Category Archives: Education

Apples for the teachers

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

Heard both another politician and Rupert Murdoch calling for “educational reform” the other day and shuddered. It will always turn out to be not reform in the sense of making things better for children and teachers, the sort of thing us ordinary mortals mean when we talk about reform. Instead it will turn out to be based on the reform caller’s own school experience (little Latin and less Greek) which will have equipped them to be an education expert; or on some right-wing ideology hell-bent on turning schools into factories (profit-generating-factories) for producing good consumers and workers. Out will come gimmicks like NAPLAN, My School website, performance pay, vouchers, none of which will do anything except make our education system, once pretty damn good, worse and worse.

We might instead, if we were serious about actual, you know, reform, turn to other countries to assess their experiences in order to see which things have failed (all the list above) and what really works. Which brings me to Finland. That surprised you didn’t it? Top of the international education league tables for most of a decade. Students clamouring to get into university teacher courses. Massive numbers of applications for every teaching job. How do they do it?

All teachers have to have a Master’s degree, so teaching is equivalent in prestige to law and medicine. The highest-flying youngsters then started flocking to the profession because of its new-found prestige. Schooling is free (including free university education) and compulsory for all. No selection of pupils for individual schools. No school uniforms, and informal relations between students and teachers. No inspections of teachers (“They are academics and well-trained, so we trust them”), no national testing of pupils. Class sizes small (maximum 20 in first 2 years of high school for example). Pupils transfer to either an academic or a vocational school at the age of 16 after nine years of compulsory schooling.

The only part I disagree with is that because it is illegal to charge fees in the Finnish education system, even those schools that are run privately take their funding from the state. Hmmm!

But generally speaking the key seems to be to raise the prestige and training of teachers and then trust them to get on with the job.

Actually a prescription for success in most work places I suppose.

Time for the ideologues to back away from education. Julia and Kevin could visit Finland (as many education ministers from around the world are doing, most recently England’s Education minister) to see for themselves how the Finns have done it. Mind you they would want to be quiet and listen. I have a feeling in my chalk that the Finns would be stunned and disgusted by the “reforms” to education undertaken here in recent years by both sides of politics.

The ragged trousered philanthropist

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by Climate Change, Economics, Education, Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Because I am a philanthropist, in words if not finances, can I offer a couple of free suggestions to Julia Gillard and the Labor Party. I mean you are doing about as well as Gordon Brown just before the Cameron landslide, or John Howard before the Kevin Rudd one. Sorry, that was a bit mean-spirited – how about Malcolm Fraser before the Hawke deluge?

Anyway, suggestion one. Julia, call Bob Brown, apologise. Arrange to meet for dinner. He is a charming dinner companion you will get on well. Say that you recognise, now, that Greens are normal human beings who have jobs, families, and values very similar (I’m guessing, and we’ll come to that) to your own. That having, belatedly, read some Australian Labor Party history, you recognise, now, that in many ways the Greens represent the Labor Party of Chifley and Curtin, of Whitlam and Cairns. That the Labor party has lost what was once its progressive wing in the way that it once lost its regressive wing (the DLP) and is suffering for it. That you understand that while there are disagreements between Labor and the Greens in relation to the importance of environmental issues and one or two others, these are not insurmountable. That you would like therefore to see a formal coalition (joint party room, shared ministries), in government, between the two parties, in the way that the Liberals and Nationals, facing similar policy agreements and disagreements, have successfully managed for over half a century. That you realise that there will be objections within both parties, at elected and grass-roots levels, but that with goodwill this should be something that two social democratic parties should be able to overcome. The alternative being another long-lasting Liberal/National coalition government led by the most regressive members of that coalition and creating an Australia anathema to both Labor and Green parties. All elections are critical, but the next one is arguably the most critical ever seen for the future of this country and planet, and we no longer have the luxury of the two left-wing parties of Australian politics slagging each other off more than they do the real political enemy.

Right, that’s the structural thing out of the way, and it is a biggie.

