Shit on my hands

BB

Given that my daughter can still squeeze into size 2 clothing, and is at a stage in her development where she thinks trying to store alphabet magnets in her vagina is funny , I haven’t yet done a lot of hand wringing over where she’ll go to school. She’s three. I only just finalised her middle name. Cheerfully moronic people like me, who spend all their money on miniature Eames chairs and wildly over-priced rental units, just send their kids to the local primary school when the time comes. Only people with the dough to pour into private education seriously consider schooling options when their kids are still on purees and sleep schedules. Right?

No, as I discovered this week when I took Clementine to a Justine Clarke show ( where, incidentally, I was so ensorcelled by her that when she implored the children in my area- the CHILDREN- to give her their best dinosaur impersonations, I reared up like a T-Rex, and roared in her face) While milling about the lobby, observing the pained expressions of the ushers, we bumped into a woman from Clem’s old occasional care centre, a willowy blonde American who drove a BMW the size of the Large Hadron Collider and who always made me feel like a bucket of shit. The kind of woman who makes me wish I didn’t have tattoos and a glaringly obvious dye job. The sort who releases my Armadale demons, the one’s who say ‘look how far down the slope you’ve slid, wanton slag. Is there any blondewood in your home? A My Family sticker on your car? A tasteful barn conversion for weekend escapes in Daylesford? No? FAIL’ Anyway, this woman- we’ll call her Peggy, as that’s her name- wanted to know if I’d decided on a school for Clementine yet.  It’s not an entirely unreasonable question, I guess. I want her to have a good education. But my decision regarding her primary schooling will go approximately like this: which one’s closest to our house? I assume that living as we do in the inner city, swimming in an ocean of uptight honkies, any and every school in our vicinity has no choice but to be pretty great. If they were anything less than stellar there’d be an uprising.

 I’m not expecting Clem’s primary school education to be about Rilke sonnets and philosophy. I just want her to learn to read, write, and play bat tennis. Pretty basic stuff.  But for Peggy and her ilk, primary schooling is a serious business.  Junior must be placed in EXACTLY the right surrounds to coax the delicate bud into bloom. Play based, textbook based, Steiner streams-I don’t really give a shit. I’ll weigh up her high school options a little more carefully, and pay close attention to the rates of teen pregnancy at each potential school, but I’m not going to engage in this hysteria over which primary school she’ll go to.  And unless a million bucks falls into my lap courtesy of a long lost uncle who as it turns out, is secretly the King Of Zaire, private schooling isn’t an option. Like private hospitals, private schools are a pretty obnoxious concept anyway: one kid has no more of a right to a good education than another (disclaimer: I have private health insurance. I’ve got an immune disorder that puts me in hospital about once a year, and I’d sooner die than languish in an unflatteringly lit public ward, hemmed in by heaving bags of others peoples piss. I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite)

My own life is a shining example of why private schooling is not necessarily worth the money.  I went to a private primary and secondary school, the former an obnoxiously uppity institution that makes people automatically hate you when you admit to having been schooled there. I’m now a single mother with a ‘meaningful’ tattoo, a pensioner concession card, and a tried and routine for dealing with door-to-door debt collectors. Private schooling gave me nicely rounded vowels and the ability to knot a tie properly. They encouraged my love of reading and writing. But, more critically, so did my Mum. I don’t believe the local state school would have discouraged me to read and write. I didn’t give a rats about rowing, or debating, or cross-country skiing, which are the main benefits of private school education. I did like wearing a straw boater, and I did like going to the Arts Centre for speech nights, but a nice hat and a posh speech night are hardly ample justification for shelling out 17,000 bucks a year. My friends still smoked bongs and gave sebaceous looking twits hand jobs at parties. All the stragglers and deadheads were expelled in Year 10, before the crucial VCE years, lest they impact on the school’s ability to claim ‘100% of our students received a TER of 85% or more’. From what I can gather, a lot of them are now beauticians and housewives. There’s nothing wrong at all with that. But it makes you wonder if their parents wouldn’t have done a far greater thing if they’d thrown all that money at a fistula hospital in Africa. A state school education would have made much more sense for me, and my parents would probably have gold-plated toilets to rest their over-worked buttocks on now, having saved somewhere in the region of half a million dollars.

 

 I do think education is of the utmost importance. I’m reading loads of books to Clem, and encouraging her to be thrilled by music and nature. What I teach her in her early years is just as critical as what her primary school teaches her. It’s not as if my primary school choice is going to be the deciding factor in whether she becomes a surgeon or a strip-a-gram. We’ll see how it all goes. Watch this space (in 15 years)