-state.asp

Find your federal senator here:


http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/senators/

Somebody thinks I'm acceptable

I got accepted! Somebody thinks I'm acceptable! Granted, they don't know me from a bar of soap, and I'm only acceptable in an academic sense, but it's nice to feel wanted all the same.

Two weeks after applying for a Dip Ed Bachelor of Teaching (in high school science), I got a letter of offer. I can't actually accept the offer, because UTS's website isn't ready yet, but you can't have everything. The strangest thing about this is that people keep asking me if I'm going to be a teacher. It kind of seems like an existential question, will my being be changed by learning about pedagogy? I doubt it.

Even on a practical level, I don't know what I'm going to do with this qualification. It won't be a career, that's certain. I'm done with careers, I only want jobs now. Given that, I don't know whether I want to teach full time or just be a casual teacher. I think both have merits, both from a teaching and financial view point. What this will give me more than anything is a flexibility I've never had before. Every job I've ever had has been firmly anchored to capital cities, mostly no smaller than Sydney. I've resisted moving overseas because I'm a sedentary creature - I put down roots and I don't much like pulling them up. This has limited both our careers, but it's allowed us to start to feel like part of a community, and we have friends that mean so much more than a directorship.

I'm also a little nervous about learning about teaching. I've always taught - tutoring, training staff, teaching my own kids. I'm worried that I'm either going to discover that I'm doing it wrong, or (more likely given my disposition) discover that I don't believe a word of what they're telling me. I hoping that I'm going to discover some perspectives I hadn't previously considered and also some names for things I already knew.

And then of course, there is the minor matter that I still have a business that I'm part owner of that needs running, growing and supporting. I don't want to be doing this forever, but we have every intention of continuing to build this business, so I seem to trying to split myself in two.



One day I might know what I want to be when I grow up.

The Pressure to Succeed

When I was in year 12, the media was starting to carry on about the stress of the HSC. Some of the people I was at school with might have even felt that stress. I wasn't one of them - I was aiming pretty low in terms of entrance requirements for uni, and academic achievement was my strong suit anyway. Still, not a huge proportion of the people I went to school with wanted to go to uni. Most of them didn't want to do things that uni prepared you for.

Since then, more careers have required university degrees (to what purpose I can't possibly imagine, but there it is) and successive governments have decided that the best way to keep youth unemployment down is to keep them in education longer - indefinitely if at all possible. OK, maybe not indefinitely, because then they might have to pay for higher education in a more effective way, but definitely for as long as possible. At the same time, the media has really bought into the HSC stress hype, and all of these things have combined to blow the HSC all out of proportion in terms of its significance in a person's life and to make it the stressful year from hell that so many people experience it as.

Worse still, it doesn't stop there. In order to get into the courses you need to do to in year 12, to get the marks you need to get into uni, to do the course you want, to get into the career you'll probably change out of within 5 years anyway - you need to do well enough in the school certificate in year 10. That means you need to get into that selective school in year 7 (have I ranted about them before? If not - it's coming). That means you need to get into the OC class in year 5. That means you need start to take a long hard look if things aren't going swimmingly in year 3.

WTF? How did we create a world where people can start to be concerned about their child's progress at age 8? How did we allow a system to actually create advantage for those kids who shine earlier? Obviously we need to keep the early bloomers interested, but do we really need a formal OC course which funnels into selective schools and all the way on up? What about those who come into their own at 13, 15 or 24? I'm sorry, you were the wrong kind of kid - you didn't excel in our narrow little world of junior primary school, and while we won't actually stop you using your later arriving talent, or your talent outside our definition of valuable, we certainly won't help you. And we definitely won't make it easy for you to realise that there are other paths to happiness and fulfillment.

We need, en masse, to reject this idea. We need to try very hard to relax and not worry if our kids are on the "right track". We need to yell loudly about TAFE courses and mature age enrollment at uni and apprenticeships and good old fashioned job experience. We need to remember that happiness and fulfillment are not made only of jobs. We are not defined by our employment. Some people will be happiest with a regular job with minimal stress that is left at work, and will do their real good outside the employment sphere.

