“Good parent, bad parent: private school, public school” article by Leslie Cannold and Jane Caro is the sort of socialist rubbish only found in left-wing rags like “The Age”.
They set up a “good” mummy versus “bad” mummy model based on women’s fears of performing as mothers. They mention childcare as a parameter, but might as well include breast-feeding.
They attempt to draw a parallel between the “haves” and “have-nots” and the ability of the poorer families and the rich middle class to educate their children in the State system versus the “private” system, and make assumptions about the motives of each group.
Upfront I should declare that I was educated at a “Public School”, one of the GPS in Melbourne. It was a church school, as they all are. It was a privilege that required a lot of money to support, but it was motivated by the desire of my parents to ensure I had a religious education, and a good education that they were willing to pay for.
I do not believe that the school I went to receives a significant amount of govt. support. I do not believe that it should receive a significant amount of govt. support.
But Cannold and Caro ought to recognize that the Whitlam Federal Govt. introduced the Federal Govt. support for the private schools because the Catholic Education system educated about 30% of the Australian school children and it was strapped for cash. Do your history. Read about the Catholic Bishop of Goulburn!
The Federal Govt. gives the states a huge amount of money to educate the children of Australia in the State System. The entire GST goes to the states. The Federal Govt. accepts the responsibility of the private system and does not impose the burden on the states in entirety.

The states waste money. In Victoria we are on 3A water restrictions. The Vic State Govt. could build a dam on the Mitchell River that would almost double our reserves for about ONE BILLION DOLLARS. The Vic Govt. has chosen to build a stupid desalination plant for 4.5 BILLION DOLLARS (a difference of 3.5 BILLION DOLLARS), and nobody knows how much fresh water it will harvest. But we all know the maintenance will be huge, the output small and the greenhouse energy required to push the seawater through a SPM will be massive,
Kevin Rudd is about to spend 600 MILLION DOLLARS to reduce the waiting lists in all Australian hospitals. How much better would our State Schools and hospitals be if we built a dam and spent the 3.5 billion dollars on health and education?

Yvonne
If fathers are not paying much attention to what goes on inside of schools then they definitely should be.

Many schools are becoming increasingly feminist, and there are now public schools that no longer celebrate father’s day, but they celebrate mother’s day.

Nearly every school celebrates International Women’s day, but I know of no school that celebrates International Men’s Day.

Male trainee teachers are now down to 22% of trainee teachers, and on a national basis boy’s marks, their retention rates and their levels of engagement in education are all declining.

Very little of this has anything to do with funding or school facilities, and much more to do with teachers attitudes.

The authors of this article are feminist but rarely mention fathers, because they have no interest in fathers.

I also know of many teachers who are feminist and have no interest in boy students, and it has been proven on countless occasions that the no1 factor in determining student outcomes is the teaching methods being used by the teachers and also the attitudes of the teacher.

So private schools may be the only hope for boy students in the future. The public has no say about what occurs inside a public school, but private schools are less likely to employ feminists than a public school.

So in the future, the boy students may have more of a chance in a private school than a public school.

I get annoyed when only 'mothers' are the ones mentioned in issued to do with education. It is always the pushy mother that is discussed when in fact many of the times the mother isn’t pushing the children but instead pushing the system to do the right thing by the children with full support and encouragement from the father.

It is true that if the Public System was run better and was stricter and less controlled by bullies then parents wouldn't have to move their children to the non-government school sector.

We have had to move 3 of ours out of the public system. They were motivated, ambitious, intellectually gifted, sporty, high acheiving, polite, respectful students who were good role models and leaders and who were big on justice and morals and instead of the public system supporting them, they targeted them, victmised them, bullied them and tampered with their test scores and school applications so that they would be unsuccessful for placement in the schools that they needed and wanted to attend and so as to publicly discredit their intelligence and destroy their reputation. They targeted the children because I made some public and formal complaints about the appropriateness of their education and the treatment served to them by some bully teachers. The 4th is still in the Public system due to lack of funding.

What did fellow public school parents do? They turned their back on my family and we were ostrasized by the community, critisized and ridiculed as they feared that if they were seen to be associated with us that their children would also be targeted.

There lies the difference between Public and Private. I really doubt that Private schools parents would have turned their back on one of thier own and allowed a fellow private school student/parent to be victimised, bullied, vilified and treated so obviously unfairly and unjustly without saying a word.

Education - Keeping them Honest
http://jolandachallita.typepad.com/education/
Our children deserve better

Once again Petal says you can save $2b by not subsidising private education.

What a pathetic argument. So what! This is not a case of either / or. The $2b that the gov spends on private education is less than the gov would spend if there were no private schools.

If the funding was removed, the extra money probably would not go to public schools, but something else on the gov hit list.

The majority of the opposition to this funding is based on envy, and not on concern for public schooling. The purpose is not to improve public schooling, but ruin private schooling for those who would dare to choose a different path.

God help us if proponents of mediocrity like this get to have any influence on gov policy.

As i see it the school system should be funded one way and that is dollar for dollar public or private school.When a child is passed through the system and can't read or write the whole country looses just look at our skills shortage now.Our public school system is in a mess because of in-equalities and lack of attention by successive government's.I see some of you complain about millitant teacher's but would you take on the responsabilities of educating our kids for the lousy wages and conditions that they work under [i think not].When our kids do wrong the teacher's are told you can't punish and when they hurt themselves they are told don't hug them because it's in-appropriate.So fix our public school system and let the wealthy of our country if they wish send their kids to a church funded private non tax paying school.