Tag Archives: education

Field of dreams

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

Odd moment during the recent announcement and garbled discussion of education reforms in Australia. Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher, was asked by parochial reporters, essentially, “what’s in it for Canberra?”

She said, perhaps bemused by the stupid question, that because most if not all Canberra students were already receiving support above what was being proposed, there actually wasn’t anything “in it” for the ACT.

In hunter-gatherer societies all children are educated equally – it would be suicidal for the society to do anything else. Same with the early agricultural societies. In both cases gifted individuals may specialise in particular areas of expertise later, but all will be educated.

We lost this equality of opportunity as the accumulation of wealth by a few created a situation where better education could be purchased, and that has remained the case, and been strengthened, ever since.

Indeed in Australia the Right, themselves, one and all, the products of the best education money could buy, decided they could do better as old boys (or girls) than merely denoting a few tax deductible dollars to the alma mater. They could, they realised, get their name up on the honour roll by getting the people of Australia to pay big bucks to schools already overflowing with swimming pools and polo ponies and acres of rolling playing fields. And they could lock in such payments permanently with a clever mathematical formula which achieved bias while appearing objective. A simple formula, always applied by conservatives, and always effective = The Rich get Richer. Genius eh?

So, it’s time for a reversal of fortunes. A simple formula = To each according to his needs. Identify the poorest public schools, give them more money to build up their resources to the level of the richer public schools. And then, whisper who dare, onwards to the levels of the private schools. Oh, sorry, getting a bit carried away there. Never mind, let’s get all students onto as level a playing field, playing fields, as possible. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of class war.

But wait, there’s more. The other conservative legacy also affects equality of educational opportunity – religion. Separation of church and state? Yeah, whatever, but separation of church and school just as important. Yet John Howard unleashed the dogs of sectarianism. Loony tunes religious schools proliferated. Students taught curriculums in which garbage like creationism can be included, because religious freedom. “The more religion, the lower the quality of education” – write that on the blackboard 100 times Mr Howard

But worse is that schooling, meant to broaden horizons, introduce new ideas, allow children to mix widely, teach the ability to think and evaluate, to see a world beyond the walls of their home, has been narrowed. Religious fanatics have been allowed to carry out home-schooling in bulk. Allowed to make sure that no child raised in the closed little worlds of religious fundamentalism is allowed to discover that there is another real world outside.

So, equality of opportunity for all students? Absolutely, stuff of dreams. But understand that it involves more than just money. I have a dream of getting all students onto the playing field of secular education.

What’s in it for Australia? Only the next generation.

Read the news today, oh boy

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

I first became aware of “news” in 1956, which was, in retrospect, not a bad year to do so. My own personal news was that this was my last year of primary school, last year of childhood you could say, and 1957 would bring the first year of adulthood, the simultaneously frightening and exciting prospect of high school.

Unaccountably the rest of the planet seemed blissfully unaware that I was, at least in my head if not out loud, singing “Watch out World, here I come”. They seemed preoccupied with other stuff in that year of my awakening awareness of news that was to continue for a lifetime.

Plenty of other stuff had happened since I was born (the years known as AD for After David), small matters like the end of world wars, atomic bombs, Berlin Wall, Long March, Korean War, Indian independence, a new Queen of England, death of Stalin, the voting out and voting in of Churchill, and so on, but I had been too young to take much notice of (or understand had I done so) those interesting times I was living in.

But then came 1956, and my mind sprang to attention as the world seemed to erupt in serious, newsworthy events, most with long-term implications. Suez! Hungary! Olympics in Melbourne! TV in Australia! Elvis Presley! First commercial nuclear power plant! Black protests (Rosa Parks having done her courageous thing in December 1955) increasing in America!

From then on of course, year after year, newsworthy events kept happening until you felt like screaming “stop the world I want to get off”. There was Sputnik in 1957 (the whole world, it seemed, including me, stood outside their houses at night, getting cricks in their necks as they stared upwards at a tiny manmade star moving, it seemed unbelievable, through space. Or, almost as incredibly, it was possible to listen, on a radio, to the high-pitched beeping sound that was the star communicating with Earth. Advanced technology, completely indistinguishable from magic, and destined, though few of us knew at the time, to revolutionise communications among other things).

There was the election and killing of JFK, the build-up in Vietnam, the Beatles, Castro, riots in Paris, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the assassination of Allende, the end of the Vietnam War, man on the Moon, and on and on as Sixties became Seventies and beyond.

All through these decades, as the world settled back into a new order after the end of World War Two (like a city rebuilding after an earthquake), serious news was related to us in serious ways. Morning newspapers gave sober facts, thoughtful editorials, expert analysis, on the significant events of the previous day at home and abroad. Television and radio had major evening news bulletins to do likewise. Oh, of course there was also frivolous stuff all through the media, but there seemed to be a recognition (especially from the ABC, but other media outlets as well), that there needed to be a core of seriousness for serious times. That there were things that an educated public needed to know.

But then, somewhere along the way to the 21st Century (and this won’t be news to any observant human being), everything changed. Oh, there was no shortage of significant world events, but the way they were, or weren’t communicated to the public changed.

On the pretext that there was more news to report, the “24 hour News Cycle” became a self-fulfilling description, and 24 hour news channels came into being. Instead of single major news bulletins in an evening, short news grabs were pumped out all through the day, and lasted no longer than a ay. And because when you got down to it there weren’t any more significant events than there had been, “news” had to be padded out with a white noise of trivia.

