Category Archives: Education

Currency Lad

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by Education • Tags: , , , , ,

Looking at the books on my bookshelves triggers all kinds of thoughts, memories, remembrance of times past. As I assembled this essay (a form invented by Montaigne, whose biography I recently read) in my head I glanced across for inspiration once again. There sticking out slightly (because of its unusual format) is one of the 150 or so books I published as a Publisher. Reminded me immediately why those years were so difficult and thankless. Authors. Publishing would be easy if it wasn’t for authors.

Anyway, this one stuck in my mind because of one event. I had put a lot of effort into publishing his book. It wasn’t a great book, but I had given it the full treatment to make it as attractive and worthwhile as possible (many, most non-fiction authors say that they are “not worried about sales, money, only interested in getting the message out”, an attitude that doesn’t survive the first set of sales figures). The whole team had worked hard on it, culminating in a fancy book launch at a ritzy venue. At the end of the event, as I sat on a chair, somewhat tired but relieved, the author came up to me and passed me an envelope. Oh, that’s very nice I thought, most authors don’t bother to say thank you, this one has taken the trouble to write me a letter of appreciation. I took the envelope from him, began opening. “Oh, don’t bother opening now” he said, with an air of being more in sorrow than in anger, “it’s just a list of a few typos I discovered for you to fix in the second edition”. I put the letter in my pocket, too weary to bother pointing out that since he had worked closely with editor, had been given edited manuscript to check, then galleys ditto, any “typos” were actually his fault. Never did get a thank you. “Thanks” not a common currency in publishing.

Anyway, the second thing that made me think about books was watching “The Killing” (in Danish “Forbrydelsen” which actually translates as “The Crime”. If you haven’t seen this fantastic murder mystery, beg borrow or steal to get it on DVD and watch). Am now about half way through, and neither the police nor I know who did it yet, how it ends, but in this episode a suspect’s flat was being searched and I thought – I recognise that book on the bookcase. Sure enough it was the Bill Clinton autobiography “My Life” (called something like “Mi Lif” on the spine of this book in a Copenhagen flat) which also sits on my bookcase. Underlined the fact of how international book publishing is these days. And how international, as a consequence, our shared literary experience is. Oh many books on my shelves are of limited Australian interest (eg books by Ellis, Kelly, Tanner, Keating, as well as many older ones), but the majority these days are on bookshelves all over the world (eg Ackroyd, Ali, Phillips, Fowles, Tomalin, Palin, Uglow, Alda, Dawkins, Weir, Singh, Krauss, Sobel, Bennett, Schama, Adie, Klein, Hansen, just to name a few at random as I swivel around from my keyboard and scan the book spines) as well as mine. Shared reading, shared knowledge. A common universal currency.

And the final thing was visiting the “Lifeline” bookstore yesterday. [Lifeline, for those outside Australia, is a valuable free telephone counselling service, for people with problems in life such as feeling suicidal, drugs, relationships, bereavement, loneliness, health and so on. The Canberra branch is almost entirely self-funded by having, twice a year, a huge second-hand book sale of books donated by the public]. I was dropping off several boxes of books, non-fiction this time after an earlier donation of fiction some weeks ago. It is using books as another kind of currency. People donate books they are finished with. Other people buy them. The proceeds help other people.

But anyway, to the point at last. Looking around at my slightly sparser Lifelined shelves today I was struck by the almost equality in numbers between fiction and non-fiction. When I was young most of the books I bought, borrowed, was given, were fiction. Not all, but probably I guess some 90%. But gradually over time the proportions have shifted, until nowadays most of the books I buy are non fiction – biography, history, science, politics, literature, and so on. Does everyone go through this kind of shift? Maybe it is just me. I suppose when you are young humdrum reality is what you are trying to escape from – escape to other times, other places, other lives, other adventures. When you are older you have discovered that fact is much stranger than fiction, and what you want is facts, the truth about the world around you. Your mental currency is fiction when young, fact when older. In my case I have shifted in particular towards biography/autobiography (hence Bill Clinton). I suppose because completed lives (even partially completed ones in some autobiographies) have a pattern to them. When you are living your life it is as if you are a character in your own novel, no way of knowing what happens next, how it will turn out, how it will end. Whether you will turn out to be the hero of your own life or not. In a biography, or a history, the end is known, the pattern observed, the end neatly wraps up the narrative.