Now, you yourself Julia. I know everyone has had a go at your style of public speaking (just between you and me I have been known to yell in despair at the TV – “no, don’t say it like that Julia, don’t say that” – the most recent example was when you responded to Malcolm Turnbull’s thoughtful interview on climate change as follows “Malcolm Turnbull told us the truth. He told us the truth that basically this plan won’t work. He told us the truth that it would blow the budget.” – that kind of repetition, and negativity, is what drives people like me to despair) but that isn’t much use without something positive to suggest. And telling you to change the style (I’m guessing) you have had since high school doesn’t get either of us very far. So here is a positive suggestion, and a bit more Labor history (in a very broad sense). According to Wiki “President Franklin Roosevelt first used “fireside chats” in 1929 during his first term as Governor of New York. He faced a conservative Republican legislature so during each legislative session he would occasionally address the citizens of New York directly. He appealed to them for help getting his agenda passed. Letters would pour in following each of these “chats,” which helped pressure legislators to pass measures Roosevelt had proposed. He began making the informal addresses as President on March 12, 1933, during the Great Depression“. These “informal” chats came to be called “fireside chats”, not sure why, partly I think because his audience were sitting around the fireside listening to the radio, partly because the illusion they presented was that Roosevelt himself was sitting by the fire in the White House, in a comfortable chair, talking personally, as to a hundred million friends, about the important issues he and they were concerned with (the Depression in general, and then the War).

Again turning to Wiki for an explanation of the success of these chats (Roosevelt would receive millions of letters in response to each one):
“Rhetorical Manner
Sometimes beginning his talks with “Good evening, friends”, Roosevelt urged listeners to have faith in the banks and to support his New Deal measures. The “fireside chats” were considered enormously successful and attracted more listeners than the most popular radio shows during the “Golden Age of Radio.” Roosevelt continued his broadcasts into the 1940s, as Americans turned their attention to World War II. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat was March 12, 1933, which marked the beginning of a series of 30 radio broadcasts to the American people reassuring them the nation was going to recover and shared his hopes and plans for the country. The chats ranged from fifteen to forty-five minutes and eighty percent of the words used were in the one thousand most commonly used words in the English dictionary.
Where Roosevelt’s Simplicity and Clarity Come from?
When Roosevelt was doing his chats he wanted them to be simplistic and clear. He wanted to be clear enough for his audience to understand what he was saying because it was important to him. He came up with three techniques to make his chats clear and simple. First, he wanted easy to read and open language use. Second, he wanted to include many concrete examples and explanations into his text. Third, he wanted simple organization in his text.
How did he make his chats persuasive?
There were four tips that Roosevelt used to persuade his audience when he gave his chats. The first was he used the word “We” when he made claims. He wanted the audience to feel like they were a part of the chats. Second, he embedded his claims into objective statements. Third, he used a lot of adverbs and adjectives. Finally, he made his language go from soft to hard. Slowly draw his listeners in and hit them hard later on.

Memorise those tips Julia, make them a part of your being. I want you to start “fireside chats” to the nation. Literally, sit by a fire in the Lodge in a comfortable chair, having had a nice dinner, couple glasses red wine, and now a beautifully made fresh pot of coffee ready to pour your first cup. Just a single camera there, and you start talking through it (not to it as you usually do), forgetting it is there at all, to the people of Australia, to all your friends, as if they were sitting in the other comfortable chair with a cup of coffee. You speak softly and quietly and warmly, as you are just talking to your friend. And what do you talk about? Well, this is just as important as the ambience. You will talk about the “Why” of what you are doing. Not the “what” and the “how” and the “when” and the “how much” and how you are being blocked by the Opposition. There is no opposition in the room, just you and your friend.