But by happy coincidence this padding served another function. Because so much “news” was being pumped out by the media it was hard to make people (whose parents and grandparents had once clustered eagerly around a radio to hear the 7pm Bulletin) take any interest in news bulletins. So they had to be turned into entertainment. Short snappy tabloid style reports replaced longer factual ones. Nothing could be reported that didn’t have video footage to accompany it. Analysis from experts was replaced by opinions from small numbers of regular ideologues (some employed, some on contracts). Sport dominated bulletins that had once kept it to a minimum, including at times running sporting stories as the lead.

Bulletins had to end on a happy note, so funny animals, whacky people, strange events, of a kind once restricted to tabloid newspapers or sideshow alleys, appeared, often taking more time than a report of, say, World War Three breaking out. And then began to be dotted through the bulletin to lighten it up. Conversely, to add suspense and interest, in the way of a lurid crime novel, the networks began including scare campaigns in which anything and everything in your kitchen could kill you, strangers could slaughter you, children be abducted, yellow hordes invade, aircraft crash, and so on. Every day some new thing to fear – keep reading/watching, we will keep you alert and alarmed, keep you warned about what to be fearful of.

So news bulletins, once so fundamental to a well-informed democracy, turned into glossy gossip magazines with moving pictures. And the “24 Hour News Channels” going the same way except at greater length with much repetition, and slabs of talking heads from right-wing think tanks or shock jock radio or Retired-Conservative-Politician-Land.

Then to compound (if ’twere needed) the problem, politicians, seeing the way the electronic wind was blowing, and realising that the days of thoughtful, longer, discussions of policy or events was long gone, began speaking in sound bites themselves to fit into the new news style. And, to be helpful, associating political stunts, as colourful and entertaining as possible, to go with the three word slogans and three sentence propaganda. There you are, a small package beautifully tailored for insertion straight into “news” bulletins 2013-style.

So a torrent of news noise washes across this land. Little or no information, in fact often deliberately misleading information through the stunts and slogans, just a scrap-book of sound and fury signifying nothing. And, as an unforeseen consequence, a view of the world promoted in which everything is of equal significance, or that nothing is of any significance. Wars and rumours of war of no more interest than skate-boarding dogs or surf-skiing hamsters. No ability of the public to distinguish what if anything is of concern and importance among all the fake fear campaigns and funny animals.

No way now that a child born in 2002 could see 2013 as a memorable year of great world events, or understand what they mean.

Nor could anyone else.

One journalist further

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , ,

People passionately follow all kinds of things – Manchester United, the Catholic Church, Justin Bieber, Survivor, Capitalism, Communism, chess, guns, baseball, Islam, Formula 1, scouting, civil war (whichever) re-enactments, stamp collecting, Republican Party, Alan Jones … A comfort I suppose, a sense of belonging to a club, a sense of not having to think about stuff (MUFC is simply the greatest football club in the universe, obviously).

I sometimes wish… No, I don’t really. They all involve not only a willing suspension of disbelief, but a kind of willing acquisition of total belief. And total belief, or faith, is the antithesis of what should make us human.

Demagogues with crowds of cheering, saluting, marching, smashing, looting, killing, followers (even football fans!) are the example that everyone thinks of. But it makes no difference, ultimately, whether the great leader is spouting populism, anarchism, fascism, communism, catholicism, islamism or buddhism. The words are spread on the fertile culture medium of total belief and the mobs begin to rampage.

But there is a much commoner, more apparently acceptable form of belief, so common that people don’t see it as part of the same phenomenon. That is the belief that some particular individual – shock jock, sportsperson, journalist, politician, celebrity, hell even some religious people – is a role model, someone whose words, written or spoken, are to be taken seriously, accepted as, well, gospel truth.

Curiously a corollary of this touching faith in the one true prophet is often a belief that the rest of those in the cohort are fools and rascals. A typical sentence construction “Well of course most journalists these days are biased rogues, except so-and-so”.

This worries me (hell, everything worries me these days). It really is no different in kind, although obviously in scale, to the adoring crowds hanging on every word of the political demagogue. At both ends of the scale what should be important to us is not who is saying something, but what is being said. If we think so-and-so is the one true journalist, then our critical faculties are suspended and we are more likely to believe what we are being told instead of subjecting it to the kind of cynicism and fool-me-once-shame-on-you-fool-me-twice-shame-on-me disbelief that should serve us so well with everyone who is telling us stuff.

Think of it this way. When people say to an atheist “how can you not believe in god” the reply is “well, you know how you don’t believe in any of the thousands of gods except one, well I just take it one god further”.

So there you are. If you don’t believe in all except one journalist, take it one journalist further, politicians same, shock jocks, the lot. Belief, faith, has no place in politics or media.

Except blogs of course. No harm in you thinking this is the one true blog, the best blog, and casting your vote by clicking the Best Blogs 2013 blue button near top of right column (blog subscribers, don’t forget you need to visit the blog to vote, come on down). But you can show your critical faculties remain intact by leaving a critical comment or two.

Chicks Lit

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , ,

For this post something of a look behind the scenes, a slight lifting of the curtain, on the process of blog post writing at Watermelon.

Sometimes I use objets trouvee to prompt a thought, perhaps a memory. The other day I happened to see one of my old children’s annuals. Do they still exist? Perhaps in relation to pop stars or movie spin-offs, not sure. But once upon a time they were very big and popular with children. Reflecting in turn the popularity of children’s magazines. Not comics, though these of course have also long been popular, but junior magazines, part of a spectrum of publications which went up to adults and indeed to old people. Magazines still popular of course, but nothing like what they were in their heyday, and probably destined to die out as they are totally replaced by the internet.

