The real private-school inequality is gender imbalance

Apart from bumper stickers, there’s not much to look at in three lanes of back-to-school commuter traffic during rush hour in a city suburb.

So when a person of indiscernible gender, standing on the footpath, in a monkey suit — the furry kind, not the debs sort — waves furiously at the slow-motion vehicles, it gets attention.

‘Monkey’ wore a crisp, white t-shirt emblazoned with a website address. The service advertised was €15 an hour.

A bird costume would have been more apt. This venture was an early one, out to get a lucrative worm. It was for grinds.

The school gates had barely creaked open after the holidays, and students were being told they would need grinds.

This dedicated grinds school combines live classes with online tutorials, downloadable interactive notes, zany promotional films, a Facebook page offering cash prizes and cut-price participation, and tech-savvy teachers, who would be banned from Linkedin for taking up too much space with their qualifications.

It’s all very razzmatazz and high-tech, compared to my era, when ads for grinds were handwritten on the back of old Christmas cards and pinned to supermarket notice boards, and any teacher who could work the school video player was hailed a genius and put in charge of entries to the Young Scientist Competition.

But while ‘monkey’ highlighted a generation gap in the way grinds are structured and marketed, he/she also underlined the fact that some things haven’t changed. There were, are, and always will be people who pay for private education.

Their children might not go to fee-paying schools, but they pay for private grinds; mid-term revision courses; trips to the Gaeltacht; student exchanges in France; specialised Leaving Cert colleges; repeat Leaving Cert colleges — whatever it takes, and whatever it costs, to give junior a better chance of success in the exam hall.

The debate over public funding of teachers for private schools forgets this. The schools say they would close if they paid salaries out of their own revenue, and the Government says it would then have to fund those teachers in the public system, so there is little benefit in abandoning the fee-paying sector.

Undoubtedly, some schools would close, but, despite the economic calamity, there are still people with money in this country, and it would leave barely a scratch mark on their wealth to pay the teachers of their children.

Take a school of 400 pupils, with 20 teachers on an average salary of €50,000 each.

Covering their salaries would cost €1m a year, or €2,500 per pupil — a deal-breaker for middle-income families, perhaps, but a small price for the wealthy to pay to preserve their educational elitism.

Of course, it would be cruel and impractical to force schools to try that experiment overnight, but the Government is sending out mixed messages about what it wants to do in the long-run about public funding for private schools.

While not wanting to baldly state a principled objection to funding for private-school teachers, the Government is increasing the pupil-teacher ratio for private schools, in effect reducing funding for private-school teachers.

This is abandonment by degrees, at a pace slow enough to avoid having to take a definitive stance, or to declare whether financial practicalities or principled beliefs are the main influencing factor.

But while the coalition gets their divided thoughts in order regarding what’s best to do with public schools, and how best to justify it, here’s one to muddle them up again.

Whether or not you believe there is an inequality in children attending private schools while the majority uses the public system, there is an inequality within private schools — the enrolment is dominated by boys.

According to Department of Education enrolment records, there are 30% more pupils attending all-boys private schools than there are attending all-girls private schools. Within mixed private schools, the imbalance is even more pronounced: 40% more boys enrolled than girls.

Do boys need private education more? Do they deserve it more? Is this situation merely an overlooked legacy of a time when it was hardly worth educating a girl, whose primary goal was marriage to a man educationally and financially her superior?

Or, is it a statement about how girls and boys are still valued differently in a society in which inequality should ideally only be read about in classroom history books?

Regardless of how those questions are answered, gender imbalance is enshrined in the private-school sector and the old boys’ network will never be opened up so long as a young boys’ network keeps feeding into it.

It is ironic that when Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who took on the Taliban, was in Ireland last week, she was honoured for her courage and determination in fighting for the rights of girls to be educated under regimes we would regard as discriminatory and backward.

But the words she spoke at the awards ceremony, in Tipperary, are worth recalling: “When all the girls and boys sit on chairs, the chairs that are all the same, it shows equality, that all the children sitting on the same benches are equal.”

She made, as she described it, “a humble request to the parents of every child — that they must honour their daughters as their sons.”

In Ireland, we don’t shoot girls for wanting to go to school, but there may still be ways in which we shoot down their ambitions, their confidence and their sense of self-worth.

The private-education sector should not be one of those ways, and if it is, whether by accident, design or default, contributing to the perception or experience of gender inequality, then Government efforts might be better spent away from tampering with pupil-teacher ratios and working to influence better girl-boy ratios instead.

Monkey, it turned out upon advanced googling, was male, going by the name of Louis. Or, at least, the furry-suited character on the footpath was.

Who was actually the occupant of the suit, I don’t know.

It could have been a male or a female and that’s how it should be — an equal-opportunities spectacle.

The Government might fear coming under fire for trying to deliver that same message to the private-school sector, but Malala Yousafzai got shot for real and it only strengthened her determination. When it comes to not monkeying about with important issues, she could teach us all a lesson or two.