Explain the “Why” of a Carbon Tax in relation to global warming, the why of plain packaging of cigarettes, the why of improving conditions for workers, the why of health reform, the why of mining resources taxes, the why of improving education, the why of saving the Murray and old growth forest, why infrastructure like the National Broadband Network is important, and so on. Let your own ideas, and those of your Green partners, flow out to explain clearly and simply to the people why these policies are important. In doing so you will, as Roosevelt intended, bypass the vicious spin of the Murdoch Press and the shock jocks and you will communicate directly to your friends the Australian people. And if they understand the why they will understand the reasons in a way that the dull recitations of what and how doesn’t do (this was the mistake Kevin made too). So you will bring them with you instead of letting them be alienated. And it will serve another purpose too – you will also start to consider more fully the why of existing policies, and some of those might be changed as a result (think refugees, think gay marriage, think free trade). And when they are changed to something more reflecting your social democrat ideals you will then in turn be able to let the public see the reason for the new policy, the “Why” behind your change of mind.

Oh you won’t win them all, in some cases the public will disagree with your “Why”.

But at the moment you aren’t winning any of them.

Feel free, adopt both ideas, quickly. No gratitude needed, say they were your ideas. I’ll keep shtum, just the warm glow of a job well done is enough for this philanthropist.

Or are they just the products of a fevered brow (nah, not so fevered today), or somewhat ragged trousers?

Hostages to fortune

by Climate Change, Economics, Education • Tags: , ,

Was driving behind a car the other day with one of those irritating bumper stickers. You know the kind of thing “Driving around Australia to spend our children’s inheritance”, or some variation of that (and there is a TV advert along similar lines I seem to remember). Doesn’t annoy me quite as much as “I fish and I vote” or “Australia love it or leave it” or “Don’t blame me I voted Liberal” but it does annoy me. You see even though I vote the wrong way and therefore, according to Julia Gillard have no values, ethics, morals (unlike apparently the NSW Labor Party Right, who knew?), it seems to me that this joke about “spending the inheritance” actually represents a very unpleasant set of values. The point of it is that as you drive off into the sunset in your camper van, or set sail on the Queen Mary 6, you give a two fingered salute to your children, assembled to wave goodbye, and scream out “earn your own money, you are getting nothing from us”.

I have always thought that you had obligations to raise your children well, feed and clothe them and give them a good education, prepare them for life, and then try to make sure that you have provided for their future to make it as secure as you can. Isn’t that a family value or have I misunderstood something? Oh I don’t think you should horde all your money, living a miserable life with no skerrick of enjoyment, until you are so old you don’t have anything you are up to enjoying. But I also don’t think you should mindlessly spend everything you have on an ocean cruise and leave the kids to sink or swim in your wake.

The super rich don’t of course. James Packer is happily running his father’s (and grandfather’s) empire, the Murdoch younger generation are being slotted into the places where the levers of media empire get pulled like so many giant slot machines. Once the big fortunes get made they stay in the family. Not much sign of Rupert Murdoch sailing on the QE5, don’t remember Kerry Packer being a grey nomad, instead they are consolidating the work of previous generations and taking care of the kids. You may not have a newspaper chain or television network to hand down to your offspring, but you do have a chance to be content in the feeling that you have done your best for their future, and that your family is building on its achievements.

Oh and speaking of that, you don’t I think have the right to spend energy reserves like a drunken ship’s passenger either, burning up all the carbon on the planet and leaving your children to cope with a warming Earth and the need to try to reduce the CO2 you left in the air for them as your only legacy.

I have a feeling that the people complaining about a carbon tax, and standing behind Tony Abbott with offensive banners, are the kind of people who are “driving around Australia to burn our children’s inheritance”, thumbing their noses at them as they go.

Never thought I would say this but “follow Rupert Murdoch’s example”. There, I’ve done it.

