KEY POINTS:
From the mouths of political innocents, many a truth is spoken. When Labour's candidate for East Coast Bays stood in for the Education Minister at a forum in Auckland last week, she proudly announced she did not pay school fees. Viv Goldsmith, a teacher herself, said that when the fee requests arrive from her children's school she always sends them on to the minister.
For this she was reportedly cheered to the rafters at the forum organised by the Quality (sic) Public Education Coalition but the Labour Party was less pleased. Ms Goldsmith sounds like the sort of member who gives a party a bad name, not because they misrepresent it but because they express its base attitudes all too honestly.
Labour's policy is to tolerate schools charging fees as long as they are labelled a voluntary donation, but it does not believe in them. In principle the party believes state education should be free and equal for all. Enforcing that principle, however, would require a law forbidding all parents from providing a little bit extra for their children's school, which would be an outrage.
So, schools and parents are left in an unsatisfactory limbo where "donations" can be requested and most parents willingly pay. But those like Ms Goldsmith, who adhere to a different philosophy, must expect to be regarded as free-riders on fellow parents who contribute to the cost of the education their children receive.
It can be an emotional issue for both sides. Ms Goldsmith would be wise not to repeat her declaration in a forum of parents who willingly contribute, or among taxpayers who understand the nature of public finance.
In justification of fees, schools run the argument that government funding is miserable, which is not so. Education is one of the state's three or four largest outlays. But education, like health, will always provide more than a budget will afford.
In fact, every industry would like to provide more than its customers are willing to pay. When customers pay the prices, the providers use commercial techniques to increase demand; when the state pays, providers enlist customers to put constant political pressure on those who control the funds.
Most parents who willingly pay school fees do so in the belief, carefully nurtured by school administrators, that public funding falls short of providing the essentials. It does not. If schools were forbidden to charge a fee, they could provide an adequate standard of education. But they want to provide much more than that and they have no difficulty convincing most parents of the extra value their children can receive from equipment and experiences the fee will afford.
That is as it should be. The fact that not all parents can afford the fee should never be a reason to forbid it. Schools can and do allow discreet exemptions for hardship. And unfortunately they have to tolerate the resistance of a few like Ms Goldsmith.
Ideally, parents of her outlook would be able to choose schools for the like-minded, which would restrict their activities strictly to what they could provide on the state grant. In a city there is plenty of scope for schools to serve different social philosophies. But within the education profession opponents of school fees are opposed to diversity, too. They want the population corralled into school zones for the sake of an equality that eludes them anyway. The rich move into the right zone.
A change of Government could change this philosophy. Labour's reluctant tolerance of school fees should be replaced by outright encouragement for them. It is totally to be applauded that parents want to pay something towards the education of their children. It is reprehensible that any parent with the means would object. It is time this society said so.