Anyway the children’s magazines, as a way of cashing in on their popularity, almost all (or perhaps it was all) produced an “annual”, aimed at the easy-Xmas-present-for-desperate-relatives market, and, I guess, providing a welcome cash boost to the publishers. But they were also eagerly awaited by children, containing, as they did, new stories about favourite characters, interesting facts, puzzles, games and so on.

The spectrum began with the very young, and the oldest example I have is the “Chicks’ Own Annual” of 1950, sent by relatives in England for a Xmas present in December 1949, my name carefully filled in in the space provided on a frontispiece which said “This Jolly Book belongs to…”.

Anyway. I looked at this, and its familiar front cover of a sack race by the popular characters, triggered the kind of memories other authors seem to get from eating bits of cake soaked in wine on a spoon. And I was all set to write one of those remembrance of times past, remembrance of times passed, kind of memoir posts that regular readers know and love. But then I thought I’d have a look inside.

And was suddenly plunged, unexpectedly, on page 19, into a new subject for the post.

chicks

You probably can’t read the text of the little poem, and so to avoid you missing the full flavour of the humour, here it is (note that the hyphens to break up longer words into syllables is house style throughout the book, presumably making it easier for young readers):

“When eb-ber I am making tarts,
De nigs soon find it out,
Dey creeps in-to my kitch-en and
start monk-ey-ing a-bout.

Dey eat de jam, dey tease de cat,
Near drive me off my head,
De on-ly time it’s safe to cook
Is when dey’se all in bed.

‘Why don’t I chase dem out”‘ you say.
H’m! Just yo’ come and try!
While I am catch-ing hold ob one,
An-nud-der eats a pie!

De mis-chief dat dem boys can do
Is plain for all to see,
Dat wo-man who lib-bed in a shoe
Was be-ter off dan me!”

It’s hard to know where to start with this page of totally forgotten (by me) humour.

Remind yourself that this is an English magazine for very small children (I was four), not an American one. Remind yourself that this was written by a white man (or woman, but I’m guessing a man, there is no indication of editorial team or writers anywhere). Remind yourself that although there were a few people of Caribbean (and African) origin in England for several hundred years by this time, this poem was being written not long after the 1948 British Nationality Act gave British Citizenship, and full rights of entry and settlement in Britain, to all people living in Commonwealth countries, and that as a result the first ship (the MV Empire Windrush) carrying 492 Caribbean immigrants had arrived in London on 22 June 1948.

So the presence of this “funny cartoon” in 1949 is a bit strange. As is its form. These, I presume, are intended to be some kind of comic idea of American blacks. Based on what? Some memory of Hollywood movies or American comedians doing a parody black voice? Why was it thought suitable for four year old English (or Australian) kids in 1949? And was the use of the term “nigs” really seen as jolly good fun and not offensive in that year?

Finally the big question. Was this sort of thing common in children’s comics, magazines, annuals of the day, and did it affect the racism of the public later? Caribbean migration began in 1948. Race riots and attacks built up in the 1950s. Twenty years later came Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, perhaps the most offensive words ever to come from a British politician. Were these public attitudes at least partly built on the playful pages of Chick’s Own and others like it? Many families try to restrict their children from playing with toy guns, concerned about the effect on their attitudes in later life. Should they also have been concerned about those harmless looking children’s annuals stuffed innocently into Xmas stockings?

Anyway, I thought I should check out the rest of this Annual, see if page 19 was just the tip of the iceberg, see if my young mind had been unknowingly but permanently warped by subliminal racism and turned me into the adult racist I so famously became (just as my cap-firing cowboy gun, proudly blasting away at about the same time, turned me into a gun fanatic blasting kangaroos in national parks with an AK 47).

And there we had it. Straight away on page 2 we have “Nigger” the black chick (one of the jolly chick chums of the title of the Annual) and later “Golli” the golliwog and “Golly” the golliwog, who seems to be a different character. All appear in several different stories. On page 26 “Neddy and Nellie Nigger” appear asking “some jolly riddles”. They are also cartoonish, but more humanised than the “Naughty Nigs”.

At one moment you think this is all quite innocent, reading too much into a long-ago children’s book. But then you think, just a moment. Why is the black chicken called “Nigger”? What’s with the golliwogs? Why is it “Neddy and Nellie Nigger ” who are asking “jolly riddles”? And, looming overall are those “Naughty Nigs” (note that, as if to underline connections, a golliwog appears in the scene, as one does on the front cover, falling over, and therefore coming last, in the sack race), as offensive, in retrospect, as caricatures of Jewish people would have been before the war.

But did any of it have an effect on me and my contemporaries, make us predisposed to be racists? I don’t know. It is just one of tens of thousands of influences on you as you grow up (and another time I will have a look at Lion Annual 1957 for what was going on in the big boy equivalent of Chick’s Own), and who knows what results in one prevailing over another.

It is worth noting the reverse though. That this kind of content was thought absolutely appropriate in a magazine for young children (remember that this Annual reflected content produced week after week, year after year) in an office in London in 1949. And by inference, by at least a good proportion of the population of England at the time. And that, this one little lone Annual of mine representing a very small tip of an iceberg, this kind of unconscious/conscious racism in publications must have been widespread in society. Therefore creating, in its representation of black people as definitely “other”, as not quite human even, fertile ground for the violent racism that was to come.

The Write Stuff

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

“…he lounged up and down the pavement, and gazed vacantly at the ground, the sky, the opposite houses, and the line of railings. Having finished his scrutiny, he proceeded slowly down the path, or rather down the fringe of grass that flanked the path, keeping his eyes riveted on the ground. Twice he stopped, and once I saw him smile, and heard him utter an exclamation of satisfaction. There were many marks of footsteps on the wet clayey soil; but since the police had been coming over it, I was unable to see how my companion could learn anything from it” … “… the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg …” Sherlock Holmes ‘A Study in Scarlet’.

