Foxy

"A child raised in a 'high-status' family has a good opportunity to acquire the values, attitudes, personal contacts, education, and skills that make for success in our society. A child from a 'low-status' family is raised in an atmosphere of poverty, interacts with low-status peers, and lacks the models and opportunities that children in a higher class take for granted. The upper-status child has a head start in life. The lower-status child, a handicap. As a result of these social influences on the individual, most people remain for a lifetime in their class of origin."

Great post, Foxy, and I agree with you that the die is cast at a very young age.

The differences in class you've outlined here were once ameliorated to a much greater extent in Australia than they are today through the existence of a free and universal public education system. Most of us went to public schools and all kids, rich and poor alike, rubbed shoulders together. We learnt from each other and became a little more tolerant and a little less different to the 'other'.

Today, we have a polarised system, where public schools are being run down to the point of becoming residual institutions for the poorest and most disadvantaged, while those already better off are enjoying the benefits of increasingly generously-funded private education.

Unfortunately though, Foxy, I don't have the faith that you do in the Rudd Government to change the situation. I see the so-called 'education revolution' as a hugely disappointing con.

The Rudd/Gillard 'vision' will do nothing to wind back the divisive two-tiered system created under the Howard Government. The unfair SES funding model is to remain unchanged and the publication of League tables will only compound the disadvantage already experienced by struggling public schools in less desirable neighbourhoods.

Focusing on early childhood is a step in the right direction, but it will take a lot more than promising computers to break the poverty cycle. Unless Rudd eliminates the divide between public and private education, class difference in Australia is set to become further entrenched.

Bronwyn,
Education is indeed a MAJOR factor but as Belly put it how do you get the little blighters to stay in school and apply themselves when all about them, including parents are formative negative influences?

I suggest it need a cultural change the prime issues to me are to give them hope of a real future (education is but part of that.)
We need to change the exploitive culture. One source is the media and its emphasis on sensationalism spin and consumer manipulation.

I also think that paying decent salaries to
teachers would possibly attract better
teaching staff to schools that desperately
need them in the public sector.

As would introducing the same school curriculum
throughout the country.

Brony, I have hopes for the Rudd Governmment.
And feel that it's early days yet. They certainly
have to do better than Howard did. My biggest wish
is that under Turnbull, the Opposition won't
continue to block everything in sight.

We'll have to wait and see.

Google reveals

"The earliest evidence we have been able to find for the term bogan is in the surfing magazine Tracks in September 1985: ‘So what if I have a mohawk and wear Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)?’ At this stage, bogan was (especially teenage) slang for someone who is not ‘with it’ in terms of behaviour and appearance, someone who is ‘not us’; hence, someone ‘horrible, contemptible’."

First of all I am wondering why OP actually USED the name if OP had no idea about "Bogans". My own defn is those "nouvaux" who migrated to St Ives [Sydney] to become the Cafe Latte Set [but of course never leave their Bogan past behind].

If we are however just talking of the view of "nice people" [those wot can read n rite and use computers] of others [who can't] then the shocking truth is they outnumber us [yes I too consider myself couth] about 10 to 1.

This realisation came to me in 1967 when my birthday was drawn from Pigiron Bob's Barrel to fight Yellow Peril [as he called it] and I found that a randomly selected platoon of 50 contained only 5 of "us", and the rest were I guess bogan-like, especially in their zeal to insert "fvck" as many times as possible [sometimes with great ingenuity in the middle of another word] into every sentence [albeit they didn't know it was a sentence]

Examinator, As one who is often heard to cite education as the fix for so much, I agree that, in this case, its only part of the solution.

The 7 years I spent in Australia prior to coming here was spent among what people call bogans (Oh crap, that sounds like a National Geographic title: "My Life Among The Bogans"!)and then, when I went back to Uni I lived this strange double life of half my time amongst the cultural elite and half my time amongst the cultural dregs .Each side used to love hearing stories about the other side – it really was as though I was talking about distinctly different life-forms to each group.

As I wrote in the My Predictions thread, the worst thing about being poor is that you forfeit societal respect. Whatever labels society puts on them, Bogans are poor people. No, not yobbos. Yobbos are simply the uncouth and once there used to be a sort of inverted pride in Australia about being thought a yobbo. A reaction against what many Aussies considered effete European society.

You said you used to have a chip on each shoulder – many poor people (sorry, I can’t keep using the B-word) in Oz today are second or even third generation Centrelink clients. Their chips have been eroded into huge heavy burdens of hopelessness as the certitude of their fixed place in society is reinforced throughout their lives.

Yeah, I know that this view will be seen as impossible to correlate with the image of the foul-mouthed, violent anti-socialism of the people whose behaviour prompted this thread. But bear in mind also that, though suicide occurs across the board, it is more prevalent amongst the poor and that much of the risk-taking and violent behaviour results from an ingrained conviction that life is not worth living.

The effect on a child of being born into a family where mother, father, grandparents and neighbours have not – or never have had – jobs is inestimable to most people.

examinator

"Education is indeed a MAJOR factor but as Belly put it how do you get the little blighters to stay in school and apply themselves when all about them, including parents are formative negative influences?"

I agree, it's not easy.

There are many contributing factors, but our two-tiered education system is clearly exaccerbating the problem. Children in public schools are increasingly being made to feel that right from the start they're travelling an inferior pathway and that their choices in life will be lessened because of the school they've attended. How does this permeating mindset help give students hope that they can overcome the disadvantages that plagued their parents? It doesn't. It's part of the reason many become disillusioned at an early age and fail to realise the value in attending school.

Foxy

"I also think that paying decent salaries to teachers would possibly attract better teaching staff to schools that desperately need them in the public sector."

I agree, but the Rudd Government isn't interested in raising salaries for all teachers. Its plan is to pit teacher against teacher to compete in a way that will completely destroy the unique collegiality which has always been a hugely mitigating strength of public education.

"As would introducing the same school curriculum throughout the country."

Yes, on the surface maybe. But on whose values should this curriculum be based? No curriculum is value free and mandating the same learning for all students will in itself advantage some over others.

"Brony, I have hopes for the Rudd Governmment. And feel that it's early days yet."

I'm trying to stay hopeful too, Foxy, but its policy decisions on education and climate change in particular reinforce for me its unwillingness to depart from the neoliberal free market orthodoxy of the Howard years, which in my view has created the rapidly-growing wealth disparity and the reckless consumption of natural resources now threatening our very future.

"We'll have to wait and see."

Yes, Foxy, time will tell. I sincerely hope you're right and I'm wrong!