Ross Farrelly

My suggestions on how to improve the lot of indigenous Australians

2012-02-12T17:19:00.001-08:00

If you'd like to read my suggestions on how to improve the lot of indigenous Australians, I have a new article just published in Policy Magazine. See http://www.cis.org.au/publications/policy-magazine for details.

Final results in Don’t Get Kicked competition

2012-01-14T19:18:00.001-08:00

I’ve finished 111^th out of 588 teams in the Don’t Get Kicked competition on Kaggle (top 20%). Not too bad I think. I used R on a standard laptop to make 27 submissions and obtained a Gini of 0.23975. The leaders took 119 submissions to get 0.26720.

Movin' on up

2011-11-15T23:29:00.001-08:00

Now up in top 50 of "Don't Get Kicked" by using Generalized Boosted Regression Models

glmnet

2011-11-14T03:28:00.001-08:00

Am experimenting with R package glmnet in the "Don't Get Kicked" contest on Kaggle.

Up the Board!

2011-11-14T03:19:00.001-08:00

Just moved into the top 100 in the “Don’t Get Kicked” competition on Kaggle (with a gini of 0.226 vs 1st place of 0.26). Added 0.007 to my Gini score and went up 26 place! It’s a crowded leader board.

White solution to black problem spells failure

2011-08-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

Letter to the editor - published in SMH 09/08/2011

The Strategic Review of Indigenous Expenditure confirms there is very little to show for the $3.5 billion a year spent on indigenous programs (''Billions spent but Aborigines little better off, says report'', August 8).

This is a travesty for both the intended recipients of the programs and for the taxpayer.

It's time for governments to admit they don't know what will work when it comes to improving the lot of indigenous Australians and start to use randomised trials of selected social policies to test what works and what does not.

Until this happens very little will change but much will continue to be wasted.

Complying with AQS legislation while Minimizing Waste

2011-05-24T03:53:00.000-07:00

I recently gave a webinar on how food manufacturers in NZ and Australia can comply with the newly introduce Average Quantity System (AQS) legislation. These (currently optional) guidelines indicate how purveyors of pre-packaged good must verify the amount of product contained in the packages they sell.

The big challenge is to minimise waste while still maintaining a high probability of passing an audit (0.99 say).

As well as covering standard quality techniques such as Gage R&R and Control Charts, I outlined the use of the binomial distribution and the inverse normal distribution to calculate the mean of a process in order to pass an AQS audit with a given probability.

To demonstrate the relationship between reducing variation and minimising waste I produced this animation.

The area under the curve between 470g and 485g is keep constant, while the standard deviation is varied from 20 down to 3.

At each stage the waste, a new mean is calculated and the area under the curve greater than the nominal weight of 500g is calculated.

This shows the waste changing from 86.6% (standard deviation = 20) down to 0.1% (standard deviation = 2).

The R code to generate this is a follows.

library(ggplot2)
library(animation)
make_hists<-function(){ for (i in c(20:3)){ sig = i #the standard deviation prob_pass = 0.99 #the probability we pass inspection Lot_size = 500 nom = 500 #the nominal weight n = 50 #the sample size TD = nom*3/100 #the tolerable deficiency m = qnorm(prob_pass) #the inverse cumulative normal defects = 3 #the number of allowable defects #set up the quadratic to solve for p a = n**2+n*(m**2) b = -2*defects*n-n*(m**2) c = 9 #solve for p p = (-b-sqrt((b**2)-(4*a*c)))/(2*a) #run a smulation over a number of values for mu and find the one that works diff = 100 mu = nom-10 while (diff > 0.01){
a = pnorm((nom - TD - mu)/sig, mean = 0, sd = 1)
b = pnorm((nom- 2*TD - mu)/sig, mean = 0, sd = 1)
delta = a - b
diff = abs(p - delta)
mu = mu + 0.01
}

# generate and plot 10,000 sample from a normal distn with mean mu and standard deviation sig
weight = rnorm(10000, mean = mu, sd = sig)
waste = 100*(1-pnorm(500,mean=mu,sd=sig))
tol = (470dat = data.frame(weight, tol)

#plot the histogram with the target and mean lablled

m<- ggplot(dat, aes(x=weight))+
geom_histogram(binwidth = 0.5, aes(fill = tol, colour = tol))+
geom_vline(xintercept = mu)+
geom_vline(xintercept = nom)+
annotate("text", label = paste("target: ", nom), x = 530, y = 700, hjust=0)+
annotate("text", label = paste("P(pass audit): ", prob_pass), x = 530, y = 650, hjust=0)+
annotate("text", label = paste("mean:", round(mu,1)), x = 530, y = 600, hjust=0)+
annotate("text", label = paste("stand. dev: ", sig), x = 530, y = 550, hjust=0)+
annotate("text", label = paste("waste: ", round(waste,1), "%"), x = 530, y = 500, hjust=0)+
xlim(465, 565)+ scale_colour_manual(values = c("red","blue"))+
opts(legend.position = "none")

print(m)
}
}

# make the animation
saveMovie(make_hists(),interval = 1, width = 580, height = 400)

“American Grace” - Robert Putnam

2011-04-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a talk by Robert Putnam (of “Bowling Alone” fame). He spoke about his new book, “American Grace” and the influence of religion on American politics. His main point is that Americans are highly divided on religious matters but also highly tolerant of each others religious views. In brief, Putnam’s thesis is that during the sixties young Americans became less religious but that older Americans became more religious as a reaction to the changes in social mores which took place at the time. This lead to the religious division we see in American today and the rise of the “young nones” – young people who do not identify with any formal religious group. Putnam measures religiosity using survey questions such as “How often do you say grace or give thanks to God before a meal?”

However, despite this divide, Americans are very tolerant of people who do hold divergent religious views. Surprisingly, a majority of evangelical Christians in America believe that good people of other faiths or of no faith at all can go to heaven. Putnam explains this unusual finding in two ways. He points out that many Americans have switched religions during their lifetime, and also have close friendships or familial ties with people who belongs to a different religion. Knowing these friends and relations to be good people leads Americans to believe they will be saved despite the teachings of their faith.

Putnam’s research also showed that people with close social ties through religious organizations are “nicer” that is to say, more likely to volunteer, give to charity and to help strangers. However it is not the religious belief which is a predictor of “niceness” rather the social ties that usually accompany them. So an atheist who has many friends who attend church and goes to the occasional service with his or her religious spouse is “nicer” than the devout but socially isolated church goer.

In terms of social capital, Putnam sums up his finds thus: “Bowling together is better than bowling alone, but bowling in the church league, that’s the real deal.”

DataMilk's Australian school finder and visualisation page (beta)

2010-09-23T03:08:00.000-07:00

I have been playing around with making the Naplan results more accessible to people who want to examine the data for themselves rather than rely on the summaries published by ACARA.

You can find the data accessible via Google maps here:http://www.datamilk.com/schools / where you can create maps such as the one above.

Data tables can be found here: http://www.datamilk.com/schools/tables.php
and a bit of background info here: http://www.datamilk.com/schools/about.php

All comments are welcome.

The Uses of Pessimism by Roger Scruton.

2010-08-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading a very good book which I am moved to share with you. It's The Uses of Pessimism by my favourite conservative modern day philosopher, Roger Scruton.

Scruton argues that a number of fallacies lie at the heart of much of the misguided thinking we see in politics, art and the humanities today. He argues that, when presented with the grand plans of the theorists and the unbridled enthusiasm of the believers in human progress, a small dose of pessimism and a sprinkling of irony would go a long way towards bringing some reason into the picture.

He lists fallacies such as:
The born free fallacy: the false belief that people are born free and that by removing all societal constraints such as law, custom and traditions, people will be able to live happily, freely and peacefully – free from oppression. He points out that people are not born free – societies have earned (relative) freedom by building institutions, morals, customs and traditions which restrain men's baser instincts and allow strangers to live (relatively) peacefully side by side. He blame many of the innovations in modern education on this fallacy.

The utopian fallacy: the false belief in the existence of a utopian state human affairs towards which we should all be striving and the attainment of which would represent the realisation of a blessed state for human kind. This fallacy lies at the heart of movements such as The French Revolution, Marxism and Fascism. This raises the interesting question of whether it’s possible to be idealistic without being utopian.

The zero sum fallacy - the false belief that one person's gain must be another's loss and that one country's gain must be another nation's loss. From this fallacy is born the concept of the "third world" as the victim of colonialism and the phenomenon of "transferable grievance" of the minority - a perceived inequality in search of an object of blame.

The planning fallacy: the false belief that societal improvement can be achieved by a small group of elites developing a predetermined plan and then imposing it on society by means of legislation. Scruton's prime example of this is the European Union. He contrasts this with the conservative view of society organically evolving one step at a time in a direction known to no one in advance but controlled by everyone by their continuous involvement.

The book is thought provoking in the best possible way and I recommend it highly.

Review of Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

2009-06-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2008
US $27.99, 320 pp
ISBN 978 0 31601 792 3

First published in Policy Magazine, June 2009.

High intelligence and extraordinary achievement are endlessly fascinating subjects. We’d all like to know the secret behind stratospherically successful individuals so we can emulate their accomplishments. Outliers sets out to explain the secret of success—but it is far from successful in doing so.

To solve the puzzle of high achievement, Gladwell takes a number of examples of exceptional people and seeks to explain why these people reached great heights in their chosen professions. But rather than examining the personality types of these exceptional individuals, he looks at the environment in which they grew up. Gladwell’s thesis is that demographic, social, and even ancestral factors have greater explaining power than individual personality traits when trying to account for success.

Gladwell’s book is written in his typical free-wheeling style, heavy on anecdote and packed with fascinating personal stories. It touches on some important themes such as determinism vs free will and the debt we owe to those who came before us. In the current climate of economic uncertainty, many readers will relate to the idea that we are often at the mercy of forces beyond our control. The book also provides a healthy antidote to the self-help mantra of the supremacy of individual desire and effort. Gladwell also appears dedicated to exploding the myth that contemporary American society is a meritocracy in which any talented individual can rise to the top. He argues against the cult of the individual genius who makes it on his own through his or her own exceptional powers of intelligence and insight.

In his characteristically breezy style, Gladwell rattles through a number of examples in which external factors largely determine whether or not an individual succeeds. He cites the example of Canadian junior hockey players born early in the year and who are consequently taller and stronger than most other children in their age cohort. They are more likely to be chosen for rep teams, receive extra coaching and practice and become pro hockey players. He tells the story of The Beatles who succeeded because they cut their teeth playing eight-hour sets for days on end at dingy strip clubs in Hamburg, and of Bill Gates who succeeded because he had unheard of access to a time-sharing computer terminal in 1968 and spent every spare moment honing his programming skills.

One of the flaws in Gladwell’s approach is that he cherry picks anecdotes that suit his thesis and then generalises them into pseudo-universal laws. Thus from The Beatles/Gates examples he posits the ‘10,000 hour rule.’ There is no discussion of bands that practised 10,000 hours and failed to make it big or the mega-bands that changed the musical landscape without ever putting in the requisite 10,000 hours.

The anecdotes continue with the story of Robert Oppenheimer who was a child prodigy, studied at Harvard and Cambridge, and headed the Manhattan Project. His life story is contrasted with that of Chris Langan who had an IQ of 195, worked a series of low paid labouring jobs, and ended up retiring to the Missouri countryside to tend horses. Gladwell explains the differing fortunes of these two geniuses in terms of family background and emotional intelligence.

This exposes another shortcoming in Outliers. Once we look behind the rollicking narrative, Gladwell’s conclusions often don’t go far beyond commonsense. It’s not groundbreaking to assert that being good with people and having supportive and educated parents is going to help you make the most of your intellectual gifts.

Gladwell also looks at the role of ancestry in the way we act. The outlier here is the large number of violent family feuds that persisted in southeast Kentucky. Some lasted more than 100 years and ended only in the 1930s. Gladwell concludes that residents in that area are more inclined to feud because their Scottish–Irish descendents came from marginally fertile lands where there was a strong culture of honour. He cites studies that indicate when insulted, modern day Southerners are more likely to react aggressively than their Northern contemporaries. Exactly how this chapter relates to the ‘Story of Success’ is unclear. Again we get the feeling that Gladwell is cherry picking studies and experts whose views support his thesis. He also has a liking for the ‘one factor’ explanation.

Gladwell’s inclination for oversimplifying a complex problem is also evident in the section on airline crashes. His retelling of the crash of a Korean airliner at Guam and a Colombian airliner at New York make for some very compelling reading. Gladwell is at his best as he retells the tragic story of these disasters, revealing the black box transcript line by line. However his one factor explanation—that these planes crashed because the aircrews grew up in cultures with a highly developed deference to authority—is very thin. Almost as thin as his explanation that South Asians are good at maths because their ancestors had to work long and hard to extract a living from their meagre rice paddies.

If Gladwell wants to propose a thesis that will be taken seriously, he needs to be more thorough. If he simply wishes to relate good stories and point out possible themes, we are left with the impression that he isn’t really saying much more than what common sense would suggest: that hard work contributes to success; that our ancestry influences our behaviour; and that being born at the right time in history can help us succeed.

Gladwell’s books, including Outliers, could be categorised in the self-help genre. We were invited to read The Tipping Point to better understand change and to start our own ‘positive epidemics.’ Blink taught us to improve our decision making by knowing when to trust our instincts. Outliers invites us to better understand the origins of success, and to be more successful ourselves. However, the message of the book is that you need to have the right ancestry, the right parents, and be born in the right demographic to succeed—factors that are beyond our control. If you’re looking for an in-depth understanding of the origins of genius or a self-help manual to make yourself more successful, Outliers is not the book for you. Nevertheless it’s a ripping yarn full of fascinating anecdotes and interesting insights.

Time to get real about evidence

2008-09-22T02:22:00.000-07:00

First published in The Canberra Times, 22nd September 2008

One of Kevin Rudd’s favourite mantras is that he wishes to develop “evidence based” policy. That is, he backs policies which have enough supporting evidence to suggest that they will produce their desired effect. However, it is well known in scientific circles that there is one gold standard technique for discovering such a causal relationship between cause and effect– the randomised trial.

A randomised trial starts with a hypothesis – a statement of fact which is to be tested in the trial. Stating a hypothesis forces policy makers to move from a vague statements of intent to a specific measurable outcome they wish to achieve. The hypothesis is then tested by randomly selecting two groups of people. One group receives the treatment and one group does not. The power of the randomised trial lies in the fact that the two groups are as alike as possible in every respect except for whether or not they receive the treatment. If after the treatment has been applied, there is found to be a significant difference between the two groups, that difference can be attributed to the treatment and to the treatment alone. The researcher can conclude that the treatment caused the difference and therein lies the power of the randomised trial.

If policy makers want to be able to claim that their policies will work, they should subject them to randomised trials beforehand. Randomised trials present the policy maker who genuinely wants to make a difference with a powerful and irrefutable tool to put his theories to the test and to draw fact based conclusions from them. Apart from trivial and self evident cases, the randomised trial is the one and only means of establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between one phenomenon and another and should be utilised by those who are serious about evidence based policy.

There is a growing recognition internationally that randomised trials should play an important part is assessing the efficacy of social policy. One of the most outstanding examples of randomised trails in social reform is the Progressa (later known as Oportunidades) Program in Mexico. The aim of the program was to “close the gap” between rich and poor in Mexico in terms of nutrition and education. Funding was made available to poor rural familles for education and improved nutrition. However the funding was conditional on attendance at both school and a government funded infant health clinic. The results have been encouraging and the program has been expanded into urban areas and extended to target youth up to the age of 22.

Randomised trials have only been used only twice to assess social policy in Australia. Between 1999 and 2001 the Department of Family and Community Services conducted two randomised trials on the Job Network examining the effect of interviews and follow up contact from professional staff on workforce participation by the long-term unemployed. They found that the intervention led to a reduction in the number of hours worked but an increase in the number of hours spent in studying or training. In 2002 the effectiveness of the NSW drug court in reducing recidivism was tested in a randomised trial. The trial showed that not only did the Drug Court reduce recidivism, it was also more cost effective when measured by cost per offence averted.

Kevin Rudd speaks often about his preference for “evidence based policy”. The government’s responses to the 2020 summit are to be built on “a strong evidence base”. A raft of new policies is being introduced by the recently elected government and many of these policies are candidates for testing by randomised trials. If Rudd is serious about evidence based policy he should insist these initiatives are subjected to scrutiny by randomised trial.

In the financial year 2005-2006 the Federal government spent an around $90 billion on programs which purported to benefit Australians one way or another. None of these programs were tested by randomised trial. There are a number of factors which make randomised trials unattractive to politicians. Making a real difference is hard and many randomised trails often show that the treatment made no difference. However, our elected representatives like to be seen as decisive, energetic and positive; especially when there is a crisis. They like to be seen as doing something about the problems and demonstrating leadership where others will not. Randomised trials on the other hand take time to implement, require an investment of time and money, show no immediate results and are based on the premise that no one actually knows what will work. Nonetheless, if the government wants to be taken seriously when it speaks of evidence policy, it cannot ignore the randomised trial.

Policy On Trial

2008-09-09T02:35:00.000-07:00

First published, Policy Magazine, Spring 2008.

Policymakers claim to develop programs that will benefit citizens. They claim, either implicitly or explicitly, to have certain knowledge of the causal relationship between the actions they plan to take and the outcomes they wish to achieve. This claim is emphasised when, as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd does so often, they express their wish to develop ‘evidence-based’ policy. It is well known in scientific circles that there is one gold standard technique for discovering such a causal relationship—the randomised trial. If policymakers want to be able to claim that their policies will work, they should subject them to randomised trials beforehand. Randomised trials present the policymaker who genuinely wants to know how to make a difference with a powerful and irrefutable tool to put his or her theories to the test and to draw fact-based conclusions from them.

Randomised trials are the least random and most scientific method known for testing a hypothesis. They are the epitome of rational inquiry. In a randomised trial, the burden of proof is placed on the facts themselves and ideology, beliefs and vested interests are put to one side. In a randomised trial, the truth, as indicated by the data and as revealed by the experimental design, is laid bare for all to see and the facts are allowed to speak for themselves. Randomised trials, preferably double blinded and placebo controlled, have been the benchmark for scientific inquiry since R. A. Fisher’s ground-breaking work in the 1920s. Clinical trials are mandatory for every drug approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. In short, except for trivial and self-evident cases, the randomised trial is the one and only means of establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between one phenomenon and another.

What are randomised trials and what can they do?

A randomised trial starts with a hypothesis—a statement of fact that is put to the test in the trial. For example, one randomised trial in Kenya tested the hypothesis that the provision of text books would raise students’ test scores.[1] (They didn’t.) Another in the Philippines tested whether or not regular visits from a bank representative would increase household savings.[2] (They did.) Stating a hypothesis can itself be problematic for policymakers, because it invites them to move from vague statements of intent to a specific measurable outcome they wish to achieve.

The second aspect of a randomised trial is to test the hypothesis by randomly selecting two groups of people. One group receives the treatment (the text books or the visit from the bank representative) and one group does not. The appeal of the randomised trial lies in the fact that the two groups are as alike as possible in every respect—geographical location, gender, age, socioeconomic status, education, and so on—except whether or not they receive the treatment. Thus, if after the treatment has been applied, a significant difference between the two groups is found, that difference can be attributed to the treatment and to the treatment alone. The researcher can conclude that the treatment caused the difference. This is a much stronger conclusion than discovering that the response and the treatment are merely correlated. A causal effect has been established, and therein lies the power of the randomised trial.

In the past, social experiments—such as the negative income tax experiment in the United States in the 1960s—have been conducted on grand scale with high ideals and enormous budgets. In contrast, the current trend is for randomised trails to address very specific questions and to be conducted on a small budget with minimal sample sizes. This makes the randomised trial a potent tool for economists working in developing countries.