When I was young I thought “Oh, if only I could write like Enid Blyton”. A little later it was “Oh if only I could write like WE Johns”. Then followed Charles Dickens, and a little later JD Salinger, and on and on through a life spent reading and writing. These days I will read some beautifully argued and written blog post or newspaper column and think, oh, if only I could write like that, perhaps I should copy their style, see what I can do.

But you can’t, really of course. Your writing style is born with you, grows with you, is the result of nature and nurture, is as individual as a fingerprint.

Or your track through a desert. It is often remarked (though I think much exaggerated and mythologised) that Australian Aborigines, Kalahari Bushmen, North American Indians, can identify not just which species of animal they are tracking but an individual, and the same when tracking humans. And what they were doing – here they paused to rest, here ate some food, there drank, at this point they were running, at that they were sleeping and so on. A track across a landscape becomes a history of an individual.

As does the track across your life of the things you write. We all leave behind not broken twigs, crushed leaves, footprints in soft mud; but letters, wills, academic research papers, letters to editor, books, post cards, theses, speeches, school essays, diaries, newspaper columns, poetry, book chapters, reviews, referee reports, and, more recently, emails, tweets, blogs. We don’t all leave all of those of course, but the combination of written works we do leave will also help to define our lives, define who we are, as much as the style and content of what is written.

Some disciplines impose strong frameworks not just on what is written but on how it is written. Law, Science, Medicine, Engineering, for example, impose style and content requirements that greatly reduce the individual footprint that can be produced in them. On the other hand writing history for example, or of course literature, is very much open to, indeed demands, that the writer develop their own style.

So you could, and people called biographers do, deduce a great deal about a person, their personality, ideas, creativity, influences, life story, from the written works they leave behind. A box, an attic, full of old papers doth a biography make. But for it to be a true, accurate, portrait of a lady, or gentleman, the record must be complete. There are many heartbreaking stories to the biographer or historian, of letters burnt after death on an author’s instructions (Dickens for example), of manuscripts lost in some way, of material discarded when a family moves house, and, these days, of crashed computers or damaged discs. The problem is not just that some detail is absent, some chunk of time not described, but that the missing material may well have totally altered our understanding of a life, a character, an achievement.

Material from which to cut the whole cloth of a life need not be actually physically lost, but can be merely lost sight of. A classic example in science is Gregor Mendel. He published the paper which showed how genetic inheritance worked in 1866. It was ignored for the next 34 years (and all his papers burnt after his death in 1884), during which time Darwin’s discovery of natural selection remained without a proper framework of genetic inheritance, until rediscovered in 1900. It was only after that time that modern genetics began to develop, and the genius of Mendel recognised. There have been many similar cases in all scientific disciplines I suspect.

This kind of failing is not just a thing of the past. Today the standard approach to “reviewing the literature” in an academic paper is to look only at the last few years, an event horizon at 5 years apparently prevents any further investigation. A literature review once was, should be, the following of a trail of evidence and argument back to its origins, in order to understand the life story of a theory or set of data. It only takes one or two literature reviews in which some papers are ignored for them to disappear into a black hole and never be referenced again (because future researchers will come to this point in their search and, not finding them, remain unaware of their existence).

Does it matter? Yes it does. If older works disappear from consideration then newer ones will keep reinventing the wheel, keep coming up with suggestions long ago dismissed for good reason (see my earlier post “The Burning Bush” for an example of this). Science is supposed to grow steadily as data and ideas accumulate, not keep slipping down to the bottom of the hill and start again the next day.

And for the individuals concerned (like poor old Mendel), ignoring work is as bad as having the maid burn a manuscript while lighting a fire, or work being done on a computer tape that can no longer be read by modern computers. Their life story, their achievements, their personal style as illustrated in the fingerprints of their writing, will be invisible to history, be incomplete. And we have no Sherlock Holmes now to decipher the biographical footprints scuffed out by policemen.

No one will ever know I smoked Trichinopoly cigars.

People like us

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

It is often remarked that people in different political parties can seem more alike and be more comfortable with each other, than with members of their own parties. The reason is simple. Political parties are composed of no more than three kinds of people (what follows is based on Australia, but with minor variations could also be used for US and UK) – idealists, ideologues, careerists.

The careerists of both sides have little interest in policy or ideology. Such people join the Liberal Party in a natural progression, just as they might join the Melbourne Club. A brief stint as a lawyer, into politics, on to diplomacy, into lucrative seats on the boards of big companies. It’s just what people like us do, dear chap, what our families and friends do, have always done. One expects, naturally, to be a minister, but the purpose of being so, except for providing mates’ rates on government projects for friends, is of less interest than the tailor who has made one’s suit. Just give them the party platform, whatever it is, and they’ll go along with it and be sure to stick their hands up at the right times. In return the lucrative business opportunities to make serious money will emerge naturally from the contacts made.

Much the same on the Labor side. Some university training, perhaps in Law, activity in a suitable Union involving administration in some way, into politics, into diplomacy perhaps, on to Boards of medium-sized companies and statutory authorities. Friends and family will have often followed similar career trajectories. If you are smart you’ll become a minister, but apart from making decisions that will benefit causes you and your friends hold dear, just give them the party platform, tell them which faction they are in, and the hand will be raised at the right time. In return, after, or even during political life, business opportunities will arise that make poor boys from the wrong side of the tracks or the wrong side of the ocean, rich almost beyond the dreams of avarice.

