1. Editorial [Maxwell Newton], “State aid and the privileged,” The Australian, October 21, 1964, p. 10. Excerpt: “How can the churches behind these schools calm their Christian consciences or steady their trembling hands held out for Commonwealth gold?”
  2. The free & compulsory education sacred cows have no clothes — Collecting six Bert Kelly articles: “Should we continue to educate the unwilling?,” The Australian Financial Review, October 9, 1970, p. 3; “Can we judge students by the amount of hair on their heads?,” The Australian Financial Review, November 13, 1970, p. 3; “No pity for the poor graduates,” The Australian Financial Review, January 14, 1972, p. 3; “So why not learn now, pay later?,” The Australian Financial Review, July 21, 1972, p. 3; “‘They would hit you with their halo …’,” The Australian Financial Review, September 20, 1974, p. 3; and “The sacred education cow has had her day,” The Australian Financial Review, April 28, 1978, p. 3.
  3. Greg Lindsay says state schooling unjust — Collecting four Greg Lindsay articles: “Where has the choice gone …,” freeEnterprise, April, 1975, pp. 6-7; “Curriculum must be out of bounds,” The Australian, July 29, 1993, p. 11; “Maintaining education divide,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 6, 1998, p. 16, as a letter to the editor; and “Education is another consumer choice,” The Australian Financial Review, September 22, 2004, p. 63. Excerpts: “Education by the state is not just, it is not free and, most of all, it is not in the interests of those being educated …” And: “Maybe what we should be talking about is not one curriculum, but instead, even more than the seven indicated by the State administrations. Perhaps too, we should be wondering, even aloud, about what the State is doing in education at all.”
  4. Shit State Subsidised Socialist Schooling Should Cease Says Singo — John Singleton, “The day the parents became citizens,” Nation Review, August 6-12, 1976, p. 1044. Excerpt: “There is only one thing wrong with our whole education system and this is our whole education system.” And: “As there is no profit incentive in the education system, it is monolithic, incompetent and generally not worth pissing on.”
  5. John Singleton with Bob Howard, Rip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 34-35, under “Causes — Not Symptoms”. Excerpt: “The root cause of most of the problems in education today is the fact that it is compulsory. Thus, the simple spending of more and more money and modifying the details of the system won’t solve the fundamental problems.”
  6. John Singleton with Bob Howard, Rip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 83-87, under the heading “Education”. Excerpt: “If you owned a store, and the government guaranteed that a certain number of people would, every day, spend a certain amount of money in your store, what would happen? (Assuming that the amount you would receive was enough to satisfy you.) What would happen to your store, your service and your attitude? Nothing is what. And that is the situation in our schools. The teachers are guaranteed classes. The schools are guaranteed customers by the zoning regulations and compulsory attendance laws. As a result, there is no market function relating what is offered by way of facilities, teachers and syllabuses to the demands of the market. We are forced to accept what we get. This is why compulsory schooling has to go.”
  7. D.C. Stove, “The Force of Intellect,” Quadrant, July 1977, pp. 45-46. Excerpt: “[I]t would be splendid to hear him [John Anderson] maintain, as he would, that it is the subject, and standards in the subject, that alone matter, not the student.”
  8. Our kids will get homework, so let’s first give them schoolwork — Sir Roderick Carnegie, “To Convince Our Children,” a talk to The Queensland Confederation of Industry, The Gateway Inn, Brisbane, March 1, 1979.
  9. Maxwell Newton measures bullshit tertiary schooling — Maxwell Newton, “The Failure of Education,” Australian Penthouse, March 1980, pp. 44-52. Excerpt: “There is an elitism in the dogma that we must all have a tertiary education if we want one. … The elitism would have us detest any form of learnin’ except book learnin’; it leads us to a contempt for practical life experience, for practical job experience, for practical jobs at all.”
  10. Peter Farrell compares Australian universities to nursing homes — Peter C. Farrell, “Australian universities: A critique,” Engineers Australia, August 24, 1984, pp. 42-47. Excerpt: “The necessity of raising funds is a way of life in the United States. Our universities by comparison have more in common with retirement villages, where nothing much matters.”
  11. Greg Sheridan, “The lies they teach our children: Vipers in the nation’s classrooms,” The Weekend Australian, February 2-3, 1985, p. 1, 12. Excerpt: “All around the country, teachers are giving our children a diet of intellectual poison … Australian students are receiving the worst education possible: plenty of moral anger and little intellectual substance.” Another excerpt: “A traditional rigorous academic education, in fact, demonstrates far greater respect for the intellectual freedom of students, because it does not require them to have opinions about issues on which they are almost entirely ignorant. Rather, it gives them knowledge and methods of gaining knowledge which they might later apply to any issue that interests them.”