Little house on the prairie

by Economics, Education, politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

I was reminded the other day by a television programme not only repeated but revisited and rewound of the architect Walter Segal and his “self-build” homes. In one of those moments of serendipity, I read, the day after the NSW election, the following “Mr O’Farrell says the state’s population is set to reach nine million in 25 years and he will fix the population pressures on Sydney by growing regional New South Wales. “Instead of Sydney, which is currently home to two thirds of this state’s population becoming home to three quarters, we are going to engage in whole of state growth,” he said “We are going to engage in a regional development act to decentralisation, to ease Sydney’s growth pains and offer to people in this state … the services that they have in the cities.”" Let us leave aside the moment the idea that we should just sit idly by as passive observers as more and more people are packed into the state, and accept the proposition that there are inevitably, whatever the exact figure, going to be more people. I am not sure how he is going to find the money to do so much regional development of services in the light of the other things he wants to spend money on like rail links within Sydney, but it seems to me that you might well attract people to regional centres by the prospect of decent but very affordable housing.

Which takes us back to Walter Segal. He designed a house that could be not only built cheaply from cheap materials, but that could be built by amateurs (with some level of supervision) who had never even used a hammer before. So ideal for a cooperative arrangement where families don’t have sufficient capital to buy a house but can compensate for that by donating their own labour. The houses have other advantages: the design means that the internal arrangements are very flexible so families can customise the arrangement of internal walls to suit their needs; the designs incorporate energy saving features in windows and roof; the cooperative approach to building (people work on each other’s houses as well as their own) means that a community is being established well before people move in; building your own house and those of your neighbours means there is little chance of people damaging or vandalising their own work later; people in the scheme are learning many skills which can potentially help with finding jobs later; the individual houses on pieces of land are much better for children and families than the giant tower blocks which are commonly used to provide community housing.

I don’t know that the Segal house, specifically designed for England, is exactly what we want here. For one thing it would need to be modified significantly to allow for bushfire protection, and to be even better equipped to save energy and water. I also think that the particular cooperative scheme featured on Grand Designs wasn’t perfect. The people involved took an awful long time, working a few hours per week in between paid employment, to finish their houses, and when they did they didn’t own them but simply rented them from the Coop. All of that could be improved with more professional help, and with a purchase not a rental scheme at the end. So a job for Australian architects to design an Australian easy-build house, and for economists to work out an equitable scheme for low income earners to be able to pay off the houses they build.

But in general the introduction of such ideas into the affordable housing question in NSW, and its adoption in country towns such as Yass as a way of attracting people from Sydney and giving them the chance to build a new stake in a community, would be well worth the new government looking into, rather than just following the well worn paths of the past. Paths littered with failures. In addition, as well as other low income earners, such schemes would be a way of attracting new migrants to regional areas, and helping them settle in and learn new skills.

Over to you Mr O’Farrell, time for a new start in public housing in the country?

Life is a lottery

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by Atheism, Climate Change, Education, Evolution, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is a media ritual when there is a big lottery prize looming that involves an interview with a “number expert” who can tell you what the “lucky” numbers are, ie those which have come up most often. The number expert can protest until blue in the face that every number, every time, is equally likely or unlikely, by chance, to appear. Makes no difference. “What are the lucky numbers?” will be asked, over and over. When the winner is announced comes the trip to the “lucky” outlet that sold the ticket. This outlet, is the suggestion, will be worth buying from again. But it won’t be of course, every outlet is equally likely, or unlikely to sell the next winning ticket. But the use of “luck” and the suggestion that some people are “lucky” is encouraging belief in the paranormal on the one hand, and belief in people being “rewarded” by a god on the other. There is no luck, there is only chance.

Whenever someone reaches a milestone like 100 years another narrative comes into play – “to what do you attribute your long life?” Well, in reality their long life can only be attributed to a chance allocation of pretty good DNA and a lot of luck through the decades, they have reached an advanced age by chance, just the far tail of a normal distribution of age at death – a few die very young, a few die very old, most die in between. Life’s a lottery and then you die.

Road accidents too. The media (and politicians) tend to react to an individual accident by blaming someone or something for it. But for a given number of cars on the roads, and therefore for a given number of chances of them coming into contact with each other or some object beside the road, there will be, by chance, a given number of accidents, and you, by chance, may be one of them. And those accidents will range, by chance, from those where a car and its occupants are scarcely dented, to major pile-ups and death and everything in between.

