“It’s a financial decision”: students’ ethical understandings of non-government faith-based schooling in a neoliberal society

The expansion of faith-based schools as marketised non-government institutions raises ethical questions, including their appeal to students. This article utilises focus groups with 24 Australian secondary students to identify ethical virtues in their perceptions of non-government faith-based schooling in a neoliberal education market cultivating a conflicting ethics character seeking to respond to both collective and individual goals. Taking the virtue ethics approach, the paper portrays how students perceive faith-based schooling as a financial enterprise contesting the virtues of justice, self-improvement, and courage. Firstly, findings illustrate students’ ethical discomfort with how a push for more socially just outcomes in such schools has, ironically, resulted in greater injustice. Specifically, findings capture a disjuncture between the schools’ emphasis on fee/affordability programmes for greater accessibility and their implications, i.e., the creation of unjust social divides between the “haves” and “have-nots”. Secondly, a mixed picture portrays some students’ virtuous behaviour of self-improvement in a faith-based schooling space seen as a “client”-oriented environment that should be utilised for one’s advantage, while others illustrate how such a system can, in fact, alleviate their need to actively seek to improve their skills and/or social engagement. Correspondingly, some students highlight how being outside the non-government faith-based schooling system “forces” them to strive academically or be socially proactive– regarded as working towards developing their virtue of self-improvement. The paper concludes with the students’ call for a courageous course of action for faith-based schooling, envisioned to promote more affordable and equitable educational opportunities and produce ethical forms of socially just schooling.