Bloody hard

Australia is a rugged country, most people who live elsewhere get this. Perhaps we who live here find it a bit curious, and find that we are not so much rugged or tough, but laid back.
We often say that we are the land of the ‘fair go’. But like so many such statements, the ones who get ‘the fair go’ are those who are doing pretty well already, thank you very much.

One of the things that has saddened me in the more than half a century I have lived here, is that our hearts seem to have become increasingly hardened.
Not rugged but HARD.
We are no longer saying,”If you want to live here then you have to work hard, and pull your weight.”
We are saying stupid stuff like
“We are full!”
“Go back to where you came from.”
“If you come by boat you will never settle here!”
Now, I came here by boat in 1967.But then I am white, I was born in the UK…and though I may have some non-Aryan ancestry…yet of course I speak English ( and a smattering of other languages…looking forward to retiring to brush up on Bahasa Indonesia !)
Curiously we moved into a South Australian industrial town, Whyalla, as did hundreds of other UK citizens in the late 60s. There was a real sense of ‘ghetto’.

I went to the central High School ….I had never experienced ethnic discrimination before …but I did there. I was a Pom!
People laughed at my accent (NW England) as if they some how had the key as to how English should be spoken.
Let me tell you that Maroon …is pronounced MAH ROO N
Not MA RAWN!!!
That it’s perfectly OK to say DANCE with a hard ‘a’ and you can say DARNCE if you want to…but who cares?
To provincial South Australians these seemed like linguistic baseball bats.
We tended to retreat to our ethnic homelands…so my four close friends were from Liverpool, Tyneside, Luton and North Wales.
By the time I graduated with education degrees and became a teacher in the third High School the tables had reversed.
In that school 85% of the students were not born in Australia. Most came from the UK with about 10% a mix of Greeks, Italians, French and others.
While I realise I was subjected to the pejorative “Pom”…in the Eastern school, the Aussies were “Skips” in the Western school …and thought to be as thick as two planks.
This is how prejudice works, not with logic but with the prejudice of the majority mocking the minority.
All of this is of course nonsense.
I was fortunate to have teachers who realised that when I was a minority “Pom”, I had actually probably had better schooling in Maths, Physics and Chemistry before I came to school in Australia than they had been able to deliver. John Lyon my Chemistry teacher was one of the first to spot this.
He gave me an A in my first series of reports even though I had been taught under an ‘old fashioned’ way. He took time help me translate this, and I accelerated with his help.
Five years later, inspired by him I guess, I went to be a teacher in school of which he was Head (Stuart High School). I understand now that he had not only an educational vision, but also a spiritual, philosophical and theological vision of what a school might be. I liked that.
Deeply influenced by liberal Protestant theology. He promoted such epithets as “Freedom to choose!” and “Acceptance of consequence” deeply seated in the theology of Tillich, Bonhoeffer and others.
Made sense to me.

The nonsense of the mandate

I grit my teeth every time the modern politician talks about a mandate.
The truth is the Westminster system does not deliver mandates.
It delivers government.
We elect a team to govern, not simply or only to implement the declared and limited list of policies that may have been identified during the election campaign.
I am not saying that these should be disregarded, ....but I will come back to that in a moment...
Then truth is it nonsense for any party to say it has a mandate to implement every single policy that may have crossed their lips during an election campaign simply because they happen to have been elected (and in this latter case by the slimmest of majorities)
Just let me walk you through my logic.
During the last election campaign, just to take the presently elected team, they talked about: Marriage Equality, Superannuation, Budget Reform, Submarines, Education, Refugees and the hideously named  lie "Border Protection", let alone the duplicity on both sides about Health Care
Now I agree with them about some things..and indeed some aspects but not necessarily all of their policies. I do not agree with them about some others
Now I, and everyone else, did not get a chance to say what I was particularly "giving a mandate" for.

Indeed I was NOT giving a mandate! I cast my vote for an individual and/or a party whilst not necessarily agreeing to absolutely everything they were promoting.

Indeed I actively disagree with both major parties about their hideous policies to do with refugee resettlement.

Though they can erroneously claim that they have a "Mandate"...they have no way of knowing which of the broad range of policies people actually approve.

I would suggest that most Australians...however they voted... did not give "mandates", they thought some things were good and other things were not.
We vote not a "mandate" ...but on balance.
Indeed we vote for the team.
We recognise that not everything is solved, or sorted. But by and large one team has got the balance we prefer.  This does not commit us to support the details.
Rather we empower the team.