What randomised trials can’t do

Randomised trials are not applicable in all situations. There are two main areas in which randomised trails are not able to test a proposed social policy. The first is in trying to assess the effectiveness of very long term policies. Claims that an intervention will increase the life expectancy of certain groups of people, benefit future generations, or affect global warming are not testable by randomised trail. Randomised trials are also not applicable to policies that are not repeatable. The benefits or otherwise of going to war, holding the Olympics in a certain city, or signing an international treaty are not repeatable and therefore not testable by randomised trial. But this still leaves a vast array of policies that could easily be subjected to randomised testing.

Are there alternatives?

Some claim that there are attractive alternatives to randomised testing, the main candidates being observational studies, pilot programs and surveys. A pilot program in which the intended intervention or treatment is applied to a small sub-population to test its efficacy has one major drawback. Having applied the treatment and seen an improvement in the desired outcome, the researcher usually goes on to assert that the treatment caused the change in response. In doing so, however, the researcher is implying that he or she knows how the targeted population would have fared in the absence of the treatment. In fact, there is no way of knowing this and therefore pilot programs are not able to establish a causal relationship between the treatment and the effect.

Observational studies are also proposed as valid alternatives to randomised trials. Yet, not only are observational studies unable to establish a correlation between two phenomena, they are also subject to bias. With an observational study, there is scope for researchers to look for, discover, and report findings that fit with their preconceived views. They may choose to overlook or nor report findings that do not agree with their previous publications and they may choose to include certain co-variates in their regression analyses that corroborate the conclusion they wish to find. I am not commenting on the prevalence of such biased researching methods but merely indicating that observational studies contain within them scope for such bias.

In contrast, randomised trials, if rigorously conducted, are not open to such abuse. In a well-conducted randomised trial, the hypothesis should be stated and publicised beforehand. The finding of no effect is important information because it establishes the absence of a causal link so results tend to be published whether or not the treatment proves to have a statistically significant effect.

A survey is also a poor alternative to a randomised trial. Surveys are notoriously unreliable at predicting the outcome of planned interventions. Asking people how they think they would react if a certain change were to be made in some aspect of social policy is one thing. It’s quite another to apply the treatment and observe how people actually react. Life is full of unexpected consequences and the only reliable way to discover the reactions to social interventions is to trial the intervention first. Surveys are also subject to selection bias. Only the views of those who choose to respond to the survey are recorded and analysed, but these people do not always comprise a sample representative of the entire target population.

Are there limitations to randomised trails?

Randomised trials are an effective means to answer micro-economic questions. They will tell you about the efficacy of a single planned intervention in a particular stetting. They will not tell you much about macro economic strategies, nor will they be able to predict the interactive effect of a large number of policies. Randomised trails are not the one and only sound way to develop good policy. They should be viewed as one (very powerful) solution in the economist’s toolkit. Having said that, the scope of randomised trails can be very wide. If the experiment is well designed the outcome of the trial will answer the question you are seeking to address. The results of randomised trial have been criticised as being too narrow and not generalisable.[3] If randomised trails are promoted as the silver bullet for poverty alleviation then this is a fair criticism. If they are viewed as an additional weapon in the economist’s arsenal it does not hold water. Particularly in developed countries such as Australia, in which macro economic question such as long term growth and interest rates are well addressed by other means, randomised trials in to examine micro-economic issues have particular relevance.

How have randomised trials been used elsewhere?

One of the most outstanding examples of randomised trails in social reform is the Progressa (later known as Oportunidades) Program in Mexico. The aim of the program was to ‘close the gap’ between rich and poor in Mexico in terms of nutrition and education. The program was planned as a randomised trial from the outset because the incumbent president knew that without hard evidence the program would not survive a change of government.[4] A secondary consideration that led to Progresa being implemented as a randomised trial was that budgetary constraints meant that the program could not be delivered to all familles which might have benefited from it.[5] What could have been seen as a deficiency was turned into a positive attribute through randomisation.

Funding was made available to poor rural familles for education and improved nutrition. However, funding was conditional on attendance at both school and a government-funded infant health clinic. Independent consultants from the International Food Policy Research Institute were engaged to evaluate the trials and compare the families which were offered the incentives with those which were not. The results have been encouraging and the program has been expanded into urban areas and extended to target youth up to the age of 22.[6]

This program has a number of striking features. Firstly, it worked! The families who received the conditional funding benefited significantly from the intervention. This might sound obvious but there has been plenty of funding of programs that have not made people better off. Secondly, we know they benefited because of the program. The improved outcomes cannot be attributed to another cause because the control group, who were like the treatment group in every other respect, did not benefit. Thirdly, the evidence was so overwhelming that the program survived a change of government. Objective evidence proved to be more persuasive than ideology.

The Progressa/Oportunidades program is just one example of randomised trials being used to test social policy. Randomised trials have been used to test policies as diverse as the effectiveness of driver education programs[7], the effect of class size,[8] and phonics vs whole language reading tuition.[9]

Randomised trials are becoming increasingly well established in social policy assessments. There is now a think tank solely dedicated to such trials, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT.[10] J-PAL has run randomised trials to test many social programs, mostly in developing countries. Issues examined include: the effect of remedial education programs on school quality and test scores; the effect of micro-credit in Hyderabad slums and a comparison of electronic surveillance, documented teacher attendance, and incentive pay as means to improve student performance.

For-profit micro credit institutions are also turning to randomised trials to test the best ways to serve their markets. The Centre for Micro Finance in India has coordinated a number of random trails on micro credit financial projects. Projects include a trial of smokeless cooking stoves as an alternative to tradition cooking methods that lead to serious respiratory infections in many young children; a trial comparing the difference between weekly and monthly repayment schedules on loan default rates; and a trial measuring the impact of micro-health insurance products on clients and their families.[11]

How have randomised trials been used in Australia?

Despite some recent interest, randomised trials are yet to be used extensively in Australia[12]. However policymakers here have experimented with randomised trials a number of times. Between 1999 and 2001 the Department of Family and Community Services conducted two randomised trials on the Job Network, examining the effect of interviews and follow-up contact from professional staff on workforce participation by the long-term unemployed.[13]^,[14] They found that the intervention led to a reduction in the number of hours worked but an increase in the number of hours spent in studying or training.

In 2002 the effectiveness of the NSW drug court in reducing recidivism was tested in a randomised trial.[15] 514 offenders who met certain criteria were randomly assigned to either the standard court system or the NSW drug court, which took them through a detoxification program. The trial showed that not only did the Drug Court reduce recidivism, it was also more cost effective when measured in cost per offence averted.

Is there scope for further randomised trials in Australia?

In theory, the time is ripe for randomised trials in Australian politics. Kevin Rudd speaks often about his preference for ‘evidence-based’ policy.[16] The government’s responses to the 2020 summit are to be built on ‘a strong evidence base’.[17] A raft of new policies is being introduced by an enthusiastic newly elected government. Many of these policies are candidates for testing by randomised trials. Let’s examine two proposed policies which lend themselves to objective testing.

Behind the introduction of the national welfare card lies the following hypothesis: ‘Making welfare payments available to delinquent parents through a national welfare card will benefit the children of these parents.’ Some agree with this policy while others doubt it will work.[18] The hypothesis would need to be more clearly defined to be tested by randomised trials and the exact benefit that is supposed to accrue to the children would need to be specified. Once this has been done there is no reason why the hypothesis could not be tested. As child protection authorities identify delinquent parents, each family could be randomly assigned either to a control group with no curb on their welfare spending, or to a treatment group that receives welfare payments via the card. The hypothesised good that is supposed to accrue to children could be measured before and after the trial and the efficacy or otherwise of the welfare card could be determined.

A similar analysis could be applied to the provision of high speed internet access to schools, another Rudd government initiative.[19] The hypothesis behind this initiative is that it will benefit students; that is, it will improve their grades. By randomly assigning high speed internet access to one group of schools and leaving another group as it is we could discover if such technology makes any difference to student achievement.

Such a proposal will no doubt raise objections. On what grounds could the government possibly deny schools access to high speed internet access? Wouldn’t that be inequitable? This assumes that high speed internet access is beneficial to students, the very question the trial is designed to test. Temporarily denying a group of people a service which may or may not benefit them is a reasonable price to pay to discover if it is actually beneficial.

Clearly, such randomised trials would be one of the most effective uses of public funds. Instead of rolling out untested programs which have not been proved to deliver benefits but which draw heavily on taxpayers’ funds, the government would be judiciously screening proposed new programs before they are introduced on a wider scale.

Why are randomised trials not being used?

In the financial year 2005-2006, the Federal government spent an estimated $90.2 billion of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on programs that purported to benefit Australian one way or another.[20] None of these programs was tested by randomised trial. A number of factors make randomised trials unattractive to politicians.

Making a real difference is hard and many randomised trails often show that the treatment made no difference. There are two ways of looking at this. One is to celebrate that fact that the treatment is now known to be ineffectual and that it can be discarded as a possible solution to the problem. One could also acknowledge that without the trial many taxpayer dollars could have been wasted on a ‘solution’ that was no solution at all. Alternatively, one could take the view that the experiment was a ‘failure’, the researcher’s hypothesis was ‘wrong’, and that funds that could have been better used elsewhere had been squandered on a frivolous investigation which bore no fruit. The former interpretation of the outcome is based in the scientific method. Unfortunately, the media, with its propensity for a bad news story, often favours the latter.

Suppose, however, that the randomised trial shows that the treatment gives significant benefit to the participants. Suppose the national welfare card really does benefit children or that broadband internet access really does improve student grades. Surely that must be a coup for the government. Not necessarily so. They may find themselves open to accusations of withholding a beneficial treatment from the control group. In retrospect this is true, but at the time the randomised trial was conducted it wasn’t known whether or not the treatment was beneficial. Unfortunately such subtleties are often lost on the popular press and consequently it is understandable that randomised trails are not seen in a favourable light by many politicians.

These are not the only reasons randomised trials are unpopular with politicians. Our elected representatives like to be seen as decisive, energetic and positive; especially when there is a crisis. They like to be seen as doing something about problems and demonstrating leadership where others will not. Randomised trials take time to implement, require an investment of time and money, show no immediate results, and are based on the premise that no one actually knows what will work. The fact that they may lead to certain knowledge about real solutions is often not enough to recommend them to many politicians.

Since governments spend far more on implementing social policy than any other body in Australia it would be preferable if they were the primary champion of randomised trials. But because of the political and ideological factors mentioned above this is unlikely to happen in the short term. It is more likely that NGOs or charities may be open to possibility of testing their interventions through randomised trails. NGOs are less subject to popular opinion and are under no obligation to be seen to be benefiting the entire population. Therefore, small-scale randomised trails may possibly fit within their charters. They may also find randomised trials an attractive means of providing hard evidence for the efficacy of their programs and thereby attract additional funding.

Conclusion

There is little doubt that randomised trials are the best way of establishing causal effect between one phenomenon and another. Because of their inherent sophistication, there are serious challenges that need to be overcome before an elected body in Australia will take up randomised trails as a means to test the efficacy of proposed social policy. However, if elected officials really want to make a difference, and not just be seen to be making a difference, this is exactly what they need to do.

Ross Farrelly is….. The author thanks Andrew Leigh for listening to, and discussing, some of the ideas contained in this article.

Endnotes

[1] Glewwe, P., Kremer, M. and Moulin, S., Many Children Left Behind? Textbooks and Test Scores in Kenya, 2007, http://www.povertyactionlab.com/papers/Textbooks%20and%20Test%20Scores%20Kenya.pdf .

[2] Ashraf, N., Karlan, D. and Yin, W., ‘Deposit Collectors’, Advances in Economic Analysis &

Policy, Volume 6, Issue 2, Article 5, 2006, http://ipa.phpwebhosting.com/images_ipa/DepositCollectors.AshrafEtAl.2006_1.pdf

[3] ‘Control Freaks’,The Economist, Jun 12th 2008, http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11535592

[4] Ayres, I., Super Crunchers, 2007, p 76.

[5] Dufloy, E., Glennersterzand, R. and Kremerx, M., Using Randomization in Development Economics Research: A Toolkit, 2006, p20, www.povertyactionlab.com/papers/Using%20Randomization%20in%20Development%20Economics.pdf

[6] Mexico’s Oportunidades Program, http://info.worldbank.org/etools/reducingpoverty/docs/newpdfs/case-summ-Mexico-Oportunidades.pdf

[7] ‘Try it and see’, Economist, 3/2/2002, Vol. 362, Issue 8262, http://www.cemcentre.org/Documents/CEM/publications/downloads/CEMWeb023%20Economist%20p97-98%20March%202%202002.pdf

[8] ibid.

[9] ibid.

[10] http://www.povertyactionlab.com/

[11] Brochure of the Centre for Micro Finance, http://ifmr.ac.in/cmf/CMF_Brochure.zip

[12] A recent conference, New Techniques in Development Economics, at the ANU included a session entitled, ‘The Economics, Ethics and Politics of Randomised Policy Trials’, http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/developmenteconconf.htm.

[13] Barrett, G. and D. Cobb-Clark (2001), ‘The Labour Market Plans of Parenting Payment

Recipients: Information from a Randomized Social Experiment’, Australian Journal of

Labour Economics 4(3):192-205.

[14] Breunig, R., D. Cobb-Clark, Y. Dunlop and M. Terill (2003), ‘Assisting the Long-Term

Unemployed: Results from a Randomised Trial’, Economic Record 79(244):84-102.

[15] Freeman, K., http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/evaluation/freeman.pdf

[16] As of 20/05/2008, the phrase “evidence based” occurs six times on the official prime ministerial website. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4SKPB_enAU217AU217&q=%22evidence+based%22+site:pm%2egov%2eau

[17] Australia 2020 Summit Initial Summit Report, http://www.australia2020.gov.au/docs/2020_Summit_initial_report.doc, p 38

[18] Karvelas, P., ‘Welfare curbs on parents’, The Australian, May 09, 2008, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23668892-601,00.html .

[19] First 100 Days, Achievements of the Rudd Government, February 2008, http://www.pm.gov.au/docs/first_100_days.doc p 5

[20] Hargreaves, J., Welfare Services Resources: Financial and Human, 6^th December 2007,p 5, http://www.aihw.gov.au/eventsdiary/aw07/presentations/jenny_hargreaves_welfare_services_resources.pdf

Infomania

2008-04-06T00:40:00.001-07:00

Published - Weekend Australian 5th April 2008.
John Naish recommends a data diet to cure us of our addiction to information. I’m been a self imposed diet for quite some time: I have no TV in my house, I’m on to my second master’s degree (which forces me to read books cover to cover and demonstrate that I have comprehended them) and my main source of music is live concerts. This works wonders. My home is a place for the family to bond, not a place to be bombarded by advertising. For entertainment we read, talk and play together. For information we read what we choose. For education we read, study, reflect and discuss. Avoiding infomania is not difficult but you do have to be prepared to be different.

The Predictive Power of Statistics

2008-03-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

first published in Policy Magazine, Autumn 2008

A review of Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres

On a recent visit to my local medical centre I came face to face with the fact that Dr Google now seems to know more than my family GP. I was ushered into the consultation room where I explained my symptoms to a slightly ruffled and obviously overworked doctor. He listened attentively, nodded thoughtfully and then asked for a moment while he entered a few keywords into Google.
“Right then,” he continued brightly, “what you have is …” and proceed to diagnose my ailment and prescribe the necessary to clear it up. I was taken aback. What was he doing looking it up on Google? I expected that he’d have enough experience to know what my problem was. And what if the internet was down? Would he just guess?

I was reminded of this incident and my reaction to it when reading Super Crunchers. Ian Ayers’ latest book addresses this very question – what is the right use of data and how can conclusions derived from it be used alongside the intuition and experience of the expert?

Ayres, who is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale’s School of Management, has written a very readable and highly topical book which sits easily alongside such titles as Blink, Freakonomics, The Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds. His main theme is that that we stand at a significant moment in history - intuitive decision making is now being complemented by data crunching and may well soon be overtaken by it. Ayres argues that those who refuse to acknowledge the influence of high powered data analysis will lose their competitive edge and will soon fall behind those who embrace the possibilities of this emerging field.

Ayres reasons that a number of factors have combined to make the collection, analysis and utilisation of data essential tools for government, business and consumers. As the cost of data storage decreases it becomes feasible for companies to collect and store vast quantities of data. Furthermore, an increasing number of transactions are “born digital” so the collection of data has become both cheaper and quicker. These two factors combined with the increasing power of personal computers mean that data based decision making is emerging as one of the fastest growing and most important developments in modern society.

Throughout the book Ayres uses the term “super crunching” as a synonym for the less sexy but more commonly used term “data mining” Over the last fifteen years, data mining has emerged from the related fields of classical statistics, artificial intelligence, on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and machine learning. Data mining distinguishes itself from these older disciplines because it deals with huge data warehouses which are measured in terabytes (10 to the power of 12 bytes) or even petabytes (10 to the power of 15 bytes). Data mining is concerned with extracting predictions, patterns and other useful information from these large datasets in such a way that ordinary mortals (not just statisticians) can understand them. Since data is constantly being added to many of these data warehouses, data mining is also concerned with real time extraction of meaningful information and predictions.

Ayres opens his account of supercrunching by referring to websites such as itunes, Amazon.com and del.icio.us which compile list of most read articles, most downloaded songs, or most popular bookmarks. He uses these sites to illustrate how technology is taking the place of experts. In the past we gained referrals by asking well informed friends. Now we follow the advice of a website. He follows a similar vein by explaining how web-based match-making services and recruitment firms use real time data collection and powerful regression models to predict how successful a prospective match will be. Once we listened to the advice of friends and colleague when making such partnerships. Now we are guided, knowingly or unknowingly, by the coefficients in an unseen regression equation.

Ayres points out that while businesses exploit the power of supercrunching to maximise profit, customers can also harness this new technology to get a better deal. He gives the example of farecast.com which not only reports and compares current prices of airline tickets but also predicts whether or not the price will rise or fall in the following day or two.

One of the most interesting aspect’s of Super Crunchers is the use of randomised trials to objectively test whether or not planned changes will actually produce the desired results. Ayres tells how Capital One, one of the largest issuers of credit card in the US, used randomised trials to test alternative wording of marketing campaigns. The strength of this approach is that because of randomisation, the two groups exposed to the alternative wordings are identical in all but one factor – the difference of the wording to which they have been exposed. Without randomisation, differences in the performance of the two alternatives are confounded by hidden factors and the results are much more difficult to interpret. Online, real time data collection allows randomised trials to be conducted continuously. Ayres tells how he used Google ad-words to test two alternative titles for his book, making Super Crunchers itself something of a child of the supercrunching phenomenon.

Stories such as these in which companies use their considerable financial resources and technical expertise to wring every last cent out of unsuspecting customers may not be to everybody’s taste. However there is a second application of randomised trials described in this book which I found to be of great interest. Ayres describes the use of randomised trial to test the efficacy of proposed changes in government policy. He illustrates the point with the example of the Progresa Program for Education Health and Nutrition in Mexico. The program, introduced by President Ernesto Zedillo in 1995, is a conditional welfare program in which potential recipients must meet certain criteria before they receive cash payments. To receive welfare, recipients had to keep their children in school, report for nutritional monitoring and seek prenatal care if they were pregnant. Politics in Mexico is such that no poverty program survives a change of President, so Zedillo knew he would need to prove the efficacy of his reforms if he wanted them to have lasting benefits for the Mexican poor. He decided to introduce randomised trials to test the effect of conditional welfare. The results were overwhelmingly positive and when he lost the presidency in 2000 his successor “scrapped” Progresa and replaced it with his own “Oportunidades” program which just happened to have identical personnel, procedures, incentives and outcomes!

The idea of testing policy reforms before they are introduced on a state-wide or federal scale is an excellent one and yet it is strangely absent in Australian politics. The Progresa Program has obvious similarities to the reforms suggested by Noel Pearson to end passive welfare dependency in the Cape York Peninsular and yet to my knowledge there has been no suggestion that the proposed reforms should be subjected to testing by randomised trials before being introduced. ANU economist Andrew Leigh has written on this subject, rebutting the main objections to randomised trails in government policy and arguing that it is in the interest of political parties which value substance over rhetoric to submit their polices to such evaluation. He describes limited small scale randomised trials in the NSW Drug Court and the Department of Family and Community Services but points out that there is much scope in Australia for further development in this area.

