Beyond the comfort zone
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
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Last week I was on a train. In the same carriage was a collection of object studies for parental hope and anxiety. There were the private-school girls in their blazers, box pleats and boaters, their silky ponytails unravelling. There were the labourers falling asleep, heads against the windows. There were the clerks and office workers, and a man in a suit speaking into his earpiece. "That's the meeting that worries me," he said, crossing his pinstriped legs. "Clear my diary for that one. It won't settle. We'll be going to court." He must have had good marks at school, I thought. He got into law. And there were the junkies – three of them, clothes draped and belted over their bones. They were teenagers. They stank. One sat next to me. These are the hazards of public transport. Or public anything. You cannot choose your fellow travellers.
I think at heart I am scared, which is in keeping with the times. I am afraid of the future, afraid of difference and afraid for my children. The greatest fear of all. Our children make us hostages to fortune. Naturally we do what we can to bulwark them against risk. But I am considering doing something that most of my peers seem to regard as an unacceptable risk – I am thinking of sending my children to the local high school.
My suburb was built during the Marvellous Melbourne goldrush era – a time even more preoccupied than our own with material wealth and how to get ahead. The main thoroughfare, Mount Alexander Road, was once the route to the goldfields. People threw in their jobs and gave up all manner of small securities to trek with their possessions to the quagmire of the diggings. Or that's how I imagine it to have been.
It must have seemed, back then, that risk, sweat and a fair measure of luck might just be enough to lift oneself above the drudgery and insecurity of life. It is different now. The statistics show that there is a more certain way to security and comfort. It is education. Post-school qualifications are the most reliable predictor of income, and also of social attitudes. In 2001, university-educated people earned a median of $1,036 a week, compared to just $727 for workers without higher education. The difference between comfort and counting every dollar.
The modern age favours the skilled. Those without post-school qualifications are more likely to be unemployed or under-employed. The evidence suggests low-paid jobs no longer serve as the first step on the ladder to higher-paid ones. Usually, they lead nowhere.
Those without post-school qualifications are more likely to be single and childless. Recent research by Monash University's Centre of Population and Urban Research shows that almost a third of unqualified men in their thirties are not married or partnered, and therefore usually do not have children. The most likely reason is that they cannot afford them.
For the unskilled, life is lonely and hard. There is no goldrush. There is only education. Education, the sociologists say, is the new proxy for class. So surely any good parent should invest.
MOUNT ALEXANDER ROAD HAS CHANGED since the goldrush. Today it runs through gentrified suburbs, but also past public-housing high-rises. Just down from what real estate agents refer to as the "cosmopolitan cafe and restaurant strip", two schools face each other. One is Flemington Primary School, where my children are in the middle years. The other is the local high school, Debney Park Secondary College.
The Department of Education and Training puts out graphs that plot schools on axes of advantage and disadvantage – parental income on the left and numbers of parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds along the bottom. Flemington Primary School is in the warm and dense area at the top left – high wealth and low numbers of migrants. Debney Park, on the other hand, is flung out on the right-hand side. Only a few schools in Victoria are more disadvantaged. You can see one school playground from the other but the graph tells us they are, in fact, far apart.
In today's Australia, social position and wealth are usually correlated with postcode. Disadvantage and advantage are geographic. But in Flemington, so far as schooling is concerned, the divide is the old route to the goldfields. It is Mount Alexander Road.
Among the parents at Flemington Primary I have yet to meet any who are seriously considering sending their children to Debney Park Secondary College.
"Well, I think they have their schools and we have ours," one parent said to me, as we wrapped presents for the Father's Day stall last year. I had asked why so few of the public-housing tenants, many of them African refugees, attended Flemington Primary. I wrapped a pair of black cotton business socks in giftwrap and choked down my initial, furious reaction. After all what she said was a simple statement of fact. And it was dressed up with the usual caveats of those parents planning to send their children to private secondary schools. They are sure, of course, that teachers in the public system do a very good job. But it won't be for their children.
It is also true, of course, that "our" school has a catchment area covering the well-to-do renovated houses in the leafy streets. The public-housing area falls just outside our catchment area and is served by its own primary school.
It is not that there are no poorer students, no dark faces, in our school. There is a smattering of recent African refugees, their mothers in head-scarves, but they are in the minority and rarely seen at school functions. The leadership of the school and the atmosphere are unmistakably white and middle class. Our school has a nickname in the suburb: "Flemington Grammar". One of the teachers told me with pride that my children were fortunate – I was getting "a private education without having to pay for it".
At Flemington Primary there are a thousand things that we do without thinking twice that confirm our comfortable financial situation. We have school concerts in the local theatre with an admission fee of $15 a head. We have a Christmas dinner in a restaurant at the casino that charges $45 each. Hardly a week goes by without the need to shell out money for something or other at school. Recently, a letter came home requesting a $100 donation per family – fundraising towards a new school hall. Our social functions include alcohol and the sausage sizzles are rarely halal, despite all the black Muslim faces across the street.
In another conversation, I was talking to a parent about the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. "Ah yes," he said. "Balwyn. If you live out there, you can educate your children in the public system and they'll be ok." The implication, not conscious or examined, was that one could not do that where we lived.
Instead, the parents discuss the private school options or which government schools – some of them many kilometres away – present an acceptable risk. Nobody even considers the high school across the street.
But I am, or I want to. And hence my fear.