Are elite private schools unAustralian?

The airs and graces so many Australians chose to leave behind in Britain have somehow followed us across the seas and embedded themselves in our education system, writes Margaret Wenham.

I still remember Dad’s demeanour after he’d been on the phone to his niece from England.

“Bloody ridiculous,” he’d snorted and I listened in as he explained to Mum what the “favour” my “fraightfully”, awfully posh cousin was after from her uncle — a £10,000 loan (about $72,000 AUD in today’s money) to keep her eldest son at Eton that year.

You see, the fabric of Sue and her investment banker husband’s lavish lifestyle was threadbare following a financial crash in the UK.

But never mind, the Sussex house and the Daimler were gone, at least some of the appearances had to be maintained. Top of the list was keeping their three children in their extremely expensive English public schools, where they could continue to rub shoulders exclusively with the offspring of aristocracy in the hope enough crumbs from this upper crust would stick to give them every appearance of being one of them.

Sue wasn’t born “one of them”. But she’d learned the detailed art of “putting on the dog”, as Dad would describe her strangled vowels, name dropping and affectations, from her mother, Dad’s sister and my Aunt P, a past master in rewriting the modest, lower-middle class family history and trying to climb Britain’s greasy, class-stratified pole.

Despite being impecunious after Uncle Harold died, Aunt P somehow stumped up the money for her only daughter to attend “the same school as the Queen Mother” and she rarely let an opportunity go by to drop this into conversation, with the loaded inference that Aunt P’s and Sue’s social status was a cut above the rest of our motley family crew.

The idea of keeping up appearances is the kind of pomp people like my dad chose to leave behind when he migrated to Australia. Picture: iStock

This was certainly the case when, aged 21, I made my rite of passage backpacking visit to the UK where I was regarded by Aunt P and Sue as some sort of colonial curiosity — an antipodean Eliza Doolittle desperately in need of having the rough edges knocked off.

“One doesn’t sprinkle salt, Margaret, only pepper,” Susan admonished sharply, during our first meal together. “One makes a small pile of salt on the side of one’s plate.”

When she caught me “shovelling” peas, you might have thought I’d dropped a noisy fart and given a great shout of “What-ho, Vicar!” A swift lesson in skewering and squashing peas onto a vertically held fork was curtly delivered.

I let most of the criticisms wash over me — like being lectured about having bare feet, even inside, and not answering the door in a “state of dishabille” to tradesmen (I had on neck to slipper, a tightly belted dressing gown), and all the other pretentious nonsense like Sue insisting on “getting the Daimler out” to drive me the 50 yards to a neighbouring farm when I said I was going to stroll down and introduce myself in case they had any horses they wanted exercising.

But relations nosedived when Aunt P “accidentally” opened and read mail addressed to me, notably including a card from Down Under mates keen to pass on the latest joke. “What does an elephant use as a tampon?” they’d written, obviously rolling about.

I learned of the card, the joke and the answer (a sheep) from a furious Sue shouting down a telephone line at me.

“You’ve made mummy ill,” she roared. “You’re disgusting, a degenerate. But I’m not surprised. I know exactly what goes on in the colonies.”

In my family, those who were educated at the same school as a member of the royal family were, in their parent’s mind, on an equal footing with the royals. Picture: Daniel Leal-Olivas

I pointed out Aunt P shouldn’t be reading my mail and decided I’d had enough of the bulls**t. We didn’t speak for years.

It was Dad’s aversion to the bullshit — Britain’s entrenched class system, the upper mob’s sense of superiority and determined separation from the hoi polloi and the latter’s efforts to join the elites’ club — that drew him to a country that proclaimed a spirit of egalitarianism and whose countrymen he’d met during the war exhibited an appealing scepticism of, if not scorn for, elitism and class distinctions and divides.

But I’ve always thought we don’t have to scratch our egalitarian epidermis very hard to reveal something pretty similar to the Brits’ upstairs downstairs malarky — originally imported not just by those who were themselves the product of pricey English public schools, but by those proclaiming affection for a classless society while secretly harbouring a desire to join (or for their kids to join) the upper echelons of one.

I sometimes think about this when I pass one of our venerable GPS schools and see its topiaried name shaped into shrubs on a gentle slope that meets one of its many lush, expensively manicured playing fields, or when I’m passing one of the local Catholic schools where money currently appears to be no object to attaining its massive building and sporting facility expansion program. And I think about it when I ponder my three public school-educated kids and their subsequent achievements.

The MySchool website provides food for thought about where we’re at. Picture: iStock

The MySchool website provides some interesting food for thought. In 2017 the gross income per student (that’s federal and state funding, plus fees in the case of the non-public schools) at the GPS school was $25,708, nearly double that of my kids state alma mater of $12,750. The Catholic college students enjoyed $19,703 each and, between 2014-16, than $21 million’s worth of accumulated capital expenditure. Meanwhile, 74 per cent of the GPS school’s students top scored on the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, compared with 61 per cent of the Catholic students and just 47 per cent of the state high’s.

Now, consider the likelihood of such a system entrenching educational inequality and fuelling social division. And that it might be antithetical to our supposedly cherished egalitarianism. Because surely it has to and is.

The antidote for those of us who regard this as undesirable — unAustralian even — is simple. Ending social class-segregated education with equality of funding.

Those who disagree can cry “it’s the politics of envy” all they like but they’ll be squawking up the wrong tree. It’s not those who support and patronise the non-exclusive public school system who suffer from envy, it’s those who don’t.

And the best way to eat peas is to shovel ‘em.

Margaret Wenham is a columnist for The Courier-Mail.