But whatever the case, undoubtedly books do furnish a room, do furnish a life. Both fact and fiction books mark the years of your being (your life line in fact), bring back memories, provide ideas, provide the mental furniture of your brain, provide the currency with which you can communicate with others. A life without books, would be a life not fully lived. A life not, as a teacher once said of me, working to capacity.

I have read so much. There remains, I hope, still so much more to read, some currency left to spend. How about you?

Twenty years a-growing

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by Education, politics • Tags: , , ,

When I left home, aged 20, circumstances didn’t allow me to take anything more than a suitcase of my clothes. My bedroom, mine since birth, was like one of those shells which crabs decorate as they carry them around. It was full of my life so far, books, drawings, train sets, sports gear, things my father had brought back from war, old school stuff. But I walked out, shed my shell, without a backward glance. I was eager for adventure, for life outside these four walls, this house, this family, eager to see what the world had in store for me. Adulthood was beckoning, imperiously, and I had to go.

Half a century on, I feel very differently of course. Want to have stern words with that young whippersnapper. It wasn’t the things so much that were important but the whole structure of family life I was leaving behind. And the psychological and emotional effects of twenty years a-growing (title of a book about an Irish childhood I’d been given). Without a backward glance, totally unaware that my much older self would look back with regret on what I was leaving behind – the comfort of familiar voices, shared history, common values, comfortable chairs, surroundings I could navigate with eyes shut. A stability which was going to be absent for quite a while as I tried to find my way bravely in a new world, where nothing was familiar. Oh, it hadn’t all been great, back home, we were a family with problems, and ups and downs like any other, but it was home, and it would take a while to find a new one.

Not unique? Of course not. We all go through this transition from youth to adult, one way and another. We all leave stuff behind. But looking around me now it seems far too many of us leave all behind. Every day there is news of bad behaviour by politicians, business leaders, unionists, sportsmen, of a kind that makes you want to have stern words, say “what would your parents think about this behaviour?”, “what would your grandparents think?”, “where did you leave the values you grew up with?”

But more than that. The country, Australia, I grew up in all those years ago, has itself changed immeasurably. The young Australia seems to have packed its bags, walked out the door of the old Australia (200 years a-growing), grabbing at a brave new world, leaving behind the baggage of fairness, equality, caring, mateship, anti-authoritarianism, mutual respect, honesty. Of course it hadn’t been perfect in the past, the treatment of women, indigenous people, migrants and the environment, were nothing to write home about. But we have lost more than we have gained. Think again, old country, look homeward.

Note – have told much of my story under “Dream” tab above. My family stuff starts about half way (say at “Leaving from Liverpool”).

Faith Less

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by Atheism, Education • Tags: , , ,

The other day I saw a sign advertising something called “Catholic Education Week”. While thinking, snarkily, they had mis-spelled the third word, I saw the slogan – “Faith in every child”. I paused, briefly, as I am sure you have, to admire the cleverness, nay genius, in that play-on words. Then I got a bit cross, and I thought I’d share my crossness with you.

Not, I hasten to add, crossness merely with the Catholic “educators”. For all I know there is also a “Jewish Education Week”, a ”Muslim Education Week”, a ”Evangelical Education Week”, and a ”Scientology Education Week”, all of whom could use exactly the same slogan.

Instilling “faith” in children is indeed what religion is about, but is precisely the opposite of what education is (or should be) about. Here are some alternative education slogans for you:
“Curiosity in every child”
“Inquiry in every child”
“Confidence in every child”
“Ambition in every child”
“Caring in every child”
“Achievement in every child”
“Balance in every child”
“Happiness in every child”

I invite you to add some more.

Tell you what, keep “faith” away from a child until it is seven, and I’ll give you an educated and rational adult.