We do not implement the mandate. We elect a government.

This would rather expose the  current Marriage Equality discussion.

There is NO mandate to implement or not implement Marriage Equality; there is no mandate for a plebiscite.

What there is, is a requirement for the elected member to exercise their conscience.
And not to hide behind the false wall of the illusory mandate.

Heed the warnings!

I think by and large a national curriculum is quite a good idea.
It is not unreasonable to think that we should be able to say that if you go to school in Australia then there should be a capacity to say that if you have completed, say, 10 years of schooling then at least you have been exposed to the same general education in Tasmania as you might have been if you happened to have gone to school in Western Australia.
This is better than saying each State government, or worse each individual school , can decide what it likes about what is the core.
But this, of course, does not guarantee that everyone will be at the same level when they leave school. We still have to address the issues of scale, the problems of remote and small communities, and the ever-increasing disparity between private and public education. These are not, essentially, issues of curriculum...they are issues of resourcing, inequality and justice.
A national curriculum is "a good idea" if it is the genuine struggling of the educational community to grapple with what it means to "be educated" in 21st century Australia.
It is not a good idea if it is governments, politicians and/or bureaucrats making decisions about what is in the best interests of people and imposing that on the system.
This does not matter whether it is Labor or Liberal, Greens or Independents...while they are all entitled to their opinion they are not, cannot be, and should not be the only voices that are heard in this discussion.
So often they are. And of course there is enormous power and influence if you control the purse.
So much is immediately apparent in the opening salvos of the history debate.
Our politicians (eyes as ever on the polls) are already eyeing off public opinion and creating division about the curriculum..."too much aboriginal", "too much asian", "not enough British"....
Where, I ask, is the debate about what 'history' is?
One thing I know is that while history may often have been indoctrination (think of the way we have talked about WW1 and WW2 for example)...or what we now call 'political correctness'...that is, supporting particular political goal.
Education is ultimately about equipping a student to assess and evaluate situations for themselves. While this might require the gaining of certain fundamental skills (eg. spelling, factual information, numerical competency, language vocabulary etc....) it is not, in the end, being told what to think!

Right and wrong

Teachers are both wrong and right about the standardised testing. (here and here for example).

Both sides of the present discussion no doubt agree that it is important that we focus on our children.

If you don't ask evaluation questions (And in reality teachers do this all the time) like "has Johnny's spelling improved?" or "Can she do long division?" then you are doomed to go round and round in circles. .and just guess at what is happening.

However nothing is more certain than the fact that this information also will be often only crudely analysed. It will be misunderstood and even abused by some with other axes to grind (this would seem to be the core of the teachers' objection).

Part of the reason for this conflict is that there does not seem to be any agreed purpose for the testing.

I mean "so that we can weed out dud teachers" is a fear-driven goal...and probably misplaced. (but it lurks there).

In reality we need to get rid of this fear & blame based stuff and state that the purpose of evaluation is to identify weakness and throw more resources at it.

If we don't do the evaluation then the identification of weakness is just intuition and guess work. Some may be good at this, but it is not the smart or prudent way to do it.

The solution should be to state the clear positive goals of evaluation and what responses might be made. I don't hear this at the moment. Even from Ms Gillard.

"The parents right to know" is not sufficient rationale. "To know what?" and "What is going to be done as a consequence?" are also consequent questions.

In theory, there can be nothing wrong with identifying areas of under-performance and making the connection that more resources need to go in that direction.

In theory there is nothing wrong with identifying areas of excellence (here for example) and suggesting that we promote that.

We can and should do both.

The perversity of our system is that often the connexion is made that we only see what areas are doing well and say "This is where our money is best spent".

So the rich get richer!!, and, The poor get poorer!!

Let's not do that

Julia's journeys

The Deputy P.M. is in India at the moment trying to shore up the rising tide of panic about violence against Indian students, particularly in Sydney. You would wonder why it requires such high level governmental representation until you hear that the foreign student revenue is something like 15 billion dollars a year.

And the whole service delivery appears to be a bit suspect (Four Corners exposed this a few weeks ago)...chefs who use an electric frypan, accountants who never count a bean...aand so on.

