I promise…

To keep my promise – mostly. That is:

Friends, so depressing is all this and more in this dark time for Australian politics – not just beginning at the last election either – that I have decided to opt out of further commentary. This blog will become exactly what it says – a Commonplace Book of images, quotations, reviews, nostalgia and history, sometimes music, and sometimes recycled matter from my long back catalogue of blog posts.

But as you saw my recommendation of the 2013 NSW Schools Spectacular did rather get hijacked by:

Not much ambiguity about that, is there? But click on the image and you will – sorry, might – be taken to the Prime Minister’s site where there is – might be – a transcript of his friend Andrew Bolt giving him a hard time over what Young Christopher ACTUALLY said.  It would be rude of me to resort to words like “Jesuitical” and “casuistry” given those are of a less enlightened age, and both gents are well… But there it is. Our forebears would have seen the point as Tony Abbott manages to make a bad look even less attractive.

Go to the NSW Liberal Party site and read the press handout on behalf of National Party member and Education Minister Adrian Piccoli:

on November 29, 2013

The NSW Minister for Education Adrian Piccoli has asked the Commonwealth Government to clarify its position on education cuts and which schools will be affected, following comments by the Federal Education Minister at a meeting of Education Ministers in Sydney today.

The Federal Minister for Education suggested that reductions in Commonwealth funding would only be applied to States’ and Territories’ public schools, as Catholic and Independent schools were protected in the Australian Education Act (2013).

NSW attempted to clarify the assertion, however, the Federal Minister refused to provide any further details about the Commonwealth’s plans, creating further uncertainty for all NSW Schools.

Mr Piccoli said that the majority of States and Territories also restated their support for the principles of the Gonski model with recommendations passed by the Council.

“A majority of Ministers supported a needs-based school funding model, based on the principles of the Gonski report, and that the six-year funding agreements signed between the Commonwealth and the States and Territories should be honoured. They also supported the rights of non-signatory states to be offered Commonwealth funding,” Mr Piccoli said. 

“The NSW motions were supported by Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory.

“Today was the first opportunity for all Education Ministers to meet since the Federal election, and I am disappointed that it failed to provide certainty for all NSW Schools.”

Here is just one of Christopher Pyne’s performances before the election.

And after…

Remember when “Gonski review panel member Kathryn Greiner says signing up to the Gonski reforms is a “no brainer,” and that this is the best opportunity for states to get required schools funding”? Sigh! She was such a leftie, eh! Not.

Today a former NSW deputy director-general of education and training, Jim McMorrow, has a go in the Sydney Morning Herald.

NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli is not alone in finding it hard to make sense of what his federal counterpart, Christopher Pyne, has up his sleeve for the funding of schools beyond next year.

For example, what does Pyne mean by a ”flatter” schools funding formula? We can assume he does not mean to flatten it upwards, raising the resource levels of all schools to the standards now enjoyed by the privileged few. But if ”flatter” means a smaller piece of the funding pie for disadvantaged schools, with any increases spread more thinly, this will make a mockery of the Gonski review principles enshrined in the Australian Education Act 2013.

Most of the students whose educational outcomes are put at risk by family and community poverty, lack of fluency in English, irregular school attendance, transience or remoteness depend on the public education system for their chance of school success, not to mention a rewarding life.

How can Pyne justify any move by the Commonwealth to shift the funding balance away from, instead of towards, these schools? Will he repeal the act? Or just destroy its integrity?…

With very few exceptions – Kevin Donnelly being one – the chorus of hurt, disappointment and downright anger directed against C Pyne and T Abbott has been loud and not very proud, and it has not been just from the left either.

Dean Ashenden, Pyne’s Gonski shambles; Leo D’Angelo Fisher, Breaking the Gonski promise may provide painful lessons for Christopher Pyne; Peter Boden, Gonski reform architect Dr Ken Boston slams Christopher Pyne over school-funding backflip; Laurie Oakes, Christopher Pyne needs to play the statesman, not games; David Zyngier, Ditching Gonski: what’s so unfair about funding based on need?; North Coast Voices, The Lies Abbott Tells Part 5; Adrian Piccoli, Politics has always been the enemy of good education policy in this country.

BTW, speaking of Kevin Donnelly, here is something I wrote years ago:

I did Dip Ed at Sydney University way back in 1965. So I have been around education for a very long time. Kevin Donnelly’s Why our schools are failing (sic) is probably the worst, the most stupid, book on education that I have read in all that time. To call it reactionary would be to flatter it. Even Malcolm Turnbull is so embarrassed that he is constrained to say in his foreword: “Dr Donnelly’s views are his own and not those of the Menzies Research Centre.” Malcolm Turnbull may be many things, but stupid is not one of them.

