Catholic Education in Hard Times Since education is an important means of improving the social and economic condition of the individual and of peoples, if the Catholic school were to turn its attention exclusively or predominantly to those from the wealthier social classes it could be contributing towards maintaining their privileged position, and could thereby continue to favour a society which is unjust. (The Catholic School #58) The Problem The vast expansion and resuscitation of Catholic Education in Australia commencing under the auspices of the Commonwealth Schools Commission, itself founded as a result of the Committee chaired by Professor Peter Karmel to examine the claims of the private sector and make recommendations accordingly, has now come to an end. The 1970s was a period of overall high economic growth, profits and full employment, and public expenditure of the kind unleashed by Prime Minister Whitlam and the Australian Labor Party in the health and welfare spheres a natural result of years of post war austerity in which the booming economy would inevitably generate a social theory for good times. The 1980s and 1990s are however marked by a lack of overall economic growth, even economic depression in some areas, with high unemployment, especially for young people. The Australian economy has been categorically restructured with devastating effects on a manufacturing and agricultural base ill-equipped to compete internationally and without the capacity to generate support for the protectionistic policies of the Seventies. While a buoyant economy and secure population can support all manner of interesting and alternative developments in education, when economic restraint occurs, these programs and developments disappear. The pinch is particularly felt by that part of the private sector critically dependent on public revenue for its survival. That Catholic education dominates this group there can be no argument. What is however arguable is the extent to which the Catholic community has been kept abreast of the status of their schools in terms of funding. (Very few Catholics see their schools as mixed economy schooling, while many regard them as private schools). In times of strong economic growth it is relatively easy for the state to support programs aimed at addressing disadvantage and injustice. Catholic education systems were among the first to endorse and accept the values of the Disadvantaged Schools Program, the Participation and Equity Program and funding in relation to Aboriginal and Multicultural Education during times of largesse, infusing into their use of such funds an added dimension from the Gospels as well as the social teaching of the Church. However, when economic constraint prevails it is the values of the dominant culture that are largely reinforced with the fewer resources available. Any pretence at being counter-cultural must be dropped and the new economism strongly adhered to. This generally takes the form of a return to basics in the form of the standards debate, which is fairly consistently taken out of the box of discredited conservative educational paraphernalia, dusted down, and given an airing in hard times. Catholics are no less immune to authoritarian solutions to complex social issues than other groups (Argyle and Beit Hallahmi, 1975). When there is full employment, there is little concern by the community and politicians about what is happening in education. The co-opting of parents and friends in the seventies during the great heyday of Catholic educational expansionism in this country is a wonderful but scary saga of colossal energy invested without much reflection as to its purpose particularly in terms of the quality of education provided, still less as to its outcomes. In all my research into the provision of Catholic education in Australia I have come across a wasteland of incredibly barren and desolate proportions when it comes to providing a reasonable critique of the quality of curriculum offerings in Catholic schools. Even in the literature about the role of justice in Catholic schools I have nowhere encountered any discussion of questions of access and opportunity in relation to Catholic schools that forms the very basis of the great comprehensive education debates of the Seventies. It is almost as if the private and content curriculum agenda of Catholic schools has blinded them to the necessities of asking questions such as: who pays for Catholic schools? Who controls them? Who doesn't go to them? Why are some excluded from them? In economic recession, everyone is concerned about what is happening in schools, Catholic or otherwise (Tanner and Tanner, 1975). A number of Catholic education systems and individual schools have been systematically re-structured through the eighties, and as economic rationalism bites even more ferociously into the social policy framework of this country, it is highly likely that the Catholic community will come to experience even more severe depredations than those of recent years in terms of the state of their schools. Fees inevitably will rise and fewer poorer Australians have access to a religious education. In a sense such a scenario isn't simply unjust but represents a compound of several injustices that are aired in this research. First of all the current problems facing Australia have little or nothing to do with schools and education. Yet education has been made the scapegoat for much more sinister and uncontrollable economic mis-management at a political level far beyond the capacity of those who administer Catholic or other education to have anticipated. The problem indeed lies within the basic values of a materialist and consumer society with a myopic, unswerving and misconceived faith in the notion of economic growth. Secondly, in response to this new set of economic circumstances, and as a result of an incapacity as a nation and a people to deal with basic and fundamental changes to our society and its institutions and values, we now have the spectre of a new and