The ideologues who join the Liberals do so because this is the Party that will, for purely pragmatic reasons, support them. A gaggle of true believers in one or more of Libertarianism, neoconservatism, union-bashing, fundamentalist religions, racism, climate change denial, anti vaccination, guns, anti-environmentalism, war, the rich, anti fluoridation, misogyny, anti-abortion, xenophobia, creationism, gay bashing, the 1950s, find a warm and welcoming roof over their heads in the Liberal Party. They come from small community groups and even smaller astro-turf groups. Once they would have found themselves on the very back seat of the very back row of the Back Bench, these days they find themselves as Shadow Ministers and Ministers. And where once ministers might be selected for their expertise in, say, education or health, these days the ideologues will find themselves in charge of that which they hate most – climate change deniers as environment minister for example, xenophobes in immigration, religious fundamentalists in science, union bashers in workplace relations, anti vaccers in health, creationists in education, and so on. In later life they will go back to doing what they were doing before political life, listening to shock jocks and taking part in virulent demonstrations outside abortion clinics or refugee bureaus.

The ideologues who join Labor often do so from Union backgrounds. They do so because of the chance to sing “solidarity forever” out of tune at union meetings, and to be totally supported by fellow colleagues, while having a platform to rant about their particular obsession, which may be total support for union activity regardless of any other consideration, fundamentalist religions, racism, climate change denial, anti vaccination, guns, anti-environmentalism, war, the rich, anti fluoridation, misogyny, anti-abortion, xenophobia, creationism, gay bashing, the 1950s. They rarely seek ministerial glory (and would be seen as too loopy to get it), but are much happier in the back rooms deciding who does get the ministries and what policies are followed. They can it seems block environmental action, same-sex marriage, serious climate change moves, compassionate attitudes to refugees, while supporting chaplains in schools. Later life will be the same.

The idealists in the Liberal Party hark back to the golden age of small-l liberalism, back to the time of Menzies, and believe it still forms the core of the Liberal Party. They imagine the Party as a “Broad Church”, one where many voices and points of view are welcomed, indeed encouraged, where one is free to be an individual (unlike of course the regimented group-think of Labor), where merit is recognised. There may be small-l libertarian, small-b business, and small-r religious beliefs involved. They believe, or believe they believe, in science, rationalism, humanism, and that they are the children of the Enlightenment. In spite, or rather because, of these beliefs, in government they find themselves shunted into low status soft ministries (like arts or environment or social services) or left on the back bench, where they may occasionally consider crossing the floor in relation to issues such as refugees. In later life they find themselves heading community service organisations, or becoming professors of public medicine, or practising pro bono legal work, or working for causes such as refugees or Aboriginal people.

The idealists in the Labor Party are drawn to it, moths to a flame, by the Light on the Hill, believing that the Party is still that of Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam. They come into it not via the unions but via universities and community organisations. They imagine Labor is a Broad Church where a diversity of ideas and opinions are encouraged, individuality welcomed, unlike the Liberal Party with its iron party discipline. They believe in small-s socialism, small-e environmentalism, small-a atheism. They believe, or believe they believe, in science, rationalism, humanism, and that they are the children of the Enlightenment. In spite, or rather because, of these beliefs, in government they find themselves shunted into low status soft ministries (like arts or environment or social services) or left on the back bench, where they may occasionally consider crossing the floor in relation to issues such as refugees. In later life they find themselves heading community service organisations, or becoming professors of public medicine, or practising pro bono legal work, or working for causes such as refugees or Aboriginal people.

Clearly, those within each category, irrespective of party, will have a lot in common. Labor and Liberal careerists may combine on a more or less shady business deal; Labor and Liberal ideologues opposing abortion will find themselves at the same rally or prayer meeting; Labor and Liberal idealists will find themselves signing the same petitions, joining the same university departments. Each pair may well find themselves complaining about how bad their careerist and ideologue colleagues, say, are.

What is needed, clearly, is a mechanism for converting the two parties into three.

But gold shines like fire

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by Media • Tags: , , , ,

A recent story here provides yet another vignette of the problems with modern journalism. A tiny thing but symbolic.

It is the ten year anniversary of the devastating bush fires that hit Canberra in 2003, and local media of course are running a number of stories to mark the event.

An obvious follow-up story was that of Robert de Castella, famous marathon runner of the 1980s, and the most high profile person to lose his home in the fires. He was extensively interviewed at the time, and it was logical to see how he was going ten years on and ask about his reflections on the event in retrospect. So far so good.

It was competently done, bread and butter for someone like local ABC journalist Craig Allen. Footage of “Deek” walking through the burnt out ruins in 2003 interspersed with segments from a new interview. But the ending jarred on me.

At the time much was made of Deek losing everything including all his Olympic, World Championship, Commonwealth Games medals. However they were recovered, some melted, by sifting through the ashes and here they were now ten years on, piled into a small bowl and shown to Craig. It was used as the final image of the piece, shown while Craig’s voiceover says words to the effect (I haven’t tried to transcribe) “What were once Gold and Silver, are now all bronze.” Then comes the punch line “Fire it seems is a great leveller”.

All well and good. Just one tiny problem, the film shows quite clearly that the medals are in fact quite clearly still gold silver and bronze! A note in the transcript (not spoken in the segment that went to air this time, but from the 2003 report) says – “His mother-in-law later [ie after the fire] spent countless hours scrubbing and cleaning the medals, some of which were molten and unrecognisable lumps of metal.”

Now I guess this doesn’t “matter”. “No big deal”, I hear you say. And you’d be right. But consider this. The story stood alone as it was. Absolutely fine. Deek made the point that possessions didn’t matter and that family did. He had come to realise that his losses of material objects he once thought important were irrelevant in the greater scheme of things which was his family.

