Recently I attended an open night at my daughter's future high school. The public school had once been in a downward spiral of miserable results, poor discipline and falling enrolments before a new principal started turning things round. Staff boasted about last year's school dux whose ATAR score got her into biomedicine. "We're improving all the time," a teacher beamed as we milled about the home economics lab. Despite the late hour dozens of students had come to serve us freshly-baked muffins and spruik their close-knit, proudly multicultural community. An older boy with a mop of hair over one eye said, "Best school ever!"

Driving home, I thought about the boy's jubilant endorsement and the sense of optimism and striving I had absorbed along with the muffins. Then almost on cue I passed billboards advertising private schools – images of children, immaculate in their uniforms, communing with musical instruments or poised above the bunsen burner, with slogans trumpeting their "inquiring minds," leadership or entrepreneurialism. The unmistakable message is that parents wanting to give their children every opportunity naturally covet such schools – one glance at these billboards and, like a chemical reaction, doubt seeped in.

Illustration: John Spooner

The same message informs the last-minute booking website School Places, which offers hefty discounts for "Australia's leading private schools," under the promise, "sending your child to a private school just got easier."

And the same message underpins private school scholarships; the idea that only the very gifted can attend such schools for free has the paradoxical logic of both validating the high fees and creating an illusion of meritocracy or superior moral worth. Still, if I had a dollar for every parent I know sweating on the outcome of their child's scholarship exam, I'd be as rich as the elite schools themselves. Interestingly, the private school lobby likes to say that parents choose these schools for their "values." I'm not sure what values are at work in the scholarship system. The private schools would say they're bequeathing opportunities to less advantaged kids. But these schools cherry-pick kids whose achievements will advantage the institution by attracting yet more fee-paying students. The only "value" exemplified is the value of commerce, with students analogous to high-yield investments.