dominant ideology, hitherto marginalised as the rantings of a few (Thatcher-Baker, Hayek-Friedman, Metherell-Chadwick) but now effectively colonising the mainstream of the polity especially its financial and administrative machinery and with strong allies in the international banking and business sector. While there are still remnants of the 1970s social democratic ideologies, the dominant ideology being promoted by the state is anti-collectivism (Lawton, 1988). It is this ideology that is being foisted on state and Catholic schools alike and which is categorically opposed to overcoming disadvantage or lack of access and participation. Indeed, it is founded on a belief that disadvantage is acceptable, that what is important is not the collective good but the advancement of the individual, based on the capacity-to-pay within a freemarket context. Certainly an attempt has been made to accommodate a vestigial remnant of social justice rhetoric in the new educational raison d'etre. However, stripping away the gaudy haute couture of Messrs Finn, Mayer and Carmichael exposes a view of curriculum that is plainly technicist, uncompromisingly opposed to open-ended proceduralism, and wedded to the paraphernalia of outcomes and standards that is the very opposite of a school-based curriculum with social justice as its core value. This is certainly a development that is fundamentally opposed to both the provision of public education as well as a Catholic education because it is driven by an economistic impulse rather than a democratic one. Under this impulse, education is reduced to money terms and balance sheets. Needs based funding goes out of the window and resource availability takes over. The key interests of this impulse are not communicative understanding and emancipation but technical efficiency and control. It is the `privilege' (Lawton, 1988) of parents and the community to provide additional resources, while the state withdraws from its socially ameliorative role of compensating for economic disadvantage and is opposed to both the interests of the public sector as well as to the social teaching of the Catholic Church (Gremillion, 1976). Moreover, such an economistic and utilitarian view of education denies its essentially qualitative interpersonal, aesthetic and subjective nature, which is an ethos full square within the Catholic tradition. Instead schools are encouraged to seek funding from private sector or corporate interests with ambitions to turning a fast buck. Hence the MacDonaldisation of education in New South Wales where the Department of School Education encourages schools to seek corporate sponsors in return for advertising. It will not take a great deal of foresight to see the havoc that such an arrangement will play on the values (not simply the diet) of the next generation of young Australians, in which the official curriculum in health and physical education will be replaced by `eat more junk' indoctrination, with the poor and much maligned public health system having to pick up the tab in later years. Schools able to withstand these developments are inevitably middle-class with alternative avenues of resourcing. Those without such an infrastructure will not have resources and quality programs. It is essential to the purpose of my argument that it be recognised that it is not middle-class schools that are the object of my critique, nor for that matter private sector schools but the systematic destruction through restructuring of an infrastructure that has assisted the poorest Australians to achieve some semblance of equality of opportunity over the last two decades, which is my focus. This argument has been persuasively put by Anderson (in Castles, 1991) when he provides statistics suggesting that the gradual move across to the privatisation of Australian education has dire consequences for the public culture of Australia which now reflects a smaller percentage of state educated citizens than in any comparable democratic polity. At the current rate, State and Catholic systemic schools, Anderson says, will be left to pick up the residue of the unwanted, after the more private and selective end of the market has taken its pickings. This naked and manifestly centrally driven attempt at economism is cloaked in the highly personalistic and alluring language of managerialism and the panacea for the nation's ills in terms of education is to "restore" responsibility and accountability of schools to their managers, viz school principals and the local community (Russell, 1989). What is usually not explained is that schools must take the responsibility for whom to employ, and who not to; for what sort of curriculum to afford, and which one to forego. Generally these questions are to be resolved along market principles, which by and large are shockingly destructive of a co-operative community-building ethos, and which usually marginalise the poor, the inarticulate and the social basket cases, who rely for their existence on the values that underpin the provision of a comprehensive education, viz caring, justice, equity and a fair go for all. Education (or curriculum, that is) cannot be comprehensive when minimalist perspectives are set in place, simply because there are insufficient funds to meet the needs of the community. There is much evidence from both secular as well as religious sources of enquiry (Marginson, 1993; Australian Bishops' Enquiry in Wealth Distribution,1992) to show this. In effect, with compensatory factors eaten out of the practice of taxation revenue expenditure, the theory of economism dictates that the community must pay. For various reasons - the voluntary nature of this new requirement, as well as the incapacity of some communities to raise revenue locally - the destruction of the tax base has awesome consequences for public and Catholic systemic schools. Let me outline what some of these are. First and foremost the social construction of schooling in a user-pays system will quickly generate schools whose curricular and other values will