Ayres also points out that some phenomena have been randomly assigned for years and inadvertently provide a rich source of data which can be used to test many hypotheses. The pairing of college roommates, the assignment of judges to trials and the gender of the village head in parts of India are some of the examples mentioned.

Is high powered data mining an unmitigated good? Ayres does not think so. He points out cases where statistical algorithms have incorrectly labelled people as criminals and excluded them benefits to which they are entitled. He also points out the difficulty of checking other people’s calculations and conclusions. However the trend towards making datasets publicly available is mitigating this to some degree.

Throughout Super Crunchers, Ayres takes us on a rollicking ride through diverse subject areas including: predicting the value of French red, estimating the value of American baseball players, the evidence-based medicine controversy, Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, point shaving in college basketball and Direct Instruction education. He concludes the book with a plea for more emphasis on statistical literacy and predicts that people who are equally at home with intuition and statistical analysis and able to toggle back and forth between the two will be at the forefront of research in the 21st century.

To emphasise his point about the need for statistical literacy, Ayres relates the story of Lawrence Summers who, while president of Harvard University in 2005, made some comments at a conference about the scarcity of female professors in science and maths. Summers lost his job in part because of a lack of statistical literacy in the media and the reading public. Summers’ comments regarding the relative intelligence of men and women related to the spread or standard deviation of the IQ scores. However they were interpreted as referring to the average intelligence which is quite another thing. It is believed by many that the controversy following his comments may have contributed to his resignation from Harvard in 2006.

Super Crunchers has an informative companion website (http://www.supercrunchers.com/) which provides a number of online examples of the types of analyses described by Ayres. For example, one of the links allows you to enter a number of characteristics of your marriage and obtain an estimate of the probability that you will still be married in a certain number of years time. (By some mathematical quirk the probability my wife and I will still be together in 15 years is estimated to be 107.65%!)

Super Crunchers is an entertaining, informative and well written book. It assumes no specialised knowledge of mathematics or statistics. If you’re looking for an in-depth discussion of contemporary data mining techniques is this is not the book you need. However for lively survey current of developments it’s a valuable resource. The book is almost exclusively centred on the US and rarely mentions research or developments in any other country. Ayres subtitles his book “How anything can be predicted”. This is obviously an overstatement. There have been moves in the US to open a futures market on the location and type of the next terrorist attack. Theoretically this is entirely possible but ethically and politically the proposition proved to be distasteful and never got off the ground.

So, having read Super Crunchers will I now be any happier when I find myself being diagnosed by a computer or rejected from a job I know I can do because a statistical algorithm says I’m over qualified? No. But I will be more informed about how and why these things are happening and probably be more prepared should I ever need to circumvent the ever-growing power of the super cruncher.

Notes on Johnson’s Selected Essays

2007-10-13T03:11:00.000-07:00

These notes are ramdom personal relfections based on Selected Essays by Samuel Johnson, Penguin Classics, 2003.

The Rambler (1750-52)

1. Being able to speak about any topic at the beginning of a new venture is troublesome and it is best to under promise and over deliver. An author should not boast of his talent but let his writing speak for itself.
2. The human mind moves from hope to hope rather then from pleasure to pleasure.
3. Virtue and vice are not two sides of the same coin.
6. We can’t be free from troubles but we can rise above them. Although we can never hope for total equaniminity we can strive towards it. People with little to do are troubled by small things. Rest without work is not restful. To seek happiness by changing anything but one’s own disposition is fruitless. Contemplation is essential to virtue as virtute involves long term goods.
7. Religion involves contemplating the future not enjoying the present.
8. Just as matter is 99% empty space so our lives are 99% wasted time. The mind is quick – what it takes us an instant to imagine can take a lifetime to work out. Small and pernicious thoughts ought to be rejected at their outset otherwise they grow and fructify in the empty moments of our lives.
9. A man thinks highly of his own vocation because he has devoted his life to it. Rather than belittling others they should magnify his own vocation.
13. The getting and keeping of secrets is fraught with difficulties and should be avoided at all cost.
14. To write and speak about ideas is relatively easy - to live by then is much harder. To maintain the appearance of superiority, leaders need to keep their distance.
17. Fame and ability alienate one from society.
18. There are only two good reasons to marry: integrity or companionship.
22. Wit and learning are usually opposed to one another but if they can be combined they make a brilliant partnership.
23. Writing can’t be done by committee so critics should mind their own business.
24. One shouldn’t waste time considering unanswerable question or on idle speculation.
25. Character traits such as rashness and timidity are not equally bad, because rashness, being active, makes its folly known and can be corrected. The difficulties faced when trying to excel should be met with the force of industry.
28. People pay lip service to the maxim that one should “Know Oneself” and often overestimate their own virtues. Praising good is not doing good. One should know oneself by sober reflection
29. To be unduly concerned about an uncertain future is pointless and productive of misery. Misfortune is as likely as good fortune so both excessive hope and fear are equally fallacious.
31. People who criticise human nature generally exempt themselves from the criticism. It is hard to admit an error, especially when it has been committed to writing, however not to do so propagates corruption. People with few failing are happy to admit them. Pain cannot be avoided so we should cultivate patience to deal with it. It is easier to bear pain we don’t deserve as the pain is not made worse by remorse. Patience is not indolence – we can strive patiently.
32. Health is the result of a measured existence of both labour and rest.
36. Pastoral poetry is pleasing to everyone as we all recognise the subject matter, however it affords little scope of extension to other subjects.
39. Plain, single women are like barren countries, untroubled by suitors because they are not worth the effort of conquest. A father should take pains to find a husband for his daughter lest she find one for herself.
41. Since we are not in the present most of the time we engage dreams of past and future to fill our minds. Memory of the past helps men improve their designs. Personal growth is the sign of a life well spent. Although the present is short its effect can be long. To ensure occupation in old age one should store up a treasure of interesting and worthwhile ideas to explore at your leisure.
45. Marriage of itself doesn’t produce happiness. Unhappy people have unhappy marriages and vice versa. Considering the many poor reasons for which people marry, it is a miracle marriage works at all. The main aim during courtship is to ensure that your true nature doesn’t show itself. A contract begun in fraud will end in disappointment.
47. Many passions seek their own remedy but sorrow does not. There is no cure for sorrow but time and employment. Some people recommend avoiding close relationships in order to avoid sorrow.
49. In order to keep ourselves occupied we set a value on the valueless and then strive to attain it. It would be better to gather virtue as it benefits you after death. Fame is empty and meaningless however a moderate love of fame can be a useful spur to effort.
60. Biographies touch us because we are moved by events to which we can relate. Small details in biographies are often more revealing than grand narratives.
63. We mistakenly attribute our discontent to external circumstances rather than to internal dispositions. Changes made of the sake of novelty often turn out for the worse or at least achieve little. We gain a glimpse of a beneficial future state and build a case in our own minds to try to achieve it – overlooking the difficulties which will be met along the way. It’s often better to preserve in one’s chosen field rather then changing in search of easy advancement.
64. True friendship is a very rare thing – even for an eminent person such as Socrates. Many people are incapable of friendship on account of their inability to suppress their own desires. Common endeavours are supposed to lead to friendship but often end in enmity and competition. Friendship prospers between equals.
70. People learn in one of three ways: learn for themselves, learn from others or don’t learn at all. Experience teaches us that unchanging virtue is a rare commodity. As people learn by example we should consciously display virtue whenever possible. Many people repeat aphorisms without cognising their meanings.
71. Expectation of pleasure is more rewarding than its attainment. We forget that life is short and act as if we will live forever.
72. Since most of life is passed in trivialities it is important to develop an easy and pleasant manner. Good humour eases the gaining of virtue and a lack of superiority endears you to your fellows.
73. Desire for future goods is an evil which should be avoided.
74. People generally hold themselves in high opinion and forgive themselves their shortcomings. Villains find solace in numbers and envy the innocent.
77. Writers of high ideals claim to be poorly received by the general public which is no surprise as they don’t live up to their words. Intelligent writers are obliged to write for moral uplift and should be condemned for not doing so.
108. Only very few moments of a life are spent engaged doing anything creative. The rest of the time is preparation or housekeeping. Time is your estate and should be cultivated carefully.
114. Sever punishments for trivial crimes cause more harm than good because criminals are spurred on to greater crimes since they have little to lose.
121. Classics build on Classics by invoking the sentiments of their predecessors.
129. A man should make a just estimate of his own abilities and undertake enterprises which have some chance of success. Vigour of minds appears when there is no place for doubt. Difficulty is the daughter of idleness.
134. Delaying that which cannot be avoided is folly. Idleness cannot acquire tranquillity.
135. Man is an imitative being. Vacations are pointless if moving from idleness to idleness.
137. Ignorance make us slumber in the gloomy acquiesce of wonder. Learning takes courage and perseverance. New intellectual endeavour may be beyond many but comprehending the works of others is not.
142. Mediocre authors have their place in the scheme of things just as farmers and other lowly workers.
146. Most people are too busy to fawn on idols.
148. Fame is the most unreliable of acquisitions. Cruel oppressors are sure to die and lonely miserable death.
151. The intellectual life-cycle mirrors the physical life cycle. The natural order of desire can be tamed.
156. The aim of study is to instruct by moving the passions. A writer should distinguish between that which is right and that which is merely customary.
158. Critics deduce precepts from great authors which they themselves cannot follow. We forgive the faults of others when accompanied by significant merit.
159. Power and confidence grow together. Custom is often not controlled by reason. People study the past through fear of ignorance.
161. No one is much regarded by the rest of humanity. The workings of the world can be found in a singe household.
165. Pleasant truths are readily accepted while unpleasant ones are quickly forgotten. Disappointment and misery are more constant than joy. It’s is unrealistic to think one would ever be free of unhappiness. One should enjoy pleases why one can as they will not last long. The art of selling is to paint a picture of future happiness. Dreams of future happiness and grandeur and sure to be disappointed by the reality of the situation.
167. Marriage is a solemn league of perpetual friendship.
168. It is important to distinguish a proposition being made from the images or language used to express it. Words become low by overuse and revive the image with which they are commonly associated. Good writing is both agreeable and useful.
176. In criticism the work as a whole should be considered not just minor details. Critics often overlook the obvious.
181. Gambling is hopeless dreaming.
182. Riches and fame are not inherently valuable but are made desirable by the fact that only a few have them.
183. Envy is one of the few vices which never sleeps – it does not seek its own happiness but the misery of others.
184. Many great decisions are taken lightly with little thought – hence we should trust in the divine
188. Everyone wishes to excel at conversation which is a pleasant diversion. Narrative is one of the best forms of conversation.
191. Learning can endear you to some and alienate you from others. Man is easily lost in the trivialities of life.
196. Opinions often change.
197. Youth has energy without insight – age had insight without energy.
207. Anticipation is more enjoyable then attainment. The best literary works finish strongly. Past deeds count for little.
208. Live with a friend as if he will one day be an enemy. Write anonymously as if one day you will be known.

The Adventurer
39. Laziness is being inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquillity.
45. Power naturally aggregates into the hands of a few. Unanimity and cohesion are no guarantee of a better society. Competition spurs scholars on to greater things.
50. The liar is the one villain who has no friends. The lie of vanity is the most common.
67. Happiness is known by its absence – hence hardship is valuable. There is meanness in the highest dignity and dignity in the meanest. Everyone has the opportunity to contribute to the general happiness.
69. People always hope that great success is just around the corner. To achieve greatness we need to progress more quickly than the general population.
84. There is no advantage in practicing fraud.
85. To be a well rounded man of letters it is necessary to develop facility with reading, writing, speaking and conversing – as each mode of expression develops a particular skill. Reading helps us learn from others. Writing develops thorough reasoning and speaking engenders alacrity of thought.
95. Although human truths are invariable it is necessary to re-express them from time to time.
99. People who undertake great projects are lauded if they succeed and ridiculed if they fail. We should applaud projectors even when they fail.
102. Idleness is not restful and a life of luxury is not fulfilling.
107. The deeper into the intellectual sphere we penetrate the harder the questions become and the more disagreement there is over the answers. Since we ourselves change our opinions we should not be surprised when others disagree with us.
111. Misery is absolute while happiness is relative. Much pain is caused by yearning after things we do not need. Work is a joyful end in itself – not to be avoided.
119. Man may grow rich by taming his desires. Excessive wants cause artificial poverty. We seek after trifles because we see others seeking them. We should dispel desires of trivialities which only allow us to laud it over others. Prize everything according to its real use.
126. Many seek happiness in solitude – however most are disappointed by its realisation.
137. Many read for different purposes and glean different lessons from the same text. Ideas in the books we read influence us whether we will or no.
138. Many an attractive idea for an essay vaporises on closer inspection.

The Idler
1. All men wish to be idle and the idler has no rivals.
5. The worst thing about war is that females are left without suitable companions to accompany them. The obvious solution is to allow women into the front line.
10. People commonly believe things unsubstantiated by fact. People’s prejudices colour their understanding of the facts.
22. The vulture’s view of war highlights the irrationally of conflicts.
22. Imprisoning debtors only punishes one party to the contract – the lender should also take some of the blame for the broken contract.
23. Friendship only endures as long as it is mutually pleasurable for both parties. It is the desire to please and the willingness to be pleased.
27. Philosophy urges us to know ourselves but we seldom do. People fool themselves into thinking they can succeed by sheer will power when they have failed so many times before.
30. Desires multiply with possessions. The rich and fortunate need some employment so they devise goods no one needs. People with too much time and money are poorly off.
31. Idleness is constant activity without productive labour.
32. By sleep we are abstracted from ourselves. In solitude we dream alone – in company we dream together. The aim is common – to forget ourselves.
36. Experts often rephrase the obvious in terms obscure.
38. Imprisoning debtors wastes human capital and produces hardened criminals.
50. People are obsessed with their own causalities and vicissitudes and treat then as if they are unique. Statistically speaking nothing is particularly remarkable.
51. Eminent men are least eminent at home and lose their lustre on close inspection. It is vain to seek for distinction where no distinction can be found.
57. To always take the middle road is somewhat insipid.
58. Pleasure is seldom found where it is sought. Hope is happiness. Imagined pleasures are better then actual pleasures.
59. Writing on profound principles wins the author a small long term audience while writing on the topics of the day gains him a large, short term audience.
60. Literary criticism is both malicious and harmless.
66. Unwanted memories are almost as troublesome as unwanted forgetfulness.
72. He who is not busy with the present spends his time looking back into the past.
84. Between falsehoods and useless truths there is little difference.

Is the Child Wronged by Same-Sex Parenting?

2007-08-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

Published at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2004/08/15/is-the-child-wronged-by-same-sex-parenting August 15th, 2004

Knowing that you are the product of two people, two families, two lineages which come together in a unique manner to form you gives you a more complete understanding of who you are and where you came from.

The gay community is again calling for the legalization of gay marriage. We should resist any such extension of the term marriage to include gay couples not as a matter of principle but, because it will be inextricably linked to same-sex parenting, in which the child is harmed in a very significant way.

The question of same-sex parenting raises a plethora of ethical issues, from the morality of homosexuality and the reproductive rights of the parents to the welfare of the children involved. It causes us to reassess the very meaning of the terms “family,” “father,” “mother” and “offspring.”¹ Changing social mores and advances in assisted reproductive medicine have made the impossible, possible; the unthinkable, available and the unimaginable, viable. It has transferred techniques which were previously the subject of science-fiction very much into the realm of science and commerce.

Of all the perspectives considered when discussing the ethical dilemmas offered by such changes, there is one which is often overlooked -- that of the child. Take the scenario reported in the documentary Two Men and a Baby, which was aired on the Special Broadcasting Service in Australia in September last year. A homosexual male couple wish to have a child. The sperm of one of them is impregnated into a surrogate mother. She conceives and gives birth to the child. The couple then remove the child from his mother and raise the child themselves. It is their intention that, as far as possible, that the child has no mother but two fathers. The question is, is the child morally wronged in this situation?

Here the child is wronged in a very real and significant way. The relationship of a child with his biological mother is unique, and that it is a natural good. The child is being denied the natural good of the aforesaid relationship and is therefore wronged. Furthermore the truth about one’s biological origins is a basic human good and the child is denied this truth and is therefore wronged.

To many people, the thought of a child being reared solely by males is rather repugnant. If we do not find it repugnant we at least pity the child and feel that he is missing out on something very significant. The Declaration of the Rights of the Child issued by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, which draws its principles from a broad spectrum of cultures and beliefs, declares in strikingly decisive terms the central role of the mother. “The child … shall be entitled to grow and develop in health; to this end, special care and protection shall be provided both to him and to his mother. … A child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother.”²

This repugnance is not simply a result of old-fashioned conservative thought. It shows a deep-seated intuitive understanding of what is natural and what is not. We would not wish a person’s mother to be reduced to the status of a mere logical deduction, the product of the syllogism that runs: all humans have mothers, I am a human, therefore I have a mother.³ Leon Kass has put forward a convincing argument that such feelings indicate an innate wisdom of that which is conducive to human flourishing and that such feelings should be respected as meaningful and indicative of human nature, not merely ridiculed as prejudice.⁴ As Kass admits though, repugnance in itself is not an argument, and so in what follows I will attempt to show why such feelings warrant serious consideration.

Biological uniqueness of blood relationships

It is obvious that an individual’s blood relations are biologically unique. Each individual has exactly one biological mother and one biological father. This will remain the case for the foreseeable future (unless the Raelian vision of a cloned society is realized more quickly than seems feasible at the moment). Although the modern conception of the human being celebrates individuality, our biological makeup reminds us that we are not isolated beings but that each of us springs from two other people: a biological mother and a biological father. Its very universality means that our parents also have parents, as do their parents, and so, whether we like it nor not, each of us is part of a lineage of blood relations whom we did not choose and whom we cannot deny. When we are born we are willy-nilly linked in a very significant way to a long line of blood relations. With respect to an individual, these blood relations are uniquely different from all other people. They are his family.

Not only are these blood relations unique, there is a natural genetic hierarchy among them. With respect to any given individual, some blood relations have a large number of genes in common with them -- others fewer. The largest proportion of genes a blood relation can have in common with an individual is one half, and this is achieved only by the individual’s children (should they have any) and their mother and father. Since the individual in question in this essay is a child we may dismiss the individual’s offspring and concentrate only on his parents. And thus, for the purposes of this essay, for any given child there are two biologically unique people who stand at the top of the hierarchy of blood relations -- the father and mother.

Social uniqueness of blood relationships

Maternal and paternal genes have a standard social meaning.⁵ The undeniable uniqueness of our biological relations has a profound impact on us as social beings. Such relationships “go beyond the contractual and the voluntary, in them we incur responsibilities not of our own choosing.”⁶ It is these blood ties which prevent us from descending into a solipsistic isolation and society disintegrating into the “dust and powder of individuality.”⁷ Blood relationships are not only physically unique but they are also socially unique because they are not subject to personal choice but are given to us by powers beyond our control. They are not matters of opinion but are matters of fact with which we must live -- they cannot be willed out of existence. Of all the people with whom an individual has some sort of relationship, his blood relations are not subject to personal selection. They do not come and go. They do not change with time. In a world where every other relationship may be formed and broken by human will, blood relations are a fixed point. This enlarges the individual’s self concept beyond the immediate confines of the body and its needs for pleasure and gratification and expands his awareness to something larger -- the family. By remembering our ancestors, recognizing our obligations towards them and treating them as part of our living family we acquire a sense of our identity.⁸

The biological parents also have a unique obligation to rear and nurture their offspring because they, and only they caused the offspring to be born. The fact that one has made something immediately obliges one to care and take responsibility for it. As H. L. Nelson and J. L. Nelson put it:

Those who contribute genetically to a child can be said to cause that particular child to exist, and if the ethics of the family adopts a causal rather than a contractual model of responsibility, then the child’s genetic parents would seem to have a prima facie obligation to remain in the child’s life.⁹

Uniqueness of relationship with biological mother

Thus far we have discussed the uniqueness -- both biologically and socially -- of an individual’s parents. We now turn to the thorny issue of gender differences to distinguish the mother from the father.

