Tuesday, September 21, 2004

CREDENTIALISM LIVES! THE HIDEBOUND EDUCATION BUREAUCRACY

This story could be repeated in most countries of the developed world today

"It takes a peculiar type of institutionalised stupidity not to appreciate the value of Elizabeth Stone. Her treatment by the morbid education bureaucracy has opened a window into the real reasons why the school system is a war zone in this federal election.

This week, Stone is going to turn away from a successful career in law and commit to becoming a high school teacher. Why? Because she thinks it is the most important thing she can do. Until recently she had planned to teach in disadvantaged public schools with the greatest needs. They are desperately short of maths teachers so I was going to teach maths," she told me. Her ambition was to become the headmistress of a damaged public school and turn it around.

Laudable. But what does she bring to the table beyond idealism and altruism? A lot. She is a Rhodes scholar. She has a BA and LLB from the University of NSW, and a masters in law from Oxford University. At school she excelled at academics, sport and leadership. She is now a lecturer in law at UNSW, teaches classes of 30 to 40 students and, most importantly, ranks in the top 1 per cent of teacher performance surveys. She is 31, married with two young children, but willing to take the big salary cut required to become a teacher.

You couldn't write a better resume. Stone is the sort of person the public education system should be desperate to recruit. So how did the NSW Department of Education respond when she applied for a job?

Not qualified. Go away.

This, remember, is the same bureaucracy which for decades has averted its gaze from the excesses of the NSW Teachers' Federation as the union blocked, stymied and diluted every attempt to measure the effectiveness of teachers in the classroom and enable the removal of those who shouldn't be there.

This is the power alliance that has contributed to the exodus from the public system. One in five students was enrolled outside the public system 25 years ago, but now it's one in every three.

What exactly was wrong with Elizabeth Stone? She didn't have a diploma of education. The bureaucracy could not see beyond this fatal gap. It would not even consider allowing her to teach (and thus earn an income) while getting a Dip Ed in her spare time at her own cost. "All they did was put up barriers," she said.

Inevitably this story flows towards the private school system. She made inquiries and was immediately snapped up. Last week she was offered a contract by Barker College, which is near her home on the North Shore. "She is going to make an enormous contribution to our kids," Barker's headmaster, Dr Roderic Kefford, told me. "Why would Elizabeth not be the sort of teacher any school would want to grab?"

Private schools, unlike public schools, have the flexibility to offer a job to any applicant with high potential. They allow a Dip Ed to be acquired as part of professional development..... "

More here

I myself had a very similar experience over 30 years ago. I wanted to do High School teaching but had at the time "only" an M.A. -- no Diploma of Education. The New South Wales Department of Education gave me the heave-ho but a small regional Catholic school (at Merrylands) gave me a job teaching economics and geography. Although the school served a very working-class area, my students got outstanding results in their final High School examinations (the Higher School Certificate, which serves as the university entrance examination). Despite that outstanding track record as an experienced teacher, I am still to this day not regarded as "qualified" to teach in any government High School in Australia. Nothing has been learned in the last 30 years.





A TRUE LIBERAL EDUCATION IS NEEDED

An argument for a very different education from what we have today:

"Education is out of joint. It examines nature more than life, mathematics more than justice. It assumes we are placed here to watch the growth of plants or to marvel at the speed of the Internet, not to learn how to do good, and avoid evil, as Socrates understood. Man is elevated only to the extent of his morality and moral wisdom. That should be the North star of education.

The great business of the human mind is not external nature, but discovering a higher purpose between ashes to ashes and dust to dust. As unsurpassed philosopher Sam Johnson elaborated: "Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be pleasing or useful, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all places. ... Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians."

Elementary school students need immersion in Aesop's Fables, La Fontaine's Fables, "Alice in Wonderland," and Greek mythology. Instead, they read insipid "award winning" books like "The Bee Tree" or "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus." Young children need instruction in moral distinctions and matters of degree; in speaking and writing with exactness and brevity; and in landmark issues and events in American history, including slavery, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. At present, however, young children are taught nothing about expressive skills, nothing about moral reasoning and nothing about the pivotal happenings that have made the United States, warts and all, the greatest nation in the history of mankind.

Secondary school students need to master Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dumas and Thoreau. The histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch and Gibbon should be scrutinized.....

The United States could have avoided much of its current and past follies, both foreign and domestic, if its leaders and the public knew history and had acquired a fine sense of justice, prudence and moral judgment.... Without a keenly developed sense of morality and justice, there is nothing to distinguish mankind from beasts.

More here






HOW MULTICULTURALISM TRASHED A SCHOOL

In Australia, multiculturalism has come to mean an abandonment of all standards for right and wrong or good and bad.

I was reminded of being told by one teacher and the husband of another how Middle Eastern boys in an inner city school had treated the female staff with a gross lack of respect. These women had felt sexually harassed.

And I was reminded even more of Coburg's Moreland City College, which lost two thirds of its students in five years and is now being shut down as a lost cause. What no bureaucrat or politician will openly admit is the extraordinary reason for Moreland's death -- how a school that had planned to grow to 1200 students in fact shrank to just 250.

The answer, as I found when I visited two years ago, and spoke to parents, teachers and the principal, was one of those nasty secrets that most of us are too scared to mention for fear of being branded racist.

Moreland was a fashionably multicultural school, just like the school my colleague visited (let's call it School X), so that the increasing number of Middle Eastern children who went there were made to feel at home - their parents' old home, that is, and not their new Australian one.

Islamic preachers addressed assembly, Arabic and Turkish became the main foreign languages taught, Islamic headscarfs were common.... Worse, Moreland become known for its ethnic gangs - with Lebanese students notoriously smashing up three Yooralla buses that were kept at the school. To make a tough situation worse, its discipline and academic standards were left to slide, without any intervention by the Education Department until it was far too late.

By that time, other children - Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Italian - had been pulled out by their parents and sent to other schools, which meant that those left were overwhelmingly Muslim, and Australia must have seemed the "other".

No doubt, the students... got the usual teaching about Australia and its past - about our "genocide", our "stolen generations" and our "racism".... An education of the kind that had Melbourne University's Hellenic Society tell me: "A nation that created itself from the blood of its slaughtered and persecuted native inhabitants and the destruction of their culture has no right to demand further assimilation from its migrants."....

Have such students yet learned to call Australia home? How successful have we been in assimilating them, so that they share our most important values and feel as responsible for this wonderful land as do you?....

In fact, what worries me most is not even that a minority of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, encouraged by too many of their "leaders", seem particularly intolerant and rejecting of Australia.

More worrying is that our institutions -- not least our schools -- don't seem to promote aggressively an Australia that the children of such immigrants would want to join. Or even give them all the skills to do so. It's not just that we like to madly imagine this country has an evil past. See how we trash our present, too.....

Is it smart to let poorer state schools, or whole suburbs at that, become dominated by a minority culture, and turn into ghettoes? Is multiculturalism in schools -- such as the teaching of the student's home language -- trapping immigrant students in their own closed culture, and should we try harder to make them fall in love with Australia's?

Are we too often teaching students to disrespect this country and its past, and to see Australia as ugly? Are we asserting our values and our core culture strongly enough? Or have we so lost confidence that teachers do not dare even to enforce basic rules of civilised behaviour? And again I ask: what do our bureaucrats do to pick up schools that are failing?

In the end, I suspect, we will discover that discipline, rigor, a little prudishness and an optimistic belief in Australia and a respect for its rituals were not so stupid, after all.

More here.


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