BY COLIN CLEARY
The provincial industrial centre where I work as a relief teacher is not the prettiest or the most prosperous in the state. A good half of it consists of housing commission dwellings erected in a burst of Menzies-era optimism that petered out decades ago. The working-class families remain, anchored by the cheap accommodation and squeezed by the shortage of jobs.
There are four high schools in our city, three run by the state education department and the other by the Catholic Church. Filling in for absent teachers, I have come to know all these institutions well. Each has its peculiarities, but there is one particular chasm that divides them. It can be summed up as: "St Brendan's" versus the rest.
The chasm is not primarily based on old secular versus religious, "papists versus prods" dichotomies. Many of the students at St Brendan's are not from Catholic backgrounds. Nor is the divide strictly a material one. St Brendan's does not draw its pupils from a wealthy elite — such an elite scarcely exists here. The school's facilities are marginally better than those of the state high schools, and the choice of subjects is much the same.
The reason St Brendan's is different is that parents have to pay to send their kids there. They do not, of course, have to pay the whole cost; St Brendan's could never operate without a hefty federal subsidy. But the thousands of dollars a year required, mean that to send a child there, you either need to be solidly well off, or make painful budgeting decisions. If parents have more than one child, the scale of pain increases, very likely to the point where you forget the idea of sending them there entirely.
At a guess, St Brendan's, which educates about a third of the city's adolescents, is too pricey to be an option for the schooling of at least half the city's secondary school age population.
So why, do so many parents send their children to St Brendan's if they do not necessarily have religious motives for doing so? The answer, as many teachers and parents will tell you, is implicit in the question: which students are locked out of a fee-paying education?
Let me introduce my neighbours, Keith and Leanne, whose 15-year-old daughter Mandy dons her tartan pleats each morning and heads up the hill to St Brendan's. A determined rather than brilliant student, Mandy nevertheless wants to pursue a professional career. Might she get into law, her parents wonder?
A few years ago, Keith and Leanne faced the dilemma of whether to send Mandy to "Blaxland High", the nearby state secondary school that fronts onto a sea of housing commission duplexes. Keith and Leanne are not rich — a boilermaker and a nurse — but as conscientious parents, they decided they didn't really have a choice. St Brendan's, they concluded, would give their daughter chances that Blaxland High wouldn't. Sacrifices would have to be made.
Inside the loop
The experience of teaching and learning that occurs in a room full of middle-class students is sharply different from what takes place in the educational world of the poor.
Students at St Brendan's muck up, but a few forceful words are enough to contain them; then the learning resumes. Not only are the students' home backgrounds more likely to be literate and articulate, but the cultural expectations the pupils bring to school means that they apply themselves because they believe they will be rewarded in time with success. The students have a sense of being inside the loop, heirs to the largesse of a society which, as it seems, works to their benefit.
It is not as though gifted and well-motivated students cannot be found at Blaxland High. There is nothing uniform about housing commission homes beyond the floor plans, and the school's parent body contains many capable people who are anxious to see their children succeed. But in such a school, anyone who loves to learn must swim against the stream. Among quite large numbers of students, the perception that prevails is that school is just another of the institutions, along with the workplace and the welfare and legal systems, that exist to rob, bully and humiliate them and the people they live among.
In a city where a hundred job applications can fail to land an interview, there is no obvious connection for many Blaxland High students between effort and success. Needless to say, this has not stopped the education system from intoning that hard work brings rewards.
Trapped in a situation at once absurd and belittling, students hunger to affirm their dignity through meaningful action. Often, the most meaningful action they can find is to try to subvert the system and reduce it to chaos. At St Brendan's, discipline provisions are an afterthought; at Blaxland High they are an exhaustive system of red cards and time-out rooms. For teachers, maintaining order is a task that cuts massively into their time and mental energies.
Insurgents
The classroom insurgents of Blaxland High, who understand their situation more keenly than any number of liberal ideologues, are not stupid. But their revolt is not an answer to their problems, any more than the aimless social deviance it mostly grows into.
As heroes to their peers, the most determined mutineers impose a solidarity that blocks the chances of escape for others who might hope to find holes in the wall. Raise your hand in class because you know an answer? You'd be ratting on your mates, breaking the circle of sullen non-cooperation.
Decades ago, the most alienated students would have had little chance of setting the tone for whole classes. Their role would have been offset, even in schools like Blaxland High, by the native curiosity of students whose general start in life was more propitious. A rival solidarity, of students wanting to learn, would have operated. But the latter students are now at St Brendan's and at a swelling number of other "low fee" private schools whose existence is made possible by federal funding. According to the February 13 Australian, more than 31% of Australian secondary students are now in private schools, and the proportion is rising.
Many of the more gifted and experienced teachers are joining the drift, whether for better pay and conditions or simply for the professional satisfaction of being able to teach rather than practise crowd control. The teachers at Blaxland High are heroes in their way, but mostly quite new at their work. The psychological pressures are gruelling, and turnover is high.
According to education ministers, the net result of the shift to private schooling is an increase in freedom of choice. For some, perhaps. But of the teachers who quit the state system for its private counterpart, many would say they had no choice.
Keith and Leanne, wanting the best for their daughter, felt they had no choice either. Morally, if not juridically, they have lost the right to free education for their children.
The pensioners and low-paid workers whose children attend Blaxland High definitely have no choice. As Australian education is steadily privatised, such parents are doomed to having their children educated in low-achiever ghettos. Students who might have gone to university will settle for TAFE courses. Would-be lawyers will reconcile themselves to teaching. Potential medical students will study science.
The prestige faculties will be filled by well-tutored students from leafy suburbs. Education, once seen as a way of breaking down the rigidities of the class structure, will be another factor stiffening the concrete.