One liberal conception of the sex and gender is that sex is biological but that gender is socially constructed -- that girls only act like girls and that boys only act like boys because they have been taught to do so by the people they grew up with.

On the other hand there is, predating this conception of humanity, and boasting a long and respected tradition in many cultures, the idea that the nature of a man and woman are inherently and fundamentally different and complementary. Such thought is now described as “stereotyping” but it is hard to dismiss the notion, observable in virtually every aspect of nature, that species are naturally divided into male and female and that members of the two sexes have distinct roles.

Are men are men and women really different? Consider the extreme case of a child raised in the company of men only. Can we really suppose that a community of men could raise a child as well as a community comprising both men and women? Could we honestly say that the child would lack nothing so long as he comes into contact with a broad cross-section of men from different backgrounds and of different personality types? Surely we must admit that the absence of women would constitute a serious omission in the child’s upbringing. Does this not indicate that there is a significant difference between men and women?

Not only is the natural division of roles observable in nature, it is also embedded in the mythology and culture of the major civilizations. The primeval division of male and female is one of the fundamental dualities used to symbolize universal forces: Purusha and Prakriti, Father Heaven and Mother Earth, Yang and Yin, Zeus and Demeter.

It may be argued that these representations of the male/female duality is merely mythological or symbolic and tells us nothing about human nature. Joseph Campbell and others have argued extensively that these myths exist in culture precisely because they do reflect human nature and the human experience.¹⁰ It is not my intention to undertake a full discussion of the vexatious issue of the differences in the nature of man and woman and into the roles most suitable for them to fulfill, but merely to point out that there is a difference between the sexes -- a real, significant, fundamental, non-arbitrary difference which is recognized by the traditional male/female duality.

One variation on this essentialist view of gender has been proposed by Carol Gilligan who argued that “women are more ‘care orientated’ while men are more ‘justice orientated.’”¹¹ Gilligan’s findings are controversial and she has been attacked by Christina Hoff Sommers and others, not so much for finding a difference between male and female, but for the poor light in which she casts young men and for the changes she believes are necessary to the way in which children are taught.^{12, 13}

It is worth noting that the assertion that men and women have different natures does not imply that one is superior to the other. They may be different, complementary and equally valuable.¹⁴

This fact, together with the fact of the uniqueness of the biological parents, indicates the uniqueness of the child’s relationship with his biological mother.

But the uniqueness of one’s relationship with one’s biological mother does not rely on the traditional male/female duality. Even if you reject this understanding of human nature and insist that gender is a social construct, the fact that such social construction has been going on for millennia means that today, men and women are very different, but for a different reason. Socio-biology argues that the “current gender roles are adaptive features resulting from natural selection during hominid evolution.”¹⁵ You must then admit that women have been conditioned to be better nurturers (say) than men and that that conditioning cannot be undone overnight. It may be galling to “pander to the stereotypes” and thereby reinforce them, but the question under discussion is not “Are stereotypes being reinforced?” but “Is the child wronged?” Psychological androgyny may be an ideal at which a homosexual couple may aim but it is not the current state of human psychology.

It may be objected that the social role of mother only exists when the biological mother explicitly assumes that role. This view ignores an obvious fact about human nature, which is that the concept of motherhood (and all close familial relations) is deeply implanted into the human psyche and cannot be erased by mere thought or will. Witness the impelling drive for adopted children to discover their birth parents, or the sense of loss experienced by many women who have abortions.

Relationship with one’s biological mother is a natural good

Such a unique relationship is a natural good because women have evolved over millennia to love and protect and nurture their biological offspring more than any other child. Societies throughout history have utilized the “love of one’s own” to ensure that children are nurtured. This strong natural tendency of love from mother to child is so deep-seated that it cannot be categorized as a mere social construct. Since women are the ones whose bodies actually give birth to the child, they are compelled to be present at the birth of the child, whereas the father may or may not be present when the child is born. For the survival of the species women have naturally evolved to care and protect their offspring. Richard Whitfield, former Dean of Social Services and Humanities, Aston University describes a mother caring for her child thus:

Throughout the months of fetal development, and from the moment of birth, the baby’s hope is hugely invested in its mother. Relatively helpless compared with many other new-borns in the animal kingdom, and having a much longer period of dependency, baby relies on mother to be the first mediator of a strange world. If secure and nurtured herself, the mother is able to give early meaning to her child through the first glimmers of physical then verbal language; also a sense of joy in life from providing rewarding body contact, including satisfying feeding. Mother’s capacity to mediate warm, focused and sensitive concern is vital, the child’s hope and potential mirrored in her countenance and demeanor. She is indeed baby’s ‘mother of hope.’ At this stage the main caring role of father, extended family and neighbors is to give practical and emotional support to the mother.¹⁶

Having a mother and knowing who she is a natural good because it is central to one’s ontology. To establish one’s place in the world one needs to know one’s kinship, ancestry, and lineage. Having a father is only half the story. Every human is the unique result of a familial nexus. Knowing that you are the product of two people, two families, two lineages which come together in a unique manner to form you gives you a more complete understanding of who you are and where you came from. This cannot compare to the shallow concept that you are the product of your father’s sperm and some other mysterious person who was used only as a tool to produce you. Knowing that you are the product of a financial agreement between your father and an anonymous women whom he did not love, in fact hardly knew, but with whom he had an financial agreement cannot and does not compare to the knowledge that one is the product of the loving union of your father and mother. Leon Kass explains this co-mingling of the mother and father to inform the child’s ontology thus:

Through children, a good common to both husband and wife, male and female achieve some genuine unification (beyond the mere sexual “union” that fails to do so): The two become one through sharing generous (not needy) love for this third being as good. Flesh of their flesh, the child is the parents’ own commingled being externalized, and given a separate and persisting existence; unification is enhanced also by their commingled work of rearing.¹⁷

Furthermore, truth is a natural good -- in particular the truth about one’s origins. From adoption we know that many people have a strong urge to know about their biological origins and to discover their genealogy.¹⁸ The truth is that the child has a mother. When the child is denied this truth, it is being wronged.

I have argued that a child is wronged by being brought into the world with the explicit intention that he be raised by two men and not by his mother. I will now explore some of the implications of this.

Adoption: It may be claimed that although the child may be wronged by being raised by a same-sex couple, the alternative of living in an institution represents an even greater threat to the child’s welfare. There may be some substance to this argument but in practice it will not often arise because generally speaking the number of children up for adoption is far less than the number of couples who wish to adopt, in which case it is not a choice between a same-sex couple and an institution, but between a same-sex couple and a heterosexual couple. If what I have argued above is true then, in the latter case, generally speaking, the child would be better off going to the heterosexual couple. There would be practical difficulties in legislating for this as it is a clear case of discrimination against homosexuals but, I believe that my argument shows that for the sake of the welfare of child, such discrimination is warranted.

The rights of the same-sex couple. It may be argued that although the child may be wronged in some way by being reared by a same sex couple, the same-sex couple would be wronged if they were denied that chance to have a child and that the rights of the parents to have a child outweighs the right of the child to be reared by both mother and father. By choosing the homosexual lifestyle the men in question choose a relationship which is physically incapable of producing a child and, as I argue above, emotionally inferior when it comes to child rearing. They thereby forfeit the right to reproduce and to nurture children. Bill Muehlenberg argues that “Any couple which seeks to live outside of the means of nature to provide to have children cannot talk about rights being denied, any more than I can talk about the right to be ten feet tall.”¹⁹

Furthermore the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.²⁰

Conclusion

Is homosexual parenting conducive to the flourishing of the child or does his welfare come second to the desire of the two homosexuals to ‘have’ a child in some way which their biology will not allow? I have argued that the child’s relationship with his biological mother is a unique natural good which is denied to the child who is raised by two men. The denial of this natural good constitutes a serious wrong to the child. The child is further wronged by being denied the truth of his biological origins.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] Muehlenberg, B., ‘Unrestricted IVF: Who Protects the Child?’, News Weekly. 29th July, 2000, p 6.

[ii] ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Child’, Principles 4 and 6, accessed 2 October 2003, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/25.htm .

[iii] Dalrymple, T., “The Starving Criminal”, accessed 2 October 2003, http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_oh_to_be.html

[iv] Kass, L., 1998, “The Wisdom of Repugnance”, The Ethics of Human Cloning, AEI Press, pp 17 – 24.

[v] Nelson, H. L. and Nelson, J. L., 1995, ‘Family’, Encyclopaedia of Bioethics, MacMilliam, Vol 1, p 805.

[vi] Ibid, p 802.

[vii] Burke, E, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford University Press, 1999 p. 96

[viii] This concept is comes from by an argument developed by Roger Scruton in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, St. Augustine’s Press, 2000, p 8 ff.

[ix] Nelson, H. L. and Nelson, J. L., op. cit., p 806.

[x] Campbell, J., 1972, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press.

[xi] Dodds, S., 1998, ‘Sex Equality’, Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, Vol 4, Academic Press, p. 57.

[xii] Benfer, A., ‘Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists’, http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/03/09/sommers/ (accessed 1 November 2003).

[xiii]White, T., ‘Two Ethical Styles: The Debate About Gender’, accessed 1 November 2003, http://www.ethicsandbusiness.org/kg1.htm

[xiv] Dodds, S., 1998, ‘Sex Equality’, Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, Vol 4, Academic Press, p. 55-57.

[xv] Howie, G., 1998, ‘Gender Roles’, Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, Vol 2, Academic Press, p. 371.

[xvi] Whitfield, R., ‘Why we all Need Committed Somebodies’, For a Change Magazine, accessed 22 October 2003 http://www.forachange.co.uk/index.php?stoid=342.

[xvii] Kass, L., 1998, ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’, accessed October 22, 2003, link.

[xviii] Siegel, D., 1998, ‘Adoption’, Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, Vol 1, Academic Press, p. 32.

[xix] Muehlenberg, B., ‘Unrestricted IVF, Who Protects the Child?’, News Weekly, 29 July, 2000 p. 6.

[xx] http://www.uncrc.info/ Convention on the Rights of the Child, Part 1, article 3.

National Curriculum: A Bipartisan Bad Idea

2007-07-08T04:10:00.000-07:00

A national curriculum involves more risks than benefits.

(first published in Policy Magazine - Winter 2007)

Irrespective of which party wins the next federal election, it looks as if Australia is in for a national curriculum. Education Minister Julie Bishop has taken her predecessor’s proposal for a national leaving certificate one step further and is now pushing for a national curriculum. Labor under Kevin Rudd issued a policy document supporting a national curriculum, creating a bipartisan consensus at federal level.

In April this year Bishop persuaded the Labor state and territory education ministers on the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) to set up working groups to consider models for national curricula.(1)

In the same month the Council for the Australian Federation released a report entitled The Future of Schooling in Australia, which outlines the collective vision of the states and territories for future directions in school reform. This report also endorses a more uniform approach to reporting student achievement and a national curriculum which sets ‘core content and achievement standards’.(2)
In general terms the states and territories will not be obliged to teach a single national curriculum but they will be expected to show that their curricula comply with a national framework. They will also be obliged to report student performance on a nationally consistent scale so comparison between states and territories will be possible. Other measures put forward in the proposal include replacing society and environment studies with the more traditional subjects of history, geography and economics.

Reasons for a national curriculum
Julie Bishop gives a number of reasons as to why she supports moves towards a national curriculum. Her first and most compelling reason is that a national curriculum would eliminate unnecessary replication under the current system whereby each state develops its own curriculum. In a speech to the National Press Club in February this year, Ms Bishop said, ‘In a country of 20 million people, why do we need to develop eight curricula in eight jurisdictions?’(3)

As evidence for this argument, she cites the findings in the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) report Year 12 Curriculum Content and Achievement Standards, which concludes that many of the state and territory curricula (particularly the sciences) already have a large percentage of common material.(4) Bishop’s argument is, if the curricula already have much in common, why not have one comprising all that is common and then choose the best of those parts which are different to make up the rest?

There seems to be a prima facie financial case for eliminating replication among state curricula. However, any saving would depend on how the centralised body administered the curriculum in each state. Since all states would have to be consulted on the content of a national curriculum and it would have to be delivered and administered in each state, the resulting costs may be similar to the current system. No detailed proposal for these arrangements has been done, nor have detailed costings been prepared. It is therefore difficult to say what, if any, savings would be achieved.

The second reason Ms Bishop gives for a national curriculum is that it will raise standards across the country. This appears to be her strongest motivation for introducing these measures. Her reasoning is that by selecting the best of all the state curricula and combining the cream of the crop into a single national curriculum, all students in every state would be better off. Again, at first glance, this seems to be a reasonable argument.

However, this line of reasoning ignores one very important fact. Consolidating the eight different state and territory curricula into a single national curriculum changes the curriculum development environment from one which has some scope for competition, comparison and diversity into a monoculture in which there is a single solution imposed on every school in the country. This consolidation of decision-making is a recipe for the lowering of standards, not for raising them. At least with eight different state curricula, curriculum developers can easily compare their work with other states and debate the relative merits of various approaches. Under a national curriculum this ability to compare would be lost.

Here we can learn from the experience of a national curriculum in England and Wales. In those countries a national curriculum was introduced in 1998 with the promise that it would raise standards. But it failed to do so. Starting in 1983, the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University ran a detailed analysis of A-level students’ performance. Their results showed that the abilities of biology, English literature, French, geography, history and mathematics students fell between 1988 and 2001 and increased slightly thereafter.(5)

The decline in maths was particularly significant and prompted the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, The London Mathematical Society and the Engineering Council to conduct an enquiry in 1999 into how to combat the problem. The enquiry found a ‘serious decline in students’ mastery of basic mathematical skills and level of preparation for mathematics-based degree courses. This decline is well established and affects students at all levels.’(6)

By 2002, Chris Woodhead, former Chief Inspector of Schools, wrote that the national curriculum had failed to deliver and should be abolished.(7)

The third reason Julie Bishop gives for the introduction of a national curriculum is that it will assist families which move interstate with school-aged children. However, this argument does not hold water for two reasons. Firstly, the percentage of school-aged children who move interstate each year is very low. In 2006 approximately 80,000(8) out of a total school population of 3.3 million(9) moved interstate. That is 2.4% of the school population. The introduction of a measure which will disadvantage all students through lowering standards cannot be justified on the grounds of making things a little easier for such a small number. Furthermore, since the curricula are already very similar in many areas, the difficulties experienced when moving from state to state would be minimal.
The fourth justification put forward for a single national curriculum is that it is fairer because no child will be in a state with an inferior curriculum. However uniformity is not synonymous with fairness. Replacing a system of eight state and territory curricula, some of which are better than others, with a single national curriculum, which could well end up being worse than them all, is not fair to any Australian child.

One of the least plausible reasons put forward by Ms Bishop for her proposal is that a national curriculum will be more accountable to public opinion than the state and territory curricula. In an address to the History Teachers’ Association in late 2006 she said, ‘A common model curriculum would (by virtue of being on the national stage) result in curriculum being made more accountable through greater public scrutiny at the bar of public opinion.’(10) I have argued previously that input into state curricula by anyone other than education professionals is virtually nil.(11) Public submissions are called for and curriculum review documents are available on the internet but because parents lack any real mechanism to influence curriculum content they become disengaged from the curriculum development process. It is hard to see how removing the curriculum one step further from the parental level is going to make it more accountable. I predict that it would have exactly the opposite effect.

The final and most misguided reason put forward for the national curriculum is, in Ms Bishop’s own words, that it will counter the ‘ideologues who have hijacked [the] school curriculum’(12). In her History Teachers’ Association speech she said, ‘We … need to improve the quality of what is actually taught [in schools] … We need to take school curriculum out of the hands of ideologues in the state and territory education bureaucracies and give it to say a national board of studies.’(13)

The thinking here is completely muddled. If the ‘ideologues’ can hijack a state school curriculum they can also hijack a national one and wreak their havoc not on a state-wide level but on a national level. It is the centralised state curricula which allow the state-wide hijacking. A centralised national curriculum will set the scene for a nation-wide hijacking. The solution is not to further centralise decision-making at the federal level but to decentralise to an open market. Centralising has caused the problem. More of the same will not solve it. In her criticism of the states, Ms Bishop acknowledges that centralisation at the state level does not work. She told the National Press Club that ‘Notwithstanding the billions of dollars invested in schools in Australia, there is evidence that standards have declined.’(14) Having identified the failure of centralisation, Ms Bishop would be better advised to push for a less centralised, competitive curriculum marketplace rather than trying to fix the problem with further consolidation.

Labor’s policy
In February this year, Labor set out its case for a national curriculum in a document entitled New Directions for our schools: Establishing a National Curriculum to improve our children’s educational outcomes.(15) The reasoning in this document is similar to the case put forward by Julie Bishop. While paying lip service to ‘school autonomy, local innovation and choice’ as important aspects to a healthy school system, the authors list assistance for those who move interstate and increased national consistency as the main justifications for a national curriculum. There is no substantial evidence to support the assertion that more consistency leads to higher standards. This is taken as a given.

The authors also mention in passing that a national curriculum would promote ‘collaboration between levels of Government’ and end ‘the blame game’ which currently occurs on educational matters, with the Commonwealth blaming the states for curriculum deficiencies. However, a national curriculum may lead to the blame game working the other way, with state and territory education ministers blaming the national curriculum body for falling educational standards.

A better way to raise educational standards
I have argued elsewhere that the best way to raise educational standards in Australia is to introduce two reforms.(16) Firstly, the state based monopoly on curricula should be abolished and replaced with an open market for curriculum development. Individual schools, groups of schools, corporations and state education departments should be free to develop and market their curricula, and schools should be free to adopt whichever best suits the needs of their students. Jennifer Buckingham(17) and more recently Kevin Donnelly(18) have both argued that there may even be a place for a national curriculum in such a competitive environment as long as it is offered on a voluntary basis.

The second reform should be to introduce a school voucher or tax credit thereby putting the power of choice into the hands of parents. The consequence of these two reforms would be a surge of innovation and meaningful educational improvement driven by genuine competition of curricula and real consequences for failure. Poor curricula would die a quick and natural death in such an environment and the hijacking of school curricula against the wishes of parents would become impossible.

While Brendan Nelson was Minister for Education and Training, he explicitly ruled out the possibility of school vouchers under his watch, though the present Commonwealth policy on private schools, which amounts to a quasi-voucher system, has certainly increased the educational choices open to many families.(19) In the light of this policy it is disappointing that Ms Bishop is moving to centralise the school curriculum system rather than introducing as much choice as possible.

By way of contrast with the Liberal’s education curriculum policy, consider these comments on superannuation by the then Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer, Mal Brough, in Parliament in December 2005:

Today we are here to talk about choice … This side of the House actually believes [the Australian people] have the capability to choose for themselves, and they have done so ... It was interesting to read [in] the Financial Review today … the headline: ‘Everyone’s a winner in transition to choice era’. That is the Financial Review giving it the thumbs up. Why are they a winner? They are a winner because people have lower fees, better service, greater choice and a greater return on their savings ... As the Australian people head into Christmas time, they will know that this government will continue to provide choice.(20)

Here we have a vigorous defence of the efficacy of choice and the ability of citizens to make informed decisions concerning complex matters. My question is, why do these arguments not also apply to school choice? The answer is that they do apply, and it would be beneficial to all Australian school students if at least one party recognised this fact.