Amidst all this is the fear that we all have, that the genuine education system (perhaps the schools, TAFE and the Universities) has actually been sold out to economics of the paying students. And they are now so dependent upon the revenue that their actual service delivery may be compromised if they can't maintain student numbers.

The economic rationalists call this the dictates of the market and that this is the reality of the world.

Meanwhile the educationalists bemoan that there is no longer any learning for its own sake. Where is pure science and unbridled research? Where is the opportunity for genuine philosophy and scholarly (rather than political) history? Where is the exploration of classic and modern literature, of ancient text.....and dare I say it....theology

That's entertainment!

There is no doubt that current reality show Masterchef has been a hit (here). Another SC and I are now so caught in the grips of it that, tired as we were on coming home from my birthday dinner last night, we had to watch the time-shifted episode I had recorded.
Had I known that
a) the program would overrun and I would cut the denouement off the end of the tape
b) any way I could have watched the highlights on the internet

Then I would probably not have bothered to record it.
However it begs all sorts of questions.
Whilst each episode is slow as, could be at least 50% shorter if they just cut out the recaps...at the heart of it is the building sense of competition.
I have always thought this strange. As a former teacher it seemed strange to me to try and inculcate competition as the key and indeed most desirable quality of a given program. And as you go on, inevitably you associate with those who have been able (like yourself) to use this to their advantage.
What it has to do with learning, education, contributing to the corpus of knowledge etc....is beyond me. But when you consider that even the top echelons are bedogged by this (eg. the Nobel prize) it is obvious there is an unquestioning acceptance of it.
It is of course bizarre, but good TV, to see fine cooking being treated as a competition. When people get voted off because they get 8/10 instead of 9/10 it just stupid. But there would be no program if it was not competitive.
One of the good things about Masterchef has been the refusal by most fo the guest chefs to get sucked into the competitive mode, but rather to try and help the contestants as much as possible. Clearly the world of the chef is highly competitive, but there seems about it a camraderie which is to be commended. Good luck to them.

Military Spending

I have been trying to think of something to say about the recent announcement of massive increase in spending for the military. It is difficult to be dispassionate about this, few people are prepared to argue against big military budgets.

But I was reflecting  that it took a while for people to begin to question whether the "stimulus strategy" was the appropriate way to deal with the current economic dilemma. ie. is giving people more money to spend and encouragement to spend it an appropriate strategy to solve a problem that is allegedly brought about   by people overspending!

Is spending more money on military might the best  strategy to end the warring madness of the world?

The dogma that "The price of peace is eternal vigilance" is so unquestioned that it stands more as a testament to our paranoia than our political astuteness.

We think that unless we have a big gun to frighten (probably) the Chinese that they will be down upon us. 

But I would wish to note that I don't see the Chinese queuing up to rape New Zealand, which has adopted a much less strident military policy than our own.

My great sadness is the inordinate amount of money that military equipment, (everything now measured in millions and billions) is glossed over so easily. Yet when we talk about education, health, refugees, third world aid and so on every single drop has to be squeezed out.

(POST 995)

What is literary truth?

The Australian continues its war against teachers of English. Justine Ferrari can scarcely hide her indignation in a front page piece today (28/2/09) this is followed up by editorial comment which suggests that professional teachers of English have (once again) got it wrong. We are of course entitled to our opinions, though Ferrari's article purports (and I use that word advisedly!) to an objectivity which is tainted with snide comment and emphatic utterance which hardly renders it impartial.
The thrust?
In discussing the national curriculum English teachers want us to recognise that the teaching of literature is inherently a political act. This Marxist view has undoubtedlyt an element of truth.
When you think back to what you were required to read at school, at the very least we should all recognise that we were being given a world-view which was the political correctness of the time.
Not all of this is bad?
But what I think the English teachers are suggesting is that kids read cultural values outside the bounds of literature. Indeed kids don't read anything approaching 'literature'. They do web-surf, they do watch music videos, anime, youtube and so on.
If they were to leave school not being able to evaluate this populist material they are far more vulnerable than if they have never read Great Expectations or even watched youtube about it!!
TheAustralian also takes opportunity to whine about the teaching of grammar ( I have blogged before)
I have mixed feeling about this, but I am most concerned about the fact that the constant demand to "teach grammar" is not about addressing understanding but about doing something manageable. It is not an exercise in education, it is an exercise in control (pretty Marxist sort of stuff ehhh?).
I am not convinced that understanding what an adverbial clause is necessarily contributes to understanding.
I do think that spelling is important, though meaning is more important.
It is important to be able to read critically and to be able to address issues...this is not about parsing sentences and so much of what passes for grammar.
We need to recognise that grammar is the servant of language and not the end.

