Schools & Trades
Shane Green discusses the report which shows that last year kids from independent schools entered university at twice the rate of those from public schools:
The State Government would not have been happy with this focus on the figures. It prefers to highlight the number of students pursuing TAFE studies, vocational courses and those who have entered the workforce.
These are life directions that should be properly acknowledged. Life paths other than university, such as apprenticeships, have become devalued. In a perfect society, the uni choice would rank equally with the trade choice.
But back to the real world. We are a society that wants the best possible life for our children. We equate this with a university education, opening doors to the “best” jobs - those that don’t involve manual work. This isn’t necessarily ideal; it’s just the way it is.
It’s just the way it is, Shane, if you’re a snob.
Note how the second paragraph seems to suggest that Shane Green himself regards the choice to enter a trade as being wholly equivalent to the choice to enter uni, in terms of its value to the individual making that choice. In the last paragraph, though, we’re told that “we”, as “a society”, think that choosing to go to uni is better.
Here we have one of the classic ways in which one might attempt to steer around one’s own prejudices. First, deny that one has them. Then say that because of the prejudices that the rest of society has, one really has no choice but to go along with it.
I don’t think that society is as prejudiced against the trades as Shane makes out. If nothing else, most people (especially those who’ve had to hire one) would regard becoming a plumber as a great way to make lots of money. Certainly, it’s preferable to academia in that respect. In terms of prestige, too, lots of tradespeople own their own businesses, provide a valuable and sometimes essential service, take pride in their work, and exhibit skills that most of us don’t have. As someone who is conspicuously ungifted in the manual arts, I’m much more likely to be intimidated by a tradesperson than to look down on him. And if I had a child who was interested in taking on a trade apprenticeship, I’d give her every encouragement, and I certainly wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that she made up a part of that “worrying” statistic about kids not going to university.
Of course, if it’s true that a big proportion of public school kids who want to go to uni are being given an inferior education to their private school counterparts and being denied an opportunity as a result, then that’s a problem. I would imagine that with the stratospherically high ENTER scores which are required for entry to some courses these days, and with the machine-like efficiency with which some private schools are able to churn out kids with those scores, there are probably kids being unfarily excluded. Without claiming that there are no problems with public schools, though, I wonder whether the ENTER system itself might be a big part of the problem.
I’ve studied alongside students entering the first year of a law degree straight out of high school. The majority of them have almost certainly come from private schools (even at LaTrobe, the ENTER for law was up around the 98 mark, from what I remember, and at Melbourne it was 99.9 or something ridiculous, so the effect would be even more pronounced there). What struck me about them was not how frightfully well educated they were. Don’t get me wrong - they were bright kids, who obviously worked hard and took their studies seriously. But their defining feature in my mind was their exam-orientedness. It was most evident in lectures, where many of those students seemed to engage a kind of filter which was constantly interrogating the information they were hearing so as to deliberately exclude anything which might not be on the exam. Most of the law lectures I attended were, in fact, devoted mostly to cramming student laptops (and, by extension, brains) full of the plethora of unrelated and inconsistent details of law which were necessary to pass the exams, and most of the students gave this process their full attention. Occasionally, though, one of the lecturers would allow herself to rhapsodise for a while about something, a discussion of policy considerations or law reform or the philosophies underpinning a particular area of law. Around me, there was an audible murmur of frustration. “Do we really need to know this?”, I once heard someone behind me whisper. The point at which I began to tune in was the point at which many of the younger fans began to tune out.
During study period before exams, it was common for students to go to the library and go through past exam papers. I even saw tables drawn up featuring the last five years of exams and what topics they had covered, so that students could try to spot a pattern and narrow down their study to the topics that were most likely to be on this year’s exam. It’s likely that students who did that sort of thing got better grades than I did. If they got better grades for that reason, though, then the grade doesn’t reflect anything about their knowledge of the subject - all it reflects is their particularly (and, to my mind, cynically) strong commitment to exam-taking.
When I used to teach instrumental music in private schools, students in years 11 and 12 who were taking music as an extra-curricular activity would frequently be forced by parental diktat to give it up so as to focus more on their academic studies. You can’t really blame them. The ENTER score is the be all and end all of university entrance, so the kid who wants to get into law or medicine has to become what the ENTER system rewards them for becoming. I don’t think they improve their potential as actual doctors or actual lawyers in the process - in fact, I think they compromise it - but that’s the system as it stands.