The inability to recognise or accept chance events has led to the idea of “miracles” raising its ugly and misleading head again. In any major accident or catastrophic natural event involving many people, there will be, by chance, quite often, survivors, perhaps only one survivor, perhaps two or three. Whether it is plane crash or train crash, tsunami or earthquake, the fact that many people die and one or more don’t is always headlined and described as a “miracle”. People don’t want to believe in chance, want to believe that good things happen to those who deserve them, that there is a “reason” for a survival (other than a reason involving a chance sequence of events or spatial relationships), and that if they, I suppose, were involved in such a disaster then they would be the ones walking out of the cloud of smoke, the wall of water. If only they knew what the secret was. And there will be plenty of people to tell them – money up front.

The constant reiteration of the “miracle survival” nonsense by television reporters encourages this sort of irrational thinking and comes full circle when they almost always, as the punch line to the survivor story, say to them “You should buy a lottery ticket”, taking the failure of logic full circle. The suggestion, of course is that having walked away from a plane crash the person has been blessed with good luck, and that while the “effect” lasts the person should take advantage of the residual glow of good vibrations and have them influence the way that lottery balls tumble, chaotically, randomly, in a big glass ball, in order to create a sequence of numbers that match, miraculously, with those on a piece of paper that the lucky person has bought. Does the reporter really believe this? Does the audience?

The alternative narrative is that some people are subject to “bad luck”, or, in the religious narrative, have behaved or believed (or failed to believe) in such a way that they will be magically propelled into path of speeding car or train, will be crushed by landslide, eaten by shark, have a roof tile land on their head, catch, at the last moment (perhaps by an exchange of places with another, lucky, person), a plane that then crashes. In these cases the event is deemed to be so rare that being killed by it must have a cause, an explanation, people “doomed” by some unexplained mechanism of heavenly forces. But all such events become possible given 7 billion people on a planet as small as ours. And all of these bad luck narratives, the “what were the chances” scenario, depend on a misunderstanding of the nature of chance. What are the chances that “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” so that Humphrey and Ingrid meet? Pretty good actually. I mean if you multiplied the number of gin joints by the number of people in the world at the time (3 billion?) the odds look astronomical. But only because Rick has decided after the event which has already taken place that this was a significant meeting. If you were to ask what is the chance of any man and any woman meeting in a gin joint somewhere the odds are, well, 100%, any night of the week. Since Rick was in the bar every night, it was the most popular bar in Casablanca, and there were few American women in the city, the chances of the lovely Ms Bergman walking into his gin joint were also very very good.

So there are many things that people, with the guidance of the media and religious leaders, think are not chance events which are in fact sheer chance. On the other hand people think some things are chance which are not. The creationists among us are constantly asking how you can “assemble a 747″ by chance in a “junkyard”, how “random mutations” could give rise to human beings from “primordial ooze”. But evolution works much as Bergman found Bogart, the odds aren’t some multiplication of the remote chances of single events with those of other single events, but a gradual refinement over time. Imagine that in Rick’s bar gambling was going on (you’d be shocked, shocked, I know). And they were playing a kind of poker in which each player kept one good card and discarded four and picked up a new four, and then kept the best of those and discarded three, and picked up three new ones and so on. You would eventually finish up with some very good hands, all round the table. Small chance on any one card, but chances improved as you discard and pick up, discard and pick up.

Drive by shootings are presented by the media as if they are totally random events, that at any moment your house, chosen at random by gangsters, will be peppered with bullets. What are the odds? Number of houses in Sydney, say, divided into the number of shootings? But rarely, it turns out, is the shooting actually random as distinct from being aimed at a rival bike gang, rival drug dealer, loan defaulter, love triangle rival. Not random, targeted. Chances of a small number of people being shot at, very high; chances of the rest of Sydney houses getting bullets through their front wall, virtually nil. Shark attacks, same treatment in media, reality that the number of attacks is tiny, the great bulk of them not “attacks” but accidents, and the result of risky behaviour by the swimmer or surfer, not random moments of doom.