Endnotes
(1) Justine Ferrari, ‘National model for schools’, The Australian, 14 April, 2007, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21554294-601,00.html.
(2) Federalist Paper 2, The Future of Schooling In Australia, A report by the States and Territories (April 2007), p 33, http://www.dpc.vic.gov.au/CA256D800027B102/Lookup/FederalistPaper2TheFutureofSchoolinginAustralia/ $file/Federalist%20Paper%202%20The%20Future%20of%20Schooling%20in%20Australia.pdf.
(3) Julie Bishop, ‘Preparing children to succeed—Standards in our schools’, address to the National Press Club, 7 February 2007, http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/Bishop/2007/02/b0010807.asp.
(4) Gabrielle Matters and Geoff Masters, Curriculum Content and Achievement Standards (Canberra: DEST, January 2007), http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/ BEBED234-E6F9-43C0-AF0F-0975DCFEE39B/15412/curriculum_content_achivement_standards1.pdf.
(5) Reform, Standards of Public Examinations in England and Wales (London: Reform, 2005), p 3, http://www.reform.co.uk/filestore/pdf/Standards%20of%20Public%20Examinations%20in%20England%20and%20Wales.pdf.
(6) Engineering Council UK, Measuring the Maths Problem (London: Engineering Council UK, 1999), p 3, http://www.engc.org.uk/documents/Measuring_the_Maths_Problems.pdf.
(7) Chris Woodhead, The standards of today and how to raise them to the standards of tomorrow (London: Adam Smith Institute, 2002), p 11, http://www.adamsmith.org/pdf/the-standards-of-today.pdf.
(8) Julie Bishop, ‘New interstate student data transfer note system’, media release, 15 February 2006, http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/Bishop/2006/02/B001150206.asp.
(9) ABS, Australian Social Trends, ABS Cat. No. 4102.0 (Canberra: ABS, July 2007), http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/EC86E4FDB608A715CA2571B00014B866?opendocument.
(10) Julie Bishop, ‘Address to the History Teachers’ Association of Australia conference, Fremantle’, speech, 6 October 2006, http://www.dest.gov.au/ministers/media/bishop/2006/10/b001061006.asp.
(11) Ross Farrelly, ‘Parent Power’, Policy 21:1 (Autumn 2005), pp 9–14, http://www.cis.org.au/policy/autumn05/polaut05-2.pdf.
(12) Bishop, ‘Address to the History Teachers’ Association’.
(13)As above.
(14) Julie Bishop, ‘Preparing children to succeed—Standards in our schools’.
(15) Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith, Establishing a National Curriculum to improve our children’s educational outcomes (Canberra: ALP, February 2007), www.alp.org.au/download/now/new_directions_national_curriculum.pdf.
(16) Farrelly, ‘Parent Power’, Policy.
(17) Jennifer Buckingham, ‘Let the schools choose which accredited curriculum to teach’, The Canberra Times, 30 October 2006.
(18) Kevin Donnelly, ‘Labor using old maps to chart new territory’, The Australian, 7 April 2007, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21515020-601,00.html.
(19)‘[A school voucher system] is not Government policy, nor will it become so as long as I have the privilege of being Australia’s Minister for Education, Science and Training’, from a speech prepared by Brendan Nelson for but not delivered to the ANZSOG conference, ‘Schooling for the 21st Century: Unlocking Human Potential’, 29 September 2005. This partly reflects the lack of direct Constitutional power over school policy.
(20) Hansard, 8 December 2005, http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/TranslateWIPILink.aspx? Folder=HANSARDR&Criteria=DOC_DATE:2005-12-08%3BSEQ_NUM:90%3B.

The Immorality of Writing Badly

2007-04-19T03:22:00.000-07:00

Published on www.aussiecon.net, September 2006

Alain de Botton in his recent book How Proust can Change your Life points out that "An effect of reading ... is that once we've put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to exactly the things which the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company." As Huxley put it in Brave New World, "You read, and you're pierced."

Yes, he is talking about literature, but the more general point he is making is that what we read affects us. One implication of be Botton's observation is that writing is not a morally neutral activity. When we write, we produce a text which will deeply affect the reader. There are strict laws governing the production of food stuffs which demand that the label show all the ingredients. The aim is that the consumer may accurately ascertain the likely effect the consummation of the food product in question will have on his or her constitution. There are no such laws governing the production of the written word and yet language in its written form jeopardizes the welfare of the recipient in exactly the same way as the consumption of food.

I'm not suggesting we pass laws to warn readers of the potential harms which lie hidden in the articles, books or short stories they are about to read, but I am suggesting that authors consider carefully the likely effect their outpourings will have on the hapless reader who, either by choice or compulsion, reads their works.

Furthermore, my concern here is not great works of literature. I am not concerned about whether or not Sons and Lovers corrupted a generation and marked a significant decline in public morality or whether or not Oscar Wilde planted a seed of superficial cynicism which was never to be eradicated from the mind of the English speaking public, or whether or not Bertold Bretch was a visionary realist or a morally corrupt disparager or all that is worthwhile in the human soul. No. My concern here is the uncounted mass of authors who sit at their keyboards in offices all around the world, hardly aware of the fact that they are authors at all. Lawrence, Wilde and Bretch were no doubt aware that their works would be read and would influence their audience. But far more insidious is the author who never considers his audience, and therefore writes in a moral vacuum.

Take for example the bureaucrat who wrote the follow passage: "For the purposes of this document, the definition of an event is 'a significant gathering of people, who are either: a) members of the university or b) not members of the university or c) a mixture of people, some of whom are members of the university and some of whom are not'"

I suggest that the author of this passage, which says that an event is a gathering of people, did not consider the effect he would have on his audience. For me, the effects of reading such as passage are as numerous as they are depressing. Firstly, I feel a rising sense of resentment that, by reading this passage, I have been forced to spend a small (but to me significant) period of my life deciphering something which I expected to be meaningful and which was in fact not. It's a little like unwrapping a Christmas gift and finding within it nothing but straw. I discard the entire document at my peril because hidden within it's cotton wool padding could very well be a gem of information which will prove to be invaluable. However, it seems such gems are very rare and appear just frequently enough to keep one reading, ever hopeful of find another of fearful of missing the next.

The cornerstone of our judicial system is the writ of habeas corpus by which one can petition an unlawful imprisonment. But being forced to read an extended passage of meaningless verbiage because one fears that by not doing so one may miss a single vital piece of information is akin to being imprisoned in a text against one's will. Perhaps we need a writ of habeas animus to protect the unlawful detention of the soul.

Furthermore, by reading such an exquisite passage of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, I sense that I have been exposed to the most trivial, the most mundane, the most nit picking, unimaginative, uninspiring, dispiriting, mean hearted and mealy mouthed aspect of the human condition. And it leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. Sure, it's not so bad to just read a sentence or two of such trivia, but consider for a moment the hapless clerk whose lot it is to read such stuff for a living. He has no choice in the matter. For good or ill he must read the documents which cross his desk. His mind and soul are exposed to the whim of the bureaucratic author for the duration of the working day and the working year. We would consider it immoral tie down such a person and force feed him nothing but junk food. We should consider it similarly immoral to force him to read bureaucratic verbiage which does his soul ill and dulls his mind.

If de Botton is correct and the material we read does affect us, it is a terrible thing to be exposed to such mind numbing, mind jumbling prose.

Don't Apologise for Reading Great Books

2007-04-19T03:21:00.001-07:00

Published on www.mercatornet.com, September 2006

Children find the classics relevant and interesting if they are taught properly.

Parents who wish their children to learn something of the classics of English literature at high school must be tearing their hair out in the state of Western Australia. It would be a travesty if school students were directed to study the reality television show Big Brother during the precious few hours they have in the English classroom. However the state's curriculum council has gone one better, suggesting that students study the ads screened during this program.

This tragic situation is a result of the post-modern view that any text is as good as any other, that there is no absolute truth and that no books have anything meaningful to say about the human condition. Homer Simpson is thought to be as good as Homer’s Odyssey and students end up wasting precious time watching the ads screened during Big Brother when they could be studying George Orwell’s 1984, thereby discovering the origin of the term.

In "Australia’s wackiest postmodernists" James Franklin says that is difficult to formulate a workable alternative to post-modernism in academia. This may well be the case but in K-12 education it is not so difficult.

One example of an alternative to studying television ads is the Junior Great Books program. Earlier this year I visited Chicago, the home of the Great Books Foundation to attend a training course in this excellent program. Since then I have been running the program at my school and helping other teachers to trial the course in their classrooms.

The Junior Great Books program comprises a series of high quality texts from a variety of cultures. Each story address a fundamental problem of human existence in a manner which is age-appropriate and attractive to the young reader. The students study these stories in great depth. They listen to the teacher read the story aloud, make directed notes on the story and write compositions based on the linguistic features employed by the author.

The culmination of the study is a shared inquiry discussion, a disciplined group discussion which examines a single question raised by the text. Students are free to formulate responses but are encouraged to cite evidence from the text to back up their arguments. This approach assumes that the author has written something meaningful and worthy of sustained study and that the text under discussion holds some authority -- a view what is the anthesis of the post-modern celebration of the death of the author.

The shared inquiry discussion is conducted according to four basic guidelines set down by the Great Books Foundation:

Only those who have read the selection may take part in discussions.
Discussions are restricted to the selection that everyone has read.
Support for opinions should be found within the selection.
Teachers may only ask questions -- they may not answer them.

The advantage of this method of collaborative learning, especially when the teacher rigorously follows the fourth rule of shared inquiry, is that the students get to see a living example of sustained intellectual curiosity. The importance of this cannot be overemphasised. Children learn much by example. Teachers can tell their students that books are interesting and important but nothing is more powerful than seeing them actively engaged in careful examination of a piece of literature, striving to find meaning in it and actively pursuing an aspect of the story which they find personally meaningful.

This type of teaching, a form of Socratic dialogue suitably modified to meet the needs of primary students, has the added benefit of connecting students with this aspect of their heritage, the rational, open minded pursuit of truth which was introduced to the West in Classical Athens and which endures to this day.

The Junior Great Books Program comprises literature of the highest quality. The stories are selected with several criteria in mind. Obviously the stories must be well written. If a traditional story such as a Grimm’s fairytale or one of Aesop’s Fables is selected, the retelling is very carefully chosen. The story must be profound enough to sustain at least four readings; it must be age-appropriate; and it must deal with an issue which is relevant, interesting and meaningful. Furthermore, the stores chosen must be somewhat ambiguous. Morality tales do not lend themselves to lively debate while stories which can be interpreted in a number of ways encourage students to draw divergent conclusions and to justify their conclusions with reasoned arguments.

For example, at the beginning of a series aimed at eight and nine-year-old children, students study The Happy Lion, by Louise Fatio, which deals with the question of what makes a true friend, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, by Beatrix Potter, which deals with one’s approach to authority figures, How the Camel Got His Hump, by Rudyard Kipling, which deals with one’s duty towards society and Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest and Piglet Has a Bath, by A. A. Milne, which raises the issue of dealing with strangers. Each of these is accessible to primary students and opens up discussions on important and profound issues which children meet as they grow up. Studying such texts prepares them for more difficult questions and helps make them more thoughtful, more considerate, more humane people.

Some critics assert that literature of the type found in the Junior Great Books program is irrelevant and boring. My experience is otherwise. Because the texts embody fundamental questions which lie at the heart of the human condition, students find them incredibly relevant. It does take a certain amount of teaching skill and enthusiasm to involve all students in the discussion - but it is well worth the effort.

Finally, the study of good literatures refines children’s tastes. They develop a taste for leisure reading which makes them think, consider, reflect and reason. Big Brother and the accomanying advertisements lose their appeal. And this is no bad thing.

Innovation meets education - a winning formula

2007-04-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

This is the second part of an article co-authored with Naomi Smith, first published in Sydney's Child.

This year, more than ever we have seen a distinct trend towards the centralisation of education policy. The federal government, principally through its education minister Brendan Nelson, is intent on wresting the responsibility for education from the states and exerting its influence on every classroom in Australia.

Strangely enough, this policy is at odds with the Liberal’s philosophy of decentralisation, small government and deregulation. In many policy areas they recognise that competition and minimal government control is best for consumers. Take for example these comments on superannuation by Malcolm Brough, the Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer in the final session of parliament for the year.

Today we are here to talk about choice. … This side of the House actually believes [the Australian people] have the capability to choose for themselves, and they have done so…. It was interesting to read [in] the Financial Review today … the headline: ‘Everyone’s a winner in transition to choice era’. That is the Financial Review giving it the thumbs up. Why are they a winner? They are a winner because people have lower fees, better service, greater choice and a greater return on their savings…. As the Australian people head into Christmas time, they will know that this government will continue to provide choice,”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Choice, competition and a deregulated superannuation market had led to lower prices and a better range of services for consumers. The government acknowledges this, and is indeed proud of this fact and makes a point of mentioning it whenever possible.

Many studies have shown that the same principles apply to education. School choice, curriculum competition, diversity of educational products and a deregulated education marketplace drive up standards, encourage innovation and introduce real consequences for failing schools while providing excellent schools with a pathway to expand and grow. And yet, when it comes to education, the Federal government introduces measures which run in exactly the opposite direction.

It is also informative to look at the reasons given by the Federal government for the introduction of these centralising measures. When explaining these measures, Dr Nelson complains that there are differences in standards between the states and that this creates difficulties for people who are moving interstate. But a mere 2% of the school age population mover interstate each year. Changing an entire education system for the benefit of 2% of the students is clearly not justified. He also cites the difficulties faced by defence personnel and their familles when the move about the country. This group of students make up an even more miniscule faction of the entire school population. Even the Reid report gives scant regard to this argument, yet Dr Nelson continues to put it forward as a valid reason to change the current arrangements.

As outlined by Naomi Smith, Brendan Nelson is intent on seeing some form of national leaving certificate introduced to Australian schools. Although Nelson denies he is working towards a national curriculum, no one doubts that a national leaving certificate will have some effect on the material children are taught in schools. Every teacher knows that the test at the end of the year influences the choice of subject matter in the classroom. It’s simple commonsense to conclude that the national leaving certificate will create more uniformity in the state curricula of the relevant subjects. It would be a logical next step for the Federal government to introduce a national curriculum once a national leaving certificate is in place. After all, if all students in the country are sitting the same exam, they may as well study the same curriculum to prepare for it. This highly controversial move to a national curriculum would no doubt be introduced as a means of providing the best preparation for all students. This year Brendan Nelson commissioned a study to compare year 12 courses in all states. It would be very easy to use the results of such a study to argue that some states are worse than others and that in order than no student be disadvantaged when preparing for the national leaving certificate, a uniform national curriculum is needed.

Unfortunately, centralised education planning does not drive up standards. Education is an intensely personal matter and the teacher’s values love of his or her subject is the primary motivating force which inspires teachers to give of their best. A top down decree which turns inspirational teachers into mere bureaucratic functionaries delivering a curriculum which has been devised by a distant and faceless member of the educational commissariat is unlikely to inspire peak performance in students. Red tape, regulations and centralised control have minimal power to enforce excellence but enormous power to hinder teachers in their vocation and to turn excellent creative educators away from the classroom and into areas in which their creative talents are appreciated.

Take the poster of “Values for Australian Schooling” recently issued by the Federal government to all schools. In order to be eligible for federal funding, every school in Australia has to agree to display this poster in a prominent place. Of course the schools will agree to do this. They would go broke if they didn’t. But the display of such a poster and the programs of values education which accompany it will not achieve the aim of inculcating values in all children. Many schools will resent Dr. Nelson telling them what they should or should not value. The poster could well become an object of ridicule and derision rather than the inspiring message it is designed to be.

Increased centralised education policy and curriculum means that you and your family have less choice, less competition between schools and school districts. It means that educational fads more easily disseminated across the entire country and the less innovation will be fostered. We may hope that the education bureaucrats in Canberra will altruistically try to work for the good of all Australians and make policy and curriculum decisions objectively based in impartial reports, but it is much more realistic to acknowledge that the first item on the agenda of any bureaucrat is his own self interest and that centralised education will mean that the welfare of political parties and pressure groups will be put before the needs of your children.

So - what if Standards are Slipping?

2007-04-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

Hardly a day goes by during which we are not told by someone that standards of one description or another are slipping. Basically, things are not as good as they used to be. Whether it’s the absence of values in public schools , a decline in civility in the general community , school-boy antics in parliament , increasing criminal activity on the streets or race riots at Cronulla, according to many commentators, Australia is inexorably doing away with many of the standards of civilised behaviour we once cherished.

However, it is informative to explore what exactly we mean by “standards” and the alleged descent associated with them. Here I will examine the question as it relates to K-12 education in Australia by looking at three interpretations of the “Standards are Slipping” mantra followed by some suggested responses. It is commonly assumed that there must be an agreed set of knowledge standards against which students performance must be measured. I will argue that the assumption is inherently flawed and that adherence to a single set of such standards depresses student performance rather than encouraging excellence.

Case 1 - The curriculum is dumbing down
In February this year, Colin Lamont, a former Liberal state MP and Queensland chairman of the Australian Council for Education Standards claimed that that standards are slipping in Queensland schools. By way of evidence, he produced a scholarship paper from 1955. This test was not a scholarship as the term is commonly used today – quite the opposite in fact. All students who wished to gain entry to secondary education had to pass this test. Lamont claimed that most of today’s 13 year olds would fail the test, and that therefore standards had slipped.

It is interesting to note the UK had a similar controversy when The Spectator published the 1898 entrance exam for 11 year olds to King Edward’s School, Birmingham. The questions covered Latin, British history, grammar and maths. They included grammatical parsing and analysis of fairly complicated sentences and difficult arithmetic calculations such as finding the square root of 5 185 440 100 (sans calculator). That fact that many (adult) readers had no idea what the questions even meant was supposed to show that educational standards had declined.

Colin Lamont’s claim that many students would struggle with the 1955 paper is objectively testable and seems plausible, but the conclusion that he draws from this is less objective. He claims standards have slipped, while education authorities claim that standards have changed. The typical response to claims such as Lamont’s is that children now learn other, more relevant skills and that they excel at modern-day activities such as computer programming which would be beyond the average student of days gone by.

Literature is an area in which the “standards are slipping because the curriculum is dumbing down” cry is heard most often. Here it is taken to mean that children don’t learn the classics as they used to. As with all controversies there are (at least) two sides to the argument. The pro-classics camp believes that certain books are inherently superior to others. They believe that this is not just a matter of taste or of opinion but an objective fact. They argue that children growing up in Australia need to read about the great classics of Western culture such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton et al in order to appreciate the society in which thy live. This view of literature is based on the belief that certain texts deal with key issues which lie at the heart of the human condition, issues which must be faced and resolved by every person if he or she is to lead a contented, happy and fulfilling life.

One alternative to this view of literature is the post-modern view which currently dominates many state educational curricula in Australia. Proponents of this view claim that no text is better or worse than any other and that no text encapsulates objective truth about the human condition. Their view is rather that all texts are equally worthy of study and that Homer Simpson is a good as Homer’s Odyssey.

Those who believe that the classics are an absolute good certainly have reason to claim that standards are slipping. For example, the prescribed texts for the common content of standard and advanced 2006 HSC English courses comprises fourteen texts only two of which could be called classics, Shakespeare’s Tempest and a selection of poetry by Coleridge. The new Year 12 leaving exam in Western Australia allows students to write answers based on a poster for the film Spider-Man 2 and to analyse one of their own compositions. They can even draw answers to questions and, if they do choose to answer the question in English, they are not required to use correct grammar, punctuation or spelling.

Those who believe that the classics are outdated, irrelevant, written by dead white males, perpetuate the hegemony of a ruling elite and are downright old fashioned have much to celebrate. The rise of media studies within the English curriculum and the victory of pop over high culture would give them good reason to rejoice.

Again the fundamental distinction between standards which have changed and standards which have slipped is highlighted. Your solutions will differ according to the way in which you frame the problem (if you see a problem at all).