If the school-leaver law students that I was talking about had come into the course with a broader focus, an interest in the subject that extended beyond examinations, then there’s no doubt in my mind that, quite apart from making the study environment more pleasant for everyone, they would have had a greater potential as lawyers. With the entrance scores as high as they are, though, I don’t think that year 12 students can afford that breadth. They have to be single-minded and exam-focused, or they, like all those public school students, won’t get in. I think it’s to the detriment of the educational institutions and the prefessions which they feed into that a student’s merit is judged by such a crude instrument which is so susceptible to being taken advantage of by a cynical approach to the later years of schooling.
I’m not sure what a better system would look like. Perhaps some kind of short selection course where there would be the opportunity for students to demonstrate not only their exam-passing ability, but also their commitment to learning, their enthusiasm for the field of study, their communication skills, their teamwork abilities, etc. I think we’d find much more depth of talent than we do with the current system, and our schools (including private schools) could devote more of their resources to actual education instead of being forced to become mere exam factories.
Palindromes
We’ve all heard about dogs panicking in pagodas, but check out this palindrome page to really impress your friends. There are selections just waiting for the advertising industry to discover them:
A Toyota! Race fast, safe car. A Toyota.
Some naughty ones:
A man, a plan, a butt tub: anal Panama!
Geopolitical ones:
A medico: “Negro Jamaica? A CIA major genocide, Ma.”
And best of all, some with me in them:
A Dan, a clan, a canal - Canada!
Poor Dan is in a droop.
Pus, Dan! Ogre sales use laser gonads up.
(Hmm … I think my next band will be called “Ogre sales use laser gonads up.”)
(via Metafilter)
Gideon on Mike
Gideon Haigh on Farenheit 9/11:
Most of the film’s more febrile assertions disintegrate on any contact with evidence. Bush, we are told, ferried bin Laden family members to safety in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attacks - except that it proves the flights were authorised by Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar now among the President’s most astringent critics.
This strikes me as an extraordinarily pissweak point. I’m sure that lots of the decisions for which Bush is criticised have involved other people as well. Some of those people may go on to write books which are critical of the administration, but so what?
Perhaps it seems particularly weak in light of the fact that I’ve always thought there was a much stronger point to make about Moore’s use of this episode. I make this critique without having seen the film, so apologies if I’m getting it all wrong, but it seems to me that the whole Bin Laden family exodus thing sounds a lot worse than it actually is. I’m sure that most people know that Osama is estranged from the rest of his family, but I can’t help but wonder whether, when Moore decided to include this in his film, he did so in the hope that a portion of the audience would be digging each other in the ribs and saying “Did you hear that? Osama’s freaking family, man!” All in all, I’d think that getting the Bin Ladens out of the US at that point in time might not have been the worst idea for the sake of protecting their safety, and that even if it shows an obsequious attitude toward the Saudis, that’s hardly the worst of the Bush crimes.
The rest of Gideon’s point-by-point criticism of the movie is pretty poor, too, in my opinion. He seems to play Moore at his own game, throwing around a few unsupported assertions which have only marginal relevance to the point, bringing up some old quotes out of context to show inconsistencies, blah blah blah. If Moore’s points are simplistic and misleading, then Gideon’s are no less so.
Despite all that, though, I do agree with his broader argument, which is that those who support Moore despite acknowledging the propagandistic nature of his film, and who welcome him as a counter to the populist propagandists of the right (Limbaugh, Coulter et al), do so to their detriment. From what I’ve seen and read, the best that can be said of Moore is that he will help to get rid of Bush. I’ll be happy enough to see that happen, but it would bother me to think that the only way of bringing about political change was to meet facile rhetoric with facile rhetoric. I think if we fall into the trap of imagining that the ends justify the means, then the means will inevitably come round to bite us on the bum. There’s a connection here with my views on Australian politics. If we reward crude, simplistic populism, then we’ll end up with politicians who, regardless of their supposed ideological colours, are effectively constrained to present their position in crude, populist terms. It seems to me that good policy is the result of a complex and thoughtful process, and we can only get that kind of policy if we encourage public debate that acknowledges the complexities.
I’m of the view that propaganda is to politics like drugs are to sport. It might be that in the short term, a winning strategy is to dance with the devil. In doing so, though, we risk destroying the structure which makes the whole exercise meaningful and worthwhile.
Intelligence Failure
This comment by CurrencyLad should surely be a candidate for Sedgwick’s Blog Comments Award (although I’m not sure what category it would fall into):
Frankly, I’m suspicious about the general usefulness of intelligence anywhere, in anyone’s hands. Why this fetish for the potential of intelligence?
I think that pretty much says it all.
