Less subtle discrimination

Discrimination in our schools is not always as subtle as this. The New Zealand school system is increasingly socially stratified. Thus schools in wealthy areas with wealthy ex-pupils have good facilities, those without make do with what the government provides. Government finance to schools is weighted in favour of the upper forms. The more sixth and seventh formers a school has, the more money it gets from the government; it is the middle-class schools that have more pupils in these forms. These schools get more teachers and more heads of department for that reason.

The resulting lower staff/student ratios and the greater opportunity to work with more favoured upper forms means that these schools are flooded with applications for vacancies. Thus they get the best teachers. A favoured school in Christchurch gets 100 to 150 applicants per position. The non-favoured schools in Christchurch are lucky if they get 20. On a national scale Christchurch is a favoured area. Capitation grants from the government which provides books and other learning resources are also weighted in favour of the upper forms. Schools with 'good' middle class pupils are favoured over other schools by government policy.

School amounts to what must be one of the greatest thefts of all time. It conditions people to fit into an oppressive work system and alienating society. They are required to be conditioned so that they will accept this system which provides those with capital their unearned profit. School also steals from the majority the words that are necessary to understand that system and overthrow it by imposing academic study and instilling dead knowledge into pupils.

School is orientated towards selecting the future top level technocrats and bureaucrats who will manage society in the interests of the capitalists, and who will receive a much more handsome reward for their efforts than the ordinary worker in the factories and offices. It is these elites that benefit from depriving the oppressed of political power and the words necessary to understand their oppression. And, as has been shown, the elite is replenished largely by the children of the elite.

The chance of the lower class children of going to university is much slighter than that of the elite. They are discriminated against in the way the school is funded and supplied, by what the school teaches and page 11 [unclear: he] way in which it is taught. Yet they [unclear: re] paying for this system which [unclear: perpetuates] their bondage. The cost of training [unclear: people] to provide profit for the capitalist [unclear: is] borne largely by the taxpayers, most [unclear: of] whom are oppressed by the system, as [unclear: tables] six and seven show. The funds [unclear: necessary] to run schools are in effect [unclear: defrauded] from those who have been [unclear: de-humanised] and whose children are being [unclear: dehumanised] and discriminated against.