generate class division rather than interclass solidarity. There will be schools for the rich and schools for the poor. I do not mind the exercise of parental choice in a free market system where those who wish to, bypass the local state school to consume a perceived superior education at the nearest private academy. In any case whether I mind or not is beside the point. I concede the principle that in a liberal, democratic society it would be an infringement of rights to deny parents such a choice. What is much more objectionable is the systematic restructuring of public sector schools so as to introduce the same consumeristic values at public expense. There is an ethical problem with this development to do with the fundamental denial of all Australians to an equitable education. This scenario, by the way, does not simply reflect developments in the public sector. There is at least one large Catholic archdiocesan system where schools are encouraged to keep "lean, mean and hungry" by competing with each other for a dwindling clientele. The result is that there is an exodus of Catholics from such schools to state schools, to the extent that 60 per cent of Catholic children in Australian now attend state schools. This, incidentally, cannot have been the intention of the polity, when the rights of Catholics to educate their own out of the public purse was conceded in the 1970s. It should be a matter of grave concern to the Church as well as the state that Catholic schools no more provide the bulk of education to Australian Catholics. The question needs therefore to be asked as to where the poorer Catholics go: the Aborigines, the migrants, the refugees and the disabled, as rising costs force the level of fees, hitherto modest in Catholic systems, exponentially upwards, and pressurise those without a voice to leave quietly. There are many in the Church (Doyle and Keane, 1993; Hansen, 1993) who are raising this question. The somewhat tame response of the National Catholic Education Commission has been to commence a research project to determine why parents send their children to Catholic schools. This research has, incidentally, already been done Praetx, 1974) and suggests an incapacity or more plausibly an unwillingness to ask the harder political question of why a majority of Australian Catholics send their children to state schools. The second problem facing public and Catholic systemic schools relates to the increasing centralisation of curriculum. No critique of this nature can be complete without some insight into the spectre of those who crowe about the evils of collectivism and ideological rectitude, while applauding the values of freedom and an absence of indoctrination especially in matters of the curriculum. The same critics of so called collectivist education (by which is meant a comprehensive curriculum) turn around and replace highly localised and school based systems with rigidly impositional centralised structures for determining standards and outcomes. The ideologues of the New Right are in fact the most centralising and controlling that education has had to encounter to date. The curriculum of each school is to be tightly controlled by the centralisation of prespecified outcomes, standards and benchmarks. Students are to be trained in the achievement of `competencies', and the preferred mode of achieving this is through externally set and scored multiple-choice-type state or national testing programs (Metherall, 1989). There are even those in the Faith Education departments of some large Catholic Education Offices, who favour a return to clear cut and absolutist answers to set questions in the style of the old Catechism, and who see in the new competency based assessment an opportunity to restore the clear-cut doctrinal approach to Religious Education of a former and educationally discredited era (Furtado, 1993). Not surprisingly Catholic order-owned schools, despite their strong social justice ethos, are bursting at the seams because of the perception by their clientele of the relative superiority of their product to that of the local systemic Catholic secondary school. Usually these schools have a tradition of selection and academic and sporting excellence, and it is generally agreed that the congregations who administer them have a struggle in promoting a social justice ethos over the traditionalist private school aspirations of their clientele (Collins, 1986). Thus the anti-collectivist values of the new socio-economic elitism manifest themselves in the creation of a new dichotomy between schools formerly serving the public of Australia, Catholic or otherwise, and those which today, particularly though not exclusively in the states dominated by the conservative coalition are pressurised subtly into adopting socio-economic demarcation criteria such as income, parental education and aspiration, and ethnicity as a means of redefining and conserving their niche in the new educational market. The collaborative negotiation of contexts, meanings and responses in curriculum (Hartley and Owen, 1987) has been replaced by rules and procedures, and the opportunity to develop courses alternative to those described by central authorities has, in many cases been revoked (Smith and Lovat, 1991). The struggle to get alternative curricula in Social Literacy, Human Rights, Peace Education, Multicultural Education, Development Education and Global Education is now well documented (Richardson, 1990) and any pretence at school and community-based decision making has disappeared. The architechtonics of the new managerialism are to be found in a variety of manuals of a deceptively easy and naively technicist nature and are usually captioned attractively with a wide, technicist managerialist market in mind. Titles such as `The Self-Managing School' (Caldwell and Spinks, 1989) adorn the shelves of beleagued principals, discouraged from thinking too critically, analytically, reflectively and deeply about the miasma that assails them and anxious to apply the sales gimicry