Doing the Maths
John Quiggin is an economist, so he’s really good at maths. (Well, okay, perhaps that conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the premise, but in John’s case, it’s true). Fortunately, I was sufficiently cognisant of this fact that, having written a comment to one of his posts, questioning his figures, I let my mouse cursor hover long enough over the “Submit” button to realise that I was wrong and he was right, and in doing so I was able to avoid looking like too much of a dickhead. Here’s what he wrote:
TV stations are allowed 15 minutes of ads per hour, which implies that a 2-hour movie can be padded out with around 40 minutes of ads.
Now, doesn’t that seem a bit counter-intuitive? (If your answer is no, please regard the question as rhetorical.) Fifteen minutes per hour, for a two-hour movie, would surely make 30 minutes of ads, not 40? What I realised, though (during my period of well-justified self-doubt) was that John was talking about a movie where the actual movie content minus the ads was two hours long. Each hour of television that the movie occupied would have fifteen minutes’ worth of ads in it, so at the end of the two hours the movie would still have half an hour to play. That half hour could (presumably), have 7.5 minutes of ads in it, leaving another 7.5 minutes still to play at the end of the half hour, but in that 7.5 minutes you could actually have 1.88 minutes of ads, so … hang on … I think I’ve just proven that a movie on commercial television never actually finishes! Gotta rush, gotta get into John’s comment box and point out that I am actually a maths genius after all!
Ugly Stuff
“Mike Moore is entitled to his opinion but that’s the quintessential ugly American, sitting down attacking the Australian prime minister,” Mr Costello told the Nine Network.
An odd place for this kind of anti-American cliche to make an appearance, I thought. And not only that, even taking the cliche at face value, the “quintessential ugly American” would certainly not be sitting down attacking the Australian prime minister, because part of the quintessence of ugly-Americanism as defined by the cliche is insularity and ignorance about the outside world. The classic ugly-American stereotype would be saying “Australia - that’s where they do the skiing and make the chocolate and yodel and stuff, right?”
Thinking again, though, maybe it was a strategic move on Costello’s part, non-sequitur notwithstanding. Throwing a bit of anti-Americanism into the mix might not be a bad idea. He might stand a chance of dragging back that little band of voters who think Mark Latham’s cool because he called John Howard an arselicker and George Bush the worst president in history (or words to that effect). By directing his anti-Americanism specifically at Michael Moore, it’s a win-win - he can appeal to the knee-jerk Yank-haters without running the risk of alienating any pro-American right-wingers, because the latter group could never bring themselves to berate Costello for an attack on Moore.
Darfur Wiki
We should be able to recognise it by now. First there is the small report of violence and strife in a corner of a little known country, in the corner of a newspaper. Then there is the larger report, full of incomprehensible politics and history, acronyms flying everywhere. Someone warns of genocide. There is a stern editorial. Then the debate moves on - Iraq, childhood obesity, a bucks’ night video - and we forget it. Then the devastation occurs and we go back to past news reports and try to track why we missed it.
This time around, it’s happening in the Sudan. There were articles about it here and elsewhere a few weeks ago. Like many, I read them, tried to sort out the politics, failed, resolved to look it up on the internet and then forgot. Inconveniently, the situation failed to solve itself.
This struck a chord with me, not least because my own understanding of the Darfur conflict has followed a similar pattern. When a story like this is emerging, it’s often in a place that you’ve never heard of, with groups of protagonists with funny names who have grievances against each other that you don’t understand. It makes it hard to be as interested as we all should be in something so important as a genocide.
I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be a good idea if some bright person was to keep an eye on these sorts of stories, and maintain some sort of simple, broad-brush summary (kept as accurate as possible as events unfold), to enable those of us who are latecomers to a particular story to catch up with what’s going on and who’s doing what. Then I realised that someone already has. (Well, a group of people, actually). If you’re like me and you’re inclined to glaze over a bit when you read stories about Darfur, because you don’t really have any understanding of what’s going on, then I’d recommend the Wikipedia article on the subject. I think it’s just about spot on in being concise and to the point. It gives you enough detail to give meaning to the news stories that you read, without presuming that you want to become a walking talking expert on the subject. It was last updated six days ago - it discusses events that have happened this month. I think it’s important, actually, that a resource like this exists these days. It has the capacity to make a big difference, because it allows people to ask the questions they might have been afraid to ask (for fear of looking ignorant, maybe) and get accurate, easy-to-understand, up-to-date answers. I think it’s a great tool in the fight against ignorance and apathy (my own, in particular).
