Conservatives have been losing their sh*t over what is taught in schools and books. Educators are being harassed, and books are being taken off the shelves. If a book is about to be banned, read it. Florida is at the center of book bans and taking schools to task for daring to do their jobs. After all, Florida is governed by a wannabe authoritarian.
Redacting history and historical facts. The Germans teach and are reminded from the cradle to the grave of their part prior to and during WW2. All of Germany pays attention to its history good or bad. They as a consequence now have a more tolerant and united nation as a result compared to DeSantis’s, Trump’s and the GOP’s America.
“Florida is doing its best to shut down discussions about race, slavery, anything having to do with a challenge to the idea that racism is still a real factor in American life today,” said one author and former professor.
Why aren’t the backbone of the 50k untenured lowly-paid university lecturers, tutors and researchers striking here in Australia? Universities in Australia are paying administrators millions to turn our Universities into Corporate businesses for profit on the backs of false promises while fleecing and driving the next generations into debt for certificates of little or no use. One degree no longer guarantees anything. Two are a risk. MBAs are now commonplace and we now have the most educated but too few tradies on the planet.
Doing courses in introduction to the right people clubs and social networks would lead to greater opportunity than any degree. Apprenticeships guaranteeing the right match, far better than any degree, when it comes to social mobility. Assistance in crossing social barriers would be far more useful than the current promise of education that leads to Uber driving.
Part-time faculty at the New School and Parsons School of Design in New York City went on strike last week. Jacobin spoke with striking workers about their demands for job security and wage increases to keep up with the cost of living.
It is vital to free ourselves from belief in the systems of white supremacy and imperialism that are inculcated in the educational system and are affirmed and amplified by the media and establishment opinion.
The recent death of Queen Elizabeth II puts the need for political and psychological liberation in high relief. We are encouraged to admire an anachronistic monarchy, and are exhorted to join in mourning an individual and a system that have caused great harm to Black and other oppressed people around the world.
The equivalent of madrasas but in New York. Republicans want them in their States too but Christian. Building Cultural armies for war.
“The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition—and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.”
Ten years ago, Australia’s then-prime minister, Julia Gillard, gave a speech in parliament that would echo long after her leadership came to an end.
“I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not,” said Gillard, in response to the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, accusing her of sexism.
“And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever.”
In Australia it’s “teachers in Government Schools are Marxists” who encourage sexual fluidity and are grooming our children. Dutton has announced it as his central campaign as leader of the Opposition
Anyone familiar with how Fox News gradually warms its audience up to an idea could see it coming. First, the network ran endless segments hyping the myth that school teachers were training kindergarteners to hate white people with something called “critical race theory.” Next came false claims that schools that accept LGBTQ teachers and students were “grooming” children to be sexually abused by pedophiles. Having implanted the idea that public schools are a scary place turning their grandkids into self-loathing sexual perverts, the end game was finally rolled out during the popular primetime program “The Ingraham Angle”: It’s time to end public education entirely.
Two idiots with no ideas of their own Andrew Bolt and Dutton chat on Sky News demanding “parents should decide the national curriculum”. So what do elected governments in a democracy get paid for? Not a word on how that should be achieved if it wasn’t their job? Parents should stop work and homeschool and assess their kids any way they want one can only assume.
... Australia’s version of Sean Hannity, Andrew Bolt, Dutton revealed how that ‘soft’ side will dictate his behavior. Taking a leaf out of the playbook of the absurd Republicans such as Sarah Palin and Marjorie Taylor Greene he unveiled his first target in his quest to win back the sensible middle. That is to attack teachers using the treatment of LGBTIQA+ students as his weapon of choice. The assault in the US on these children is obscene and the right wing of our Liberal Party has its own history using teachers as the focus of their dog-whistle tactics.
Dutton…. With the enthusiastic encouragement of Bolt he made is initial gambit in presenting what will be his friendly, softer side. He firstly attacked those radical teachers who, as part of the Union movement, control the ALP, uninterested in the fact that the Teachers Union is not affiliated with the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
…. Dutton has embraced this right-wing diatribe questioning the values of the National Curriculum and parroting almost word for word Florida’s Republican Governor, Ron DeSanto’s views that parents are excluded from the teaching of their children. Dutton’s articulation of this right-wing position is that he ‘wants to shine a light on (the exclusion of parent’s rights) and let parents be the judges on what is being taught in schools’.