It’s showtime

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by Education • Tags: , , , , , ,

Has been Agricultural Show season (American county fairs) round these parts lately. When I was young the family always went to the Show. My grandmother baked her famous jam tarts and made her equally famous lemon butter and carried them carefully to the Showground. We would come back, anxiously, after the judging, to see if she had won, knowing how disappointed she would be if someone happened to beat her one year. My mother did sewing and flower arranging, and again was always disappointed if she didn’t win. I wandered around, a young fellow, sitting on tractors, looking at big cattle, marvelling at the farmers in their show day clothes and hats – farming was such a glamorous profession. I would take a few grains of wheat from the overflowing golden boxes on display, to try to make them grow in my suburban garden.

Much later I would be showing and judging sheep, possibly also looked at in awe by the young kids running around. So a long involvement with agricultural shows all over the country, until I have had to give it away. Others have too it seems, shows have seen dwindling crowds at times and have had to try to turn them into entertainment in addition to the old agricultural purpose. A great pity I think, but different times, different shows.

Just good to see them surviving though. Important community function. I remember the pleasure in catching up with other farmers from far distant places, seeing them only one or a few times a year as we arrived at shows to compete. Just as important for the locals though, as they bring in their craft work and cooking just like my mother and grandmother did fifty years ago.

Recent ABS survey shows a quarter of Australians “are involved in some sort of cultural activity, which was defined as a creative hobby such as drama, cabaret, craft, singing, playing a musical instrument or dancing”. Of those 18%, or some 800,000 people, were involved in “textile crafts, jewellery making, wood crafts or paper crafts like scrapbooking … sculpting, painting, drawing or cartooning”. The local Show provides an important outlet for all these people as well as a chance to meet others with the same hobby. So important as a social glue.

And a glue likely to continue through more generations – “People aged from 15 to 24 were most likely to participate in cultural activities (34 per cent) but interest dropped off as people aged, with people over 65 reporting a participation rate of about 23 per cent.” So the young ones are coming as old fogeys like me drop out.

And even younger ones are playing around the tractors and cattle, thinking how exciting and glamorous life on the land might be for them one day.

On with the show.

Non-Human persons

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by Education, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

For a while now the people trying to protect dolphins from their brutal slaughter in Japan have argued that dolphins with their very high intelligence, close family bonds, sophisticated communication, should have a right to be protected (as “non human persons”) in the same way humans are from slaughter and exploitation. Similar claims have been made to try to get captive whales out of amusement parks. And the same claims could of course be made for the whales being hunted and killed year after year in our southern seas by the Japanese, and in the Arctic by Norwegians and Icelanders.

Obviously the right thing to do, to add to the calls for the great apes (Chimpanzees, Orang-utans, Gorillas) to be given similar status for the same reason. The heart-breaking stories of habitat destruction, and of mothers cradling dead babies, babies calling for mothers, in all these cases should be enough to stop the hunting of these animals, their incarceration in zoo cages or small pools, and their use in medical experiments. We must surely be civilised enough to recognise this now.

But I would be inclined to look even more widely. I think we could consider extending similar status to a number of species that are among the most intelligent and social of their kind. I am thinking for example of dogs and cats, bears and pigs, fruit bats. Of birds like crows and magpies and the larger parrots. Perhaps of live-bearing reptiles and fish. And even of some invertebrates like octopus and the larger spiders.

In British culture we long ago gave up brutal use of animals for entertainment in bear and bull-baiting, dog and cock-fighting, although all of these continue today in countries like Spain and even in America. It took a long time to bring them to an end in England, but it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing for a return to them now. In parts of the world too other intelligent animals are tortured to extract bile for phony medicines, skinned, slaughtered for cheap food, have their habitats destroyed for palm oil plantations, killed with poison baits, nesting trees knocked down. It will take time to get across the idea that many animal species are so intelligent and aware that we should stop all ill-treatment of them too in other countries, but we could make a start in our own.

One day our great-grandchildren will look back and say “People used to do WHAT to dolphins and chimpanzees?”

