I remember how it was -- JR
My daughter’s planning an arts (humanities) degree. I’m proud (and quietly terrified)
As an Arts graduate myself, I have a degree of sympathy with the lady below but I think she is out of touch with the modern world. Instead of introducing kids to great literature and ideas of the past, a modern Arts degree is more likely to be dominated by "theory" aka Marxism. Arts faculties these days are little more than Madrassas of Leftism. They close minds rather than open them.
I greatly enjoyed the introduction to the humanities that I got from my education but I am not sure where you could get anything comparable these days. Find below what a humanities education can be
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2015/07/some-reflections-about-education.html
With year 12 exams now a sleep-in-filled month ago, my answer to the question of what my daughter’s plans are for next year is always given with a grimace and often followed by discussion about our society’s priorities. You see, my daughter is planning to do an arts degree.
I’m proud of her choice, despite all the jokes about highly qualified telemarketers or the core ability of an arts graduate to add the word “why” into the standard question: “Would you like fries with that?”
That’s because I deeply admire people whose motivation to study is to know more about history, language, culture and society, as well as to expand their critical thinking skills and understand our place in the world.
I’m also terrified she’s going to end up balancing on a see-saw with low career prospects at one end and a high HECS debt on the other. And yet, I read that current arts students are persevering with their course despite the soaring cost of their degree. I confess, I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and singing “la, la, la” when I think about how the 2020 Morrison government’s “job-ready graduates” scheme raised fees for arts courses by 117 per cent. (Yes, it more than doubled the cost.)
To be honest, I’d be quietly thrilled if my daughter was keen on one of the courses that had their fees lowered because they have a more direct link to a career. But the key word in that sentence is “if”.
The parents who are driving teachers out of the classroom
I’ve lived long enough to know that pursuing a course because of parental wishes or societal pressures will likely lead to drop-out or, like several people I know, to a completed degree but not a single day spent working in that field. And, let’s face it, many professions arising from courses for which HECS fees were cut by the Morrison government – to encourage participation – are not exactly inspiring at the moment. Teachers are leaving in droves, vets are experiencing high suicide rates and health workers are often overworked and underappreciated.
I’m heartened to discover that changes to HECS aren’t affecting students’ course choices nearly as much as the policy creators hoped. Research conducted in NSW (which, full disclosure, was led by my nephew Max Yong) showed that only 1.5 per cent of course choosers were influenced by price.
That’s good news because, while announcing free nursing courses makes for a great political soundbite, young people seem clever enough to know it’s a terrible idea to encourage uninterested and unsuitable people into a caring profession.
Frankly, it’s damn rude of a government to devalue those interested in bigger-picture thinking. I’d go as far as suggesting that increasing HECS fees for arts-based subjects is punishment for those not buying into neoliberal views. Especially when a HECS debt of about $45,000 (the rough figure my daughter’s facing, not including the costs of moving from a regional home to a city to study) might stretch out to a life-long burden.
Not only is it backwards logic to charge the highest prices for those courses that are less likely to set you up with a high-paying career (a point made by everyone from my nephew to the Productivity Commission), but surely we want to encourage deep and contextual thinking?
This is especially so in our era of quick-fire social media opinions and increasing mis- and disinformation. At a time when teachers are being told not to bring politics into the classroom, I reckon we need more people who understand the difference between political leanings and the complexities of history. For instance, introducing students to both the reasoning behind the creation of Israel and the impact on Palestine is not politics; it’s education.
If we cease to value thought and scholarship for scholarship’s sake, we might as well all give up and leave our world to AI businesses that are happily ripping off original thought in the name of profit.
We don’t always know what will come from study for study’s sake. When my father pursued a degree, then PhD, in the 1960s, pure maths was seen to have little real-world relevance, yet it is now appreciated for the transferable skills to fields such as computing and economics.
Who knows what jobs will be available by the time my daughter finishes her degree, which may or may not include history, English and Indonesian, subjects her amazing (public school) teachers inspired her to explore. Either way, as someone looking set to achieve a high ATAR, I think she should be celebrated for choosing arts over options that academic kids often feel pushed towards.
The truth is she has no idea what she wants to do when she grows up and, at 18, I reckon that’s OK. In fact, it aligns with the idea of studying humanities which, instead of being about concrete certainty and measurable outcomes, is about asking questions and probing possibilities.