of "edutainment" and every other passing fad to prove that their school is more competitive and viable than the other one down the road. Structures for collaborative decision making have in a number of cases been replaced by the concept of an unrepresentative group of school councillors similar to school boards and councils responsible for the operation of many private schools. In the United Kingdom this has resulted in the destruction of many comprehensive schools, where sectional interests have successfully contrived to wrest control of schools from community ownership and promote more narrow academic and sporting traditions as a means of maintaining "viability through excellence". In several instances the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have found the Thatcher-Baker Education Reform Act (1988) to have disenfranchised them from their position as trustees, while schools formerly charged by them to accept any coreligionists who applied for enrolment, have now abandoned "catch-all" enrolment policies in favour of carving out a niche for themselves in the education market (The Tablet, February 11, 1989). Why Public-Sector Catholic Schools? So where does my theory of public-sector Catholic schools come in? Arguably it could be illogical and counter-productive to the interests of Catholic education in Australia to campaign for full public funding, ie the public sectorisation of their systemic schools, in a climate in which the state itself is the least inclined to protect the principles of social justice and the most driven in instituting economic rationalism. I therefore concede the somewhat obvious point that to hand Catholic schools over to the state in return for guarantees of full funding and some Church control over the appointment of teachers and a curriculum that exalts religious education and religious values is not enough. I observe however that there are some advantages to this position, viz. that the removal of a reliance on fees to provide an education for all or most Australian Catholics is a desirable aim for the Church (and probably the state) but that this is a minimalist position. The Minimalist Position (Option One) There is some value in examining this minimalist view since Australia is quite uniquely a country in which the choice to "go it alone" by the Catholic bishops in respect of a separate, unaided church education system in 1879 "inflicted enormous sacrifices" on the Catholic community (Moloney, 1969). It is becoming increasingly clear that the great resuscitation and expansion of Catholic education through state aid from the 1970s did not lead to a return to Catholic schools of all or most Australian Catholics, an intention dear to the heart of many educators of the time (Selleck, 1970). Indeed the census figures up to 1984, when data relating to religion and education was assembled, demonstrate a steady decline in the numbers of Catholics attending Catholic schools. Various research exercises (Flynn, 1985; Mol, 1985) have replicated the prevailing U.S.-derived wisdom (Greely and Rossi, 1974) that it is conservative Catholics who attend Catholic schools. The National Catholic Education Commission is set upon yet another apparent replication of this exercise in trying to determine why Catholics choose Catholic schools. The difficulty with persisting along this path of enquiry is to risk watering down the original principles upon which Catholic education is based and to create the conditions amenable to the spread of a new model of Catholic school that is middle class and little else (Leavy, 1993; Treston, 1993). A much more healthy and original question might be to ask the many state-school Catholics - sixty percent is the current guestimate (Hanson, 1993) - why they do not attend Catholic schools. My suspicion is that many of these latter cohort perceive Catholic schools to be private schools, and so for economic or ideological reasons decline to attend them. The basis of my hunch is data generated in a straw-poll conducted among sixtyseven Catholic-school Catholics in the Third Year Bachelor of Education Degree course at the University of Newcastle between September 6-9, 1993. In response to the question `What kind of school did you attend?' a full sixty-two - more than 90 per cent - stated `a private, Catholic school, or private school'. Only 5 respondents or less than 10 percent stated `Catholic school'. So to return to the argument, there may be some merit for the social justice aspirations of the Catholic Church in Australia were it to open its schools up to any who wish to attend. It is obvious that were its numbers to be boosted by sixty percent, without an attendent willingness or capacity to pay fees, the Catholic systems would experience serious hardship. It is recognised that a capacity to pay fees is not a determinant of enrolment in a Catholic school. However, the word `capacity' is frequently interchanged with `willingness', which has a quite different meaning with connotations of charity rather than of `just' rights to a Catholic education. Before leaving this option it is useful to reflect on one of the recommendations of the Australian Catholic Bishops Enquiry into Wealth Distribution (Commonwealth for Common Good, 1992), which states: that Catholic parishes and schools continue to investigate ways of keeping costs to a minimum and making their schools accessible to all Catholics wishing to use them (p.127) Such a recommendation appears to be increasingly at odds with a realistic assessment of the local situation where social justice considerations are far from being the principal focus of afficionados of Catholic education for whom education policy stems from a desire for conformity with Roman attitudes and documents (Akenson, 1987; Whyte, 981; Moloney, 1969). By this is meant that the major purpose of the structure of the Catholic Church is to bring it into line with supporting and promoting a `Roman' line as opposed to one that derives from the historical experience and the lived reflection of local