Burning Words

There’s been two significant announcements from the new government today. In the first - disgusting, but unsurprising, Julia Gillard has revealed that the current, and much-criticised, school funding system will be kept for another four years. The current funding formulas are a disgrace. They don’t just fund private schools, but they’ve been giving them a much larger share of the pie than can rationally be justified.

I got to see this in action in high school. My first school was a miserable, struggling public school. I was lucky enough to go there after they’d just got a one-off grant to renovate facilities which essentially hadn’t been touched in thirty years. I knew plenty of talented people from those days who wound up not graduating or not going to university simply because the school, and the opportunities given, were so patently lousy. The resources weren’t there, the teachers weren’t there, and this was obvious in the outcomes it saw.

For my final three years at school, however, I attended a middle-of-the-road private school. They were swimming in government funding the entire time I was there. In those three years, we got a new library, new drama centre, new arts centre and new VCE centre. This was not a poor school, and academically, was up in the top few in the state, yet we were seeing major capital works on site every single year, of which much of the money was coming from the government. We were given tenfold greater opportunities by being able to afford to attend that school, but despite the fact that the school already had enough funds to run itself perfectly well, it was they who were getting the government funds.

To put this bluntly: in what universe is this remotely rational? How can anyone justify siphoning money away from the poorest and most struggling schools to further reify the privileges given to those with the money to attend private schools, who really don’t need the money anyway? I realise that the Rudd government are trying not to get any publicity about broken promises, and made the promise in the first place to stop the Murdoch media wedging them about ‘private school witchhunts’, as they did to Latham in 2004. But I have to say that I’m still very disappointed that this injustice stands purely because the government stands to make a slight political gain.

In a more positive development, however, Gillard has announced that the government is canning Howard’s new compulsory history curriculum, which was widely criticised for being overly nationalistic. Thus, schools will now not have to gloss over the more horrendous aspects of Australian history more than they already do. I suppose we can now chalk this up as something from the Howard era that Rudd is actually planning to repeal.

Tags: education, history, kevin rudd, privilege, school funding