  12. Colin Clark, “Ending the Welfare State,” Quadrant, November 1986, pp. 66-67. Excerpt: “But the average family cannot afford, we shall be told, to make provision for old age and widowhood, still less to pay for its health and education. What a nonsensical statement, when we come to look at it. The average family does pay for them now, pays for them out of taxation, a much more clumsy and costly way of providing them.” This essay also has Clark reminiscing about his personal correspondence with Keynes, where they agreed that taxation over 25% of national income was inadvisable.
  13. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Pay peanuts, get monkeys,” The Australian Financial Review, May 19, 1988, pp. 80-79. Excerpt: “Many years ago, Utopian socialists looked towards the time when at least some commodities could be distributed free, or at only a nominal price. The more sophisticated of them (such as the late Oscar Lange) argued that where the possible use of a commodity was limited, this would be effective and inexpensive. Nobody, they said, could or would want to eat more than a very limited amount of bread a day. The USSR tried to implement this principle, and made bread available at nominal prices. The demand soared. The reason was simple — meat was in short supply, so the consumers were converting the bread to meat by feeding it to their pigs. The principle is the same. If you make education available for nothing, it will be fed to pigs. Moreover, if the producers are paid regardless of quality and know that their product is going to be cast before swine, they will produce a product which is fit for pigs.”
  14. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Humanities vital to proper understanding of our culture,” The Australian, April 14, 1989, p. 2. The final paragraph reads: “So the fact that more and more people are studying Latin and Greek is to be praised, but it is not a reason for opposing university fees. By all means let people have the most esoteric hobbies, and even hobbies which are of the greatest intellectual significance — but teaching and learning ought to be as much in the marketplace as Socrates was.”
  15. Paddy McGuinness on class sizes — “More teachers won’t solve the problems in our schools,” The Weekend Australian, October 13-14, 1990, p. 2; “Not the size of the class, but what you do with it,” The Weekend Australian, October 20-21, 1990, p. 2; “Best and less the call for schools,” The Weekend Australian, June 8-9, 1991, p. 2; and “A new angle on teaching,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 24, 1994, p. 14.
  16. The trouble with education is democracy says Paddy McGuinness — “Schools bear bureaucratic burden,” The Weekend Australian, May 18-19, 1991, p. 2. Excerpt: “The point, however, is not that schools of either type [in the style of the Left or Right who want to impose their values on others] ought not to exist, but that there should not be a [government] school system of any kind.” Another excerpt: “In approaching reform of the public schools, therefore, the best way to improve their performance would be to take them out from under both political and bureaucratic structures. There should not be a minister of education, nor a department of education.”
  17. John Hyde, “Our kids don’t deserve such nonsense,” The Weekend Australian, June 13-14, 1992, p. 24. Starring Ron Manners. (Talking of Ron Manners, from his archives is the 1975 Workers Party pamphlet “The case against public education.” See also section 3.3 of the Workers Party Platform.)
  18. The Paddy McGuinness commencement address — “Few school terms of endearment for this old boy,” The Australian, December 20, 1993, p. 11.
  19. Paddy McGuinness proposes inheritance tax equal to handouts received by deceased — “Take from the dead to give to the living,” The Weekend Australian, July 17-18, 1993, p. 2; and “Baby-boomers must pay their final dues,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1996, p. 26.
  20. Ronald Kitching, “Teaching My Kids to Read and Write,” Economics.org.au, March 3, 2011. Mr Kitching wrote this in 1995, but I believe it was only privately circulated. There are some nice comments at the end of the article.
  21. Extend compulsion of compulsory student unionism to voting, paying back student loans and more — Padraic P. McGuinness, “Student unions — time to end the closed shop,” The Sydney Morning Herald, February 25, 1999, p. 13.
  22. Benjamin Marks, “Government Schools Teach Fascism Perfectly,” Economics.org.au, July 13, 2010. Opening line: “Government schools teach fascism perfectly. It is time that think tanks, business and parents achieve the same success at their end.”
  23. Benjamin Marks, “CIS and IPA Defend State Schooling,” Economics.org.au, September 21, 2010.
  24. Benjamin Marks, “Quadrant Defends State Schooling,” Economics.org.au, October 3, 2010.