When there are stories of unethical behaviour by a corporation – declaring bankruptcy with no money left for worker’s entitlements; dumping pollutants into a creek; moving overseas to evade tax; selling goods known to be harmful; funding political parties to obtain favourable treatment; sacking workers and outsourcing overseas; cutting prices to farmers – they are always treated as if these are singular events, a bad apple, no historical context, no implications for regulation or political action. In fact such behaviour is not random but is a direct consequence of laissez faire unregulated capitalism as practised in the last 20 years or so.

Finally climate is portrayed by deniers as being just a sequence of random fluctuations with no meaning or implication for action now or disaster in the future. The reality is that the ever rising trend line of temperatures, and the ever increasing consequences seen in melting ice, acidifying oceans, moving species, is what tells us we are in trouble.

James Randi said “To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage”. Takes a lot of courage actually, more than politicians or religious leaders possess. Now, if only we could give the media courage to call random events for what they are and talk about the causes of non-random events. They have been getting this precisely back to front.

Ground control to Major David

by Education, politics • Tags: , ,

I have been having an out of this world experience this week. Well, two really, but one was caused by a nasty dose of flu which came out of nowhere, out of a clear blue sky like an alien spaceship, infecting me, experimentally, with some germ that has never been known on Earth before. Or perhaps it was just man flu. Anyway, while I was laid low by this vicious virus I came across one of those internet projects that make you have some vestige of hope in a world which otherwise seems full of suicide bombers and murderers and celebrity news about Charlie Sheen. It’s called “Galaxy Zoo” and 250,000 people have so far taken part, helping to classify the millions of images of galaxies from the Hubble space telescope. You don’t need any qualifications, just a computer and a pair of eyes, and an ability to recognise unusual patterns (which is why it can’t be done by computer). It becomes, I warn you, completely addictive.

A galaxy, like our own Milky Way Galaxy is a collection of stars held together in a cluster by gravity. Millions, billions of stars (our own galaxy has some 200 billion stars), in each galaxy, and there are millions, probably billions of galaxies in the universe. The Hubble has already taken images of millions of galaxies, everything ranging for the simple elliptical clusters to the beautiful swirls of the spiral galaxies, and many weird and wonderful ones in between. The classification job, which is immense, will help us to understand more about the numbers of different types of galaxy and their evolution over the last 13 billion years or so, and there is always the possibility of finding something completely new (many galaxies the volunteers work on haven’t been seen by human eyes before), like a cloud of mysterious blue gas discovered by one volunteer, which is still the object of scientific examination.

I think this is one of those cooperative ventures by unpaid volunteers, like so many community activities, which give the lie to those jaundiced views of human nature that nothing is worth doing unless it makes money, no one will do anything except for money, and people will never cooperate in this dog-eat-dog super competitive world. And yet, unpaid volunteers everywhere, doing things that transcend everyday life.

I also think this is one of those ventures that should be compulsory for all new elected politicians, part of the “getting to know the parliament” induction process they go through. Partly for that sense that cooperative work is still possible in Australia (and indeed world wide) and it is a good feeling to take part in it. Partly because you are undertaking a process in which you are looking at images obtained by the most astonishing piece of human technology, a symbol of what we can do when we are on our best behaviour, and what we can do when our scientists and engineers are allowed to work on projects that don’t directly make a lot of money. But mainly because seeing, for the first time, a cluster of 200 billion stars billions of light years from here, and then another, and then another, gives an astonishing sense of the size of the universe and our tiny place in it.

And that might, just might, give politicians a sense of perspective and a sense of humility and a sense that we had better learn to cooperate, because it is a big lonely universe outside our little planet. Not much evidence of those qualities in recent times in the zoo of the national parliament.