Desperado
The last time I read Tim Blair’s website was back in February. Not that I marked the date on the calendar, but I can remember reading this post:
David Deming is an associate professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Oklahoma. Sounds kinda cool, yes? Well, no:
I am scheduled to be moved out of the office I have occupied for the last twelve years into a dank hole in the basement that was never intended to be used as office space. Recent events are the culmination of four years of retaliation, intimidation, and harassment. You see, I don’t have the right politics.
By which Deming means, he does have the right politics. It?s just that they?re the wrong politics for the University of Oklahoma.
At the time, I followed a few links and discovered discussion threads wherein one could find a whole host of other reasons why Deming might have been given the boot, none of which (naturally enough) interested Tim or his commenters.
I’m not sure why I looked back in today - a bit idle and in search of blog fodder, I guess - but, by coincidence, he has another post up about someone getting sacked for the wrong politics:
WHY WON’T SHE COME TO HER SENSES?
Seventies musical identity and former gubernatorial love toy Linda Ronstadt wows ‘em in Vegas:
Singer Linda Ronstadt not only got booed, she got the boot after lauding filmmaker Michael Moore and his new movie “Fahrenheit 9/11″ during a performance at the Aladdin hotel-casino.
Before singing “Desperado” for an encore Saturday night, the 58-year-old rocker called Moore a “great American patriot” and “someone who is spreading the truth.” She also encouraged everybody to see the documentary about President Bush.
Ronstadt’s comments drew loud boos and some of the 4,500 people in attendance stormed out of the theater. People also tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.
“It was a very ugly scene,” Aladdin President Bill Timmins told The Associated Press. “She praised him and all of a sudden all bedlam broke loose.”
Timmins, who is British, had Ronstadt escorted from the premises and vowed she?ll never perform at the Aladdin again. The British seem to have a particular dislike of Moore.
This is the second time Ronstadt?s dissent has provoked crushing. Her upcoming shows in Fort Worth (September 14/15) should be something to see.
Turns out (as Tim reveals in an update) that the stories about the audience reaction might have been exaggerated, but no word on whether the reaction of the Aladdin manager was similarly cooked up.
What’s interesting, if you haven’t spotted it by now, is the hypocrisy on Tim’s part. When a uni professor is sacked (or claims to have been sacked) for expressing right-wing views, it’s gets an unequivocal thumbs-down (which I would agree with, if it was true). When a singer gets sacked for expressing left-wing views, it’s all good fun and a terrific chance to try and deny that Michael Moore is popular. But silly me (to reluctantly co-opt a Tim Blair cliche) - I forgot that only right-wing free speech is worthy of protection.
Kcab emoc seiznem
On the subject of anti-Liberal Party websites, I followed a link of Chris Sheil’s to the website of the Satanic Liberal Party of Australia, perhaps the most amusing part of which was the Google ad which was served to the top of the page:
Written & Spoken
A former Labor Party adviser is the creator of the johnhowardlies.com website, an investigation by The Age reveals.
[…]
The formerly unauthorised anti-Government website was pulled down for a “revamp” just hours after The Age yesterday asked why Labor was promoting the site in an official email newsletter.
[…]
The publishers of johnhowardlies.com, who until now remained anonymous, faced a fine of up to $5000 for breaching the Electoral Act.
Under Australia’s electoral laws all electoral comment must be properly attributed to a company or individual.
Does this mean that someone like Professor Bunyip, had he decided to remain anonymous (which, as I understand it, he hasn’t), could be up for a $5000 fine for publishing electoral comment on his website? To me, this seems a bit bizarre for a medium like the internet. I can understand the law in the context of old media, where every electoral comment takes up an irreplaceable chunk of a finite communication channel. The internet isn’t like that, though. If someone wants to set up MarkLathamLies.com, or JohnHowardHasNeverToldAFibInHisLife.com or whatever, then they can do so perfectly easily, and readers will probably tend to salt the content as liberally as they might in the case of any other anonymous site. What public interest is served by denying anonymous commentary in a medium which is effectively unlimited? Maybe it’s an attempt to prevent unfounded smears and slanders, but I don’t see that an anonymous website is any greater threat to a person’s integrity than the mate of my friend’s Uncle who reckons he saw John Howard having a gay sex romp with Alexander Downer in the parliamentary library while Bronwyn Bishop dispensed sunflower oil from a strategically situated turkey baster. Rumour and innuendo and unfounded allegations don’t rely on the internet or any other mass media.
So is there something I’m missing? Why should this rule apply to the internet?