Mr Gonski and the social contract

Gonski was warmly welcomed by a big crowd and even more warmly farewelled – he made it clear that this was his "postscript" – but was only once interrupted by applause, and that was when he insisted that the purpose of a funding system was to "ensure that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession."

At that and many other points Gonski took tacit issue with Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum that there is no such thing as society. He reported his own family's debt to schooling. He talked about the "enormous" difference between "well-endowed schools and those in the lower socioeconomic areas." He insisted that many of his peers in the world of big business shared his "feeling for society." He encouraged people to work outside their home territory. "It is good for the individual [and] good for the society" because it builds "trust and cooperation" between sectors.

He attacked as well as endorsed and defended. His chief target was the Commission of Audit. Its alternative scheme might be clear and simple, but "like a lot that is simple it is not adequate." States could not be both custodians of their own schools and responsible for funding competitors. In any event, leaving things to the states could lead to different systems and different aspirations in different parts of the nation. The Commission's argument for winding back spending increases planned for 2017 and beyond was to be regretted. If money had to be saved, why hadn't the Commission revisited the previous government's decision that "no school will be worse off"?

Gonski told his audience that the review presented him with an "opportunity to make a stand." His speech was another, and he took it.

Is that entirely a good thing? Gonski's speech, like his report, reflects rising concern around the Western world that the surge of wealth to the already-wealthy over the long postwar boom has become a threat to social cohesion and to the legitimating claim that "opportunity" is "equal." Social cohesion and legitimacy are core business for schooling. We should certainly be grateful that Gonski called for a national approach to schooling in the social as well as the geographic and political sense.

It is an approach which should have national appeal, especially coming as it did from the big end of town. There is nothing inherently sectional or party-political about it. A conservative government could find as many reasons to go along with it as a Labor administration, and as Gonski himself pointed out, the most enthusiastic "Gonski" supporter has been the Coalition government in New South Wales.

Its federal counterpart, however, is of a very different mind, and not merely in the service of Christopher Pyne's ever-changing political needs. The underlying dynamic is that members of privileged groups often use privilege to pursue immediate individual interests at the expense of the long-term stability of the social order on which their privilege depends.

That is exactly what the high-fee independent schools have been encouraging their clients to do in the golden decades since the Gough Whitlam launched an education spending bonanza in response to Peter Karmel's Schools in Australia report. Burgeoning wealth has allowed them to just about guarantee the transmission of cultural capital from one generation to the next, partly through success in academic competition, partly via what would in other circumstances be called social engineering – using fees and academic selection to cherry-pick students and families, and to constitute networks, outlooks and codes. In the process, these schools and their selective companions in the government sector have performed something like the inverse of that service for excluded social groups and their schools.

In this perspective, Gonski (Shore old scholar) and fellow panellist Katherine Greiner (chair of high-end Loreto Kirribilli) can be seen as reminding their peers that schooling has tasks and responsibilities that go beyond privileging their own offspring. And Pyne can understood as saying: you gotta be kidding – enjoy!

Pyne has prevailed, thus far at least, because problems of social cohesion and legitimacy are not (yet) as marked in Australia as in some other societies, notably Britain and the United States, and because he and his Coalition colleagues are blinkered to Gonski-like concerns by their own experience of privilege and by an ideology that reflects it. They find it easier to see individuals as masters of their fate, and markets as the arena of their fair and bracing competition, than to see that both depend on a coherent social order accepted by its citizens as fair and legitimate.

In these circumstances it is not hard to see why David Gonski's expression of a fundamentally different way of thinking about society and schooling would receive such a warm reception from his Wilson Hall audience. But there is a big distance between the impulse and its full articulation as policy and translation into practice.

"Gonski" was only ever one part of the jigsaw of a fully national approach to schooling. It was never even allowed to be a full review of funding. Its terms of reference took as given Australia's unique and uniquely dysfunctional three-sector system – some pay, some don't, and so ad infinitum. "Gonski" recommended funding floors, but no ceiling, leaving those who can to pay whatever it takes to thwart equal opportunity. "Gonski" had much more to say about the distribution of funding than its effective use. It is now, after two years as a political football, weaker in all these respects.