Factory floored

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by Economics, Education • Tags: , , , ,

Had a meal in a cafe the other day in a big city not a million miles away. Very poor, almost inedible. These days I’m pleased when I find a good meal. Often the meals seem prepared with little care or attention, using frozen or preserved ingredients, precooked and then reheated in microwave, and so on.

So I prefer eating at home usually, but this is no longer the certainty it once was. Nothing to do with the cooking of course, he adds hastily, avoiding repercussions, but more to do with ingredients.

Don’t know if you have seen a television program called “Jimmy’s Food Factory”. The chap tries to recreate the processes by which food is converted from what occurs naturally on the farm to what you find packaged for sale in shops and supermarkets.

It is one of those programs that tell you far more than you wanted to know for your own peace of mind. He minces things up, steams them, reduces to grey sludge, adds chemicals for colour and taste, reconstitutes in new form, dries, freezes, fires out of cannon, packages, adds a misleading name (a “custard” biscuit for example having no custard of any kind), finished.

The result bears little resemblance to the original but is in a convenient shape and form that can be shipped readily, and will last for a thousand years on a shelf. There are “foods” that you can never look at the same way again after seeing this program – I was floored by a lot of it. If you haven’t seen it I’m afraid it’s not a case of what you don’t know won’t hurt you.

On top of that is the way that there is increasing misleading labelling, of the origin of foods from, say, China or South America, shipped to New Zealand and relabelled, or with labels here that confuse with misdirections involved in various permutations of “Australian made”. Before you know where you are, like watching a magician with hat and rabbit, you have little idea about where the food came from, how old it is, what additives it may have, and so on.

What can we do about it? Not much, probably, we are locked in to factory farming, factory food processing, mass transport over long distances, factory selling in the supermarkets. The people along the chain, after the stuff leaves the farm gate, all make more money the cheaper the food can be processed and the longer it can be sold for. We gain in the convenience of marching into a supermarket, at any time of day, any time of year, and reaching for a packet of something or other which is invariably there.

But having your stomach process factory food probably isn’t the best for you. Increasingly we try to grow some of our own foods, shop at farmer’s markets. Maybe if enough of us do that the stuff we eat won’t turn our stomachs quite so much.

Worth a try.

Ignorance is strength

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by Education, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How can every human being on the planet not spend their days being puzzled about pretty much everything?

Every day I ask myself questions like: How does that work? Why did that happen? Who was responsible for that? What was the purpose of that? Where did that come from? Constantly, one or more of the interrogatives – Who? What? Why? Where? When? – applied to the natural, political, built, mechanical, social worlds.

Can never remember a time when I wasn’t curious, puzzled, interested about the world around me. All children are I thought. But it seems many adults lose the curiosity. Seem to settle for a quiet intellectual life in which people they believe are authority figures tell them how things are, the way they are going to be, and they accept the propositions as given.

How else can you explain the willingness of the 99% to vote, in spite of conservative failures over 50 years or more, against their interests and elect neoconservative governments? How else can you explain the lack of action on climate change? How else explain the successful campaigns by rich miners (originally a typo almost had them as rich moners), by alcohol sellers, poker machine makers and clubs, developers, fishermen.

How else too can you explain the following of fundamentalist religions, of fake medical “cures” like homeopathy and naturopathy, of faith healers and “psychics”, of get rich quick schemes, of populist politicians.

And how else explain why we, the people, accept incuriously what the mainstream media tells us, asking no questions so told all lies. No one it seems is puzzled when they are told one thing one day, the opposite thing the next day; or when told about two identical actions by two political leaders, one of which is great the other abhorrent.

No one is puzzled when the ‘reasons’ given for starting a war turn out to be completely spurious; when behaviour said to be perfectly safe turns out disastrous; no one is puzzled that “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”; no one thinks it odd that “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation”.

Oh yes, quoting Orwell is so 1980s isn’t it? But it seems increasingly that not only are political parties and whole countries using it as a manual for controlling and manipulating the public, but so are the media. Think of just three aspects. Winston Smith’s job involves dealing with “unpersons”, people now deemed politically embarrassing, so he alters records, changes photographs, to ensure that the person has not just disappeared from modern awareness, but from history as well. Then, to fill a gap where the unperson once appeared he invents “Comrade Ogilvy, a fictional party member, who displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands”.