Up there Cazaly

by Education, Media • Tags: , , , , ,

So, another football season has come and gone. Hooray. Oh I used to follow football, a bit, when I was younger, managed to get excited when “my” teams won, became briefly downhearted when they didn’t. Even went to a game or two of the WANFL (shows how old I am) in Perth as a teenager. But I began to lose interest when the codes became professional. When the WA and SA leagues were relegated to amateur hour and the AFL took over with artificial teams like the Eagles and Crows being created (back in the good old days, teams were actually based in a district, and were referred to accordingly, this creation of artificial teams with idiotic non-location based “names” was another turn-off). Similarly in Rugby League as the Broncos and Raiders emerged. I started to find I had little interest in who won these artificial contests and indeed could barely remember who had won the competitions the previous year.

But mainly I suppose the rise and rise of millionaire football players was the turn off. Always discussion during the season, and outside the season, about footballers behaving badly. Every week or two some footballer will not only get drunk out of his brain but emerge from a nightclub or pub at 5am to let the world, and the local police force, know that he is drunk out of his brain by committing various unacceptable acts. Sports commentators, presumably on the basis that it’s best not to throw the first stone never knowing whose glasshouse is in the way, generally don’t condemn the acts as such. Men are men after all, and a bit of violence is only to be expected – on and off the field. No the criticism is always along the lines that these people are “role models” for the young. Indeed I heard one commentator say in effect that the reason why footballers had bank accounts bigger than the budgets of some small countries was not because they played football but because they were being paid to be role models, so they weren’t earning their pay when they appeared, behaving badly, on CCTV cameras outside nightclubs.

Now it has never occurred to me to have a footballer as a role model, so I would join in the hysterical laughter from CEOs of football clubs (who pay millions, and juggle salary caps, for one reason, and one reason only – to win premierships) when that statement was made. But there is anyway a curiously restricted view of what a role model is. For sports commentators a role model is purely a negative thing – a footballer should avoid doing drugs, getting drunk in public, abusing women. Now I guess this is fine as far as it goes, but since there must be 21, 999,000 people, including me, who also don’t do those things, I am not sure exactly how a footballer not doing them either qualifies for role modelhood.

It is hard to imagine, conversely, any positive aspects of being a role model that a footballer can do. The only reason these guys are in the public eye is that they have an ability to catch and kick a football. In all other respects they are no different to the average guy in the pub on a Friday night, or walking down the street on a Monday morning. So why would you choose (unless you wanted to be a footballer) a footballer as a role model for, well, life I suppose? If I was advising young people as to who they could look to as role models for their future life I might advise them to consider nurses, teachers, police officers, scientists, soldiers, aged care workers, conservationists, farmers, emergency workers, public servants. If they used those people as role models I don’t think we would need to call on footballers to fill the, er, role.

Unless you wanted to be a footballer and earn far more money than any of those good people I have mentioned.

Blowing in the wind

by Atheism, Climate Change, Education, Environment, Evolution, Media • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Science, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, these days, it seems.

If you had asked me a few years ago the answer was absolutely clear. No, not the technology, that’s just the side effect, a little bonus, cream on top.

The real importance of science, for the last 500 years, was as the one aspect of human endeavor that constantly advanced, constantly improved, built on previous work, earlier understanding, didn’t take a backward step. Each scientist stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said.

Up until the Renaissance humans had taken one step forward and two steps back in their understanding of the world around them. Some glimmering of understanding about the nature of the real world would be smashed down again by religion or war or cynical politicians or charlatans. But once the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, modified hypothesis, became established by people focussed on investigating the real world instead of accepting the imaginary world of wishful thinking, the human race never looked back. Or not for long anyway.