What education might be for?

My contribution to the wit of the 20th century was "Anglicans like to be told what to do so that they can go ahead and not do it"
I try to not tell people what to do (some would laugh) and this worries some people. We work the education system in such a way that we get good at discerning what bring the teacher's or authority figure's approval, so when we are deliberately not told it can be alarming.
Janet Albrechtsen, the rightist commentator, writing in The Australian this week reminds us that education should be about teaching kids to sift what they are taught so that they can detect the teacher's bias. This is not dissimilar to my own goal, (rather unusual for me to agree with Ms Albrechtsen). I don't want people to believe what I believe, I want them to respoect what I believe but to make up their own minds.
The ongoing grammar debate might have something of this. The trouble is that people want to be told what to do....how easy it is to just assume that there is a set of rules. This is the great flaw, grammar is much more fluid than that.
The rules by and large are not absolute, the only given is that you need to be understood. So accurate spelling is probably more important than meticulous sentence structure.
But if I write that chocolate pudding is deeeelishus, you probably know what I mean.
We make absolute rules...no prepositions at the end of sentences....which don't make the slightest biut of difference (and it is now widely regarded that this rule is more breached than kept).
What about split infinitives? Most people don't have a clue about this ...and although each year ay Synod we used to count up their number, I would like to also contend that this rule is more subtle than it is often given credit for....(did you even notice that I split the infinitive in that last sentence?) viz: to also contend has a slightly different meaning from 'I would like also to contend' or 'to contend also'...'to anxiously deny' (don't you think dear reader) is different from 'to deny anxiously' or 'anxiously to deny'.
The point? People shoudl be being taught to think not to regurgitate!!

Same, same but different

There are lots of candidates for catchy - but cliched - titles for blogs about the change in Liberal leadership.
Methinks he protests too much is one. His need to convince the legendary 'battlers' that he is not a 'silver tail' was obviously uppermost in some strategists minds. I don't think he was very convincing but time will tell.
Turn Bull into reality could be another one. Again we will wait and see.

Should we worry too much that he is rich? In one way this is a sign that this is a man who knows how to achieve, and surely we want successful people in key leadership positions.
Any way I suspect in six weeks all this will be academic, he will either be chewing it up or stuffing it up. I suspect the former, and the personal critique will then all be a bit beside the point.
Certainly will be interesting
Personally, I was in agreement with Turnbull, that it was disappointing to see that the one of the first comments the PM made was that the Republic would now be a key issue.
This is such a political ploy, aimed at agitating the Liberal Party from within, about what is essentially a minor issue.
For heaven's sake a strong opposition is a good thing(here for example). On the other hand it was good to see an encouragement from Rudd to identify key bi-partisan issues. As these troubled times go on it is clear that there are more and more issues that are just important and not just or substantially political.
I could and would name the River, education, the intervention, the War and health as just some. of these

The widening gap

One story today about the widening gap between the brighest and the dimmest students, and/or the richest and the poorest schools (here), should come as a surprise to no one.
There would seem to be little doubt that the general gist of this is true.There is a certain sadness about the fact that a country that has had, in the recent past, a well-functioning public-sector school system is allowing it to go to rack and ruin.
The article cited here states that state governments whilst needing to be committed to the state systems nevertheless sometimes prefer the private system.There are many and complex reasons for this.
I well remember (for example) M, the founder of a relatively new SA school (now schools), saying of the need for Governments to continue funding private schools..They could not afford to stop funding them. This would seem to be true. And as more and more parents have fled the state system, the need to continue funding private schools has become even greater.
I have no particular problem with this. Other than the rather serious one that, no matter what, some parents will never be able to afford to pay for their children's education , no matter how cheap.
And as long as there continues to be a skimming off of high quality teachers to the private system, either by higher pay or just be better conditions; the state system will continue to be run down and down.
By way of a side issue (but relating to the skimming) , long term teaching colleague-D- who recently retired from over 30 years in the state system to a smaller job in a Lutheran School.
He sighed as we were talking, because his commitment to the State system is profound, you know it is just nice to have a level of enthusiasm and respect from the students, with politeness.
There was a sense in which he felt he shouldn't be saying that. But we both knew it was true.
Bit sad really