people. In that sense Catholic education in Australia, as in Ireland, toes a line that in its ideological purism owes more to the anti-statist illiberalism of Pius IX and Vatican I than to the much more mellow open-ended entelechy of Vatican II (Furtado, 1977). Certainly in matters of curriculum there are wondrous, searching examples of innovative practice in Catholic schools but in reality these are at odds with the overriding rationale of Catholic education which is that Catholic schools are there to ensure a steady stream of educated but docile Church members, who practice their faith and are more given to institutional identification than to any particular interest in evangelising the World (Hornsby-Smith, 1978; Tucker, 1968; Larkin, 1976). In this latter observation, is the thesis in this research clarified. The nature and culture of individuals playing important roles in the institution of the Catholic Church in Australia has been varied and interesting, but in one important factor they have not differed, viz in their mutual possession of Romanita. Here and there, particularly in girls' education and among some of the congregations there have been nuances of difference in terms of culture, temperament and judgement of what is worth teaching and how, but by and large the institutional culture of Catholic education is marked by its loyalty, its unoriginality, its anonymity and its secrecy. Thus, given the present mindset of the Bishops, and the qualities, as marked above, of their principal appointees to the reins of power in large Catholic education offices and schools, a simple handing over of Catholic education to the state in return for guarantees to access a religious education curriculum to all or most Catholic children in Australia, without regard to school fees is unlikely because it will be unacceptable to those who see in the independence of their schools the key to a successful appeal for unswerving Church membership to a decreasing minority of feepaying Australian Roman Catholics. The `No Catholic Schools' Position : Option Two The crisis of falling numbers nevertheless continues and so there may be a second option or solution to this problem. This one should be considered because to some extent it is part of the model in operation in Australia and has parallels in the United States and in societies where the Catholic Church cannot, for whatever reason, operate a school system for all of its young. By this I mean the practice now commonplace in many societies of sending young Catholics to state schools that limit themselves to providing a human education with no reference to religious faith. For instance, my spouse and I have chosen this alternative for our children. There are many Catholics like us who choose to live out our vocation in the real world rather than in some sheltered ghetto-type workshop. Having had experience of this system, as parents and students and indeed as teachers (for most Catholic schools in the UK and Ireland and in the Low Countries are state schools, in which my wife and I have taught) we have been led to ask: is it not possible or even desirable for a Catholic child to attend a school that provides a human and moral education without explicit reference to God? If the answer is `Yes', we must question the expensive, somewhat cumbersome and duplicative systems of Catholic education that have sprung up in the past twenty years and closely examine the costs and benefits attached thereto in comparison to a public system with a Church interest in purely community based faith development. These arguments have already been aired by some (Aubrey and Dard in Tucker (Ed.), 1968; Crudden in Gill (Ed.), 1972) and belong to an era, in Australia at any rate, before recognition by the public polity of the rights of Catholics and others to operate their own school systems through the receipt of grants and other subsidies. Schools are an important factor in the world and in the national economies of developed countries, especially since the great expansion of the state attendant upon the implementation of Keynesian policies after the last World War. They have come to occupy a position in the public sector of a country's life that few theorists of Catholic education have built into a largely century old theoretical paradigm. While Catholic education theory languishes in the absolutism of Vatican I, Pius IX and the Cullenite (Romanita) reform of the English-speaking Church (Akenson, 1970) Catholic social teaching particularly since John XXIII has raced on to defining an acceptable view of the role of the state in public affairs. The only country in which this has not been accepted is Ireland where the Bishops have steadfastly brought down Ministers and governments with too great an interest in expanding the powers of the state in the public interest - principally in the fields of health care, education and community development (Whyte, 1981). At stake is the Catholic social teaching on subsidiarity, a view that the power of the state should be devolved to local bodies more in tune with local needs and therefore more suited to meeting them. At the heart of the doctrine of subsidiarity is an anti-collectivist, anti-bureaucratic ethos with strong corporatist undertones. During the interwar years, fascists and national socialists were drawn to espouse corporatist economic ideas as a means of tempering the more radical and unsuccessful economic nostrums of the freemarket as well as of the controlled economy. Pius XI, the interwar pope, in his famous encyclical of 1929, Quadragesimo Anno, championed the cause of subsidiarity, but after the Second World War, and particularly during the pontificates of John XXIII and Paul VI, Catholic Social Teaching relaxed its former slavish attachment to subsidiarity to accommodate the view that European and global reconstruction could not proceed without strong interventionist state policies. Thus Catholic Social Teaching has travelled from the somewhat tame and conservative free market aphorisms of Leo