What you have in this book is a cherry-picking exercise that would disgrace an undergraduate. Armed with a stock of cliches and prejudices, and with quite a few windmills to tilt at, Donnelly lays about the past forty years with an acute lack of discrimination, quite often plainly not understanding what he is criticising.

Want to know the right way to learn History? Simple, learn off a few dates… I do not jest. Everything since about 1960 seems to have been a left-wing plot or galloping political correctness. Objectivity is not Donnelly’s long suit, nor is analysis, or fair treatment of the evidence.

Typically Donnelly is his quoting Richard Tarnas on postmodernism (evil.) Now I happen to rather like Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind: very readable and often challenging. Donnelly cherry-picks the part that suits him, but since he regards environmental education (along with just about everything else that has happened since 1960) as deplorable political correctness, he neglects to cherry-pick such things as this:

Scott London: You point out that a widespread sense of urgency is tangible on many levels today, as if one historical era is coming to an end and another is about to begin.

Richard Tarnas: Yes, there is a real awareness that things have to change. People are becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that the ecological situation is critical and that we cannot continue to live according to the same assumptions with which we have lived blithely for the past several hundred years. There are also social, economic, and political dimensions to the crisis. There is the unprecedented plurality of perspectives and worldviews and religious and philosophical and political perspectives that are in the air. And, when it comes down to it, there is a spiritual crisis that pervades our world.

I think it affects everybody, but the more informed and thoughtful a person is, the more aware they are of the reality of the spiritual crisis. We live in a world in which mainstream, conventional modern science has essentially voided the cosmos of all intrinsic meaning and purpose. There is no spiritual dimension to it from its point of view. The intellectual power of mainstream modern science has effectively defined what kind of cosmos we live in. And yet human beings aspire for spiritual significance in the life that they lead and in the world that they live in. It is only, I think, though going through a profound inner transformation, and also an intellectual transformation, that one can see beyond that crisis and come into a world of a different kind.

The fact that Tarnas is “Director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies” seems to pass Donnelly by, who is, whatever he means by this, a stickler for the old “disciplines”. But Tarnas lives in the 21st century, after all…

See Kevin Donnelly’s pre=election objections to Gonski. In part:

Such research mirrors that of Gary Marks of the University of Melbourne, which also concludes that socio-economic status is not the main influence affecting student performance as measured by year 12 results and success at tertiary entry.

In one paper, Marks states “research has shown that socio-economic background has only a moderate relationship with educational outcomes, not a deterministic relationship so often claimed”.

In a second paper examining why non-government schools generally outperform government schools, Marks writes: “Therefore socio-economic background accounts for only between 20 and 30 per cent of school-sector differences in tertiary entrance performance.”

Other factors influencing success or failure include a student’s ability and motivation, school culture and classroom environment, and the expectation that students can do well.

Instead of embarking on a class war where so-called privileged and wealthy non-government schools are stigmatised and discriminated against, and based on the principle that all students deserve to be properly treated, any new funding model should be sector blind.

To do otherwise is to unfairly discriminate against the increasing numbers of parents choosing Catholic and independent schools.

It does not take too much imagination to see that Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne are on the same page as Kevin Donnelly, does it?

Nice place, eh! I have been there several times in the past as a debating coach at Sydney Boys High – a state school that is also – anomalously some might say – a GPS school. Riverview was more than a touch more privileged and dripping with cash than we were. But they are not all bad:  Tony Abbott’s old school hits out at asylum seeker stance as ‘betraying moral values’.  Perhaps I should mention, after that, that Scott Morrison went to Sydney Boys High – though I don’t remember him. Maybe that is because he was in the class of 1985, which I did not have much to do with. The class of 86, on the other hand, produced among others Ben Pearson, who oversees all campaign and communications outputs for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Evan Ruth who, after a career with UNHCR including time in the refugee camps on the Afghan border, is now a a Judge in the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal in the UK, and even more I could name.  I wonder if they remember Scott Morrison?

Finally, thanks to laberal:

Update 4.48 pm

I will believe this when it really happens. Perhaps we haven’t heard them correctly this time either. I do not trust them, and I trust their probable ultimate agenda even less.

However: School funding: Government to largely honour Gonski deals, boost spending for states that did not sign up.

How much wiggle room is there in LARGELY?