'Bloated bureaucracy' or bullying balderdash?

The letter from the head of The King's School was not about its private funds. It was about the school's entitlement to public funding, a quite different matter. Fortiter and fideliter may sound very fine, but to faithfully and bravely defend one's own selfish interests while dismissing those of others is not necessarily noble.

The seminal report on education in Australia, the 1973 Karmel Report, stated that "the operation of democracy requires an acceptance of rational authority, an intelligent consideration of alternatives, a willingness to participate and an ability to transcend personal interests for the common good".

The original proposal by the NSW Government to cut 53 per cent of the 2.9 per cent of the total funding of The King's School and similar high-resource schools reflected the principle that any cuts should not be applied uniformly across the non-government sector, but should fall more heavily on schools with resource levels two and three times those in other non-government schools. That decision could readily have been argued to have resulted from "an intelligent consideration of alternatives" by the State Minister, Adrian Piccoli. It is not to his discredit that he has fallen foul of the head of The King's School, who has not demonstrated his commitment to meeting the requirements of democracy outlined above.

It is his prerogative to engage in boastful and brash rhetoric or to adopt the mantle of relative victimhood when discussing his school's private business. But we all have to understand that there are many sole parents in this country having to raise (and educate) their children on a pension of around the amount being charged in fees by schools in the high fee end of the independent sector. Their champions have to understand that the public funds to which they feel entitled are generated by taxes on the families for whom such forms of schooling are unaffordable.

When speaking of public funding, we would all do well to keep civil tongues in our heads.