I’m of the age now where almost my entire social group is having children. I’ve been advised that the first two things you need to do as soon as you know a child is on the way are sign up for childcare, and then get your child on the waiting list at multiple private schools.

Private schools offering their own childcare services, sometimes known as early learning centres, represent a bargain. Or so I’m told. Once you account for the exorbitant amount a standard childcare centre charges, paying $47,010 a year for five days of childcare (like at Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne) really isn’t too bad. Even better, you then don’t have to worry about a waiting list for Prep. Then, you can start thinking about how to pay off the $23,250 per year for Prep tuition, right up to $38,790 in Year 12.

At the current schedule of fees at MLC, it would cost $420,480 to educate one child from Prep through to Year 12 (not including prior childcare), if fees don’t continue to rise above the rate of inflation, which they are. And if you want to have multiple children, you’ll just have to multiply it. A classic nuclear family calculation of 2.2 children would result in more than $1 million spent for a family in private school tuition fees.

Can that large expense – an investment in your child’s future, apparently – really be justified? Debate around education in Australia is incredibly divisive, but researching this piece made me realise how so often this discussion gets reduced to a technocratic argument over money: how much do you need, where does it come from, does it really make a difference?

The 2012 Gonski review into funding for schooling made a huge leap by providing a methodology for assessing the “how much” question. The state and federal governments are currently locked in negotiations to figure out the “where does it come from” part. Education Minister Jason Clare has vowed to figure out a way to get all schools’ Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) levels up to 100 per cent. Properly funding government schools won’t solve all the issues with segregation, disadvantage and poor student outcomes, but it’s a good start.

A debate that only focuses on funding risks losing its focus. The Australia Institute’s executive director Richard Denniss argues that, rather than obsessing about meeting the bare minimum requirements, we need to reset the conversation around what kind of society we really want to live in, and how education feeds into that.

“Even if the federal government did give the bare minimum to public schools in its next term, that’s not going to reduce the dramatic inequality,” Denniss says. “Having a democratic debate about a funding model is the perfect excuse to avoid a democratic debate about what kind of schooling system we want.

“Democracy thrives on high expectations. The longer we talk about Gonski, the less we’re talking about: are we going in the right direction or the wrong direction? … Are we willing to demand better for our kids? Should all kids in Australia have access to high quality education?”

According to Mison, we have to elevate skills relative to knowledge, both to support our economy and also to reflect the reality that people will need tertiary qualifications if they are to enter certain vocations.

“I would like to aim higher,” Mison says. “We need to start thinking about the design of schools and education systems. What do we want our school to do? What is it that we want teachers to actually do? If we can define the forms and functions, then consider how we resource that accordingly.

“We’ve got a much denser regulatory environment with increasing accountability, but it hasn’t translated to improved student outcomes for many of our young people. What we’re doing so far hasn’t worked as expected. Maybe it’s time to actually take a different approach.”

The argument around school funding is often just reduced to winners and losers. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. We could instead rethink the way we fund schools and what we’re asking in return. Currently, every taxpayer is contributing significant amounts to the education to all students – public or private. The “discount” the taxpayer gets if they to send their child to a Catholic school is about 13 per cent, and for another non-government schools about 28 per cent.

With no real obligation to serve the greater common interest, the public is not getting value for money by funding private schools, argues Emma Rowe, a senior lecturer in education at Deakin University. “Should private schools be funded by the government? I’m on the position of no, there are no strings attached, or insufficient strings attached to the funding,” she says. “In Australia there’s no capping of tuition fees, even though these are government-funded schools. In other OECD countries they receive government funding, but it changes the expectations: they have to adhere to certain public regulations.”

The problem is we’re funding private schools, while not asking enough in return, says Tom Greenwell, who teaches history and politics in the ACT public school system, and is co-author with Chris Bonnor of Waiting for Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools. “It’s time Australia stops pretending that there isn’t an alternative to the mess we’re in,” he says. “We’ve got to acknowledge that so many comparable countries fully fund non-government schools, impose commensurate public obligations prohibiting fees, impose comprehensive enrolment obligations, while still allowing those schools to maintain their own governance and their own distinctive ethos. I think the only way we can escape a kind of the past dependency that we’re experiencing is through, ultimately, an act of imagination.”

Greenwell says the review paints the path forward for a new conversation about how we could reimagine our school system. “It would put a bright spotlight on how social segregation bedevils Australian education and [would] force policymakers to answer hard questions about their responsibility to create the conditions of success for schools and students,” he says.

While this plan doesn’t hold all the answers to solving our education mess, Greenwell says it’s a solid start. “This is a really significant shift in the discourse. It’s created a space for political action. I wouldn’t bet on significant reform, but I think it is a step in the right direction.”

The evidence does indicate that paying exorbitant amounts of money for private school tuition does make some kind of difference. I went to a fancy grammar school. Would I be writing this essay for The Monthly if I had instead gone to the local public school, or the Catholic school with the rest of my primary peers? There’s no real answer to that. Children don’t get to choose where they are schooled, parents do. To some extent at least. We all just do the best with what we’re given.

The increasing segregation in our education system feels like just one facet of the widening social divide in Australia. Anyone under the age of 40 who has hoped to one day buy a house can surely relate. If as a society we have accepted that access to wealth should entitle you to buying better outcomes for your children, then it seems kind of crazy not to strive for that. If you can.

But I don’t want to accept that. I don’t want to live in a country where I can guarantee some level of advantage for one child over another purely due to financial resources. We can do better, and we can still give parents the choice to send their kids to the schools they want.

We can start by changing the conversation.