I hope the current government reverses “job-ready graduates” as part of its review of the Australian Universities Accord, which is investigating the quality, accessibility, affordability and sustainability of higher education. Yes, that’s partly on a very selfish level as I don’t want my daughter to be burdened by study-related debt, but also because young people shouldn’t be punished for asking big questions about our world.
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Mindfulness therapy does little for high-schoolers' mental health, research finds
When a group of teenagers was given eight weeks of therapy and mindfulness training, there was no improvement in their overall mental health, a study has shown.
The University of Sydney paper tracked more than 1,000 year 8 and year 9 high-schoolers, half of whom were given dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), while the other half were not.
DBT is a type of psychological intervention based on various emotional regulation skills centred primarily around mindfulness.
The DBT therapy group engaged in mindfulness and other emotional regulation exercises.
Lead author Lauren Harvey said the only improvements were seen among those students who continued their therapy exercises at home.
The clinical psychologist said these results suggested that participants needed a certain willingness for the therapy to be effective.
"What some of these findings are telling is we need that level of engagement and buy-in," Dr Harvey said.
"The research is starting to show that it's not about a particular strategy, it's actually about how we use certain strategies and in which context we apply them."
She said similar studies in the UK had also cast doubt over the efficacy of mindfulness meditation in classrooms.
Dr Harvey said, therefore, she did not advise these practices be imposed in classrooms or workplaces, since the evidence suggested it was not generally effective.
While companies such as Amazon have introduced mindfulness booths for staff, Dr Harvey said such enthusiasm for mindfulness activities may be misleading.
She said sometimes problems were "systemic", rather than internal. "With the rise of mindfulness in our society it's been branded as a panacea to fix all of our issues, but realistically it's probably not," Dr Harvey said.
Sarah Swannell, a director of Willow Oak Psychology, says DBT is generally not appropriate for children who show no real interest in it. As a DBT clinician, she says the therapy is traditionally used by people actively seeking help for depression, emotional dysregulation, and suicidality.
Dr Swannell also said time frames for the therapy also tended to be much longer than eight weeks, with training often continuing for 12 months.
She said DBT could be effective in a classroom setting, provided it was offered as an opt-in activity.
"The buy-in needs to be not just by the kids who are receiving the intervention, but the entire school," Dr Swannell said. "All of the teachers, the staff, and the administration need to be on board with it so that there's a really positive culture around learning skills."
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AmeriCorps’ Legacy: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Ask any emergency dispatch team to describe five-alarm fires, and they will likely say they’re rare and catastrophic no matter where they occur. AmeriCorps is a five-alarm fire of its own making. If you don’t believe us, feel free to peruse the latest Management Challenges report issued on November 15th by the AmeriCorps Office of Inspector General. What you’ll find is 26 pages chock full of rot and dysfunction.
According to the report, the agency failed to “demonstrate adequate knowledge and understanding of Federal accounting standards and financial reporting requirements, and effective financial management practices.” Financial mismanagement and incompetency are nothing new for AmeriCorps – this has been a problem for decades.
Unmitigated fraud bedevils the agency. The report cites the most prevalent fraud at AmeriCorps to be “falsified or otherwise non-compliant timesheets.” That’s right, volunteers and even the agency’s own members are siphoning off money and making off like robber barons by falsifying their own hours. In two separate cases, AmeriCorps programs at universities in North Carolina submitted falsified timesheets that alleged members worked excessive hours on weekends and holidays.
The report also outlines the lack of oversight in the agency’s grant programs, which has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars due to schemes orchestrated by recipients. AmeriCorps has brought in contractors supposedly to help with their management problems but has no guarantees any positive changes will last when these temporary workers leave.
Here’s the bottom line: AmeriCorps has always been a lost cause. This report adds another chapter to its history of underperformance, waste, fraud, and abuse. Its troubled relationships with accountability and oversight have been laid bare for everyone to see time and time again. President Biden deciding to prop up yet another AmeriCorps program through his “American Climate Corps” plan is the exact opposite of reform. The agency, like many others in the federal government, has proven time and time again that it is incapable of reforming itself, is stealing from hardworking taxpayers, and needs to be shuttered.
https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=409787
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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