<
https://theconversation.com/weve-come-a-long-way-on-gender-diversity-but-what-about-class-how-networks-of-private-school-privilege-dominate-australian-society-226959>
Note: This article is about more than just sports.
"In 2021, the coach of the Perth-based West Coast Eagles Australian rules
football team said recruits who attended public schools and came from
single-parent families are too costly to manage off-field and the club might be
better off concentrating on private school boys from stable families.
His comments came a year after a Western Australian parliamentary inquiry found
elite private schools had provided 30 to 40% of the state’s AFL draftees in the
previous three years, even though they accounted for only seven of the state’s
300 secondary schools.
The committee was alarmed that state government funding for football
development was going disproportionately to the elite schools, giving boys from
those schools an “unfair advantage”. The great Indigenous player Dale Kickett
observed that football is one of the few careers in which the gap between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous kids was narrowing.
If the opportunity to play at the top level were taken away, said Kickett, the
competition would become just “a bunch of rich kids playing each other”. Others
pointed out that the West Coast Eagles’ two most infamous players, plagued with
drug problems, were educated at private schools.
Elite domination of sport is not confined to Australian football. The
encroachment of privilege into sport is particularly evident in the sports that
have a higher social status – rugby (but not rugby league), rowing, tennis,
sailing, equestrian and cricket.
In England, private schools accounting for 7% of high school students supplied
40% of England’s test match batters born between 1986 and 1999 and 31% of test
match bowlers. In Australia, after a sharp increase in the 1990s, the share of
privately educated players in Ashes cricket teams has been hovering around
45%."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