XIII, through the corporatism of Pius XI, to endorse state intervention in the cause of justice and peace. Thus, the Catholic teaching on the evils of state-control of education has as much to do with the anti-collectivism and anti- statism of an outmoded teaching on subsidiarity as it has to do with a belief in the positive benefits of an education immersed in the living belief systems of parents, as is enunciated repeatedly in many documents dealing with the Catholic school (Buetow, 1989). The clash between these two competing philosophies is such that the Catholic Church in some parts of the world is locked into the dilemma of supporting schools for Christian and other fundamentalist groups, whose philosophies are plainly anti- intellectual and anti-scholastic but whose parental rights to separate schooling are given a quick, easy and dangerous ride towards state recognition because the official Catholic education position is underpinned by somewhat outdated subsidiarist assumptions. This subsidiarism further aggravates the management structure of large Catholic education systems, formed as they were to cut costs, aggregate expenditure on Catholic schools, and rationalise and systematise (in terms of standards and curriculum) a disparate and unwieldy amalgam of institutions set up by religious congregations without any long term investment or plan in the future of education in the Australian polity. The commencement of state aid made such planning an imperative concern in return for public revenue expenditure on Catholic schools. Simply to mission to Australian Catholic educational needs was not enough. The Church was now entering into an arrangement with the Australian state to meet the educational needs of a large slice of the polity. This foray into public policy has been hampered by the highly circumspect and fragmented nature of Church management in Australia. Catholic education offices are often toothless tigers, (Furtado, 1987), with little or no control over schools. Instead the balance of power rests with parish priests who often have little idea of education and curriculum and whose management practices can be officious and unilateral, owing more to the requirements of an outdated form of canonism than to any contemporary understand of community management practice. At state level, Catholic Education Offices often compete for funding and importance, presenting a far from unified front in their deliberations with the state and often being dominated by the large dioceses and archdioceses. The explanation for this is that "policy is made by and resides in individual dioceses, where the Ordinary (Bishop) is the titular head and executive member of the Church" (QCEC Statement, 1989). In reality the Australian episcopate largely leaves the administration of the vast and complex machinery of the Church's effort in the public domain in areas such as education and welfare services to competent but otherwise anonymous public service type apparatchiks who import to their positions management practices reflective of their former status and experience in the echelons of state education and other public service departments (Collins, 1986). The difficulty with this arrangement is that it has not generated the complementary structure of public accountability that typifies public sector operations. Certainly there are auditing procedures undertaken by state and commonwealth treasuries, although these sometimes betray anomalies in the accounting mechanisms of private education systems (The Australian, September 21, 1993), but the system of legislative parliamentary election, executive decision and bureaucratic administration, and judicialism, requiring the separation of powers, is nowhere as well developed in Catholic education as in the state alternative. It is only in recent years that large Catholic education offices have encouraged the evolution of Councils, Boards and Commissions, independent of the administrative machinery of Offices but technically responsible for overseeing their operation. In reality, however, the principle of election does not determine membership of such bodies, and while influential, gifted and worthy contributions have been made at such levels of membership of Catholic educational institutions, in reality the structures do not exist for ensuring that such bodies are truly in command of what Catholic Education Offices do. The same observations may be made of the operation of the National Catholic Education Commission (Furtado, 1986). Thus, it could be argued that not only Catholic children but the machinery of Catholic education could be considerably improved by exposure to and perhaps integration within a public education system with much more of a headstart in meeting the just educational aspirations of all children in the Australian polity than any equivalent system designed by Church authorities with justice and equity as their pivotal values. There is a final point to do with the advantages to Catholic children and teachers of an education in a secular environment without fear of any, even unintended, impositionalism of a Faith curriculum, this latter to be provided in a parish context and within the worshipping community. The point is best illustrated by the following quotation: They must, of course, bear themselves as Catholics, and yet do nothing to compromise religion and morality. Yet at the same time they should show themselves animated by a spirit of understanding and unselfishness, ready to co-operate loyally in achieving objects which are good in themselves, or can be turned to good. (Pacem in Terrris, p. 15) In this teaching of the Catholic Church is to be found the seeds of a just and cooperative evangelisation of the world, through education as much as through any other joint social endeavour, without undue emphasis on conserving and shoring up its position through an over-investment in separate schools for those Catholics who can afford to pay and whose notion of a Catholic schooling is to buy a service from teachers who