you can call it scaremongering, I prefer the term quantitative analysis, which is of course a good way to make decisions.

Speaking of quantitative analysis, you might also like to consider your claim that public schools have a more diverse range of students than private ones — at what level are you talking about — SES, race, performance?

Some parents, as mine did, believe in public education and think that it’s more important to be in a classroom with people who come from a range of backgrounds rather than those whose parents are well-connected.

Then there are those with no firm convictions either way. These people work long hours and pull in what looks like a high salary, but it goes out on a big mortgage and, yes, school fees. This notion of high-income earners who feel as put-upon as any proletarian has killed class-warfare rhetoric stone dead in Australian politics. It’s this latter group that are a new phenomenon, and are thus interesting.

They talk about values and discipline, but only because they don’t have time to spend with their children. To instil these qualities in your children you need to spend time with them. If you’re pulling in the tall dollars you don’t have much time. Private schools offer themselves as outsource providers of family values while also fanning the flames of consumerism necessary to make exorbitant fees seem necessary - even an achievement. School education is one service where the consumer does not receive the service, and the recipient is not a consumer; nice work if you can get it.

If you’re pulling in a reasonable income at a job that doesn’t demand more than 40-50 hours/week, where you place a premium on spending time with kids and can afford broadening experiences such as overseas holidays, music camps, theatre and sporting trips (i.e. those “extras” that private schools provide, but as extra revenue sources), then you will have more resourceful and well-rounded children than you would by shunting them off to St Blazer’s or Our Lady Of The Harbour Views and hoping they make friends with a surgeon’s kid.

Not addressed in this debate is the notion that private school students are getting to uni without the ability to hunt for information, having had it spoon-fed to them in a way that is simply unknown at state schools, and which makes them rubbish at analysing information effectively in comparison to the scrappers who’ve always had to scrounge for information.

they are basically cursing their children for life and this seems like a fair trade-off for a bigger tv/house/etc.

Conrad’s only right if you accept every bit of scaremongering that comes down the pipe - including the idea that if you don’t get a high VCE/HSC mark, your life is over at 18.

Andrew, I had some trouble working out what you meant by “long-running local debate”, given the history of Catholic schools in particular in Australia. To be honest, what initially flashed into my mind was the protestent-catholic sectarianism that was the greatest driver of catholic school enrolments. You may not see it in the same way as I do: it was a cultural divide, not anything to do with the nebulous and ill-defined concept of “values” which seems to have different meanings to different people. To make an attempt to link old style Australian sectarianism with the modern “values” debate is tenuous at best. Mr Hogan wrote nothing of “values” in your example - his words were straight out of the old DLP playbook, not the obvious language linkage you can see in Republicaln party (and now Liberal party) nonsense. It isn’t the same thing.

Imagine if all the parents that could (say 80%) paid a reasonable amount of the cost for their children’s education (or, for that matter, imagine if even those parents whose children were at public school did). This might mean a smaller house (or might not if everyone thought that way), an older car, an older tv, a slower internet connection etc. You now have a teaching force paid a reasonable amount. You could probably get rid of most of the crazy rules in schools if you had this amount of money, because people couldn’t complain about under-pay. People might actually want to become teachers more too since they would be afford to live in the big cities where rent/housing is now ridiculously expensive (you can see the problems this causes in big cities like London, incidentally — and its only going to get worse if recent reports are to be believed).

Now lets also imagine that most parents care about their children’s education in the same way as they do in most of Australia’s likely future comeptitor countries (excluding NZ).

I think we’d now have a great system that isn’t going to fall apart further in the long term. I think there are two main problems (a) some people have the wrong priority list in terms of education and other things, and want the government to subsidize them more than it is going to; and (b) many Australian parents don’t care about their children’s education enough.

Nonetheless, I think it is an interesting thought experiment to ask what would happen if every parent made this choice. Since private school students are currently subsidised much less heavily than public school students, either an increase in taxation would be required or the average quality of public school education would fall. (I have heard this type of thought experiment posed before, probably by private schools.)

I agree with you that it might be reasonable to correct university courses for entry scores of the individual schools if evidence can be shown that better student performance can be obtained on lower marks (and I sure it wouldn’t be hard to get — most universities have big databases where they could do this), although somehow or other I don’t think that is going to be likely.

I don’t think we need a full voucher system to solve the “too hard” case. My suggestion is that we create schools for the “too hard” basket that are more targeted at them, in which case they won’t end up wrecking the other public schools that could otherwise be decent, although we’re still left in the position where not enough parents are willing to pay enough (and taxpayers for that matter).

I dunno about private schools always getting higher marks for the same brain power, but if so it’s a good argument fro discrimination in employment and in uni entry in favour of public school students. Or is that not what you meant?

You’re right, though, about the ability of private schools to put kids into the “too hard” basket by expelling or by just not accepting them. But if we move to a full voucher system as Andrew proposes, what happens to these kids?