Finally of course the idea of our tv screens watching us hasn’t happened (although …), but the tabloid press tapping phones, going through rubbish bins, and governments using spy satellites and getting internet records means the sense of privacy, lost in “1984″, is rapidly being lost here.

Inner Party member O’Brien says that in the future “There will be no curiosity”. And he is right. The public it seems now have no curiosity. And therefore the media can create a fictional narrative, an alternative to reality, that people will simply accept as truth. And in that reality they will also accept what conservative political leaders tell them.

So, I hear you ask, what is the answer?

Well, you don’t need me to tell you, the answer is “education” of course, teach kids to question, not rote learn, to be curious … oh, sorry, no, can’t keep that up.

Do you think the Inner Party doesn’t know that? Why else have preschools been privatised, religious and other private schools been massively funded, public schools and teachers constantly attacked, demands always made for more “3 Rs” (plus trade courses) to be taught and none of this “contentious” stuff about climate change or politics, ethics classes attacked and religious ones (with “chaplains”) encouraged, all attempts to encourage thinking slammed as being brain washing by the Left? Why the call for kids to leave school early and get jobs? Why the determined defunding of universities, the encouragement to teach more business courses and less “Arts”, the push for private paying students, the defunding of student unions, the constant attacks on any political involvement by students, the constant attacks on university lecturers for being Left Wing?

The 1960s and 70s gave the Inner Party a big shock. This is what happens when children are taught to think in school and university and they were having no more of that. So they have thrashed the curiosity out of education (with the willing acquiescence of the Labor Party, also not keen to see too much curiosity about its own policies and behaviour).

So no, I don’t have an answer. Anyone for a job in the Ministry of Truth? Plenty available.

A little learning

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by Education • Tags: , , , ,

When I was a young fellow, turned 14, the minimum age at which you could leave school, people demanded of my mother that I leave school, get a job, support the family. Fair enough. No one in the family had ever, for financial reasons, stayed at school past that age. And it was what people like us did, Just the way things were. There were the elites who finished school, went to university, became professionals; and there were the not-so-elites who left school early, got an unskilled job or an apprenticeship, became working class. Generation after generation of Australians, same pattern, just as it had been, and remained, the pattern in England on which our education ideas were based.

But my mother refused to listen, with some hardship kept me at school, then to university, and the rest, as they say, was history. I wasn’t alone. Robert Menzies was building high schools, training teachers, instituting scholarships for universities. Later Whitlam added to the process by building universities and making them free to all. My classes at schools in the late 50s early 60s were a mix of students from rich professional families to the poor ones like mine. If you had ability, drive, determination, you were no longer restricted by where you had come from. And we repaid the investment, students in my final high school class went on to be doctors, teachers, scientists, pharmacists, engineers, adding value to Australia.

I was reminded of all this again the other day when a politician called for essentially a return to the 1950s. Tony Abbott said “The other point I want to make is that it’s all very well keeping kids at school past year 10 but they’ve got to be the right kids being kept at school past year 10” he told radio 2UE. A return to elitism in education. A return to poor students dropping out early, rich students going on. To a view of university as being a playground for the elites, not a training ground for all. Nor a place where a well-educated population could be produced. Places of thought, discussion, debate, discovery.

Oh, it hasn’t been ideal since the increase in fee-paying students from overseas, or the dropping of less popular courses and the increase in courses to do with business for example. But the school part of the equation was continuing to ensure some equality of opportunity.

Curious that when we had a system that worked so well, that contributed to the egalitarian ideals of Australia (a dangerous thing perhaps?), that made best use of all the talents and abilities of its young people, we should have someone calling for a return to the bad old days.

Can’t have been well-educated, I guess.

Or doesn’t believe in a fair go, a fair opportunity, for all.

Life in books

by Education, Media • Tags: ,

[Article first published as Life in Books on Blogcritics.]