Fine, good, finish on those words as Deek yet again steps through the rubble of his possessions. But, and I am guessing here, the executive producer, or the journalist, thought there should be another moral to the story. That Deek’s moral was fine, but it was Deek’s, and the journalist, Craig, needed to stamp his authority on the story, write his own narrative, draw his own conclusion, show the audience that this was “journalism” not mere reportage.

In addition it seems, these days all tv stories have to include a visual metaphor. Especially bad and blatant in sports reporting (an image of, say, a flock of seagulls taking off will be accompanied by the observation that the “Swans [footballers] were flying high”), but has crept into all reporting. Find an image, add an observation which matches it in some way, wrap up the story so the audience knows how it is supposed to think about the issue.

This has become such a common practice that we don’t even notice it any more. This one became noticeable only because the metaphor image was wrong, discordant with the narrative it was meant to represent. Chosen because it should have been “right” and therefore its wrongness not really seen. Which then brings one to question the narrative. In what sense is fire a “great leveller”?

Perhaps it was meant as a reflection that if a celebrity like de Castella could be burnt out, then anyone could. But if so then this is such a trivial observation that it isn’t worth taking away from the vision of Deek’s medals. If it was meant in a more general sense that the fire had destroyed houses in a wealthy suburb, then again, a trivial observation, and not really true. It was a middle class suburb certainly, but not generally a home of the rich and famous. And given that fires are more likely to hit the outskirts of cities, then generally I suppose they are more likely to hit relatively poor people. Or, in the bush itself, more likely to hit relatively poor farming communities.

If the segment was suggesting that everyone was impacted in the same way by a fire then this is nonsense. Famously a fire can completely destroy one house, while leaving, by a fluke of wind perhaps, another untouched next door. Fires may completely destroy houses and all their contents, or perhaps partially damage them, leaving interiors unscathed, and so on.

If the observation was meant to support the idea that everybody, rich or poor, famous or humble, would be affected in the same way by fire as Deek, then again it is nonsense. There would be people whose homes contain the results of a lifetime of collecting something, stamps perhaps, or antiques, or art; there would be others whose homes contained all their photographs and memory objects of children and grandchildren, parents and grandparents, who would be bereft without them; there would be people working from home who lost all their research data, or correspondence, or tools of trade. That is there would be many people for whom the fire would be a devastating blow to their lives, work, identity, from which they would never recover. Would never be able to look at charred ruins and say, “oh well, objects don’t matter”. Rob de Castella was lucky that he was able to do that, but the proposition that the fire “levelled” everyone to that same condition is absurd.

In other words both the objects, and the metaphor derived from them, were misleading, plain wrong really. Does it matter? In this case probably not though it does I think leave people with an unfortunate view of the effects of fires and the “correct” way to respond to them and think about them. Disturbing, I would think, to the hundreds of other people in the suburb affected in different ways.

But more generally, it is concerning as an example, over-analysed perhaps, of the media approach to life the universe and everything. Many, perhaps most, of the stories you see on tv will incorporate vision from which a metaphor and a message is derived. The vision may or may not represent anything real at all, the derived metaphor will be glib and inaccurate. And yet, as part of a news package, it will help to convince you, leave you with a subliminal message, that the meaning the media outlet wanted you to attach to the event or person is the one that will be attached.

Be alert and alarmed. Say to yourself “I know what they are doing there, and I won’t be sucked in”.

Perhaps then the media will go back to presenting the facts of a case and letting you make up your own mind what they mean.

Political Gene-ius

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by Education, Environment, Evolution, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive 
That every boy and every gal,
That’s born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!
(WS Gilbert “Iolanthe”)

When I, aged 30, first met my Father we didn’t discuss cricket, and I have no idea whether he was a fan or not. But then I had no idea he was a Shakespeare fan until I learned he had somehow carried a volume of the Collected Works in his army kitbag all through the Middle East and New Guinea in World War 2, so perhaps he did love cricket.

My grandfather (yes, the one in the photo top right) certainly did play, and love, cricket, and was, apparently, a very handy fast bowler, even up to being in his Forties. I once proudly owned, and wore, his cricket cap from when he played in the County Durham competition, 100 years ago, but lost it in circumstances which remain painful.

He died not long after I turned seven. Before I was old enough to seriously appreciate cricket, and long before television, let alone direct tv broadcasts of Test Matches, came to Perth. Cricket could be followed, from England, on the radio in the early 1950s, and that was that. One of my many regrets about his early death was never being able to watch cricket with him. Both of us would have relished the experience.

But with no direct transmission from either father or grandfather, how did I get my love of cricket?

What used to be called the “lower vertebrates”, fish, amphibians, reptiles, generally speaking, fertilise eggs, lay them somewhere appropriate, and then piss off. Consequently the young, when born, are equipped to completely fend for themselves. All of their behaviour patterns are encoded in their DNA, and on hatching they simply seek shelter, food, and eventually mates in ways that were innate, not learned. [It's worth noting though that some species in all these groups have separately evolved live births, and others, after laying eggs, guard them until hatching, and then guard the young for a while. In such species it is possible the young do learn some behaviour associated with, say, feeding, from the male or female parent].

The “higher vertebrates”, birds and mammals, show considerable variation. All the birds (and three of the mammals) lay eggs of course. But there are some, the cuckoo species, that dump their eggs into the nests of other species to raise. There are some, all ground living types (emus, chickens, ducks etc), who have “precocial” young, with down cover, born ready to move off with their mother. Most others have young born naked and totally helpless, needing total care in nest from parents until their feathers develop and they can fly (and even then care continues). They therefore have a mixture of innate behaviours and learned (or at least modified) behaviours

Mammals also vary. Some, notably the herd/flock species, are up and moving within a few hours of birth and following the mother in the rest of the mob. Others are born completely helpless, and remain so for long periods, weeks, months, even years. The ones who develop quickly have less chance (and need) to learn from parents (though they will learn a great deal), those (notably the apes, including us, learn a great deal from the parents and have fewer purely innate components (though far more than we realise).