Colin Lamont didn’t suggest a solution to this problem but Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford said the government would undertake reforms which would “target reading, writing and spelling skills.” This is essentially an admission that standards in these areas have slipped and that they need to be addressed. But is he right? Perhaps standards have simply changed and Welford is making the mistake of retreating to previously esteemed values which are no longer of worth. Rod Welford sitting in his office on Level 18 of the State Law Building on Ann St does not have the answer to this problem. He may think he has, and he certainly feels that he needs to have the answer, but neither he nor any other individual does. It’s not that the sort of question which can be answered by a single person, a single committee or a single government program.

The point to be drawn from this example is that no single curriculum will satisfy any of the warring parties, nor will any single government intervention solve the problem. While there is a single state curriculum, no matter how brilliant it is in eyes of some people, a large proportion of the population will not be happy with what their children learn at school.

The solution is not to improve the curriculum. As I have argued elsewhere, the solution is to allow schools and school systems to introduce alternative curricula and to give parents the means to choose between them. Parents would then be able to put competing claims to excellence to the test, and they will be more able to find a form of eduction which best suits their children.

Case 2 – teaching methods are not what they used to be
A second interpretation of the statement “Standards are slipping” is that although the material being presented to children is just as good as it was in the past, the teaching methods used are substandard and therefore children are not learning as much well as they used to. Here the debate revolves around so called progressive teaching ideologies which focus on teaching children processes rather than facts. For example, the elementary mathematics teacher or curriculum designer in the “facts first” camp would have children learn basic number facts such as the times tables, and simple formulae by heart in the belief that having such facts at one’s finger tips is conducive to progressing through the subject with a good understanding of more abstract concepts and processes at a later date. On the other hand, a person who subscribes to the “process first” school of thought would attempt to teach children how to work out their times tables, using skip counting, concrete materials or a calculator and not insist that the children commit all the tables to memory. When it comes to formulae, the process of deducing the equation may be taught without insisting that the equation itself be committed to memory.

Some commentators claim this shift from facts to process is a dumbing down of the curriculum while others reckon it is the best way to equip students with the skills they need to survive in the modern world. They argue that teaching children mere facts dulls their creativity and limits their curiosity.

Opponents of the progressive argue that, in order to learn a process, you must first have certain basic facts upon which to work. They claim you need a certain basic level of knowledge and certain fundamental facts at your finger tips with which you can reason. It is very difficult to engage in higher order thinking and abstract reasoning without a firm basis of facts which have been committed to memory at a young age and which are so well known they become second nature. In history for example, having a basic framework of dates, names and important events in memory and easily accessible gives the student and basis upon which to discuss historical matters. Without such knowledge, a cloud of unknowing covers the discussion and the significance of certain events cannot be recognised. Process certainly have their place, but they must be based on a large body of thoroughly memorised basic facts which, much like the scales of the musician, form the underlying material upon which further work can take place.

The debate over slipping standards in this context differs somewhat from the previous two examples because, in theory at least, there is no government monopoly on teaching methods. While the leaving certificates of each state, and therefore the content of the curriculum is determined by government bodies, teachers are in theory free to teach the prescribed material in any way they see fit. This freedom is curtailed somewhat by the fact that the majority of courses in Education department, once described by former Federal Education minister Brendan Nelson as “quasi-sociology departments” are dominated by ardent proponents of progressive teaching methods and that many teachers trained in the last ten years or so will not be familiar with anything else. Nevertheless, if my assertion that competition will allow parents to choose a better option, schools which employ more effective teaching methods should be streets ahead of their competitors and parents should be flocking to them.

And flock they do. In 1995 across Australia, non government schools educated 29% of all students. By 2005 that figure was 33% and is predicted to be over 50% by 2026. This trend only highlights those parents who have the means to choose a non government school. Many other parents would make the move if they could. I In 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald commissioned an AC Nielsen poll which found that 34% of government school parents would not choose a government school if they could afford to go private. Parents choose non government schools for many reasons but one important reason is that they tend to be more conservative in their approach to pedagogy. This example is illustrative because it shows that when schools are allowed to compete on a number of factors such as teaching methods, school discipline and class size, parents prefer the educational product offered by the private sector.

Case 3 – Employer, university and parental dissatisfaction is on the rise
A third interpretation of the “standards are slipping” mantra is that student, parent and university dissatisfaction with K-12 schooling is on the rise. A number of recent reports indicate that this view of falling academic standards in schools is widespread. Fiona Mueller, Melinda Grose and Elizabeth Grant conducted a study examining the writing skills of students at the Australian Defence Force Academy in 2005. They found that many students struggled to write clearly and logically and did not have a grasp of basic English grammar. The study concludes that “A majority of the students experience some difficulties with English language use as it relates to the requirements of the Military Communication Program; English language deficits are reported and demonstrated by school leavers from across Australia; High achievement at the end of secondary school is not an adequate indicator of levels of competence in English [and] many students have not previously been required to generate lengthy written pieces that demand linguistic dexterity.”

An earlier study, conducted in 2002 by the Department of Education, Science and Training received submissions from 2000 academics from 12 Australian Universities. The study found that “more than half of Australia's academics believe the academic standard of graduates has declined and almost half say the quality of incoming students has fallen.”

That’s the academics, what about the parents? To my knowledge there has been no longitudinal study of parental satisfaction with Australian schools so we cannot tell whether or not standards are slipping in this sense of the term. What we can tell is that parents who send their children to private schools are the most satisfied. In a 1998 study the Institute of Family Studies asked 1600 Australian families how satisfied they were with various aspects of their children’s education. The survey found that “private school parents tended to express the highest satisfaction with their children’s school as a whole and with most aspects of their children’s school, while government school parents appeared to be the least satisfied.”

These finding are backed up by recent research conducted in America. University of Nebraska professor Kevin Smith recently conducted an exhaustive meta-study of school choice programs and the benefits they claim to provide. He assessed each program on its rigor, its transparency, its impartiality and on whether or not its findings had been replicated by other researchers. In short, he attempted to apply best practice scientific methods to the assessment of school choice programs and to eliminate the ideological bias so often found in these studies. He found that “higher satisfaction levels are reported across different types of choice programs, as well as among private school parents. This finding is consistent regardless of methods, indicators of motivation, path to publication, and the survey instrument used to assess satisfaction. Between 36 and 56 percent of voucher parents award their schools an A, whereas only between 25 and 30 percent of comparable public school parents award an A.”

The implications are self evident. If we wish to improve parental satisfaction with schooling it is necessary to introduce as much choice as possible. Being presented with a single school curriculum to which there is no alternative is a cause of frustration for many parents. In theory, independent schools are free to offer alternatives such as the International Baccalaureate. In practice such exams are suitable only for a small proportion of academically gifted students and are consequently offered by very few schools. Equally, it is frustrating for parents to have their children stuck in an under performing school and to be unable to move them to a private school because of the cost involved. A school voucher or tax credit would alleviate this problem and increase parental satisfaction. It would also address the issue of university and employer dissatisfaction. Parentals opinion of competing school systems would reflect the satisfaction levels of employers and universities. Parents want an education for their children which will help them find gainful employment and or entry into university or other tertiary educational institutions. If these “end users” of the school systems are not happy with the level of knowledge and skills of student graduating from school, the reputation of the school will suffer and parents will go elsewhere.

How should we respond?
Having examined four scenarios in which it could be conceived that standards in Australian education are slipping, it is informative to consider what options are available to parents who wish to improve their child’s education. Parents can lobby their local state MP for changes they deem beneficial and they can work through the Parents and Friends associations or national bodies such as the Australian Parents Council to endeavour to have a positive influence on the department of education in their state. But to many parents this seems a hopeless task. The monolithic state education departments, while espousing consultation and community ownership, are oblivious to the voice of an individual parent. Consequently, only very few parents comment on proposed curriculum changes.

Imagine the difference if we had an education system run on principles of demand side financing. If funding followed the child via a school voucher or tax credit, parents would be empowered to have their voice heard when standards decline. Furthermore, if there was competition between curricula, individual schools, or school systems could devise responses to arrest the decline in standards. These responses would be judged by the market and could succeed or fail on merit.

Recent developments in aboriginal eduction show that when the situation is dire, school funding and management turns towards curriculum differentiation and demand side funding. St Andrews Cathedral School is planning to build a school for aboriginal students in Redfern. It will have a curriculum which meets the NSW state curriculum as well as emphasising Aboriginal culture and history. It will be funded by donors, both private and public, who will sponsor individual children. In small way this is an example of demand side financing. If the child leaves the school, the school loses the funding. To remain successful the school will need attract and retain students.

In the face of falling standards and the inability of government to reverse these tends, it is time to recognise the deadening effect of single set of standards across the state and to harness the power of the market to innovate, differentiate and drive excellence in K-12 education.

1) Crabb, A. & Guerrera, O., ‘PM queries values of state schools’, The Age, January 20, 2004, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/19/1074360697635.html
2) ‘PM to public: improve your manners’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 31, 2006, http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pm-to-public-improve-your-manners/2006/01/31/1138590476814.html
3) Peake, R., ‘Mind your manners please, we’re Australians!’, Khaleej Times, 12 February 2006, http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2006/February/opinion_February35.xml&section=opinion&col=
4) Giles, D., ‘Dumbed down’, The Sunday Mail, 12th February, 2006, http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18118155%255E902,00.html
5) The Spectator, 27 November 2004, http://www.spectator.co.uk/archive/features/12872/dumbing-down-the-proof.thtml
6) 2006–2007 HSC Prescribed Area Of Study, Electives And Texts, http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_hsc/pdf_doc/hsc_english_poster_0607.pdf
7) Ferrari, J., ‘Students can draw English answers’, The Australian, March 18, 2006 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18507575-2702,00.html
8) Giles, D., ‘Dumbed down’, The Sunday Mail, 12th February, 2006, http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18118155%255E902,00.html
9) Farrelly, R., ‘Parent Power’, Policy Magazine, Autumn 2005.
10) Landers, K., ‘Teaching standards to be examined’, 17 February , 2005, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1305335.htm
11) ‘Schools, Australia, 2005’, 23rd February, 2006, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/4221.0?OpenDocument
12) Buckingham, J., ‘Learn to serve the public’, The Australian, 2nd March 2006 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18315622-13881,00.html
13) http://www.andrewnorton.info and http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/17/1092508439581.html
14) ‘Australian Independent Schools’, http://www.independentschools.com/australia/index.htm
15) Mueller, F., Grose, M., and Grant, E., ‘Remedial or rhetorical English? Tertiary students’ perceptions of their competence in English and their preparedness for tertiary study’, Military Communication Program
Australian Defence Force Academy, 22 July 2005, p 31.
16) Illing, D., ‘Standards are Slipping’, The Australian, 23 October 2002
17) Weston, R., ‘Quality of school life in government, Catholic and other private secondary schools: views of students and their parents’, Family Matters, no.50, Winter, 1998, p 58.
18) Smith, K., ‘Data Don't Matter? Academic Research and School Choice’, Perspectives on Politics, Volume 3, Issue 02, Jun 2005, pp 285-299.
19) Edwards, H., ‘A college of dreams’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 21, 2006, http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-college-of-dreams/2006/05/20/1147545570035.html

Eliminating choice impoverishes society

2006-10-07T03:17:00.000-07:00

Published on www.onlineopinion.com.au July 10th 2006

The concepts of choice and freedom are inextricably linked and I will argue here that just as human freedom is an absolute good and should only be curtailed when it would limit the freedom of others, so choice is, in almost all cases, an absolute good and should be maximised in virtually every possible situation.

In order to avoid the evils of totalitarian rule, we must assume, unless presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that adult citizens are the best directors of their own lives. We must acknowledge that the individual is the best judge of the direction of his or her life, which talents he or she should exercise and how and where individuals seek their fortunes. With this responsibility individuals flourish or flounder according to their own endeavours and learn from both successes and mistakes.

By placing the responsibly for choice at the feet of the individual, society acknowledges the inherent intelligence of every adult citizen, and with this acknowledgement the inherent intelligence is encouraged to grow and find its full expression.
Advertisement

Consider a trivial and somewhat absurd example. Every weekend a small army of Australian citizens mobilises in pursuit of the perfect lawn. Citizens across the nation fire up their motor mowers and set out to mow their own lawns.

Suppose a benign, but misguided government, were to come to the conclusion that this onerous task was beyond the competency of the average Australian and established a Department of Domestic Lawn Management. Suppose further that it increased taxes and arranged for lawns across Australian to be mowed by Domestic Lawn Management engineers. Before long most Australians would have forgotten how to mow their own backyards. The fine art of mixing fuel, changing spark plugs and setting blade heights would be lost, and the community would be poorer for it.

Take away the responsibility and the ability disappears. Multiply this effect a hundred fold, once for every government service which could be performed by individuals and the degradation of the citizenry becomes evident.

In the same way, removing choice from citizens for important issues such as health, superannuation or schooling disengages the population from these issues. In his book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs shows that voters are by and large ignorant of many important political issues, even at election time. Down argues that this disengagement from the political process is rational because voters know that their individual vote is unlikely to decide an election and that the direct result of casting a well-informed vote is almost nil. Since the voter has limited time and resources to devote to following political developments, it is rational that he or she invest these in following issues in which an individual has a direct means of influence.

Thus we see that dinner table discussion in Sydney are dominated by fluctuation in local house prices rather than the latest federal initiative to further centralise education by introducing a common leaving certificate for all states.

People take an interest in issues upon which they have some direct influence and which immediately affect them. It is for this reason that competition, choice and market forces make such a powerful engine for driving innovation and excellence. Take for example these comments (pdf file 1.45MB) on superannuation by Malcolm Brough in parliament in June this year.

Today we are here to talk about choice. … This side of the House actually believes [the Australian people] have the capability to choose for themselves, and they have done so ... It was interesting to read [in] the Financial Review today … the headline: “Everyone’s a winner in transition to choice era”. That is the Financial Review giving it the thumbs up. Why are they a winner? They are a winner because people have lower fees, better service, greater choice and a greater return on their savings ... As the Australian people head into Christmas time, they will know that this government will continue to provide choice.

I have argued elsewhere that similar reasoning holds for choice in education.

Individual freedom and individual choice is a powerful force for excellence, especially when there is a mechanism to pool the collective intelligence of a large number of people.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki argues that complex problems should not be tackled by small homogenous committees, but by large crowds of people who have the means to pool their collective wisdom.

In the context of education say, this would mean that market forces which harness the choice of the entire parent body of the state would do a better job of developing a refining school curricula than a government appointed committee. Surowiecki argues that markets have a remarkable ability of making hard decisions quickly and accurately.

He retells how, on the day of the Challenger space disaster, the market wiped 12 per cent off the value of the stocks of Morton Thiokul, the company which built the solid fuel booster, thereby passing its judgment on which company was most responsible for the disaster. Six months later the presidential commission of inquiry into the disaster concurred with the market’s verdict.

Individual choice is also the most efficient way to transform cash into goods and services. Consider the following three methods of spending:

method one: X spends Y’s cash on goods and services which will be consumed by Z;
method two: X spends Y’s cash on good and services which will be consumed by Y; and
method three: X spends X’s cash on goods and services which will be consumed by X.

Methods one and two are obviously less efficient that method three. When X spends Y’s cash X is not motivated to be as frugal as when X spends own money. When X buys goods and services on behalf of Y, X may not make selection which exactly fits the needs of Y. In method three, X knows exactly what X needs and is motivated is find the most cost effective solution. Furthermore, all of X’s cash is used to procure the goods and service and none is wasted on paying Y’s salary.

Government spending is a mixture of methods one and two while individual choice and the free market closely resemble method three.

Choice is a powerful engine for excellence and innovation and an efficient means of expressing consumers’ needs. But with choice comes responsibility, the responsibility to be informed, to be wary and to choose wisely.

There is also a responsibility to have control over one’s desires and to resist the resentment or envy which can arise when confronted with choices beyond one’s means. Having the self-discipline to live within one’s means and to increase one’s income through legitimate avenues and appropriate risk taking rather than resorting to crime or foolhardy gambling is a responsibility citizens in a free market must discipline themselves to exercise.

Banking on Education

2006-08-19T03:19:00.000-07:00

Published in Sydney's Child, August 2006

I was driving in New Zealand last summer in a car I had borrowed from a friend. Not surprisingly for the Shaky Isles, it was raining. It rained a lot that “summer”. If fact, it rained just about every day we were there. One of the windscreen wiper blades on the car was somewhat worn and it didn’t clear all the water from the glass as it passed back and forth before my eyes which continually searched the sky for a glimpse of the azure blue I had been told lay hidden beyond the canopy of thick grey cloud which blanketed the sky, so I decide to replace it. The first service station we came to was in the middle of nowhere. Right bang smack in the middle. Waiouru is the official name of the place but it’s known affectionately to the locals as “Waiberia”.

I needed a leg stretch so without really thinking there was any hope they would have the necessary part I stopped and told the proprietor about our predicament. Miraculously, he had the very windscreen wiper blade we needed, and for a few dollars, it was ours. As I drove out of the service station and onto the desert road which ran straight as the falling rain which was now being wiped highly efficiently from the windscreen by our newly acquired blade, I started to think of the miracle we had just witnessed. There we were, in the middle of a volcanic plateau in a small country in the South Pacific driving a relatively obscure brand of Japanese car and requiring a wiper blade, and without any centralised planning or Bureau of Production and Supply, it was, available to us at a reasonable price and in excellent condition.

Driving through the pine plantations of the central North Island of New Zealand gives one plenty of time to think and I began to ponder what effect this “unseen hand of the market” as Adam Smith described it, which had so efficiently provided us with the much needed wiper bade, would have on one of the last surviving Government monopolies, K-12 education.

Recently in a number of Australian states, companies have dipped their toes into the K-12 education marketplace. Such toe dipping by corporations has been met with an outcry by the teachers’ unions and by state Labor governments.

In Queensland, Springfield Land Corporation and ABC Learning Centres Ltd, Australia’s largest private sector childcare provider, floated the idea of working in partnership with the not-for-profit company, Independent Colleges Australia Ltd to open a new school in Springfield in the south-west of Brisbane. These plans were thwarted when the State Government rushed through laws which denied state funding to for-profit schools.

In New South Wales, Independent Colleges Australia announced plans to apply to build a $25 million child-care centre, primary and secondary school at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley and have also released plans to build another school campus at Casey outside Melbourne.

Mirroring the Queensland response to these moves, the NSW Education Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, announced that she would introduce laws early this year to prevent profit-making companies from operating schools.

However, we must ask ourselves, is Australia putting itself at a disadvantage with respect to its international competitors by banning for-profit education? Countries all around the world allow such education and the results are encouraging. For example in South Africa, the private education corporation Education Investment Corporation Limited (Educor) educates over 300,000 students through primary, secondary and tertiary education, to post-graduate and corporate training. It has an annual turnover of US$26 million and, is about to be listed on the NASDAQ.

When the possibility of for-profit education is raised we hear our politicians proudly announce the steps they will take to oppose it but we don’t hear the reasons it is such a bad thing. Just as the proprietor of the small garage in New Zealand was able to provide a product needed by his customer, it is feasible that for-profit educators could provided the education needed by Australian parents more efficiently and more responsively that a government monopoly. This is not some extreme free market ideological position. A recent survey conducted by the Maxim Institute in New Zealand found that less than one third of parents believe the Ministry of Education should decide what their children learn in school. This indicates a deep dissatisfaction with centralised government schooling and a desire to see more flexibility in education provision and the ability for schools to tailor their wares to the needs of the local community. For-profit schools would be motivated to do exactly this as the catchment area of a school is made up of the parents within easy driving distance.

I believe the key word here is “diversity”. Once the power of the market is unleased on education the range of educational opportunities would blossom in a manner quite inconceivable in a world of centralised government control. To really get a handle on the possibilities we need to think right outside the square, and the circle for that matter, outside every single two dimensional closed curve! Among this diversity of educational possibilities, some will work wonderfully well and others will be dismal. But the point is that those which do work well will expand and flourish and become available to many students, while those educational approaches which are not effective will die a quick and natural death. No longer will the parent body be burdened by a monolithic state run educational system which is resistant to change and liable to become a vehicle for the latest education fad.

