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For a nation ‘conceived in liberty’, much of how this U.S. election will play out will hinge on different understandings of the word ‘freedom’, a term that has two distinct and separate meanings depending on whether the person you’re asking votes red or blue.
In the new schools funding model, schools at the upper and middle parts of the parental income spectrum will find budgets getting tighter each year, and fees will likely increase. The worst affected schools will be those whose parents earn higher incomes but which have kept their fees low so that poorer families may also enrol their children.
As Australian students receive their year-end academic results, a stark educational divide comes into focus, with high-fee-paying private and selective government schools leading the ranks. This trend highlights significant socio-economic disparities across the country, raising urgent questions about the accessibility and true cost of academic excellence in a nation grappling with inequality.
Parents face a complex choice: public or private schooling? Overcrowded public classrooms contrast with well-funded private institutions, revealing inequalities in educational resources. Australia's educational landscape reveals not just a tale of two school systems but the underlying values and priorities of a nation.
Religious schools have emphasised the transmission of faith and an ethical way of life through a network of relationships, symbols and processes. But this is now being tested, with the dominant view that values and faith are a private matter best hosted inside the family. The operative goals of schools become the academic and economic advancement of individuals, with religious classes and rituals little more than decoration and rhetorical branding.
Amidst a whirl of media interviews and meetings, David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard University and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world for 2014, paid a visit to his alma mater: a state school in suburban Sydney. State schools aren't the repositories of children too impoverished or unintelligent for the alternative; they're the living manifestation of democracy, egalitarianism, multiculturalism and ecumenism.
Year 12 tertiary entrance exams: turning 17-year-olds into nervous wrecks since the 1830s. They divide the smart from the dumb, the hopefuls from the no-hopers, and, what it boils down to more often than not, the privately educated from the state educated. But what if there was another way, a way that properly acknowledged the impact high schools have on their students' access to university admission?
A survey released this week found that the lion's share of philanthrpopic giving goes to independent non-government schools. Gonski devoted an entire chapter to the question of how private cash can be got to where need is greatest. The Government should act on his recommendation, but not before beefing it up.
Once, my mother reprimanded a young student whom she taught at an expensive private school. The boy replied that his dad could 'buy and sell' her. As easy as it would be to conclude that private schools breed poor behaviour, rude children are just that — class has little to do with it.
A recent poll shows 70 per cent of people think the Federal Government gives too much money to private schools. Catholic schools have contributed enormously to the Australian community, and thus make a claim for some funding on the basis of the common good.
A neoliberal funding policy has undermined the ability of Catholic schools to meet poor children's needs. Instead, Catholic schools have allowed millions of tax dollars to be siphoned off public schools and given to the private sector.
Ross Fitzgerald claims Catholic schools 'have become the instrument through which tax dollars are siphoned off public schools and given to the private sector'. His argument is a misrepresentation of the facts.
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