Well, in brief, we are into the nitty gritty of the “nature-nurture” debate – what part of a species, say Homo sapiens sapiens, behaviours are genetic, inherited, what part are learnt? Not simple, as the evolutionary history above shows. Certainly there are fundamental things – eating, drinking, danger, comfort, athleticism – that are strongly genetically based. Then there are superficial things – religion, taste in music and art, social unit structures, political beliefs, and, yes, sport preferences – that are strongly based on the context in which you are raised.

But, on the one hand the genetic ones are modified by upbringing (eg particular food preferences, response to dangers, how fit you are), and on the other, even some of the superficial socio-culturally-based ones have some genetic basis it has been found. Studies of twins raised separately for example show some tendency for them to be similar in their strength of religious belief (though the form strictly related to household raised in). Musical abilities are well-known to often “run in families”. And more recently (for example) studies show tendency towards respectively right and left-wing political beliefs have some genetic component (though again, the particular form this might take being related to up-bringing). Wonder if the otherwise inexplicable gun love in the US is part of this inheritance?

Interestingly, though not surprisingly perhaps, both the religious and political tendencies are related to serotonin production and the brain’s response, and since music also causes serotonin reactions, it may well be that is also related to the abilities of, say, the sons of JS Bach.

Anyway, all of that may help to explain (though of course there would be many other factors), why a religious believer might suddenly appear from an atheist household, or a fervent Young Republican from a Democratic one, or a genius musician from a non-musical family. May also explain why musical ability is rare, why the irrational belief in religion persists to damage societies, and why roughly half of the voters in most countries keep voting for conservative parties that will damage their interests.

Oh, and it might just explain why I am watching a cricket match on tv while I write this! There being more things in heaven an earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, or made a fault in our stars.

A, B, C, D… E, F, G…

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

Anyway, that’s another round of chemotherapy almost completed. Neither I nor my Oncologist sure whether the first round achieved much (but had left my Neutrophils worryingly low for the start of a new cycle, so I have to have a new injection this afternoon to deal with that), but we will review again in three weeks. Some unpleasant, and mysterious, body problems this week reminded me yet again that from the moment of first being diagnosed with cancer your mindset changes. You go from being comfortable in your own skin, to being uncomfortable. And you go from happily assuming that any health problems you have are readily explainable, treatable, and short-lived, to being able to assume nothing. Your body goes from being a Known Known to one full of Unknown Unknowns. Simple views about your personal health universe rapidly give way to complex ones.

You are caught, as I said to the Oncologist this week, in the world of the Three S’s. Anything you experience could be a Symptom (of the cancer itself), a Side Effect (of the cancer treatment), or Something Else (totally unrelated to either). Life, they say, wasn’t meant to be easy. Nor, in the case of cancer treatment, is there such a thing as a free lunch, everything comes at a cost.

Anyway, all this reminded me, eating my free lunch of soggy sandwiches in the Oncology chair, machine beeping and dripping (slowly, slowly) on my right, of the debate about education this week in Australia.

The country, in some survey, had apparently ranked way down the list, 25th in this, 26th in that, 27th in the other. Our children were apparently as poorly educated as those of poorly educated countries – couldn’t be misunderestimated, we were misundereducated.

Within moments of the survey appearing on the airwaves and interwebs, as if the barriers had been opened in the Melbourne Cup, those same airwaves and interweb tubes were full of answers from experts and anyone with an opinion (to the extent that they can be considered separate categories). It was the Labor government’s fault, teacher’s fault, a funding problem, lack of attention to the three R’s, not enough rote learning, the result of education not being the same as when the opinionator was educated, school autonomy, phonics, testing programs, private schooling, and so on.

Trouble was, every Opinionperson thought the right answer was THEIR answer. That if there was a problem in education then it was the result of a single cause and had a single solution. Sadly this is the kind of simplemindedness that has resulted in many educational dead ends. When we ask the rarely asked question “is our children learning?”, just like the question “why is my stomach sore?”, we need to be aware that there are no simple answers.

Let’s start at the beginning this time with the actual survey. It was conducted in 2010, a fact that escaped media attention, so that the answer “it’s all the Labor government’s fault” didn’t really ring true. There was no consideration of how the comparisons were made, nor whether they allowed for cultural and socio-economic differences (in just the way you need to with “IQ tests”) between different countries. Nor was any thought given to desirability of high rankings. If a country was doing well because (say) of rote learning of the Three R’s, and rigid discipline in class rooms, is this really the way you want Australia to go?

But even taking the rankings at face value, concentrating on one particular aspect of what goes on in the classroom is begging for a misdiagnosis. As well as the Three R’s we also need to know whether a particular child, or group of children, falling behind in something is the result of a symptom, a side effect, or something else entirely.

Much has changed in Australia since I was a child (to start at a very remote time indeed), all affecting education in some way.

