Scots College: No Solutions - Only Trade-Offs.

If you are looking for an idiotic analysis of an issue or event, the Sydney Morning Herald is a good place to start.

It is absolutely definitely not the case that everyone who writes for the SMH is an idiot, it has some good writers. But more likely than not, if you are an idiot, you will likely get a run in the SMH.

The SMH has lots of good and smart writers, but there are also Ross Gittins, Millie Muroi, Jacqueline Maley, Waleed Aly, Peter FitzSimons, Niki Savva.

The cream of the crap floating atop what was once a great masthead.

Exhibit D this week: Following its mostly ridiculous coverage of the Scots College Boys allegations, the SMH Education Editor runs:

The Sydney private school boards that have the gender mix right, and all the ones that don’t.

Three boys have been charged with a serious crime. The Herald responded with a spreadsheet.

Not a spreadsheet of what the school did or failed to do. A spreadsheet of the gender composition of private school boards, ranked, with a governance consultant brought in to observe that it is “hard to see how a council dominated by one gender can effectively guide the school’s executive” on consent.

Not a word about what those directors know. Whether they can read, let alone read a set of accounts. Whether they have ever run anything. Governance, finance, curriculum, risk, their values, their temperament. All irrelevant!

Forget education experience, governance experience, management experience, political perspective, perhaps even some cognitive or experiential diversity.

There must be a 50/50 male-female split, and only once there is gender equivalence, the alleyways of Bondi Junction will be forever safe.

I am mildly surprised they stopped at gender. No column on the sexual preference of school councillors? Perhaps for the next column.

But while we are counting, what is the gender balance of the average public school board? Hmm.

Perhaps because there is none. Public schools take their directions from the Macquarie Street politburo and not from a board. Homogenised, standardised, and industrialised regardless of local conditions.

As always, the gender balance metric only gets applied where the answer is useful, and it is useful here because the destination is the abolition of the independent school sector and the delivery of every child to the same government department staffed by the teachers encouraging kids to skip school and attend public protests.

Meanwhile, a gender balance metric is also, awkwardly, available closer to home.

The Herald’s parent company, Nine Entertainment, publishes details of its own board and management team. The board runs to six directors: four men, two women. Two-thirds, one-third.

The management team runs to nine: six men, three women. Two-thirds, one-third again.

If a 67/33 split makes it hard to see how a school council can guide an executive on consent, one wonders what it does to a media company’s capacity to guide a newsroom on anything at all.

Send in the compliance officers. Report it to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. ASX Corporate Governance Council. Commission the lawyers and consultants.

Yet from the masthead that ranked every private school in Sydney by gender ratio, on the gender ratio of the company that owns it, silence. How could that be?

The numbers are on Nine’s own website. The education editor did not even need to leave the building.

Then there is Peter FitzSimons, whose column on Saturday allowed that elite school sports culture has much to answer for after a week like this one while taking care to add that it can still be a force for good.

What the reader is nowhere told is that the author is himself a product of the same system.

FitzSimons went to Knox Grammar, played in the 1st XV, and turned that into Sydney University, Manly, five years of professional rugby in France, seven Tests for the Wallabies, and a four-decade career writing about it.

A column arguing that elite schoolboy rugby manufactures entitled young men, written by a man whose public life was manufactured by elite schoolboy rugby, might ordinarily carry a line of disclosure.

In contrast, one of the smartest humans ever to walk this earth, Thomas Sowell, once upon a time, wrote a book titled A Conflict of Visions. In it, Sowell argued that most political disagreements are downstream of a prior disagreement about human nature.

The unconstrained vision holds that people are fundamentally good and improvable, and that when they behave badly it is because something did it to them. Bad institutions. Bad conditioning. Bad culture.

Since the fault sits in the arrangements, the fix is to tear down the institutions, redesign the arrangements, and the redesigning is done by the virtuous few, with the correct mindset and the requisite moral clarity.

The constrained or tragic vision, in contrast, holds that human beings arrive with appetites, self-interest and a limited capacity for restraint, and that this does not change.

Civilisation is not the natural state. It is a thin veneer of habits, incentives, sanctions and supervision laid over something that is always there.

Under the constrained vision, we are only a generation away from barbarism.

In this world, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The civilisation has to be repeated and handed down from generation to generation.

Most of the columns written about Scots have come from the first, unconstrained, vision.

The boys were fine, the school corrupted them; the boys were fine, the social media algorithm corrupted them; the boys were fine, the board’s gender ratio corrupted them.

The prescriptions follow axiomatically. More consent education. Regulated social media feeds. Gender quotas. No independent schools. And of course, more government to re-educate people and taxes to pay the re-educators.

The awkward fact sits in the reporting itself. Consent education has been mandatory nationally since 2023, and Scots says it has taught consent and respectful relationships from kindergarten to senior school for at least fifteen years. The unconstrained answer to a failed program is always the same program, delivered harder, by better people. And gender quotas.

The tragic vision starts somewhere less flattering.

Boys do not arrive at kindergarten as angels awaiting corruption. They arrive as humans, unfinished, with poor judgment and strong impulses, and the entire job of a school, a family, and a community is to build the restraints before the impulses find an opportunity.

Restraint is taught by fathers who model it, by leaders who do not make inappropriate melon gags, by consequences that are certain rather than eloquent, by supervision, by shame, by institutions, and by the plain knowledge that actions have consequences and that humans have agency.

This is unfortunately the harder and more demanding position, not the softer one.

If culture did it, no one in particular did it.

If the algorithm did it, the accused are victims too, and the sentence should reflect that.

Systemic excuses are an alibi machine, and it issues alibis to everyone within reach.

The tragic vision issues no alibis. Three individuals are charged. The courts will determine what happened, and if the allegations are proven, what they did is a serious crime, and they will answer for it as individuals.

No board gender balance explains it, mitigates it, or would have prevented it. No change of headmaster will prevent the next one.

That is precisely why the tragic vision gets no run in the Herald. It leaves nothing for the celestially anointed to redesign the system or a culture to blame. Or a mirror for the parents to look into.

Raising a boy to a man who will not do what is alleged to have been done takes at least eighteen years, and it is done by people whose names do not appear on a list of school directors.