And if you ever find yourself in a hiring role, or influencing hiring anywhere - remember to consider training staff yourself. Remember that a degree (in most fields) only demonstrates that a person can learn. Look for other indicators that people can learn. Think about other ways to employ people - can you hire a couple of junior casuals and one qualified person rather than two qualified people? Junior casuals are an excellent no-blame, no-shame way of finding out who's suitable for a career. Parents returning to the workforce may have a whole host of skills you may not have considered that can be very valuable - would that be a better option?

Ultimately, don't let the business world dictate every moment of our lives. Our worth is not measured by our employment, and our happiness does not depend on it. Certainly earning money is a necessity, but as a society, we can bring much more pressure to bear on the terms of that earning, and we need to do so now, if not sooner.

Perhaps we should consider a dictatorship

I was going to write a post about the morons who think taking away public holidays is a good thing, and I was looking for an online reference for the state's head moron saying that it is rare for a public holiday to fall on a Saturday (yeah, right - it will happen again next year for a start!). In wandering through Google's results, I found a link to the NSW Labor party's blog. I'm sure you'll be stunned to learn that it doesn't accept comments. I was trundling through the randomly ordered posts (I think it puts its favourites at the top, and then the chronological sorting starts below, but it is rather confusing when you are just skimming) and I found this gem. It's from today and the infinite stupidity of this government continues to stun me.

They are going to raise the minimum school leaving age to 17.

...if a student is under 17 and wants to leave school after Year 10, they will need to be in vocational training, an apprenticeship or paid employment for more than 25 hours per week.

This is justified by a bunch of statistics (described as "evidence")

• Better wages over a lifetime -- On average early school leavers will earn lower wages over a lifetime and are more likely to be unemployed for periods of their lives (Source: Access Economics 2006);
• A better chance of employment -- According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, early school leavers are two-and-a-half times more likely to be unemployed;
• A stronger economy – the NSW economy stands to gain an estimate of up to $2.7 billion if early school leaver numbers are halved by 2050 (Source: Applied
  Economics); and
• A better trained workforce – those who complete school are more likely to pursue further study/training.

A whole series of correlations without even a pretence of causality. There is no evidence presented at all that forcing kids who currently leave school early to stay on will improve their outcomes in any of these areas.

The school system simply doesn't work for everyone. There will be some kids who would be better off elsewhere. I realise that they will still be allowed to leave if they have a job or apprenticeship, but sometimes life doesn't run that conveniently. If school is proving to be a Bad Thing for someone, they are better off getting out first, and then dealing with where to go next.

And just in case the philosophy doesn't convince you, think of the beauracracy! And the obvious rorts. You want to leave school, you go get a job at Maccas working 25 hours a week, sign the form, lodge it with... who? and then quit 6 weeks later. It costs the state a small fortune to implement and makes no difference to anyone, except possibly managing to add yet more stigma to the poor kids who don't thrive in our school system.

Which brings us to the next blood pressure raising statement in this delightful piece:

“We have a first-rate education system in NSW,” Mr Rees said.

Really? I'm thinking some kids at Miller, Rooty Hill and others may take issue with that. Personally, we are very lucky to have an awesome local public school, and I support our public system, but to describe it as first-rate state wide is to dismiss the atrocious experiences of a huge number of kids.

The rest is just "kids as future labour market fodder" bullshit that makes me angry every time I read it.

But ultimately, where does the state government get off telling people exactly how they must live their lives right up to the age of 17? If we want our teenagers to grow into responsible adults, we have to stop treating them as children. This is the time they are supposed to start making their own decisions and their own mistakes - when they still have time to learn and recover from those mistakes. If the state takes control of their lives, they'll be teenagers well into their late 20s. There's way too much of that already!

Given that the Liberal party in NSW still seem to missing in action, I think we should throw everyone's name into a hat, draw one out and name them Supreme Dictator of NSW. They can't possibly do a worse job.