To name just a few relevant factors: The structure of suburbs and travel, play, and social opportunities for children are different; children are exposed to television and radio for hours each day as a primary source of entertainment, knowledge, and values; the values expressed in reality tv and quiz shows, for example, are much changed from my values; children are using computers in various forms for communication, games, learning; diets are much inferior to what they were; right-wing populist politicians and religious leaders have launched an attack on science and education in recent years; and on teachers themselves; and on curricula, with demands for including nonsense like creationism; money has been moved from public schools into private and fundamentalist religious schools; underfunding of preschool and kindergarten and loss of trained staff reduces the early educational possibilities; both parents working reduces the opportunities for learning at home; few homes these days seem to have books or encourage reading; peer pressure tends to put more value on the lowest common denominator of intellectual achievement; teacher are faced with larger class sizes, while at the same time having more bureaucracy to deal with, and demands that they teach more and more topics (driving cars for example, or coping with social media) that someone thinks is important; older teachers are retiring while younger ones have come through much the same social and cultural and educational milieu as their students; “National testing” has put emphasis on “learning for the test”, because schools that don’t do well in it will lose funding and students; some educator will come up with some mad-brained scheme like “phonics” and have some politician impose it on schools …

Enough, you get the idea, and I’m sure you could all add many more. And remember, before you can compare results for different countries, and come up with solutions, you would somehow, have to allow for all those variables being different between the countries.

Look, there is no doubt that Australian education would be a lot better if it followed the model of Finland, always top of these kinds of surveys, rather than America. Put more money into public education (and preschools), value teachers and education, try to get more education support in the home, and so on. But really, to make any improvements in educational performance we also have to seek changes to the way families and society are performing, to look at our media, and our social, cultural, political values, not just the Three R’s.

Easy, eh? Now, if you could just tell me why I have this ache in my shoulder, Doc…

The Hucksters

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by Economics, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Parents, let us safely assume, have been always pretty much the same – concerned about children’s safety, learning, nutrition, clothing. So why the childhood obesity epidemic, and why suddenly, in 2012, in the view of shock jocks and food lobbyists, have parents stopped caring about, being responsible for, their children’s well-being, to the extent that they are to blame for this obesity?

What nonsense. Whenever you hear the words “Nanny State” and “personal responsibility” reach for a metaphorical gun. Here is the argument – parents have suddenly stopped being responsible for what their children eat, and their health status (not sure why, but there it is, inarguable fact), and must be bullied into being so again by shock jocks. Nothing else has changed in society so it is obviously the fault of parents, who must pull themselves together and once more accept their responsibility. Any suggestion of any other action would be “Nanny Statism” and none of us want that, do we (said somewhat menacingly).

But wait, what is wrong with this picture? Society has extensively changed in the way that food is produced, packaged and promoted. When I was growing up in the 1950s there were no fast food outlets. I’ll say that again, NO fast food outlets. There were no supermarkets. There was very little processed or packaged food. People bought, or grew, fresh ingredients, and made stuff.  Freshly made bread was delivered to the door each morning, as was freshly made milk.

Nor was there much advertising of food, though there was, of course, of cigarettes, what would have been the purpose? As a consequence, none of us copied each other in eating certain foods, nor nagged parents to get them. Food was, well, just food, and you ate it, of necessity, just like you drank water and breathed. Conversely, glamorous cigarettes, promising a world of maturity and sophistication, were massively taken up by young teens, imitating each other, and the cool cats in adverts and movies.

But about this time, as my teenage years succeeded each other, a change came over the food industry. Corporations realised that “supermarkets” could make far more money than the old corner grocery store (which had also, incidentally, because taken for granted as customer service, delivered to the door, in fact delivered to the kitchen table, groceries too heavy for customers like my grandmother to carry home). The supermarket would also send out of business the greengrocer, and end for ever home deliveries of fresh milk and bread.

At the same time, to make the supermarket work profitably, much of what was sold had to be processed, preserved, packaged, to make it last, to make it appealing, to make it a little addictive. Meanwhile, fast food makers of various kinds were realising that if they created a market for their product by making, for example, a certain kind of hamburger as appealing as, say, Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, huge profits were assured. Fast food, which also, uncoincidentally, required to be processed, preserved, packaged, and made addictive by the addition of salts and fats.

Convince people to buy food that was convenient for the corporations but bad for them, how could you do that?

Well, cometh the hour, cometh the adman. As early as 1957 Vance Packard (as was Frederic Wakeman  in fictional form in “The Hucksters” in  1946) was detailing the sophistication with which advertising was already operating, a world away from the simple informative ads before WW2. The psychology of human beings and how they could be made to respond, unwittingly, to colours, sounds, smells, shapes, shop placement, were all carefully studied and applied. Even subliminal advertising was tested.

In the last half century the sophistication of the psychological analysis in advertising. Whole teams of psychologists examine every detail of human perception and how to manipulate it. Every age and socio-economic group in society is individually targeted with finely tailored advertising. Down to children, where there is both big money, and future customers.

So everything is thrown at children, once and future customers. Every trick learnt over 50 years is beamed at them in advertising blitzkrieg. Not just colours, shapes, smells, sounds, shop placement (though the latter is particularly a science for children) but all sorts of extras.

Most important is to develop the most powerful force in children’s lives – peer pressure. Make something so apparently desirable that its ownership by one child will make it an imperative for others to own and you have a licence to print money. Add in the linkage of products to popular films or games, and make gifts available with, say, hamburgers, and you have a bigger licence. Ensure products made attractive by such methods are placed at children’s eye level in supermarkets and you multiply your sales even further.

So, half a century of development, tens of thousands of psychological researchers, designers, film makers, all aimed at making children both want and demand things from their parents which they must have or their lives will be ruined.

And yet, in the face of this highly sophisticated industry worth billions of dollars, individual parents are supposed to be able to resist the enormous pressures. Be “responsible”. No difference between parents caring for their children 50 years ago and now, but the big difference is the food and advertising industries and their effects.

But after all, reining in this advertising onslaught on children, and its disastrous effects on their weight and health, would be “Nanny State” right?