As Australia’s private school enrolments continue to surge, Jane Caro remains a vocal defender of public education.

The novelist, feminist and social commentator first went to at Frenchs Forest Public in Sydney’s north, then later at Chatswood Public and Forest High in Sydney. 

Her recent essay, Rich Kid Poor Kid: The battle for public education, is a call to arms for public schools.

What was your tuckshop order?

I would have two sausage rolls with sauce, a cup of chocolate milk and a custard tart.

That sounds so good. What was your favourite subject in high school?

English. Of course.

Did you ever get in trouble?

All the time. I was naughty. I used to smoke around the back of the gym with all my mates. I was boy mad. I never stopped talking. I never really did much homework. I was there for a good time, as much as anything else. And I really only ever — and this is still true — put effort into the things that I like. I still do that. That would turn out to be quite a good life strategy.

What do you think is the biggest myth in the debate about public and private schooling in Australia?

That private schools are better. It isn’t borne out in any way and we’ve been convinced, really by capitalism and by neoliberalism in particular, that the more you pay for something the better it is.

There are absolutely no statistics that say that because you sent your kid to a private school they’re going to do better in life. There’s nothing really that backs that up that is substantial. We even know, for example, that more kids get to uni from private schools than from public schools. That’s not surprising because they select their students and public schools don’t. But those from public schools who do get to university tend to outperform their private school peers and are very much more likely to stay the course. They’re much less likely to drop out. My favourite reason for that is it’s probably a lot easier to go from one underfunded public institution to another underfunded institution rather than going from some of those palaces of luxury to your average university.

People clearly believe it though — there’s a stat very early on in your essay about high school fees making the top five reasons for bankruptcy in Australia.

I think there’s a great deal of change going on, and it’s very rapid change, and people are frightened, and the private schools are very, very clever at selling on fear. I mean, there are two reasons that people make purchase decisions and they are, like all decisions made, emotionally and then post-rationalise. The two reasons are hope and fear.

Public schools, by their very nature, are actually about hope. They’re about hope that we’re a good, decent society, that every child can learn, that, you know, we’re gonna give everybody an opportunity. They were created in an era of hope. Private schools are about fear. They’re really gated communities. And so they’re about protection. They’re about keeping your children away from bad things and influences and trying to protect them as much as you can against all the things that are gonna happen to them.

You’ll hear someone has chosen a private school over a public school say, for the “discipline”. Discipline just means they can get rid of the kids that I don’t like — kids with emotional issues, behavioural issues, whatever it is, the private school can ask them to leave and they know that the public school can’t do that. The public school needs to actually work with those kids because public schools owe a duty to every single child in Australia, regardless of being nice or supposedly not nice. And so I think it’s really driven by anxiety and also by peer pressure. When parents, particularly in a particular area, choose a private school, they put pressure on other parents to do the same thing.

The pressure comes from politicians as much as it comes from society in general, to send children to a private school. [The idea that] “good parents send their kids to private schools, bad parents send their kids to public schools” has created this awful anxiety.

It is interesting that you raise politicians. I’m curious about whether you think that the tenor of this debate has been shaped by the fact that the majority of our politicians, and I suspect a decent chunk of our media class, attended private schools.

Certainly, well, and that’s how you create a ruling class. That’s really what we’ve done through our schooling system, we’ve created a ruling class. And yeah, there’s a kind of oligarchy at the top of Australia. We don’t like to acknowledge it. We like to think it doesn’t exist. But it does. And it’s made up of generations of hugely boys who all went to the same schools… So yes, unfortunately most of them either went to private schools or sent their children to private schools. We’ve had only two prime ministers in the last… Oh, I think 50 or 60 years, who have not sent their children to private schools and those are Julia Gillard, who didn’t have any children, and Anthony Albanese, who sent his son to public schools from kindergarten to year 12.

In the course of your research or even just from the conversations you’ve had, are there any points in this debate that you feel are fair enough or that you’d concede to defenders of the current system?

Not for the defenders of the current system and the way that it is, but I can understand individual parents who have been faced with very difficult situations, particularly when their child has been the victim of bullying or something like that. I do understand that that’s when you’re going to do what you have to do to get your kid out of a really hideous situation. I understand. What really upsets me is, of course, that I do need to point out that only some parents have that choice — those who’ve got some money. So even though I understand why you’re doing it, I think it’s beholden on you to remember that that is not an option that this system offers every parent or every child. And therefore, do what you have to do for your own children but for God’s sake, don’t then leave the public system, as I’ve seen so many people do, and to justify your own decision and soothe your own guilty feelings — all lefties in particular do this — turn around and throw gasoline and a match into the public school you’ve left [by disparaging it].

You’ve written that Australia has one of the most segregated education systems in the OECD which is fascinating to consider at a time when we’re having a national conversation about social cohesion. How does our schooling system play into this?

We slice and dice our kids in Australia, and I think more than any other country, certainly obviously a kinder country, a developed country. We have the OECD warning us about our segregation according to social class. But we also segregate our kids by religion, we segregate our kids by gender, we segregate our kids by ability. For all sorts of reasons, even things like sporting high schools, or performing arts high schools. Those are all forms of segregation. So unlike the high school I went to back in the 70s, where just about every kid in the area went, and some parents were managing directors of companies and others were plumbers, and none of us knew or cared.

Segregating students does not increase results and it has very little beneficial effect on the kids who are all in the advantaged school in terms of academic performance but it has a devastating effect on disadvantaged kids who lose all their role models in terms of academics.

You’ve expressed some concern that private schooling has “colluded” with middle-class feminism. What do you mean by this?

Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with that particular part of it, because I wish it wasn’t true, but I also know that it is because feminism, as yet, is an incomplete revolution. So, we haven’t yet left behind the guilt that we feel around our mothering. And a lot of women, particularly middle-class women, will feel guilty about wanting to put time, effort and energy into their careers.

Private schools offer such a neat little thing you can soothe yourself with, “Oh, I’m only working as hard as I do and as many hours as I’m doing this great big job so I can pay the school fees to get my kids a better education.” That’s another reason to say it has to be a better education. “I make sacrifices to send my child to a private school”, which you hear all the time, as if the implication of that is so unpleasant that public school parents don’t make sacrifices. Is it really a sacrifice? Because what you’re making is a purchase decision. And it’s a bit like saying, “We made sacrifices to live in this leafy middle-class suburb in this nice house and really we should get a subsidy to do that, because we’re a better class of person.”

What was your fondest memory of high school?

I’m going to sound like such a nerd and I promise I didn’t do particularly well in the HSC, but I actually think some of my fondest memories are sitting in my English classroom with Mrs Frater and my fellow students discussing novels and talking about what we were reading. And particularly — and almost everybody else in my class hated it, but I loved it — Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. I absolutely loved that book. We had long and really interesting discussions about what it was about, and ordinary people, and the wife and the different gender roles that Patrick might be writing about and all that kind of thing. I really think that I felt very intellectually stimulated by those classes. I promise you those classes are still going on in every public school in Australia and I’m sure they’re going on in private schools, too. I don’t think that the teaching in one or the other is necessarily all that different but I think we have an assumption they happen in a private school and we can’t believe they have it at a public school. But of course, they do.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.