I agree with much of the article. Society benefits when the most talented people can aspire to their goals through education, training and old fashioned experience. Fostering innovation and fairness, and to avoid mediocrity, these opportunities should not only be available to those with means.

We should not allow a sense of aspiration to diminish the value of other roles – whether it be aged care assistants, labourers,or waiters. We should acknowledge not everyone aspires to a 'career' (however defined, many happy to work in a job they are able to perform and hopefully enjoy. We don't have to call a coffee maker a Barista just to appreciate what they do.

These ‘working class’ jobs need to be performed. Better we raise the status of what are considered less skilled jobs (no job is unskilled) and ensure that the minimum wage is a living wage, nor should we adopt the growing mentality that these lesser skilled jobs are only for migrants from the Third World.

It is ironic a Labor Government continues to foster education debt in the form of HECS, exacerbated by the amassing of large personal debt to enter an unaffordable housing market. Most modern families will not be able to choose to raise their own children in the home even for a short time.

It is also ironic that by using aspirational politics to push a globalisation agenda and the push for education and skills training as money-making opportunities, we actually reduce the value of education.

What was wrong with tiering education to suit various occupations and skills? Why does every occupation require a degree, particularly when the value has diminished with shonky assessment practices in many universities? What was wrong with technical schools, Colleges of Advanced Education, Technical Institutes and universities sitting at the top focussing on academic excellence, research and innovation?

We have lost much under all governments in terms of the character and integrity of education and effects in the workplace.

Yes, education should be accessible to all but only on the basis of merit. We do education a disservice any other way.

Julia Gillard as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Senior Labor Lawyer in Australia, has a unique opportunity to make the greatest difference to the way Australia has been governed, since the Liberals took over the law in South Australia in 1927. No one gets a fair go, in any Court in Australia mainly because the Liberal Party are bastards, and they have a few friends in the Labor Party, since a club of Labor Lawyers was formed.

Julia is one of thirty Labor Lawyers, in the Reps, some of whom actually practiced for a while as solicitors and barristers, and is enormously capable. She is no doubt able to understand the Doctrine of Precedent, the binding clauses in the Constitution, and if a good argument is put to her, she should be able to recognize it. I found such an argument posted on the net here: http://www.community-law.info/?page_id=512

On reading these four cases, and the fifth referred to in which the late Lionel Murphy featured with an opinion, Julia will see that Australia has been subject to a widespread and systematic attack upon the civil population of Australia by State governments sponsored and influenced by State based lawyers.

I am a Christian as you all know, and when I read these cases I felt terribly sad, and disappointed that our Christian leaders, have been totally lazy in explaining the Christian roots of Australian law. The seminaries of Atheism and secularism, established to brainwash our young, at Universities all over Australia do not teach this connection, and because of that we have no fair go anymore.

I am reminded of Frederick Forsyth’s book, The Dogs of War, in which a small force of four hundred commando’s freed a country from oppression, much as Zimbabwe needs to be freed. Let loose the dogs of war, and stop protecting the oppressors hiding behind State Legislation. The dogs who should be keeping the cattle in the federal paddock, and maintaining the electric fences are the Australian Federal Police. If dear Julia will just let them do their job, upon request from oppressed Australians ?

In her position as education minister Julia could really make a difference.
Children need to learn to think clearly and a trial in Scotland in 2001 showed just how that can be achieved.
In the trial it was shown that just one hour per week of discussion of open ended questions introduced via a story or play led to an average increase of 6.5% in IQ scores, a major change in the communication between students and teachers in both directions, and substantial improvements in student behaviour both in and out of class. The class teacher in effect acts as a discussion moderator to ensure politeness and mutual respect between the participating students.
Clackmannanshire school district is now introducing the concept to preschool ( children 3 years old) probably because education authorities there think this is effective early intervention for children from disfunctional family situations.
A report on the Scottish trial is available at;
http://www.rotherham-gt.co.uk/docs/p4c/impact2.doc
At the moment, in NSW, the Education Minister is facing opposition from a religious body to a trial run of just such a system.
Why would anybody oppose a benefit which brings improved intellectual ability to each child and improved behaviour to the classroom?