Let’s explore some of the possibilities which may emerge if educational entrepreneurs (or “edupreneurs” as they are sometimes known) were allowed to exercise their creative energies in the sphere of education.

Parents who want a tightly controlled, very strictly run school with school uniforms, tight discipline, rote learning, traditional subjects such as Greek and Latin, phonics in reading and direct instruction in many subjects will be able to find such a school.

Those who want no uniform for the students and no dress code for the teachers, a curriculum designed by the students, whole language in reading and child centred learning experiences rather than teacher centred lessons will also be able to find what they are looking for.

Those who want a school which only teaches academic subjects and provide no education in sport, art or music will also be able to find such a school, while those who want a dramatic, artistic, musical or sporting college will be able to send their children there. We may find trade based schools which combine training in the trades with a relevant academic curriculum operating alongside liberal arts colleges which teach the classical literature of the Western cannon. There will be schools which lead the way in the use of technology and those which minimise its use. In short, parents will be able to choose an education which suits their aspirations and the needs of the children, and school will be motivated to hone their efficiently and teaching excellence as they compete for business.

For our generation which knows nothing but the state controlled provision of education it is difficult to trust market forces to provide an adequate education for all. Is it therefore informative to look back in history to a time when the state was not involved in education to see how communities educated their children. Take England as one example. Compulsory schooling was introduced there in 1870 with the passing of the Forster Act. Yet there is much evidence to indicate that prior to that date the vast majority of children were already receiving significant education. Literacy rates can be estimated by an examination of the number of people who were able to sign their marriage certificates.
It should come as no surprise that there is little innovation in a monolithic bureaucracy such as a state run education system. Innovators have certain basic personality traits such as a strong need for achievement and a need to have control over the organisations they direct. They are predisposed to succeed or fail on their wits. They have an inherent drive to shake things up and to try to modify and improve the status quo. They have a sense of urgency about reform and need to see results in the short term and to gauge the benefits of their reforms based on customer satisfaction and the response of the market. In short, entrepreneurs are action-oriented and have an internal imperative to create new ways of doing business. None of these traits are compatible with an educational system in which decisions are made at head office and then handed down to schools to be implemented but not changed.

If Australia wants to compete on a global scale and to allow its students to have every chance of succeeding in a global information environment, its best course of action is to allow the entrepreneurial spirit of Australia’s best minds to come to bear on our education system. Without such reforms, we will forever tinker at the edges of a substandard centralised educational bureaucracy in which the welfare for those who run the system come before the needs of students and parents.

The Fine art of Googlometry

2006-05-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

Published on www.crikey.com.au May 19th, 2006

In the pages of Crikey, Google seems to be morphing from a search engine which finds information into a pseudo-scientific survey tool. It's being used as a measure of the importance, popularity and cultural significance of various phenomena. Such misuse is no doubt tempting as Google is free, instantaneous and its sheer ubiquity gives it a certain superficial authority. But it's misleading to use Google in this way, and it's certainly no substitute for statistical analysis.

In the recent past Crikey has published a number of articles in which the author uses the number of hits in Google to somehow substantiate his case. On April 27, Crikey published this sentence. “If you type the words ‘military incompetence' into Google, you'll find 46,500 entries.” If you type in the phrase today you get 36,700 hits. That doesn't mean that militaries world wide have become more competent. Also if you Google "military victory" you get over 600,000 hits. Does that mean that militaries are more victorious than they are incompetent? The message is, 46,500 hits on Google for “military incompetence” tells us nothing. On 11 May Crikey claimed “There are 29,800 Google entries when you type in the words ‘mateship' and ‘John Howard'”. This fact was used to support the claim that the Australian Prime Minister John Howard uses the word “mateship” a lot. What this really tells us is that there are 29,800 webpages in which feature both the word “mateship” and the phrase “John Howard”. It tells us nothing about how often PM John Howard uses the word, whether or not he uses it more or less than he used to or whether or not he uses it more or less than other politicians. Basically, it tells us nothing. It's a meaningless phrase.

We've also seen instances of Googlometry in articles on the media coverage of the Beaconsfield Mine disaster (11 May 2006) and the parochial nature of Melbourne (11 July 2005). Crikey should drop this pseudo-research and concentrate on what it does best, informed opinion.

Are Standards Slipping?

2006-02-20T03:00:00.000-08:00

Published on the Online Opinion, February 20th, 2006

Professor Shayer’s recent findings which claim to show that 11- and 12-year-old children in the UK are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development raises the vexed issue of standards in education.

When someone claims that “standards are slipping” they can mean a great many different things and it is often not easy to scrape away the surface rhetoric and gain an understanding of exactly what they are getting at. “Standards are slipping” may mean any or all of the following:

That the cognitive ability (information processing ability including perception, conceptualization and problem solving) is dropping amongst children of a given age.
The curriculum is dumbing down. That is to say, children of a given age in a given subject are being presented with facts, process and problems of a lower standard than they were at some (usually unspecified) date in the past.
It may also mean that they are expected to master less material in a given period of time.
A certain country is falling behind other countries in educational performance as measured by certain international tests such as the PISA or TIMMs tests.
There is an increase of employer, university, parental or student dissatisfaction in the community. Employers complain that they cannot find enough employees with the requisite character traits such as honesty, diligent and perseverance to man their businesses. Universities claim that they must teach material previously mastered at school. Parents complain that schools are not meeting their child’s needs and students claim that some aspects of the curriculum are irrelevant, repetitious, outdated or biased. These are clearly more subjective but nevertheless are frequently cited as an indication that the school system is failing.
The final possibility for the meaning of “standards are slipping” is that the education system as a whole is getting worse. It’s tricky to unpack exactly what such a general statement would mean in practice but in an attempt to do so we could try to image an scale of 1 to 10 with the worst possible school systems at 1 and the best possible at 10. Up at 10 we would find a number of different answers. It could be a system in which every child stays at school until the end of year 12 and then graduates with 100% in all the subjects of her choice, heads off to uni and ends up in a highly paid, influential job. This scenario is clearly impossible to achieve. An alternative answer may be that, as Brendan Nelson put it, “every young Australian … should be able to find and achieve his/her own potential. That is to say that every student learns as much as they possibly can. Again, impossible to achieve and impossible to measure. A third answer may be that everyone satisfied with the school system. Again, it is impossible that any one education system will satisfy everyone.

So we see from this simple analysis that it’s virtually impossible to define what we mean by an excellent education system and strangely enough it’s equally hard to agree on what we mean by an utterly dismal education system.

We may say that a system in which no one learns anything would be as bad as it gets. But such a system would never come about as children are learning all the time, by copying those around them. They learn from the example of their peers and the adults they meet and, although it’s conceivable that they may learn very little academic material, they will formulate a view on what it means to be human and what life is all about just by mixing with others.

An alternative formulation of the worse possible educational system would be one on which there is a complete absence of human flourishing. Where children become violent, take drugs, engage in promiscuous sex and commit suicide. Yes, that’s a pretty gloomy scenario and it would be universally agreed that we should do everything we can to avoid it. The hard part is specifying what to do to avoid the unfavourable outcome.

The lesson to be drawn from such an analysis is that no single educational system will ever satisfy the needs of all parents and that any preplanned, centralised educational system is sure to reflect the values of those who draft it and ignore the values of many people it claims to serve. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to easily and simply measure the excellence or otherwise of an educational system. People are complex beings and education cuts right to the heart of what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life. Such profound considerations cannot be measured by psychometric tests or plotted on graphs.

A far better approach is to allow market forces to shape the education system, not to impose any structure top down. A market based educational system would identify schools whose standards are slipping, not by measurement and reporting but by falling enrolments and eventual extinction.

Youth culture - formation, communication and justification

2005-09-12T02:49:00.000-07:00

Published on the Online Opinion, December 9th, 2005

If the distinguishing virtue of classical culture was a celebration of a sacred divine principle, while modern culture mourned the loss of the divine and post-modern culture celebrates its absence, then youth culture shows itself to be pre-eminent in trumpeting the supremacy of the individual – divorced not just from the divine, but from family, lineage, community and nation.

This inclination towards extreme individuality has always been latent within the human heart, but social conditions have not been particularly conducive for its expression – until now. Small families, long working hours for both parents and a soaring divorce rate cause children to be tied more loosely to their immediate familles than ever before. Today, a child reared within an integrated nuclear family is exceptional not because he lives apart from his grandparents but because he knows both of his parents.

Yet even when children are brought up in a stable domestic situation, their bonds to family are not formed as closely as they once were. Familles now sit side by side watching TV rather than face to face at the dinner table discussing the events of the day. Children and adults alike retreat to the solitary world of the PC, the ipod or the game boy rather than engaging in social intercourse with friends and family. It is true that families have always engaged in solitary pastimes such as reading and painting, but the modern examples cited above are different in one very significant way. While reading traditionally involved delighting in the artistic creations of the older generation, modern electronic media allow children and youth to live in a socially isolated, individualised world which is entirely a creation of youth culture itself. Modern music, video games, chat rooms and text messaging are not connecting the recipient with the accrued wisdom and understanding of the nation’s cultural heritage. They are means of transmitting youth culture from one participant to another.

Technology allows youth to live continuously in a cultural environment entirely of their own choosing and comprising nothing but adolescent outpourings. The cost of producing electronic music is such that any teenager with access to a PC can compose, produce and distribute her own music, and personal music devices allow youth to live the entire day not connecting with others but hemmed in by a wall of artificial sound.

Modern education exacerbates the alienation of youth from their elders. There was a time when education was the process of learning, absorbing, understanding and mastering the best that one’s culture had to offer. In our times of post-modern educational theories, all texts are equal, and children are now fed a diet of “relevant texts” which will “engage” them. That is to say, they study texts written in their own language. They no longer learn the rules of grammar and learn to speak like well educated adults. They have their street slang and local idioms fed back to them and affirmed as appropriate means of communication. Children who aspire to master mature concepts are derided as nerds, while those who develop street cred are cool.

The youth of today are further divorced from the older generations by the absence of significant rites of passage in their lives. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep identified the rite of passage as an essential element of life through which the individual gains access to membership of a community. He noted that the rite of passage usually involved an initial separation from one’s previous clique, a temporary existence on the intervening margin and a finally incorporation into the new community.

Traditional rites of passage such as christening or baptism, bar mitzvah, confirmation, graduation, engagement and marriage have lost their central importance in modern life which has become less about preserving and magnifying the cultural heritage of our predecessors and now centres on individual expression. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in the trend towards writing one’s own marriage vows, as if the ceremony (if one bothers to get married at all that is) is seen as an expression of the couple’s personality rather than an opportunity for them to join a sacred institution. The absence of significant rites of passage, with the necessary trials, temporary alienation and eventual acceptance into a new and more mature stage of life means that many youth never actually grow up. They remain forever in the adolescent stage of angst, rebellion, protest and destruction and never enter of adult stage of taking on the responsibly to create a better life for future generations.

It is a strange irony when one of these perpetual adolescents recognises the meaningless of her own existence and wishes something better for her own children. Madonna, for example, won’t even let her children watch TV. Having based her career on destroying the morality of sex and religion, and having reaped the financial rewards for providing this essential service to the youth of the world, she now realises the error of her ways refuses to inflict it on her own offspring.

What she is saying is that it's OK for other’s children to consume her offerings of overt sexuality and anti-religious sentiment, but it's not good enough for her own children. But she is not apologising for her previous artistic output, nor is she withdrawing any of her music from the market.

Having been denied legitimate rites of passage, yet still yearning for membership of a congregation, youth invent their own communities and marks of membership. But rites of passage such as one’s first experiment with drugs, loosing one’s virginity or the hedonistic mayhem of schoolies which often involves both are no salve for the yearning all young people have to enter into a community which embodies significant meaning. This is because the taking of drugs or the loosing of one’s virginity requires no concerted effort or hard won talent. Thus the entry into this new congregation bestows no benefit to the new initiate. Having attained such an easily won status, she is left feeling bereft, cheated, regretful even guilty, and she searches for a justification for her mistaken transition. Justification can only be found in numbers, and her most common course of action is to encourage others to follow and to belittle those who will not. Thus is youth culture perpetrated in a vacuum of meaning and without reference to a cultural tradition which is the sole means towards a creative and fulfilling adult life.

Altruistic Teachers also need to pay the Mortgage

2005-08-11T02:17:00.000-07:00

Published in The Age, 8th September, 2005.

The feel good 2002 French movie "Etre et Avoir" ("To Have and to Hold") portrayed an affectionate, dedicated teacher lovingly caring for a small group of children in a tiny rural school. The movie had no plot, minimal characterisation and moved at a pace suitable to cure an ADHD child of insomnia. It was nevertheless popular because it reinforced the ideal concept of how we would love our teachers to be: patient, thoughtful and above all child-centred.

This deeply held idea of the altruistic teacher helps us understand why there is such an anathema to the words “education” and “profit” being used in the same sentence. The idea of a teacher motivated by financial gains, with one eye on the class and the other on his bank-balance is not a palatable one. We much prefer our teachers to be altruistic, teaching out of the goodness of their heart and because of their love for children and the welfare of society.

But is this realistic? Of course we want our teachers to have the welfare of their students at heart, and to love learning and teaching, but we must also acknowledge that teachers have to pay the mortgage, bring up families and get ahead materially in life like the rest of us. If we cling to the myth of the purely altruistic teacher, we will never address the most pressing problem facing education today – that of teacher quality. We must face the fact that education is in direct competition with other white-collar industries for skilled labour. At the moment, K-12 education is coming distant last in the race with the IT industry and the finance sector to attracted talent.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia will soon experience a growing shortage of experienced, quality qualified teachers. As the baby boomers retire between 2011 and 2030 there will be a shortage of skilled labour throughout Australia but the education sector be worse off than most. In 2003-04 the education industry employed the highest proportion of mature age workers, with 47% of people employed in this industry aged 45-64 years.”

The teaching profession faces other challenges. It is often viewed as an unglamorous profession and held in poor regard by many because it is poorly paid and candidates don’t need to be particularly gifted to get into the industry. The UAI to get into teaching courses in university is commonly lower than all other degrees except perhaps nursing.

There is one way to meets this challenge but it will require a radical rethink of how K-12 education is managed. Simply put, we need schools which are run on a for-profit basis and which can thereby reward teachers financially for effective innovation and dedication to the task of teaching. Financial incentives need to inserted into the education marketplace to attract, retain, extend and reward talented teachers.

At the moment, a teacher’s salary is set by the award and based entirely on the number of years they have been working in the system. If a teacher wants or needs to earn more they have two options. She can work at a second job such as writing text books or private tutoring outside school hours or she can move to another industry. If she chooses the first option her energies are diverted away from the classroom. In the second scenario, she is lost to the industry all together. There is no mechanism through which she can do her job better and be rewarded financially for it. Imagine a system in which the teacher who needed to earn more went away and prepared his lesson better, marked his essay more diligently, studied each child in his class, analysed their needs and examined every possible avenue he could image to help that child learn – and was then financially rewarded for their improved performance. For profit schools would be highly motived to merit pay for teacher to stay ahead of the competition.

Australia is lagging behind in this area. Edupreneurial companies world wide provide high quality tertiary education, and are starting to explore the K-12 market. Education corporations currently represent 10 percent of the US$740 billion education market in the US. In Sweden 30 percent of independent schools are run by corporations. In Brazil the largest private sector education provider, Objetivo/UNIP, has 450 franchises and teaches around 500,000 students and an annual turnover of approximately US$400 million. In Southern Africa, Education Investment Corporation Limited caters for over 300,000 students and is about to be listed on the NASDAQ.

Since high quality teachers are essential to a well run school, for- profit schools will be highly motivated to devise merit-pay schemes to attract, retain and reward excellent teachers. If Australia is no meet the challenge of staffing our schools with outstanding teachers we need to realise that the profit motive and the ideal of the altruistic teacher are not incompatible.

Parent Power

2005-07-19T02:04:00.000-07:00

Published in Policy Magazine, autumn 2005. Republished by Education Forum and Online Opinion. A footnoted version of this article is vailable on request.

In December 2004, Andrew Refshauge was backed into a corner. In the light of the poor academic performance of indigenous students, he could no longer insist that the “one size fits all” approach to school curricula is the best model. Instead he proposed to relabel schools with high concentrations of aboriginal students as “community schools” and allow them to develop personalised study plans for individual students. He agreed that “Aboriginal parents [should now] have a say in selecting teachers and managing public schools”. He also broached the crucial issue of funding by acceding that “teachers may be paid based on their performance, rather than the union award”.

This points to the broader question of who should choose what the best is for Australia’s children. Who is best qualified to choose the curriculum and the teaching methods employed in Australian schools? As each child is different, and therefore has different educational needs, and as parents are the ones who know their own children most intimately, it is parents rather than educationalists who should choose the best education for the children of Australia. But parents will only be able to do so if the funding for schools is placed in their hands, and there is sufficient diversity in the educational marketplace to allow them to make a meaningful choice. These two factors, the ability for parents to choose where they spend every cent of their education dollar, and a school system which gives schools the freedom to tailor their wares to the needs of parents and students are the most effective means to improving school education in Australia.

The present system of centralised curriculum development by the states reflects the view that education is a highly specialised subject, which should be the exclusive domain of the experts. There is no effective method for the general population to influence the content of school curricula. In an environment where the curricula are “fractured and distorted by competing ideologies”, the only way proponents of a particular educational philosophy can secure a footing is to have the curricula developed exclusively by experts who share their views.

Each state has an organisation responsible for curriculum development. Victoria has its Curriculum and Assessment Authority, the Northern Territory has a Board of Studies, Queensland has a Studies Authority, Tasmanian is served by the School Education Division of the Department of Education, Western Australia has a Curriculum Council, and the Department of Education and Children's Services develops curricula in South Australia.

In New South Wales, the Board of Studies is responsible for developing the state curriculum to be taught in NSW. The Board appoints a Board Curriculum Committee (BCC) which carries out the development on a particular subject. A BCC comprises members of the Board of Studies, representatives from the tertiary sector, representatives from government educational bodies such as the Department of Education and Training, representatives from education unions, the Catholic and Independent sector and parent bodies such as the NSW Parents Council.

The BCC reviews the current syllabus, consults with teachers and other professionals, researches current trends in curriculum development and then recommends changes to Board. Proposed changes are then distributed to schools with a consultation and development timeline. Following this, the BCC publishes a draft writing brief on which teachers and other education professionals have a chance to comment. Surveys are sent out to schools and universities. Teachers, principals, and academics are then invited to comment on the draft writing brief.

Apart from one NSW Parents Council nominee there is very little participation in the curriculum development process by anyone other than education professionals. The consultation process is supposedly open to the general community but in reality, very few members of the public know which curricula are under review and have an interest in participating in the review process. For example the 1999 BOS Consultation Report on the draft stage 6 English syllabus shows that academics, teachers and other educationalists were asked to comment but there were no comments from the general public.

In June 2001 the NSW government launched the Vinson inquiry, a half million dollar government-funded examination of the public education system. If ever there was a time for parents to have their say, this was it. Politicians claimed that the inquiry was based on far reaching public consultation, but the fact is that virtually no private individuals had an input to the inquiry. Of the 100 submissions to the Vinson inquiry, 86 were made by educational institutions of one sort or another, one by a citizens and parents body and thirteen by private individuals. That means that of the nearly two and a half million households in NSW in 2001, only thirteen individuals who were not involved professionally with education cared enough about the public education system to make a submission.

It is clear that there is very little parental input to the NSW curricula. The curricula are in effect the product of a panel of expert educationalists.

It is a very dangerous move to take the decision out of the hands of the ordinary people and give it to educationalists. It is the duty of a parent, not the state, to oversee the education of children. Once the opportunity to fulfil one’s duty is removed, the ability and power to do that duty withers and dies through lack of use. The power of citizens to think, consider, assess and decide on the education that their children are to receive is being usurped by the government and consequently these abilities are diminishing. Under this regime, our habit of dependency deepens and our complacency strengthens, until not only do we not care that the power to decide has passed from our hands, we no longer remember that the ability to choose even exists.