People always say “Oh I love the smell of a new book when you open it.” I used to go along with this, nod wisely, say “Ah yes, nothing like it” but secretly I didn’t agree.

I’m sure when I was young new books didn’t have a particularly noticeable smell, certainly not one you could be addicted to. Perhaps in those far-off times of natural inks and relatively natural paper they didn’t, and the smell we associate with a new book now, like the “smell of a new car”, is actually a nasty compound of all kinds of modern carcinogenic compounds.

I didn’t really get all that many new books anyway, except as Xmas and Birthday presents. The rest of the year I trooped off to the public library and borrowed at least four, sometimes more books and trooped home again (a distance of several miles each way). The library was like Aladdin’s cave, but did have its disadvantages. I still remember the desperation as I finished the first volume of Lord of the Rings in a 3 volume set only to find volume two missing when I returned craving the continuation of the adventure. In addition on Saturday when I went to the afternoon film matinée (Hopalong and Roy and the rest, lots of cliffhangers, and bridgehangers and towerhangers, and narrow escapes from runaway trains and landslides) I would buy, very cheaply, secondhand books from a little shop next to the cinema. The problem with that was the condition of the books, and I still angrily remember, some 60 years later, reading to the second last page of a book I was really enjoying only to discover that the last page had been torn out by some juvenile delinquent of a previous owner. These are the things that try men’s souls.

Anyway for me books were characterised not by smell but by look and feel. The large format,highly illustrated, thin children’s books, gave way to chunkier normal books like grown-ups had. A thick book with small type promised a long story to live in. Paper backs gave a feeling of being based in the modern world. On the book shelf I could recognise the look of old book friends, as surely as I could human friends in playground or shop.

And so the years went by, accumulating more and more friends on my book shelves, now crowding around me as I write. I became a book publisher, and learnt the processes by which written words on a page become books of certain sizes and shapes, look and feel. Fought with authors who had unreal visions for how their books should look; worked with others whose clear vision could be transferred into the real world of book shop and book shelf.

Then I at long last became an author myself. Clutched the first copy of each book against my chest, as if all the blood sweat and tears that had gone into the production could be absorbed back into my heart. Felt, yes indeed, that each long anticipated work was like seeing your child for the first time in the delivery room.

Might have gone on forever this love affair with books as objects. I managed to acquire some first editions. Experienced the joy of reading a first edition of Pickwick Papers, reading from an actual page just as some unknown person had done, knowing nothing of Sam Weller, some 170 years earlier. Loved the look and feel of old books from nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries, wanted to see them on my shelves rubbing shoulders with modern paperbacks by new favourite authors.

But now it has all changed, and for two reasons. First the passage of time, and with it the inevitable baton passing between generations, has left me with a whole lot of new “stuff” including books, on top of what I had. Hasn’t quite doubled the number of “things” but has greatly added to it and it is obvious that as I pass on the baton in turn and so ad infinitum a great wave of stuff is going to swamp later generations. So suddenly my appetite for adding new books (always excluding the first edition “Origin of Species” of course) has vanished almost overnight.

It might still not have been quite enough to switch me to electronic books, which I had long held in contempt (no smell, no look, no feel). I could go on kidding myself, like a potentially reformed smoker, that just one more book would be the last, could give up any time I wanted to. Then it all changed with an unexpected medical diagnosis. I found myself facing months of treatment being stuck in a chair for 5 hours at a time in a situation where one hand was unusable and there was essentially no place to put a book.

The answer, reluctantly, an ebook reader. Took to it like a duck to wet cement. How could you read books like this on a screen? Not right, would never be right. And then, and then. Well, actually this isn’t too bad at all, is it? Screen well lit, large font, two page spread, and oh, hey, you can “turn pages” as fast as you like, one handed, with just a touch of a finger tip in the corner. I can stop, turn it off briefly to talk to a nurse, come back in and it has remembered the spot I was up to. Oh, wow, this is alright, how did I ever read books any other way? Five hours flashes by.

And, other big advantage, nothing new cluttering up my shelves. Huge books occupying no space at all except as a few electrons. Way to go.