Oh dear Jules, you forgot to mention how you were so keen to bring about social change that you joined the Socialist Left, now left-right-behind, as with Tanner and all those other so-called leftwing pollies who share the red and green seats of power with you.

I like these lines, "I went to state schools. There is no way in the world that mum and dad could have afforded private school education".

That one shows us all how you would have gone to a private school if your parents had had the money.

How much better for the image it would have been to have said that you went to state schools because your parents had well-developed senses of social justice and knew that public schooling in Australia had been one of the defining features in the style of democracy we have baked up here.

And this, "We didn't come from a family where it was natural to go to university, but my parents were always very keen to get us to be the best that we could. It became possible for me because of the excellent state school funded by a Labor state government"... yes, well those days are well behind us all are they not, with state ALPs all trying to out Liberal the Liberal Party with their un-ending support for private faith schools... "and because Gough Whitlam, Labor prime minister, removed upfront university fees", yes, well, clearly Jules is so young she has never heard of the Dawkins Reforms that stripped all that away.

Or is Jules going to take us back to a better university system? Hardly with what she has managed so far.

This article would have been better not written. Julia Gillard would be better engaged in the PR industry with Hawker-Britton than pretending to be the saviour of education, or anything else.

It's a shame her parents didn't just move down to Cornwall, where the Gulfstream brings the warm weather her condition demanded.

They could have saved 10 quid to put towards her education.

You are right Julia Gillard and you stick to you ideas and ideals. It is wrong that people cannot get the education their talents deserve.

I was lucky. My father was taken out of school at the age of 13 to work in a shoe shop. He had been top of his class which included a future reserve bank governor of Australia. He was not bitter about his lost opportunities but he made sure that my sister and I were given every opportunity and we became the first in our extended family to go to University. I think I have probably been able to contribute more to society than my father even though he had more innate ability. (He by the way was always a liberal voter).

Most people in Australia want is that noone is not held back by the lack of resources.

I know you have the political realities to face but we must continue to support public education and we should ensure that it is resourced at least as well as the top private schools. If people want to use private education that is their choice but if private educational institutions put more resources into education then the public education system should match it.

So we should set our education funding not on the basis of what the government thinks it can afford but so that our public schools can compete with the best resources private schools. If rich people think it is worth spending the dollars on their children then society should spend at least as much on the rest of our children.

Here then is a challenge for you. Make it your aim that ALL schools in Australia achieve about the same level of funding and increase the levels of public school funding to match the average of the top 20 highest funded private schools in Australia. If they increase their total funding then you increase the total funding of public schools to match.

There is by the way a method of doing this that need not necessarily cause budget blowouts.

Fickle Pickle, you seem to be unaware of how private school funding works.

The bulk of it comes from public taxes.

Private schools get more than all the public universities do.

Then they can rort taxpayers with their tax-free funds for buildings.

Not to mention being able to salary sacrifice school fees, and saving more personal taxes.

Or having the family trust avoid taxes and pay the fees.

Did I mention the billions, literally, in forgone taxes that flow freely to religions with their 'faith' schools?

Or the fact that once tax monies flood into private schools, there is no need to account for how the public monies are expended... unlike Indigenous peoples in the NT and now Brisbane who are micro-managed in their spending of tax dollars.

And this excessive largesse from taxpayers does not magically translate to better teaching.

Taking your funding route would see the misnamed private schools, actually parasites on the public community, gaining even more funding than they currently do, as they demand parity-in-the-gap to prevent any 'catch up'.

By all means, let us allow 'private' schools, and let the parents who send their children to them, pay for them with cold, hard, taxed, cash.

But why not start taxing religions, and investing those wasted forgone public monies into public schools?

Don't be fooled by Gillard and Rudd. Neither is interested in improving Australia's education systems, anymore than Howard and his cronies were.