"It seriously disgusts me" Conservatives defend private schools

Anyone who criticizes elite private schools can expect to be denounced as merely envious, or so I learned when an extract from my book The Privileged Few (co-authored with Myra Hamilton) was published earlier this month in the Weekend Australian. “Sour grapes and a chip on their shoulder?” as one reader wrote. (For those with a subscription the article is here, https://tinyurl.com/yc6scm7a)

Yes, I know, what did I expect from readers of the Australian? Still, it’s a curious allegation. If I’m envious because others had a better education than I was given at a state school, why did I send my own children to state schools? And why are they sending their children to state schools when the private option is available to them?

The answer, I think, is that those who believe envy must be our motive for criticising elite private schools cannot understand that someone could have a public interest motive for deciding to send their children to state schools. In other words, for making a decision based, at least in part, on moral rather than self-interested grounds.

For some readers of the Australian, such a thing is truly mystifying. As one reads through the overwhelmingly critical, and often bitter, comments, the full impact of selfish individualism on large swathes of Australian society jumps out. Take a selection of the “most liked” comments beneath our extract. (They all speak of private schools in general even though our article was explicitly about elite private schools, which we roughly define as the 5-10 per cent with the highest fees.)

“People pay to have their kids educated well. They have every right to do that. Get over the envy political rubbish.”

“Like many we chose to send our children to private schools as for us the service and product represented value for money …”

“Privilege is actually choice and the right to have opinions that do not conform to the approved beliefs of the woke green socialist left.”

Choice. “It’s my own personal choice and who are you to tell me what I spend my money on?” It’s the basic premise of every economics textbook now turned into a toxic political philosophy and way of understanding one’s place in the world.

For parents selecting a school for their children, various factors come into play. For some, the local public school is the only option. Some would prefer, on principle, to send their kids to public schools but other considerations prove decisive, which is understandable. For others, education is a commodity, like cars or holidays, and it’s merely a question of what their money can buy.

For conservatives such as those who write to the Australian the world is an aggregation of unequal individuals, just as Margaret Thatcher said: “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.” Or in the more visceral words of the “most-liked” comment: “Socialism is envious, greedy, jealous and dangerous. It seriously disgusts me.”

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