A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald covered the disturbing gender inequality in selective secondary schools.

It described the ‘stark and growing gender gap in the academically selective system’ where the ‘gender mix in selective high schools is now 58 per cent boys and 42 per cent girls’ (Girls and boys given equal places in selective schools under radical overhaul).

This shocking statistical imbalance is finally being addressed and not before time.

The selective school system is a state-funded guarantee of access to academic excellence and it is only fair that Asian girls should have as much access to the opportunities the system presents as their male counterparts.

In one of the most academically rigorous secondary schools in Australia, 97 per cent of the students are from a non-English language background and the vast majority of that clever cohort are from China, Korea, India, and South Asia. Now that’s a shocking statistical imbalance worth examining.

The phenomenon of Asian students excelling in non-Asian education systems applies throughout the Western World and has given rise to the widely held belief that Asian kids are smarter than their Western counterparts.

This idea is strongly resisted by many because it is axiomatic that, if one ethnic group is more intelligent than other ethnic groups, then it follows that some ethnic groups are less intelligent than others.

This is heresy in left-wing academic circles and famously earned Professor Hans Eysenck a punch on the nose when he tried to discuss this idea at that bastion of free thought, the London School of Economics.

And the situation is not that simple.

Part of the reason that Asian students excel in Western education systems is that the Asian parents who migrate to the West are usually the more highly educated and more determined members of their own culture. They bring their determination to succeed with them and are able to pass it on to their children.

The phrase ‘tiger mothers’ should be replaced by ‘tiger parents’ as the mams and dads who left comfortable professional jobs in their former countries to become taxi drivers and shop assistants in Australia have the intellectual resources to ensure that their kids benefit from the opportunities offered by Australia’s open education system.

But whether you subscribe to the idea that racial intellectual inequality exists and explains the difference educational outcomes for ethnic groups or not, one thing is certain: the current Australian educational ideology perpetuates inequality of outcome at both ends of the educational spectrum.

The disproportionate number of Asian students at the selective state schools offering the best education can either be seen as proof that they are smarter than the rest of us, or it can be seen to show that factors within their cultural and domestic environments, create a measurable advantage in educational outcomes. Either way, it ensures that Asian schoolkids have a better chance of gaining access to the tertiary educational opportunities in the schools of mathematics, medicine, and law and the opportunities that flow therefrom.

Some academics have long opposed the present system of selective schools because they perpetuate inequality in Australian society. Instead, they advocate moving public resources away from educational programs that benefit a select minority of smart kids into comprehensive public schools that benefit all students.

Thus far, politicians have shown no interest in scrapping or even modifying the selective school system despite the inherent inequalities it is creating. There are too many votes involved.

At the other end of the educational spectrum, the closing the gap ideology prevails.

The inequality of outcome between Aboriginal schoolkids and the rest of the population is, as it should be, a source of great concern in political circles. The reason why the Aboriginal kids do so badly at school is, according to politicians who maintain the system, because the education system has failed to make education relevant to traditional Aboriginal culture.

So on the one hand, the success of Asian schoolkids is because immigrants have instilled in their children the importance of accepting, working, and competing within the current educational system. On the other, the reason for the failure of our educational system to close the gap for Aboriginal kids has less to do with their family background and more with the failure of the education providers to make it relevant to traditional Aboriginal cultural values.

The inescapable fact is that the family structure is the primary determinant of any child’s willingness to engage in a formal education system.

The gap will never be closed until it is recognised that the miserable performance of Aboriginal kids at school has nothing to do with curriculum relevance. It is the values they acquire at home which doom those kids to chronic under-performance.