testing times

Its worth listening to the recent Background Briefing about the issues of paying teachers for results. It does indeed beg all sorts of questions, not the least of which is the degree of objectivity that might be brought to assessing the idea of "success".
Does Mathematics success mean that a Year 12 student can accurately reproduce the Sum and Difference Formulae (this is the point at which Maths and I parted company...why learn stuff that you can reference more easily in a book) or that they are able to amortise a housing loan, or accurately cost a building project?
More seriously is the issue of how teachers start to "Teach the Test". We all know the problem. If your pay begins to depend on how your charges perform under a certain style of assessment then your method begins to reflect the process which will maximise the results under that method of assessment. Certain schools have masterd this art for years.
More seriously are other incontrovertible truths like parental educational levels influence performance at least as much as teachers. Middle class children with well-educated parents are likely to do well in our system. There are exceptions, bright working class kids who float to the top, but having worked in a number of educational environments where kids do not start with the advantage of having tertiary educated parents it is all too evident that these kids begin at something of a disadvantage.
Some might say this doesn't matter...they are the cannon fodder. But I would want to reward the teachers who struggle with the most disadvantaged and get them to take a few steps forward rather than the "successful" socially advantaged kids who have everything goign for them.
It is a very dangerous game that we play!!

Working from home

While there have been a number of debates around recently about education, no aspect is more interesting than whether or not kids should be doing homework.
We have already had at least one bout of tears and the "I don't feel well enough to go to school" routine once this year (3rd week of school).
The naked facts are that our school age daughter is at school by 8 a.m. on 3 or 4 mornings a week. She doesn't get off the bus until 4.15. She plays the piano, and the cello....wants to do softball and netball .... and needs time just to chill.
Why is it reasonable to assume that with 8 hours spent at school something will be achieved by having 1-2 hours more. I fail to be convinced.
At some point I just want her to play, to ring her friends and feel that she has some areas of her life that her under her control.
Others argue that it is a lesson in what the real world is like. It may indeed be like that for some folk. But most ordinary people I know don't come home from work to be told they have to do two hours more...some do, but is that desirable. I don't think so.
Too many families suffer because too many people go to work and then crowd their together time out.

And after all, does a 13 year old need two hours a night extra work.
I am not convinced that this does anything more than encourage children to detest self-driven education.

No clue about education

I was vaguely horrifed to hear Education Minister Julie Bishop pontificating about what education ought to be at the National Press Club today. I only caught the last few minutes (so maybe I do her an injustice) she seemed to be saying something like......Schools ought to be consulting with employers so that they can find out what parents want children to learn at school, and so that we may continue to have economic propsperity and they can share in it
Now I don't have much problem with that bald statement as a part of the vocational function that schools should see as theirs to address. But Minister Bishop seemed to be suggesting that this was the main function of education.
Here we have a travesty of educational philosophy, I suggest; and more than that a profound denigration of the role education should play in a civilised society.
If all it is meant to do is to provide fodder for the economic machine then God help us all.
Such a philosophy would spell the death of history, literature, pure maths, research science, music and anything that does not "upskill" the average participant.
We already see the narrowness that is engendered by those who, like Ms Bishop's Prime Ministerial colleague, have the narrowest of narrow views of what education in history is about, and who bandy the word "values" around and yet have no idea of the complexity of that sociological concept.
Contrast this with avid blog reader W who is a gifted educator (even if self-doubting) presently involved in helping immigrants to learn English. Earning a quarter of what Minister Bishop is reaping from the communal coffers, and struggling with a government that seems to think that 100 hours/student (or less) is all that they are prepared to fund; she has thrown herself into this work with gusto.
Ever looking for ways to engage her charges she tried to boil a potato in a classroom and set the fire alarms off, she is now confined to only using a microwave if she intends to teach English in such a challenging way.
To hear her talk about education is to hear one speak about a process which is immensely practical, and yet which is also mind-blowing. It is setting people free to live life.
She needs to talk to the good Minister and excite her too about the fact that education is more than just preparation for participation in the economy it is about engagement with the profundity of life, its challenges and its excitement...which, I suggest, is more than just being able to fill in a Centrelink form.
W's charges will remember her, I suggest, long after we have forgotten the narrow opportunistic philosophy of Julie Bishop and her boss....Julie who? I hear you ask