Jane Caro reckons Australia is kidding itself about private schools

The Interview: Jane Caro reckons Australia is kidding itself about private schoolsBy Gina Rushton Link copiedShareShare articleAs Australia's private school enrolments continue to surge, Jane Caro remains a vocal defender of public education. The novelist, feminist and social commentator first went to at Frenchs Forest Public in Sydney's north, then later at Chatswood Public and Forest High in Sydney. Her recent essay, Rich Kid Poor Kid: The battle for public education, is a call to arms for public schools. I would have two sausage rolls with sauce, a cup of chocolate milk and a custard tart. That sounds so good. What was your favourite subject in high school? All the time. I was naughty. I used to smoke around the back of the gym with all my mates. I was boy mad. I never stopped talking. I never really did much homework. I was there for a good time, as much as anything else. And I really only ever — and this is still true — put effort into the things that I like. I still do that. That would turn out to be quite a good life strategy. What do you think is the biggest myth in the debate about public and private schooling in Australia? That private schools are better. It isn't borne out in any way and we've been convinced, really by capitalism and by neoliberalism in particular, that the more you pay for something the better it is. There are absolutely no statistics that say that because you sent your kid to a private school they're going to do better in life. There's nothing really that backs that up that is substantial. We even know, for example, that more kids get to uni from private schools than from public schools. That's not surprising because they select their students and public schools don't. But those from public schools who do get to university tend to outperform their private school peers and are very much more likely to stay the course. They're much less likely to drop out. My favourite reason for that is it's probably a lot easier to go from one underfunded public institution to another underfunded institution rather than going from some of those palaces of luxury to your average university. People clearly believe it though — there's a stat very early on in your essay about high school fees making the top five reasons for bankruptcy in Australia. I think there's a great deal of change going on, and it's very rapid change, and people are frightened, and the private schools are very, very clever at selling on fear. I mean, there are two reasons that people make purchase decisions and they are, like all decisions made, emotionally and then post-rationalise. The two reasons are hope and fear. Public schools, by their very nature, are actually about hope. They're about hope that we're a good, decent society, that every child can learn, that, you know, we're gonna give everybody an opportunity. They were created in an era of hope. Private schools are about fear. They're really gated communities. And so they're about protection. They're about keeping your children away from bad things and influences and trying to protect them as much as you can against all the things that are gonna happen to them. You'll hear someone has chosen a private school over a public school say, for the "discipline". Discipline just means they can get rid of the kids that I don't like — kids with emotional issues, behavioural issues, whatever it is, the private school can ask them to leave and they know that the public school can't do that. The public school needs to actually work with those kids because public schools owe a duty to every single child in Australia, regardless of being nice or supposedly not nice. And so I think it's really driven by anxiety and also by peer pressure. When parents, particularly in a particular area, choose a private school, they put pressure on other parents to do the same thing. The pressure comes from politicians as much as it comes from society in general, to send children to a private school. [The idea that] "good parents send their kids to private schools, bad parents send their kids to public schools" has created this awful anxiety. There are no statistics that say that because you sent your kid to a private school they're going to do better in life, says Jane Caro. (AAP: Paul Miller) It is interesting that you raise politicians. I'm curious about whether you think that the tenor of this debate has been shaped by the fact that the majority of our politicians, and I suspect a decent chunk of our media class, attended private schools. Certainly, well, and that's how you create a ruling class. That's really what we've done through our schooling system, we've created a ruling class. And yeah, there's a kind of oligarchy at the top of Australia. We don't like to acknowledge it. We like to think it doesn't exist. But it does. And it's made up of generations of hugely boys who all went to the same schools… So yes, unfortunately most of them either went to private schools or sent t

Jane Caro reckons Australia is kidding itself about private schools

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