The age and structure of the universe was established; the form and relationships of different chemical elements; the development of life on earth (and the place of Homo sapiens in that development); the history and geology and climatology of the Earth; the anatomy and physiology and psychology of the human (and other animals) body. All of this was a long way from superstition, and folk medicine, and mythology, and religion, and the last vestiges of those early and primitive beliefs were gradually being swept away as the twentieth century came to an end. At last the human race was on the move into the twenty first century, after 500 years of steady advance, with a clear vision of reality unencumbered by the past detritus of failed human beliefs.

A scary prospect, it seems, for some people. Couldn’t be allowed to happen. And suddenly all the junk thought from past millenia (with some additions) was back in the mix, spurred on by politicians and religious leaders and the media. Suddenly there were miracles, and magic remedies (homeopathy just the most egregious), and prayer, and creationism, climate change denialism, belief in ghosts and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, and mysterious forces, and supernatural beings, and faith healing, and magnets and crystals, and human domination over nature, and witches, and spirituality, all flooding back into human society and culture like an oil leak flooding into the Gulf. Just as poisonous to the human condition as oil is to seabirds.

Need a big clean up effort, both of them. Need decent science education in schools again, free of the baneful influence of religious followers. And we need a media that again accepts the scientific method and its findings, and refuses to give air time or column inches or internet bandwidth to charlatans, and religious leaders, and the deliberate deceptions of the anti-science self-proclaimed mystics and healers, and the no-nothingism of those determined to let the corporations destroy the planet. Big task to clear all this rubbish out, but once it is gone science can again get on with the task of illuminating the real world. And after the damage that has been done by the charlatans and con men and crooks in the last few years we have lost time to make up, urgently. The answers have been blowing in the wind of nonsense and lies for a decade now.

You with me?

Cross-posted at Huffington Post

Heads up

by Education • Tags: , , ,

Two stories coincided the other day on a television breakfast show. The first was in response to the increase in cigarette prices that had occurred the night before. People had been rushing to stock up, rather in the way one might stock up on cyanide or guns I suppose. And there had been an “online poll” in which two thirds of the responders said they wouldn’t give up smoking as a result of the price rise, one third said they would. This was trumpeted by the presenters as “Most smokers won’t give up as a result of price rise, is it therefore just a grab for money?”. The second story was to do with the school testing program for the “My School” league tables. One presenter said that teachers were currently preparing children to take the test. One of the shock jocks, outraged at the prospect that “a few” teachers wanted to resist this absolutely perfect capitalist experiment in public education, expressed surprise at this, noting that the tests should just be a quick unprepared sample of every day school life. And then a day or so later came news that poorly performing students were being told to stay home on the day of the test. It is not a random test which can reflect reality, it is a test whose results are biased in all kinds of different ways, which is why teachers are objecting to it being used to COMPARE SCHOOLS.

I have yet to hear a tv commentator who understands this. But then I have yet to hear a tv commentator who understands statistics or the concept of randomness. Whether it is the nonsense of suggesting that if a winning lottery ticket has been sold from a particular location a new punter should buy from there; or rubbish about road accident or crime figures; or discussions of meaningless political polls (or polls in which cigarette smokers phone in); or understanding that climate change analysis is based on long term trends, not cold days in February; or the risk of shark attacks; or the effects of flu injections; or the dangers of terrorist attacks, whatever the issue, the facts are not understood. Every single incident is treated as if it had equal meaning, when without the context that statistics provide they all equally lack meaning.

I know these people aren’t very smart, and I know the idea of tv is not to calm people’s fears but to increase them, so I understand why people are afraid of cars crashing through their living rooms; or catching an incurable disease; or having a meteorite fall out of the sky and crush them, stone dead. Good for ratings. But I don’t understand why Julia Gillard, certainly no fool, and not worried about the ratings of current affairs shows, can’t see the problem with the NAPLAN tests. If she really wanted to accurately compare student performance in order to see where government funding was most urgently needed it would be certainly possible to devise a scheme of random, unannounced, tests of schools which could give significant results. But that isn’t what she’s got, and no amount of bullying teachers can make it so.

She has more chance of winning a lottery. And so do disadvantaged schools.