Schools: part 2: the high school saga

Choosing the right high school for your kid is hard. When they're in about grade 3 or 4, you start making the rounds at the various Open Days and thinking about what's best. Do you want the school with top VCE marks? (That might seem a no-brainer, but it's really not.) What about the one with that's strong on PE? Or has a fantastic performing arts studio? It's hard -- and it's very much horses for courses.

I went to a co-ed high school (state school), and I always insisted my kids would go to co-ed schools. I wouldn't even consider a single-sex school, regardless of statistics of whether girls got better education in single-sex environments, and that was largely because I don't see school as a place that is purely about education but rather social conditioning as well. (And I can see evidence from when my left-wing brother did a business-type course and came out at the end right-wing.)

What I was after for Princess Sleepyhead was good pastoral care -- she was a kid who was always going to benefit from a bit more care. A friend recommended a Christian college -- said it was the most caring school she had ever taught at, if we could stomach the religion, which she said she couldn't. Couldn't be that bad, I thought. Till I saw the prospectus. Every subject was centred around God. PE is where students celebrate their God-given gifts of athleticism and suppleness; art is where they worship God through drawings and paintings. Hmmm. A bit full-on. And then the history room with the timeline that told that the world only started a few thousand years ago. Hmmm.

I don't have a problem with a school that teaches creationism if they do it in the RE classes, but this school was teaching it in Science. I do have a problem with that. (Especially when they tell you there's no proof for either theory. I know what the more evangelical Christians say about the fossil records, but still...)

"You do teach evolution as well?" I asked, knowing they had to say yes.

"Yes, because if our students go on to university they need to know what they have to argue against."

That was the final straw. No, really, I think I was just pursuing the argument; the timeline had really been too much.

On the plus side, I had been very impressed when the principal, in his talk, spoke with pride about the child who had just failed VCE but who had far exceeded everyone's expectations. (It was a student with a learning disability.)

It's very easy to be bamboozled by schools with great scores, but you do have to bear in mind two things:
(i) that such schools often preclude students who are not doing well from sitting for VCE (and if they're private schools, there's the added indignity that they've accepted money for the right to educate your child for so long and then are prepared to ditch them because they may not reflect well on the school's results record)
(ii) the selective schools get good results because they start with the cream -- this is not to say that such students won't thrive among like-minded, dedicated people, just that you have to expect that the results will be better anyway.

PS has never been a particularly academic student. She was not going to thrive in a school where all the emphasis was on academic achievement. We looked at schools that seemed more proud of the architecture of their new science wing, than of the attitude or dedication of their teachers. We looked at schools that impressed us in their variety of subjects but which we didn't think she'd cope well with. In the end, we settled on a Catholic school with excellent pastoral care, somewhat surprising because we're not Catholic. This school has a mandatory RE program, but with a much more moderate view than the other school we looked at. I don't have a problem with a school that teaches all about a whole lot of different religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism etc rather than trying to brainwash kids into any particular ideology. This school is also single-sex, but I know this was absolutely the best thing for PS (even if she didn't think so herself). As I said, horses for courses. Of course, the worst thing about a single-sex school for the parent with a girl and a boy is that when it's time to place the second-child you have to get back on the Open Day merry-go-round and start all over again.