Janet Albrechtsen, and the importance of maintaining the public funding of cults ...

(Above: Nicholson is currently off line as the result of hacking, but the public private sector divide cartoon was found here, in company with Chris Bonnor's useful Schools: Don't mention the ... public vs. private).

What better way to celebrate Australia Day than to read Janet Albrechtsen valiantly defending the current government funding of the private school system?

Sure some might prefer to listen to the Triple J hot one hundred, others might indulge in a humble barbecue, sill others might be signing up as citizens of this brave land, yet more will show these new citizens how important it is to get pissed as parrots and act like galahs as benefit of citizenship, but for the pond there's no more splendid a sight than our very own Dame Slap valiantly defending the fortifications of socialism and public funding and wealth transference, as we'd expect of any decent commentariat columnist in The Australian ...

You too can waste valuable minutes of your life by reading Class warriors prepare to ambush private schools, instead of getting under a hose to soften the impact of the heat (or perhaps by taking the plunge in a publicly funded, available to all public swimming pool ...).

Or perhaps as a new citizen you might marvel at the way this country has long invested in a public secular education system available to all ... and having in my youth tried both the Catholic and state systems, you've probably already guessed the way the pond's bias flows.

Or should that be floods, because in sniffing out the enemies of the private sector, Dame Slap is hyper sensitive about the use of the word 'flooding'. In much the same way as I'm sure she's sensitive about lock and load, and targets and shooting down the political enemy ...

Anyhoo, never mind, the class warriors and enemies are the usual predictable motley lot of union leaders (the teachers' unions are the last haven of unreconstructed communists, it seems), the Greens and the Fairfax press, busy shocking parents about fee increases for private schools, and the way some of the toffier schools make out like bandits. (a yearly feature, from 2010's Private school fees race ahead of inflation to 2011's Parents bear the burden of surging private fees).

The fiends! Don't they understand all is going swimmingly well in both the private and public education systems? Well maybe not the public system, but who cares, provided the private sector can keep on scoring the loot ...

Union leaders may talk about equality of opportunity but their aim is equality of outcome: each Australian student attending the same kind of school, receiving precisely the same kind of cookie-cutter education. Diversity, usually such a fashionable word in the teachers union world, is taboo when it comes to schools and choice.

Yes, diversity, that's what we need. The right of every child and/or its parents to receive a proper, decent, federally subsidised scientological education, as the sensible students at the Athena School in Newtown (just around the corner from the pond) receive guidance based on the sound principles of The Way to Happiness, written by that genius L. Ron Hubbard. (and you too can explore the precepts of the way to happiness by going to the official site here, or by reading the wiki here. Please note that the pond expressly disclaims any legal liability or responsibility for anyone who achieves an instant karmic understanding of the role of Thetans and Xenu in their lives as a result of clicking on these links, and loses squillions in the process).

Yes, we've bored stray readers before with details of how the federal government is shovelling $1.4 million down the throat of the Athena school - there's a nice new hall being erected right at the moment - and it's even picked up its own wiki, here.

Then there are the schools of the Exclusive Brethren, lining up to pocket some $70 million in federal funding at the same time as former chairman Rudd described the sect as an extremist "cult". (Brethren schools to get $70m in funding).

Finally I get to understand the meaning of cognitive dissonance ...

Being an advocate of public education is a fine vocation indeed, except when it means becoming a specialist in dishonest and illogical arguments aimed at bludgeoning the federal government into giving less and less to private schools. No strategem goes unused in their attempt to strangle private education.

Uh huh, so here are some dishonest and illogical arguments, a strategem designed to strangle some aspects of private education.

You see, as well as the scientologists, there's all the other fundamentalist creation teaching schools that can be found if you've got a spare half hour, like the CityLife Church which runs the Waverley Christian College, and which - along with helping that prime goose Senator Steve Fielding into temporary unnatural prominence - has held out its hand for federal and state government funding, and done very nicely thank you very much. And please don't get too thingie about the science curriculum, as the Association of Independent Schools in South Australia noted last year in Creationism ban a test of faith for religious schools.

And then there's the growing number of Islamic schools that pick up federal and state funding. A few years ago the East Preston Islamic college came to notice for a little larrikinism (Muslim boys urinated on Bible) but the real sting in the tail is the $3.9 million the college collars each year of taxpayer money ... (if only they'd urinated on the Koran at the same time ...)

And so on and on and on, private schools pocketing taxpayer money to fund their sundry and absurd views of the universe.

Of course all this started with the Catholics and the wealthy elite Anglicans (such a tidy division, the tykes for the poor, the well meaning Protestants for the rich, with a few rich tyke schools to make it look balanced), but it all began to fall apart, and turn to chaos in the years of the Howard government.

Usually you'll find commentariat columnists outraged at Islam, or shocked by wasteful government spending - school halls, pink batts - but you'll never hear a shriek or a moan from them at the way the Howard government helped fund a thousand different theologies and ideologies in private schools ...

Yes, let a thousand shrieking voices bloom out of the barrel of a federally financed gun.

No, you'll hear this kind of learned by rote cry of pain:

Still, teachers unions are committed to first reducing, then obliterating, any public funding to private schools. Their message to parents: if you can pay anything at all towards a private education, you should pay for the lot.

Actually, if you want your child to be educated in a scientological, fundamentalist Christian, or decent Islamic way, damn straight you can pay for the lot. And come to think of it, the same goes for the Catholics and the Anglicans.

Why on earth should the taxpayer contribute to you, your weird, warped world view, and your desire to ensure that your child shares your weird, warped world view?

Meanwhile, Dame Slap gets fired up on a dose of fevered rhetorical zeal:

Imagine how refreshing it might be to hear an advocate of public education talk about the importance, too, of private schools within our education system. Imagine if this public education advocate recognised the need to encourage - not just tolerate, and certainly not penalise - parents who can afford to privately educate their children, to do just that. Imagine if the Gonski review said just that. And just imagine if the Gillard government agreed.

Yes, just imagine if they finally managed to admit, to acknowledge, that the funding of the Exclusive Brethren cult or the cult of Scientology or the cult of creationism or the denigration of computers and the modern world was a really vital and important part of our education system, deserving of government funding ...

After all, telling hardworking parents who sacrifice in order to fund their children's education that the more they invest, the more they will be punished by a withdrawal of federal funding is no way to build an education revolution.

Yes, an education revolution that will cement in place the important understanding that creationism brings to science, and Scientology brings to those in search of the way to happiness.

It's called diversity in education, and while you might call it picking the pockets of Australian taxpayers, Dame Slap sees it as a way of building an education revolution.

And sure enough there's every sign that in the next decade the Australian education system will achieve the outstanding cretinism produced by the wondrous ways of the marketplace and the private sector, and its explicitly theological and scientifically and historically unhinged standards in the United States ... (U.S. Falls in World Education Rankings, Rated 'Average') ...while the student of Shanghai gave them a wake up call (China Debuts at Top of International Education Rankings).

Remind me again?

Who let Dame Slap into the classroom?

Oh that's right, it was Enid Blyton ...

(Below: various incarnations of Dame Slap and her tremendously effective private school up at the top of the Faraway tree. Surely she deserves some recognition and a federal government grant recognising her services to private education? After all, scientific studies suggest there's never been a better way to educate a child than to give them a firm slap.)