How far away are we from the condemnation of critical race theory? Not far when you consider the Ramsay Centre’s history curriculum based on the premise that the civilization of western values are superior to those in non-western cultures. Tony Abbott, after all, has insisted on the need for the Ramsay Centre to be explicitly “right-wing”.
We owe to one another our time and energies to improve our communities and our nation, and to protect and strengthen our democracy. There’s no guarantee that civic education will heal our wounds or make us more able to enact sensible measures the nation needs — such as reducing gun violence, as well as slowing and reversing climate change, and protecting the right to vote — but I can think of no better way to get to where we need to be.
With no policies to draw on other than the total privatisation of education and the welcoming of the dark ages Education Ministers Tudge and now Robert have turned to America to ape what conservative Republicans are doing there to alter the course of education and the teaching of history. The have been intent on censoring what can and can’t be taught in our schools. They are intent on continuing mythologising rather than facing the reality of this nations origins. Their focus is to eliminate 40,k years and fabricate the past 200 and eliminating any CRT Critical Racial teaching from our Educational Programs. It’s the eqivalent of Germany eliminating any critical analysis of its part in WW2.
We saw the introduction of the Ramsay Foundation’s introduction of a private degree solely on Western Civilisation introduced to some of our Universities under the LNP and their efforts to establish the Coppenhagen Consensus Center under Dr B Lomborg here. Tony Abbott was prepared to offer any campus $4M to situate Dr B Lomborg’s Climate denialist center here. Now its a concerted effort to eliminate CRT from our schools, forsake history curriculums,and to mythologise a mere 200 years of White Colonial history. They simply do what America is doing despite the fact we are Australia and have a unique Indigenous past of our own not yet told or discovered.
Continuing the critical race theory con, the Florida governor claimed publishers were slapping paint on their books to hide the fact we were trying to indoctrinate children. Florida’s Department of Education, led by DeSantis’s new rules, released this statement, “The highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an “alarming” 71% were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics, the release said.” Let’s look at some examples of CRT being taught to the kids: Oh, wait. They didn’t offer any. To begin this discussion, Fox News’ chyron screamed, “FL DEPT OF EDUCATION REJECTS 54 MATH TEXTBOOKS.”
Proud graduate Captain Stuart Robert MP of Australia’s Noted College of Bastardisation and Sexual Abuse became the promoter and overseer of Australia’s worst-ever Social Welfare debacle ROBODEBT. He is now Minister in Charge of Education and blamed “dud teachers” in our government schools of dragging Australia down when compared with comparable results in the rest of the world. One can only suggest Robert was talking about himself having attended that now famous Government College known as Duntroon. The “dud teachers” of Duntroon it seems resulted in his ranking as the most corrupt MP among current LNP ranks and possibly the decade if not longer.Robert it seems was trying to explain why he’s such a corrupt and incompetant shithead.
Robert has a history of foot in mouth disease that is legend and ranks as the most self-serving and incompetent MP’s in LNP ranks standing shoulder to shoulder in that competition with ex-cop Peter Dutton. Dutton wins simply because he’s been there the longest.
The acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert surely assumed he was chatting confidentially among friends last week when he told a private schools conference the sustained decline in the academic results of Australian 15-year-olds relative to their international peers is because of “dud teachers” in government schools. The “duds” were defined as the “bottom 10 per cent of teachers” who graduate from initial teaching courses notwithstanding they “can’t read and write”. But private schools are dud-free zones, the acting minister purred to his audience, because principals have the power to hire and fire and are naturally intolerant of dud educators, and if the government could only “bottle” the success of these schools, the nation’s youth would rise beyond mediocrity.
Perpetuation of the myth that White settlers are the superior people of Western nations is inspiring racism and right-wing extremism, writes Bilal Cleland.
The resource advantage of private schools is set to continue for the rest of the decade under the terms of the Commonwealth-State bilateral funding agreements. Private schools will be funded at over 100 per cent of their Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) while public schools will be funded at less than 91 per cent of their SRS in all states except the ACT. As a result, public schools will remain massively under-funded. It points to the need for a comprehensive overhaul of school funding.
Tudge’s strategy is just another example of the Morrison Government tendency to issue so-called plans and strategies that are not worth the paper they are written on.
Worker action exposed systematic wage theft within Australia’s largest university and forced management to pay staff the millions that had been stolen from them.
Unlike Tim Smith Alan Tudge survived his car crash moment simply by refusing to go. Is it any wonder he supported Smith to stay because it once again reminded us just how self serving a prick he was. A man with little class morals or manners Tudge was appointed as Minister for Education by Morrison.
