The expensive illness in Australia’s elite schools | The Spectator
A decadent managerial culture has sunk its unwelcome claws into Australian private schooling.
Article: Benjamin Crocker. Image: Getty Images.
There is a disquiet in our elite private schools, and a growing army of would-be therapists have failed to calm it.
A cursory look through newspaper education pages tells a sorry story.
In Sydney alone there were reports of Nazi salutes in the Eastern Suburbs. On the North Shore, depraved messages allegedly posted online by students led to suspensions. The allocation of school funding has been questioned by Headmastorial trips to England, and discretionary spending on plunge pools. Then there’s the general problem of plummeting teacher talentand plummeting interest in difficult subjects.
In some cases, parents are also paying 50 per cent more for this schooling than they were 10 years ago. That’s 30 per cent above inflation for the same period.
Needless to say, this is no golden era for Australian private schooling. As the community begins to seriously question the worth of these institutions, it pays to examine how and why Australia’s elite schools have arrived at their current predicament.
Over the last two decades, a decadent managerial culture has sunk its unwelcome claws into Australian private schooling.
Whilst the public system has suffered from managerialism too, the peculiar demographics of 21st Century Australia have cast elite Australian private schooling as the ultimate boutique management industry.
As school managers began to incentivise parents by driving ever more ambitious projects, their institutions saw an uptick in both activity and expectation. The kids were busier – but just a bit! The excursions were pricier – but just a bit! The calendar was fuller – but just a bit! Fees were up – but just a bit! (And parents were more anxious – But just a bit!)
But all of a sudden, it wasn’t just a bit. It was an arms race. Worse, where once learning necessitated business, now business necessitated learning.
And because learning was business, learning had to be saleable. It had to look like something. It looked like multimillion-dollar aquatic centers and professionally-curated football fields. It looked like concert halls with professional acoustics: school orchestras stuffed likewise, with professional musicians barely able to cover over the appalling decline in pedagogy.
Australia’s private school arms race was giddy, it was greedy, and someone had to pick up the tab. That someone ended up being the parents.
Fees went through the roof. Swathes of aspirational families were priced out of the market. Families who would undoubtedly have enriched the moral fibre of those school communities went missing from their milieu.
Alienated from societal reality, Australia’s ‘elite’ private schools arrive in the third decade of the 21st Century having lost the genuine diversity that could have helped prevent their latter-day loss of virtue. Worse, their alienation is entrenched by a loss of institutional humility – no organisation can protect its integrity having already repurposed its everyday operations so fulsomely toward a perpetual marketing campaign.
High-fee schools counter this alienation with a plethora of personal development and community outreach programs. These are wonderful things – generally always run by the best of the best teachers, earnestly seeking to make a difference. But here again, elite schools are being gazumped by the ‘othering’ of their students, by way of their growing isolation from society itself.
How, one must ask, can a young man or woman form meaningful bonds in his home community when his private school calendar utterly dominates his or her life, from age 5 to 18?
The 21st Century elite private school, in its quest to sell an experience for every hour of the day, is robbing its students of the social dynamism they might find by spending less time at school, and more time in the broader community. Robbed too, is family time, and meaningful negotiations between parent and child.
Schools themselves have long argued they’re only reluctantly assuming this ‘round the clock’ routine, as parents work longer hours and abdicate on responsibilities in the home. This is somewhat fair, but it must be said that schools were never designed to parent our kids.
The deeper truth is that this expensive dissolution and reconstitution of school-home boundaries has been driven not by busy parents, but by the new managerial class that runs Australia’s high-fee schools. Elite schools didn’t ride in to save society from itself. They used and then exacerbated the crisis in order to accentuate their brand differential.
In 2022, the Head Master has become simply, the Headmaster. His title has come to mean ‘boss’, its etymological import lost. He sets to work emancipated of his ancient burden as teacher-in-chief. He is today consumed by executive responsibility, and surrounded by a growing army of bureaucrats – sometimes people with scarce intuitive knowledge of how to best manage the needs of students and teachers.
Increasingly having their working lives dominated by this class of unthinking managerialists, good teachers tend to respond in one of three ways. Firstly, many simply leave. They find alternative professions, or move to the vanishingly small number of schools where learning remains a joy unstifled by bureaucracy. Secondly, they acquiesce to the status quo, rise in the ranks, and buy into the stifling culture that produced their unhappiness in the first place. Thirdly, and most depressingly, they sink into some combination of outright rebellion and passive resistance. They become cynical, often stoic, but rarely professionally satisfied.
School heads know the rise of educational managerialism to be a tragedy. Privately, they bemoan it. But are we so surprised then, when one of their ilk spends lavishly on some executive luxury…? Should we blame students for adopting iniquitous behaviors when their leaders normalise a rather perverse form of executive privilege?
Though many school heads are themselves fine teachers and outstanding role models, they exist in increasing professional isolation. Too many have proven themselves unable to escape that isolation, to lead, and develop a sincere institutional humility.
They themselves must shoulder the blame for this, but so too must the Boards and Chairmen who continue to persist with a bombastic and overheated schooling model which has broken free as an alien class within an otherwise egalitarian, but aspirational society.
This alienation can not continue in a country that is serious about the well-being of its young people, and the cohesion of its communities. The community will forgive the odd indulgence. It will not forgive the permanent shattering of egalitarian norms.
School Heads must take concrete steps to rein in the hubris. They should lower fees, and unwind the bloated, self-sustaining complexities in their management structures. They do not need vast HR departments, or directors for Tom, Dick, and Harry.
They should undertake a fundamental reexamination of their educational purpose – as St Marys Cathedral School has admirably done, in flagging a move towards a Classical liberal arts curriculum.
Most of all, they must stop perpetuating a superficial, infrastructure-obsessed, marketing-driven schooling model that prioritises fashionable thought, and unwittingly convinces students of their material superiority over the common man and woman, whilst falling short of real educational ambition. Could they not instead re-insure our community’s future with a renewed vision for the learning of the classics, and a re-habituation to civic virtue?
Australia’s elite private schools are a vital part of our school system. They do world-leading work in providing education for rural and regional boarding students. They continue to provide a worthy, humane, and authentic expression for Christian education in an increasingly secularized world. Their freedom of enterprise allows them to act as laboratories for best practice in classroom, sporting and artistic education.
These are considerable strengths to build on. But it will take a peculiar mix of personal humility, intellectual ambition, and unceasing devotion to the common good of society at large, for elite schools to recast the decaying culture of Australian private schooling.
Who among them shall show themselves worthy?
Ben Crocker taught for ten years at Private, Catholic, and Public schools in Sydney. He is the Academic Programs Manager at the University of Austin, Texas, and a Research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC.
Article Source: The Spectator
Published on 12 Aug 2023