do not necessarily have a vocation to be catechists. I move now to a third and final option, because as rational as my two earlier options may be, they are defeated by the cultural reality in Australia which, if I read it correctly, uncompromisingly asserts that Catholic schools are here to stay. If that is correct then Option Three is likely to attract most favour from the Church but may attract criticism in the public forum from political interests opposed to it. The Optimal Position (Option Three) To understand the need for optimality one has only to glance at the pages of a U.S. Catholic Education publication called Momentum, which is much favoured by the growing ranks of senior Australian Catholic educators now trained in the United States. Much of what Momentum publishes provides a religious imprimatur for contemporary "edumarketing". For instance, Mary A. Leahy argues in `A New Determination', that public relations and resource development, including longrange planning and marketing, have become integral functions in advancing the goals of Catholic elementary and secondary schools, and reasons that alumni giving, foundations and other components of development programs should become key endeavours of U.S. Catholic schools (Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 48-51, September 1989). Within the same publication there is seldom an issue in which the preoccupation of U.S. Catholic education authorities in making ends meet doesn't surface or isn't addressed in some way. One classic contribution entitled `The Spiritual Dimensions of Giving and Getting' defines philanthropy as a human growth and development process in which at least three kinds of persons are involved: fund raisers or motivators, donors or benefactors, and receivers or beneficiaries. The author, Paul C. Reinert, an avowed admirer of Fordism, sees all three groups as partaking in the process's spiritual benefits and Catholic educators at the core of the philanthropy process (Momentum, Vol. 16, No. 3, September, 1985). In the United States context, where Church education is constitutionally debarred from receiving state aid, such excessivism can be contextualised and perhaps justified, but the importation of such a economic theory to support a religious philosophy with strong redistributionist overtones in a polity committed to the public funding of education as in Australia has sinister implications for Catholic education. The groundwork for an ideological seachange in terms of a Catholic social theory of education has already been laid in Australia's New Age Boom-town, in the most Californian of our polities, which the one time Director of the U.K. National Theatre, Tyrone Guthrie, once referred to as a "centre of sun-drenched, steak-fed vacuity". I refer, of course, to the fair city of Perth, which contains within its environs, the new University of Notre Dame (Australia), significantly backed by an amalgam of Church, discredited politicians from the 80s and a variety of benefactors, alongside some of whom the Robber Barons of the U.S. strike a very close resemblance indeed (Kraybill, 1992; Priestley, 1992). Indeed, one would have thought that the commencement of State Aid would have brought a welcome cessation or diminution of private sector educational fundraising in Australia but old habits die hard,and even though current funding is inversely linked to the propensity of schools to raise their own funds, many Catholic (and other private) institutions have taken to the business management of schools with a hype that reflects an imported North American syndrome, where eighty four percent of school development activity is, through economic necessity, tied up with fundraising (Momentum, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 38-40, September, 1985 Author: Michael J. Donahue, Title: `Development in Catholic High Schools: Updating A National Portrait'). One standard objection to this analysis is that the Australian Catholic Church has never conceded the right of the state to operate in the public educational sphere other than by restoring for educational and other usage, revenue obtained from the polity through taxation. Indeed this argument was forcibly put by Archbishop Sheehan (Australian Catholic Education Congress, 1936) and later reiterated in the Australian Catholic Bishops' Annual Social Justice Statement of 1949 (Hogan, 1990). Yet, the Australian Church has never been dissuaded by this reasoning, from administering and servicing a mass of public sector hospitals on behalf of the polity. Whatever the issue, ideological rectitude and purity is not at its heart! The question therefore arises as to what objection there might be to Catholics and others negotiating with the state a Private Schools Conditional Integration agreement by special act of parliament as in New Zealand and Alberta (Canada). In those polities, the state concedes the right of significant numbers of its citizens to receive public revenue equivalent to that allocated for the provision of state schools, in return for certain basic but minimal conditions. To all intents and purpose Catholic integrated schools in New Zealand - and all of them have been integrated - are still Catholic schools. Furthermore they attract up to 97 percent of the support of the Catholic component of the polity (Hughes- Johnson, 1993), a figure far in excess of the statistics registered at the time integration was mooted. Indeed there is virtually no objection by members of the Catholic community in New Zealand to the integrated schools arrangement both as a matter of public record as well as in terms of enrolment figures in schools broken down demographically in census statistics. The objection to integration occurs from outside the Catholic community in some instances where Anglican and Presbyterian schools that have opted against integration arguing that a `same Church' integrated school represents a threat to their independence by drawing enrolments away from them. In fact there are no independent Catholic schools in