Tudge now also believes in greater Voter ID just as he believes history shows there are people out there in his electorate who want to “steal” his position.
History recognises distinctions between fact and fallacy. Tudge tells us he wants history teaching that “recognises our democracy is based on our Christian and Western origins, with a reference to the importance of the values of patriotism and freedom”. Any well-educated history student would know that in the first part he is simply wrong. The origins of democracy lie in classical and pagan Greece, not Christianity or the West, both later inventions. In the second part, he offers his opinions and, as he says, his values, but not historical understanding.
An Israeli consul general baselessly accused a graduate student of antisemitism and said she shouldn’t teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Welcome to an Israeli Book Burning
The intervention by an Israeli government official, Consul General to the Southeastern United States Anat Sultan-Dadon, followed a pressure campaign by right-wing pro-Israel websites and an advocacy group to remove the graduate student, Kylie Broderick, from teaching the history department course called “The Conflict over Israel/Palestine.” The websites and pro-Israel advocacy group pointed to postings Broderick had made on Twitter that criticized Israel and Zionism and, without evidence, cited the postings as evidence of antisemitism.
Education Minister Alan Tudge should look closely at history before criticising expert’s proposed curriculum changes, suggesting school students challenge ideas about Anzac Day, writes Dechlan Brennan.
We need to teach future generations how to properly understand the effects of fossil fuel power and become more efficient energy consumers, writes Howard Morrison.
Coming to you Australia via the LNP, Minister Alan Tudge, and News Corp the “don’t hurt my white feelings” Bill. An original carbon copy of America’s Republican push because the LNP simply has no original, even racist ideas of their own.
“I’m not trying to tell them how to live their lives or what their political ideology should be,” he says. “I just want them to be critical thinkers.” These days, he sometimes thinks of this quote by the American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: “Honest history is the weapon of freedom.”
So here’s the great irony: we’ve gone from a theory that considers racism inseparable from laws and institutions in American life to the actual enactment of rules and laws that forbid the teaching or consideration of racism as inseparable from American life. Put another way: if there ever was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that critical race theory is reality–that American institutions such as our legislatures and courts are sick to the core with racism–Trumpist Republicans are providing us that proof in spades. They are elevating critical race theory from theory to fact, and from controversy to necessity.
Knowing the real history of the U.S., is essential to advancing the struggles of today to achieve a more just society for all the multi-racial, multi-ethnic people who live in a nation becoming more diverse every day. It undermines the rationalizations for suppressing the rights to vote and protest, and for protecting political and economic power for an entrenched white and corporate elite that continues to profit off structural racism today.
“Equally, that should not come at the expense of dishonouring our Western heritage, which has made us the liberal democracy that we are today. We have to get the balance right and I’m concerned that we haven’t in the draft that’s been put out.” Under the proposed changes, unveiled by the national curriculum authority on Thursday, children will be taught that First Nations’ people experienced British colonisation “as invasion and dispossession of land, sea and sky”. References to Australia’s “Christian heritage” were also removed out of the civics and citizenship syllabus in favour of terms such as secular and multi-faith.
Garofalo then responded by giving an example while making the case that the “good” side of slavery should be taught in public schools. “If you’re teaching, if you’re having a discussion on, whatever the case may be, on slavery, and you can talk about everything dealing with slavery. The good, the bad, the ugly, the whole …” Garofalo declared, to which Hilferty quickly replied, “There’s no good to slavery, though.”
Only 1 in 4 graduates are unemployed the LNP insist it’s not good enough
more than one in four graduates can expect to be either unemployed or underemployed four months after completing their undergraduate degree. So how did that happen?
Australia has exploited international students by reaping the benefits of their economic contribution before locking them out of the country during the pandemic, writes Hayden O’Connor.
When Scott Morrison became prime minister in 2018, the Coalition poured an extra $4.6 billion over a decade into Catholic and independent schools. Productivity Commission figures released this week show government funding for non-government schools continues to grow at a faster rate than for public schools. Judging by statements the new federal Education Minister Alan Tudge made to Parliament, that inequality will deepen. Lyndsay Connors reports
Public school teachers have been working harder than ever during the pandemic. But that’s not enough for the New South Wales Productivity Commission, which wants to cut pay and conditions, while increasing productivity by pitting “value-added” teachers against their colleagues.
olddogthoughts 