Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Acronyms
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Modern Citizen 1960–1975
- 2 The expansion of education to 1975
- 3 The Karmel report and educational equality
- Part II The Anti-citizen 1975–1990
- Part III The Economic Citizen 1985–1995
- Part IV The Multi-citizen 1990–
- References
- Index
3 - The Karmel report and educational equality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Acronyms
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Modern Citizen 1960–1975
- 2 The expansion of education to 1975
- 3 The Karmel report and educational equality
- Part II The Anti-citizen 1975–1990
- Part III The Economic Citizen 1985–1995
- Part IV The Multi-citizen 1990–
- References
- Index
Summary
‘Education is the key to equality of opportunity. Sure, we can have education on the cheap, but our children will be paying for it for the rest of their lives.… We believe that a student's merit rather than a parent's wealth should decide who should benefit. … Education should be the great instrument for the promotion of equality.’
Australian Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam, Policy speech, Blacktown Civic Centre, Sydney, 13 November 1972, p. 5 & p. 12.Prelude: The Karmel report (1973)
Schools in Australia, the report of the Interim Committee for the Schools Commission chaired by Peter Karmel, was released in May 1973 to almost universal acclaim. The committee knew the newly elected Whidam Labor Government would support its recommendations, and held nothing back. Few government reports have secured such an impact. Within two years, the funding recommended by the Karmel report had lifted Commonwealth spending on schools from $364 to $1091 million and transformed the material position of all schools, private and government. The report settled the Commonwealth's role in school education and laid down a system of classifying and funding private schools that was still intact more than two decades later. Its Disadvantaged Schools Program was the high-water mark of efforts to eradicate poverty through education, and the prototype for later programs of positive discrimination and targeting to raise participation. Discursively, its reach was almost as long; the Karmel notions of quality of opportunity, diversity, choice, devolution and participatory citizenship left deep marks in schools and government.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Educating AustraliaGovernment, Economy and Citizen since 1960, pp. 46 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997