New Zealand and there is therefore no context for conflict between Catholic independent and Catholic integrated schools, as could occur should integration eventuate in Australia. It should however be registered that some Catholic schools which had a profile similar to the more independently minded order-owned schools in Australia, quickly bought into the economics of integration, and there is little reason to believe that this would not eventuate in Australia should integration occur. Catholic students (or those of other denominations) do pay attendance dues - as opposed to fees - which are specifically tied to the cost of work scheduled in maintaining the land and buildings of the school on a par with state schools. Thus the price Catholics and others pay to operate integrated schools with a special character is to maintain land and buildings, a responsibility which does not apply to clients of state schools. However, it could be argued that this additional cost is justified in a secular pluralistic polity which recognises the right of significant numbers of its citizens to state aid for schools with a special character. The advantages of integration have been mapped out by a number of commentators on the Private Schools Conditional Integration Act, eg the New Zealand Council of Proprietors of Catholic Integrated Schools (1979, 1989, 1991) as well as by the New Zealand Ministry of Education itself (Simpson, 1992); but no endorsement has been as eloquent and as far-reaching as that of Hanratty (1992), who observes that integrated Catholic schools have been much better equipped to meet the social justice aspirations of the culture as well as the Church, and in doing so, Catholic Education in New Zealand has developed a cultural context in its inclusion of Maoris and Pacific Islanders, which it never had before. As against this, the only worry of the Church is its incapacity to enforce life-style requirements for its teachers, but in so far as the Proprietor is responsible for the special character of the school, the Church is protected in its vetting and appointment of teachers of religion and in other pastorally sensitive areas in which the character and life-style of the teacher is a significant factor in preserving the special ethos of the school (Hughes-Johnson, 1993). Certainly Catholic Education Offices in New Zealand have become well aware of their incapacity to dismiss or transfer to the state system those teachers (outside of religion) who may be in divorced or irregular marriages, but so long as personnel in integrated schools maintain the privacy of these arrangements, the state protects their human rights, and their employment is subject to the same set of ethical and professional standards as teachers in state schools. This situation contrasts markedly with Catholic school teachers in Australia where such confidential and personal matters become part of the public domain and therefore provide opportunities for employers and parents to influence appointment and employment, even though such issues may have little or no relevance to the professional and pastoral attitude of the teacher concerned. Put simply, teachers in Catholic schools in Australia do not enjoy the same civil liberties in terms of human rights and antidiscrimination as those in New Zealand Integrated Schools. However whenever a situation becomes unworkable in New Zealand, as for instance in the case of a change of `lifestyle' for a teacher in a Catholic school, a position is found in a state school for that person (Eaton, 1993). To conclude: Catholic schools in Australia are in crisis by virtue of their location in the private sector. One of the apparent reasons for this location is the fear of the Church to relinquish control of its schools to `secular' interests. The end of the DOGS Debate (Defense of Government Schools) and the greater devolution generated by economic rationalism presents opportunities for Catholics and others to access their schools to more of their co-religionists without making a capacity to pay fees a condition of enrolment, a factor identified in my research as the major reason for Catholic schools in Australia not attracting the mass-support of Catholic families. Also the economic rationalism of public sector education can never ditch the socially inclusive/social justice imperatives of public sector education which are so jeopardised in Catholic and other private sector, user pays systems in times of recession. If the Australian Catholic Church had foreseen the day when their schools were to loose their special character of being Catholic by becoming private and less accessible to the poor it is doubtful if it would have accepted the Schools Commission settlement of the 1970s. As it is that arrangement has worked well, but warrants a review in the light of information and arguments presented in this paper. The most immediate opportunity to examine the case for integrated Catholic schools, as in New Zealand (the fully funded but otherwise totally independent Irish and Alberta (Canada) alternatives being unlikely to be transplantable in current Australian conditions), offers itself in the form of the following recommendation (No. 14) in the Report of the Inquiry into Tertiary Funding of ACT Non-government Schools, which states: In the longer term, consideration needs to be given to some breaking down of the current dual system of government and non- government schools and to the possible integration of non- government schools (particularly those serving similar populations as government schools) with government schools while still allowing the non-government schools to retain the important aspects of their special character. 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Michael Furtado has many years of teaching and administration in Catholic institutions in Australia and the United Kingdom. He lectures in Social Theory and Education Policy at the University of Newcastle. His research interest is in `Integrating Catholic Schools into the Public Sector'.