waterboy: "The core australian value I refer to is 'FREEDOM of religion' ie the right to CHOOSE! Did you miss that or are you being deliberately obtuse"

If anyone's being "deliberately obtuse" in this thread, I'd suggest it's those who conflate freedom of religion with government funding of religious schools. Of course I agree with people's rights to believe in whatever myths and deities they like, but I disagree strongly with any suggestion that religious organisations should be subsidised by the State - whether this is via funding of religious schools or via the numerous tax breaks that they receive.

Like I said, if you want your kids indoctrinated in some religion or another, then go for it. Just don't expect those of us who don't share those beliefs to subsidise that indoctrination.

Moreover, if all the money that's wasted on funding religious schools and giving tax breaks to churches was redirected to the public system, then public schools would be more adequately resourced to overcome the problems that apparently cause wealthier parents to seek alternatives to public education.

Probably not the best analogy I could’ve used but it still stands up.

We all pay taxes for public services and we pay money for cars, what we choose is up to us. That you chose to wilfully misinterpret my intent simply weakens your overall argument. I concur that CJ ‘s analogy is more succinct by far – wish I’d thought of it first :0)

So ‘fess up waterboy, do you want religious schools to be subsidised by all Australians irrespective of their religious affiliations to the detriment of public (open to all Australians) schools? Simple question.

Tax-payer funded religious schools. Like religion doesn’t get enough tax breaks already. You want more. Couple of words spring to mind: greedy, divisive. Not really a part of the egalitarian Australian ethos now is it?

“….... John Howard is our Great Education Prime Minister.

That's funny because, until he set us straight, I'd have said the one thing Howard wasn't on about was education. Not at any level - school, vocational education and training, or university.
In fairness, the state governments haven't been much better. But I certainly hadn't noticed the feds setting them a good example. Education is one area where Australia's spent the past decade resting on its laurels.
In the case of schools, Howard's greatest achievement has been to bias federal grants heavily in favour of private schools - particularly the least needy..."

Find the full article at: http://littlurl.com/ed0fa

From the Sydney Morning Herald dated 23 May 2007, when after 11 years, Howard suddenly clambered onto the ‘education bandwagon’.

Now we have Rudd, self professed christian, the only thing I can predict about him is that we are in for interesting times...

All this talk about "religious schools" as if they teach only the Bible and nothing more... These so-called "religious" schools are more correctly called faith-based schools where the primary purpose is to deliver the curriculum as determined by the relevant authority (i.e. the Board of Studies in NSW).

Faith-based schools (including Catholic schools) do not spend their days teaching religion. They teach the curriculum of the state in which they are registered and must deliver a minimum number of hours across Key Learning Areas. This means that 80% or more of a school's programmed time must be spent on English, maths, science, PDHPE, HSIE etc. Of the 'flexible' 20% the vast majority provide additional instruction for students in advanced or remedial classes, free lesson time for seniors, physical activity, or simply by programming additional lessons in key subjects. Some of this time (at most 20% but more realistically is around 10%) is used for studies of religion and that is precisely why parents choose these schools.

And before we get hysterical about that point, let's acknowledge that the vast majority of students in Australian faith-based schools attend Anglican, Catholic and other 'mainstream' church-backed schools, not the few far-right fundamentalist schools that promote creationism as science or other such ideology.

Also, most faith-based schools (again, Catholic schools included) enrol students from all walks of life, members of the 'public'. One of the problems in this so-called debate is that schools are named by who owns them, not who attends them. For example, 'public' schools are owned by the state governments, so why not call them government schools? 'Private' schools are owned by a variety of organisations including churches so we appropriately call them Catholic schools or Anglican schools and so on. Yet they are all attended by members of the Australian public. We get hung up on the labels 'public' and 'private' when we are really talking about who 'owns' the school which, frankly, should be irrelevant. They all provide a public service through the provision of education the vast majority enrol all-comers.

For what it is worth NBER research on the randomised lottery system in Chigago suggests choosing a "good school" or not makes no difference. OECD PISA demonstrates ublic school weight for weight actually outperform private.

Public school student out perform Catholic Independent and selective schools at uni.

Finland has the highest literacy and numeracy and next to no private schools.Has also the shortest school hours in the OECD.

School outcomes are consistantly related to extra curicular factors.

Philosophically I am against funding private schools but I am bouyed by the fact that (for an example) Catholic schools are full but their churches are empty - and produce no priests. Most private schools provide not a better education or even religeon but the old school tie. Truly religeous schols provide neither.

I can recommend anyone truly interested in education to trac down an read the works by Betty Hart and Todd Risely, some is in books but they are well cited in journals and Googling particularly the "30 million word disaster" article. May change your life

CJ

Here is what our consitution says..

“116. The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”

From this it is reasonably obvious that “freedom of religion” is a core australian value. It is also fairly obvious that the intention was to proscribe all forms of religious discrimination from Commonwealth legislation and administration.
By advocating a form of discrimination against schools on the grounds of religion you set yourself in opposition to this “CORE AUSTRALIAN VALUE”. You HAVE made it abundantly clear that you advocate elimination of ALL GOVERNMENT FUNDING to certain schools SOLELY on the basis of religion.

You also might do well to apply a more critical approach to reading. My question “Why should they pay for the education of children whose parents have CHOSEN to send them to public schools and who have CHOSEN to spend their money on other things than their children's education?” is quite obviously a rhetorical question similar in structure to your “I don’t want to pay for THEM.” attitude. If it seems absurd to you then congratulations! It was intended to illustrate the narcissistic nature of your attitude. Nowhere have I seriously suggested that wealthy people should not contribute to public education through paying taxes.

If private schools were denied public funding and forced to close then what would happen?

Lets take the 2003 figures from the AEU fact sheet again to illustrate.
The total number of students in the public system would rise to 3318620. Total government spending on education in that year was $25082m (made up of $18850m to public schools and $6232m to private schools). Government school funding, in the absence of private schools, would then have been reduced from $8361 to $7558 per student. WOULD THIS BE A GOOD IDEA? It might be consistent with your ideological position but it would NOT deliver better education to a single Australian child

waterboy I thought the constitution guaranteed us freedom from having a state religion foisted upon us.

I agree with Irfan that religious groups use seperate schools to segregate their children from the rest of society making it easier to instil their values on a compliant base often totally unaware of the mores of the rest of their age cohort. The danger in this approach is that government or protestant school educated children don't know any catholics or muslims thus are unlikely to care or standup for them if an injustice is perpetrated against them.

The current funding of the system is inequitable and unfair. Government schools have inadequate funding and some private schools receive such massive funding that they are rebuilding all their classrooms and facilities. It would be discrimination to only fund catholic and small K12 schools without funding Geelong Grammar and Scotch College.