There are other advantages and disadvantages, but on balance it is clear to me that this is the way of the future. Some ten years ago when my third book went on line as an ebook it was meaningless, meant nothing against the physical object in my hand. Had you asked me if ebooks had a future I would have been doubtful, if you had asked me if books of the traditional kind, back to Pickwick Papers and beyond would still be around in another 170 years I would have said “of course”. Ask me now and I would give the opposite answers to both questions.

Is there life in books? Yes, as electrons. Is there life beyond books? No, of course not. Doesn’t matter how you read them, it’s the communication of author and reader that matters, always did.

Never did me any harm

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by Education, Media • Tags: , , , , ,

The other day I heard the usual glib discussion of “discipline in schools” on some tv channel. About how terrible it was that teachers these days were subject to violence (certainly any violence against teachers is terrible, but as an aside I think there is a convenient forgetting about history here, as is so often the case. “Blackboard Jungle”, after all, was written in 1954, and there must have been many examples of teachers being treated badly in even earlier times) and how we needed to bring back strong discipline which had been lost as a result of “political correctness”.

But this view of “spare the rod and spoil the child”, “bring back the cane”, “they need a damn good thrashing”, “never did me any harm”, and the like are themselves “political correctness”. It is just that they are the politically correct thoughts of the Right, the authoritarian, the shock jock, the populist politician.

Every time “political correctness” is supposedly being attacked, what is happening is that someone of the conservative side of politics is trying to remove some socially or environmentally aware policy and replace it with a neoconservative one.

At various times in the past it has been politically correct to: burn old ladies as witches; kill bulls and bears with dogs for entertainment; have schoolmasters and fathers beat children senseless with sticks, belt, anything they could lay their hands on; hang people for all kinds of small and large crimes in public; invade resource rich countries owned by brown people who didn’t deserve them (oh, sorry, still with us); insult refugees/migrants by calling them names like wog and reffo, or indeed, in the case of Chinese, slaughtering them; keep women barefoot and pregnant and certainly not voting or owning property; smash down huge areas of trees with chain and be rewarded by being made state premier; kill koalas for fur, birds of paradise for feathers; take land away from Aborigines without compensation, kill many of them, refer to the remainder as Abos and boongs, while chuckling over newspaper cartoons whose joke depended on Aboriginal stupidity; have sex with women while drunk with no reference to consent; drive while drunk; have small children working in factories and mines and chimneys; have black people working as slaves; condemn people to nasty deaths for “blasphemy” against whatever the currently popular imaginary figure in the sky was; ensure that the great majority of the workforce worked very long hours in dangerous or damaging conditions for poor wages; see the mentally ill and disabled treated with scorn and contempt, mental asylums as places for public entertainment, “freak shows” in circuses; see single mothers socially and economically destroyed, their children removed, children of poor families shipped to colonies; see old people end lives in workhouses.

OK, that’s enough, you have got the idea. Those and many more similar concepts were the political correctness of their day. Many are still the political correctness of the kind of people who vote for conservatives against their own economic and social interests. When John Howard railed against “political correctness” he was representing the views of people who were outraged that they could no longer do and say some or all of those things, they having been replaced by approaches and ideas more relevant to a 21st century sensibility and knowledge than an 11th century one.

So it isn’t “political correctness” that stops children being beaten senseless in schools or homes, it is a recognition that the old political correctness that thought such behaviour was normal was wrong and extremely damaging. You want to argue a case for bringing back the birch or the hangman, open sexism and racism? Go for it, (if you are not a shock jock, in which case you have already reverted to the politically correct language of 1111), convince the public you are right. But don’t hide behind the political euphemism that the only reason we don’t behave like that is because of political correctness on the Left.

I think when you do make the argument you will find that the public in general don’t want a return to the political correctness of the dark ages. You might also find that if you are genuinely concerned about violence in classroom and playground, and not just playing jolly media games, that a very fertile ground of investigation would be the role of the media itself in influencing the attitudes of children to violence and to other people.

But maybe I am just too politically correct – should have been beaten when I was a child.