Last night’s VUW Debating Society debate was a pleasure. I’m tired of “celebrity debating” and debates where witty insult crowds out genuine dialectic.
So it was good to see 6 people earnestly trying to persuade the audience of the rights and wrongs of parental choice in education.
For those against choice – John Minto’s envy and bitterness came through all his attempts to lighten up. The Principal’s Association contribution led me to hope that they’ve given up the struggle and don’t mind being seen to go through the motions. Grant Robertson showed some debating talent until he had to go back to his dreary Party instruction notes, which did not seem to convince him either.
On the pro-choice side – Roger Kerr was informative, as could be expected and Heather Roy MP showed ACT’s usual creative use of props (vouchers were distributed, called ‘scholarships’).
The star was Stephen Whittington. I’d love to see how he’d have gone taking the negative. Part of his effectiveness was conviction, so it would be fascinating to see how much of that advocacy skill would survive arguing for a hopeless case.
The audience questions at the end probed (ineffectively) the tender spot in the argument on both sides – whether free choice would diminish or increase the assumed social cohesion effect of public schooling. That theory lay behind the US Supreme Court’s now discredited ruling in favour of school bussing.
The negative implicitly asserted that more choice would increase today’s divisions among schools on wealth lines. It is hard to see how. Education choice today is strictly on mortgage servicing capacity. What neither side teased out were the poosible effects on divisions on ethnic, religious or other class lines. Should parents be free to choose a Madrasseh, where the kids could learn little more than that killing infidels is the route to heaven?
The pro-choice speakers should have been forced by the negative to say whether they thought there was a legitimate community interest in limiting that kind of market ‘specialisation”. On the other side the anti-choice team should have been forced to explain why, if that concern is legitimate, they’re tolerating the disastrous current stratification on decile lines, and the current education philosphy that simply excuses or disguises failure.
I see no reason for our present state schools to claim they’re part of the solution to social splintering. Zoning is energetically hacking at the foundations of our classless society. NCEA guarantees that the old school tie will gain increasing importance, as employers cease to rely on the “objective” credential. But even assuming that schools were maintaining our egalitarian socialisation, at what point should that objective transcend the parent’s right to choose what their kids learn, and with whom? That is the true choice question.
Judging from last night, the left, and especially the teaching establishment, is too poorly educated even to frame the questions, let alone pursue the arguments.
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On the question, “should parents be free to choose a Madresseh…” – when I visited The Netherlands researching my book, “Let Parents Choose”, freedom in that country definitely did not extend to allowing parents choice to choose such an education. And The Netherlands is increasingly staring down the problem of fanatical Islamist immigrants. Just as freedom of speech does not allow the shouting of Fire in a crowded theatre, when no such fire exists, so parental choice in education does not allow the freedom to educate children to kill. Even Adam Smith agreed that parents should not be free to withhold education from their children, as that would be a form of child abuse, in that they would not grow into responsible, self-supporting, independent adults.