Opinion & Commentary
Education is another consumer choice
Education is an issue in which everyone has a direct interest at some point in their lives.
But much of the recent election debate has added nothing to answer a fundamental question. Why is it, with free state education available to everyone, parents give up the free product for one that can cost as much as $17,000 a year?
The parents of more than 30 per cent of Australian children are already rejecting the free product.
We live in an age when human capital is rewarded. We are constantly reminded by politicians and others of the knowledge economy and similar concepts.
Just dig around an average Mark Latham speech. He is right. Parents know this, too.
And what if being conscripted into buying a product which you think is inadequate seems so much like being forced to have a car built by the government, but one that you - the parent and taxpayer - think may be damaging or disadvantaging your children.
What do you do when you believe that your children can't afford to lag for even a small moment in the quest for human capital development? What if the major provider, the state, is failing, or you think it is failing?
Answer: You do what people are doing. You seek something that matches what you want.
In the case of education we should encourage the search. It is flexibility, choice and experimentation that are the keys to the knowledge economy.
Of course, it's not only knowledge that parents seek from schools, so human capital should be interpreted fairly broadly.
The mandarins in the departments of education ultimately can have no real idea of the educational needs of individual children, and trusting your child's future to the class warriors of the teacher unions is a risky strategy.
They are your children not the state's and that's why you agonise, and why you are willing to sacrifice. And why you end up paying twice.
It is compulsory for children to attend school. But that the state should provide the service doesn't necessarily follow, even though since the second half of the 19thcentury that's been the case.
Why should it always be so? We are moving away from state pensions and have privatised much of government service provision because these days, apart from statist ideologues, nobody really accepts that government provision is the only way.
In education, like so much else, consumption possibilities have become more accessible due to the availability of different forms of finance.
Consumption, especially when you have children in whom you wish to invest, has been made more equal than at any time in our history. Schools even take credit cards for fees.
The coalition's funding system is inadequate and has allowed the funding of schools rather than the funding of the child to lead to a divisive debate over school resourcing, reaching its nadir with the ALP's new policy.
Ultimately though, some kind of child-centred funding mechanism will be demanded to stop the grubby squabbles. Vouchers, tax credits and other schemes have at various times been proposed and all would be a vast improvement on what we have now.
Let's empower parents and make schools truly competitive and help every child have access to the best, however defined. Imagine if every parent could have the consumer power of the better off.
By all means provide extra support for government schools (this is, of course, the primary responsibility of the states), but also ask, is this the best way of spending taxpayer dollars?
More money is going into state education than at any time in history, but significant numbers of parents just don't like what they see. Who is learning from this?
It seems that it's the parents who do move their children, not to mention those who don't because they can't afford to.
Dividing the people on this fundamental issue is not worthy of any politician supporting it. They are our children and our tax dollars.
Others who think they have a claim on both should explain this pretty clearly.
Greg Lindsay is executive director of The Centre for Independent Studies.