Centralised curricula are also demoralising for some teachers, forcing them to teach material they consider to be sub-standard. In the context of the teaching of history, Gregory Haines of Riverview College, Sydney puts it this way:

The value to the student of good history method and teaching argues strongly for the abolition of all government scripted syllabuses. This attainment, greatly to be desired, would also benefit historians and educators by encouraging true professionalism. … Just imagine the havoc if good and even average teachers were actually teaching something they loved, and were teaching it with passion, rather than teaching to regulations.

If parents were able to choose where they spent their education dollars (via tax breaks or school vouchers) and the market was able to respond to diverse parental requirements by offering a range of different schools with different curricula and different leaving exams, parent interest in and input to curriculum development would skyrocket. School vouchers and a diversified education market would allow parents to “vote” continuously, via the market, for whatever system of education they think best. If the government is really serious about parent consultation, why not let parents vote with their cash?

But even high levels of parental involvement in curriculum development would not bring about significant improvement while curricula are monopolised by the state governments. No single curriculum can possibly reflect the educational vision of the parents in NSW. Take the current English syllabus for example with its emphasis on deconstruction and post modernism. In an open educational market, would such a curriculum dominate the marketplace as it now does now? Does it really reflect the philosophical understanding of the parent body of NSW? I think not. There should be a place for such a curriculum, but its extent and influence should be proportional to its acceptance in society, not to the influence of a small group of ideologues on the Board of Studies curriculum committee.

As we have seen, despite the appearance of consultation, NSW curricula are determined by a small homogenous panel of experts. When they meet they are trying to solve a very complex problem which has many different possible solutions. The exact nature of the problem which the curriculum ought to solve is itself open to debate and will reflect one’s view of human nature and the meaning of human existence. Materialists will develop quite different curricula to those who believe that a human being is more than a physical body. Those who believe in the Christian salvation will educate their children quite differently to the utilitarians. Those who believe that the most important aim of human life is to support one’s society and nation will emphasise different aspects of history and character building to those emphasised by rugged individualists.

Deciding the aim of a school curriculum and the criteria by which we will judge its effectiveness is a complex and multifaceted task. It is especially complicated because there is no set number of predetermined options from which we must select the best answer, but there is, in a sense, an infinite number of different answers. Nevertheless, it is an example of what James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds calls a “cognition problem”, one to which some solutions are definitely better than others. Surowiecki argues such complex problems are not easily solved by single individuals or even by small homogenous committees, but by large crowds of people who have the means to pool their collective wisdom. He argues that, in general, the collective wisdom of a large crowd of people is superior to the wisdom of any individual in that crowd, so long as the crowd meets certain conditions necessary to make it wise, namely “diversity, independence and a particular kind of decentralization”. He cites the example of the Challenger disaster. Four companies helped built the space craft. When it exploded on lift-off, people wanted to know which of these four companies was responsible. The collective wisdom of investors answered this question on the day of the disaster by wiping twelve percent off the value of the stocks of Morton Thiokul, the company which built the solid fuel booster, but only an average of three percent of the other three companies. Six months later the presidential commission of enquiry into the disaster concurred with the market’s decision. This is just one of many examples Surowiecki gives of the collective wisdom of crowds.

A single syllabus formulated by a committee must inevitably be the result of compromise. But Surowiecki points out that:

An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms – like market process, or intelligent voting systems – to aggregate and produce collective judgements that represent not what any one person in the group thinks, but in some sense, what they all think.

Committees are susceptible to many shortcomings which negatively influence their decision making ability. They are liable to work from unquestioned assumptions. If there is a lack of diversity and independence in the committee, assumptions can go unexamined for long periods and the committee reinforces its own view of the situation. Group think takes over and possible alternatives recede, almost unnoticed, into the background. Surowiecki cites Kennedy’s decision to invade Cuba as an example of a committee reinforcing its own mistaken view of reality.

A further argument against curricula being developed by homogenous groups of educational experts is the ease with which fads can be introduced to the curriculum. Over the last 30 years, a plethora of innovations such as the whole language approach to reading, fuzzy maths, functional grammar, outcomes based education and the ‘progressive’ education movement which promotes child centred learning experiences and emphasises process rather than content have been foisted on the unsuspecting children who populate the NSW education system and the long-suffering citizens of Australia who have to fund these experiments through their taxes. Because the NSW education system is governed by a centralised board, these fads are not small, localised experiments which are tested to see if they actually work in practice. They are implemented in every school across the state. Considerable resources in the form of both money and time are invested in training teachers to adopt these new ideologies, resources which are wasted as soon as one fad is replaced by the next. A whole generation of school children becomes the guinea pigs upon which the latest fad is tested. I am all for innovation in education, but it should be as part of a flexible open market so that only those parents who wish to invest in new teaching techniques need do so, and the damage done by ineffective teaching methods is limited.

I suggest that the collective wisdom of the parent body of NSW would do a much better job of answering the question “What ought high school students learn today in order to be well prepared for life beyond school?” than any committee. A parent body drawn from the whole population has each of the three characteristics Surowiecki identifies as necessary for a crowd to be wise; it would be diverse, it would be independent and it would be decentralised.

By independent I mean that parents are relatively free from coercion and influence of others when making deciding on what education their children will receive. Parents do discuss schools with each other and are influenced by friends, family and advertising, but ultimately the decision is their own and, since it is such an important decision, they are likely to rely on their own judgement rather than the judgement of others.

The benefit of having a large diverse parent body working actively to solve the problem of what makes a good education is that some parents will take a punt on unusual and radical ideas. Most of these will not work, and the market will quickly recognise this and these experiments will die a natural death, but a few of them will succeed and flourish. This is exactly how innovation happens in other markets, but it is virtually impossible for it to happen in education when curricula are developed by a small committee of educationalists who must attempt to be answerable to everyone.

Having established the many benefits which would accrue to students if the parent body were granted the means to directly influence the content of school curricula, let us now consider what would be necessary to place such power in the hands of parents and how such a system might operate. There are two indispensable prerequisites if parents are to have direct influence on the quality of our schools. The first is that parents have control over where they spend every cent of their education dollars. The second is that the educational marketplace is such that providers of education have the freedom to offer a variety of educational products.

How would this work in practice? The scenario I propose gives parents the ability to choose where they spend their money on education, and facilitates an education marketplace which allows providers to offer a range of educational solutions to cater for the diversity of parental expectations. In this scenario, schooling remains compulsory. Parents must send their children to a school which has been accredited by government inspectors. But the criterion for accreditation is not that the school fulfils the NSW government curriculum. Schools are accredited if they meet the following two standards: firstly that the school states openly and transparently what it is teaching. The school is obliged to make its curriculum available to parents and to explain in plain language what it intends to teach to its students. The second criterion for accreditation is that the school demonstrates that it is in fact teaching its curriculum to its students. Thus to be accredited a school must show how it assesses its students and how its students progress as they are taught.

Some opponents of transparent reporting of student achievement claim that less well funded schools, or schools which teach children from underprivileged backgrounds would be shown in an poor light if the result of student assessment were to be made public. Obviously the results of a school which caters for students with learning difficulties or special needs will be far below a school which specialises in gifted education and so comparing absolute levels of student achievement between schools is not always meaningful. But there are forms of assessment which measure student progress rather than student achievement and particularly if this is adjusted for student IQ, this can be very meaningful for parents wishing to compare schools.

The second important aspect of this scenario is how schools are funded. The easiest way to put purchasing power in the hands of parents is through a system of school vouchers or tax credits. These measures have the advantage of lending assistance to low income families without removing the spending power from parents. Here is not the place to discuss the technicalities of how such a system of school funding would operate, but Jennifer Buckingham has written an impressive monograph explaining how such a system could be implemented in Australia. In this scenario, government and non government schools would compete with each other to attract parents. But they would be competing on a level playing field. All schools would be accredited in the same way, and if government schools wanted to group together and support a common curriculum development organisation such as the Board of Studies they would be free to do so, but they would have to find the funding for it from the income they could attract from parents. Schools would be free to go it alone and seek to sell their brand of education on the open market or they could group together to adopt the services of an independent examining body. Such examining bodies would develop a leaving exam and associated curricula, and then make these available to schools and provide training and guidance in the implementation of their curricula. A system similar to this has been discussed recently in the UK. This would be applicable across the country which would also go some way to solving the problem highlighted by Brendan Nelson of parents moving interstate and encountering incompatible state education systems. Nelson’s solution is to introduce a national curriculum which would exacerbate the problems associated with centralised state curricula. The system of franchising curricula would maintain the economies of scale and avoid unnecessary reduplication, while providing parental choice and curriculum competition.

Another issue is how university and other tertiary education providers would cope with greater diversity in primary and secondary school curricula. Universities already have mechanisms to evaluate students who have studied the International Baccalaureate or sat leaving exams in countries other than Australia and they have devised comparability scales to accept students from any of the states and territories. This indicates that universities are willing to accept students with various forms of secondary education and there is no reason why this would not work with a more diversified Australian school system.

Under this scenario of curriculum competition and school vouchers or tax credits, the collective wisdom of the parent body would be brought to bear on the question of what constitutes the best education for Australian children. The net effect would be that educational outcomes would improve, parental interest in and engagement with education would increase and innovation and development in educational would be stimulated.

Learning lessons on education from ancient Greece

2005-06-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

Published by Online Opinion, June 3, 2005. A footnoted version of this article is vailable on request.

Voters could be excused for being confused about the missed message coming from Canberra concerning K-12 education policy. While the Howard government generously funds private school, (a semi school voucher by any other name), his education minister has recently commissioned ACER to analyse and report on the leaving certificates in each state and territory and overseas examples of centralised Senior Secondary Certificates with the aim of establishing a “nationally … agreed system for assessing the academic standards of students completing year 12”.

This could well be a foot in the door for Nelson to move towards a national curriculum. In 2003 Nelson was actively promoting a the concepoy. He said that, “Australia suffers because of curriculum inconsistencies between the states, by virtue of the states independent education systems” He has also raised the issue with the Defence Force. A 2003 press release from Dana Vale reads, “Children of Australian Defence Force (ADF) members will benefit from the Federal Government’s proposal to introduce a national school education system. The Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs recently supported an initiative proposed by Federal Education Minister Dr Brendan Nelson to undertake a national project to develop common curriculum outcomes in all schools across Australia in English, Maths, Science and Civics and Citizenship.”

Labour are even more keen on the idea. Kim Beazley recently clarified the ALP’s position on centralised Education. “Before you get anything national - national testing, national teaching standards, national whatever - you have to start with a national curriculum.”

Nelson seems to have realised that a national curriculum is not yet feasible and has stepped back from that position to a less controversial proposal for a national leaving certificate but it is noteworthy that his justification for this is not to improve the quality of the English, maths or science learned by students. In fact he mentions nothing of educational significance when announcing the next step in his centralising drive. The sole reason he gives for the need to centralise the curriculum is that it will make it easier for defence personnel and other families to move interstate – hardly reason enough to make a change of such significance. He doesn’t even make mention, as Kevin Donnelly does, of the economies of scale which would result.

Surely the motivation for making such a radical change to the education system should be to improve student achievement. When will Nelson start to provide evidence that eliminating all curriculum competition from schools across the Australia and the imposition of a uniform leaving certificate will actually improve student achievement?

Nelson’s obsession with centralising control of education in Canberra runs counter to a vast body of respected international academic research which shows that curriculum competition, market forces and an education system which encouraged innovation and rewards success is the best means to improve student achievement.

For example, a new report published by the The Institute for the Transformation of Learning in the US surveys all the current literature on school choice. Its conclusion on the efficacy of school vouchers, which have the effect of wrestling some of the influence over the school system away from a centralised bureaucracy and placing it into the hands of parents, reads as follows: “A growing body of evidence suggests strongly that vouchers: improve academic performance, especially among African American students; increase parent satisfaction and involvement; and appear to have a positive impact on student achievement in public schools.”

It is not just the latest research which indicates that any moves towards centralising the school system will be detrimental to student achievement. Ancient history also shows us this as well. Compare the two predominant education systems of classical Greece, those of Athens and Sparta.

Education in Sparta was the sole responsibility of the state. A single military curriculum was prescribed by that state, teachers (or trainers as they would be better described) were state appointed and parents had no say in which schools their children attended or who taught them. The result was a decline in culture, learning and what we would generally now regard as education and learning. School become brutal, and a class of boys was referred to as ‘boua’, the same word which as used to denote a herd of cattle. The head teacher went by the name of ‘paidonomus’ meaning ‘boy-herdsman’. Obviously centralisation of the education system was not the only factor contributing to cruelty and brutality of Spartan society, however it is interesting to note that it was a means by which such a society could perpetuate itself.

Athens on the other hand had a very different education system. It was a completely free market. Anyone could teach anything they liked, but only those who could attract sufficient paying customers were able to make a living from their teaching. The free market Athenian education system (if it can be called a system) produced a remarkable number of innovations as teachers vied with one another to attract and keep students. Games were introduced to keep children’s interest and reduce the need for corporal punishment. A great variety of teachers sprang up. They were able to teach material which was contrary to accepted wisdom; after all, as long as a teacher to attract enough pupils to make a living he or she was in business.

For example in a climate which favoured men as teachers and frowned questioned the need to girls to be educated, Aspasia, a female teacher born in neighbouring Miletus, was able to set up shop in Athens and promote the liberation and education of women, much to the displeasure of the ruling class. She was extraordinarily successful, so much so that it is said she attracted such luminaries as Plato and Pericles to her lectures and Socrates referred to her as his “excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric”.

5th Century Athens is synonymous with learning, culture and intellectual creativity. No one would suggest that its free market education system was not solely responsible this flourishing of the intellect. Nevertheless, it is significant that such a society, comprising as it did some of the wisest and most original thinkers in the history of mankind, was conducive to a free market approach to education.

If Brendan Nelson wants to move in the direction of a centralised education system, he must be able to come up with a justification based on sound educational research. But it will be very difficult for him to do so, because, as history shows, no good reason exists.

Why we don’t need compulsory public education – a reply to Dennis Altman

2005-05-08T02:52:00.000-07:00

Published by Online Opinion, August 5, 2005.

Dennis Altman asserts that part of our response to global terrorism should compulsory public education for all primary school students in Australia. He implies that independent schools, and particularly independent schools of a religious denomination contribute to the “balkinsation” of Australian society. Altman attributes the reasonably coherent and harmonious nature of Australian society to a considered indifference toward religion by the majority of Australians.

Altman’s arguments are seriously flawed in a number a ways. Firstly, it is not a devotion to religion which makes for a division of society. It is the relative importance one places on the religious law and the law of the land. If the law of the land in seen as paramount, to be obeyed wherever one lives, then people of all religions can live peaceably side by side. It is only when one’s religious beliefs are taken to be superior to political law and to have precedence over it that civil society is disrupted. In his recent book, The West and the Rest, philosopher Roger Scruton makes the point as follows: “Religious tolerance is the norm in Western societies precisely because they are founded on territorial jurisprudence that regards sovereignty rather than divinity as the source of law.”

Secondly, it is not the study of religion which divides society, it is the immature, non-reflective understanding (or worse still a completely fallacious misunderstanding) of religion which created these division. Truly understood, the message of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism and all the major world religions are very similar in nature and a deep and profound understand of these religions will lead to a common experience of the shared humanity of all people. Properly understood, all major world religions lead their adherents from a self centred life to an Reality centred life and lead to a love of one’s fellow human beings, to a sense of altruism and to a determination to cooperate and live in harmony. To face with the threat of the “balkinsation” of Australian society, it is not compulsory secular public schooling we need, it s a truly profound understand of the major world religions.

Having said that, society has a right to know what is being taught in religious schools. We have laws against racial and religious vilification and speech which incites violence. Transparency and openness is necessary to see that these laws are not broken within the confines of religious schools. It is this emphasis on transparency which is the appropriate response to religiously motivated violence, not the censorship suggested by Altman.

Furthermore, to engender a deep religious tolerance, it is necessary for children to develop both a significant understanding of their own faith and also to be exposed to the beliefs, practices, myths and teachings of other faiths. It is difficult to understand another’s faith if one has no inner experience or understanding of one’s own. A token multiculturalism which nods towards cultural diversity and in which children gain a passing familiarity with nation customs or religious ceremonies does not plant the seeds of a serious commitment to religious understanding and tolerance.

Thirdly, the proposition that public schools are better positioned to teach civic vales to their students is often stated but is not supported by evidence. One of the very few scientifically rigorous studies to address this question was conducted by in the United States in 2001 and published as a chapters in Charters, Vouchers and Public Opinion. The authors defined political tolerance as “the willingness to extend constitutionally protected right and legal protections to groups and individuals whom one personally dislikes”. They concluded that “something about the environment, curriculum, or pedagogy of private schools leads them to outperform public schools in promoting political tolerance to their graduates (italics added).”

Finally, our best line of defence and our most effective means of opposing the senseless use of violence we see in the world around us is a better educated, widely read, liberally educated population. Independent schools operating in education marketplace which promotes innovation, rewards success and in which there are genuine consequences for failure has consistently outperformed a state controlled government education monopoly of. For this reason alone we should support independent education and certainly not make primary public education compulsory.

Let the market decide the best approach

2005-03-28T02:20:00.000-08:00

Published in The Australian 28 March 2005

English in Australia , the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, is yet another example of the endless dispute between conservatives and leftists over what should be taught in schools, and which teaching methods ought to be employed.

Sawyer accused English teachers of failing to educate a thoughtful generation of voters who can successfully apply their critical faculties to the policies presented in the recent election campaign. It's obviously desirable that voters be able to judge the relative merits of political parties. But the part of Sawyer's editorial which aroused comment was that he equated the success of the Howard Government with a lack of judgement on the part of the voters, implying that successful teaching entailed engendering sympathies which lie to the left of centre.

Kevin Donnelly responded by bemoaning the influence of left-wing, progressive ideology in the English classroom and yearning for the days when texts were studied in a "disinterested pursuit of truth".

I agree with Donnelly's opposition to overt ideological influence in the classroom. The question is, can it ever be eliminated or should we merely aim to minimise its influence?

At present a single curriculum monopolises every Year 12 English classroom in NSW. Every student who wishes to graduate from the NSW education system has no choice but to study the curriculum proscribed by the NSW Board of Studies English Curriculum Committee. If there is ideological bias in the curriculum and the methods by which it is taught, that bias is absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, by every Year 12 English student across the state.

But the same would be true of any state-wide curriculum. It's unlikely that any curriculum would be totally free of bias or unquestioned assumptions, so rather than simply replace one monopoly with another, a better approach is to foster a diversity of curricula and let them succeed or fail on their merits.

Brendan Nelson commented that Sawyer's editorial "confirms in part what is held as the worst fears of parents that often teachers are seeking to impose their own particular views which they are perfectly entitled to have, but not to impose those views on students." If Nelson opposes the imposition of a single view on students, why does he call for increased uniformity across the education systems of the various states? Nelson has recently put forth a proposal for a uniform starting age, and has even raised the issue of a uniform national leaving certificate. He may not think much of Sawyer, but he shares his zeal for uniformity.

If we really want educational standards to rise we need to foster an education environment which encourages innovation, in which successful programs flourish and sub-standard programs die a natural death. This can brought about by the introduction of a number of competing leaving exams to which schools may subscribe.

Surely we can recognise that parents have different aspirations for their children and ought to have some sort of choice about the curriculum they are taught. Furthermore, we must recognise that replacing one monopoly with another will not allow us to meaningfully compare the two.

If we really want the best for our schools we need to trial different curricula and different teaching methods simultaneously, and let parents have the freedom to decide which system is working best. As with other industries which encourage innovation and let the market decide on the best solution, educational progress needs to be driven by demonstrable success, success which can be appreciated and understood, not just by professional educators and academics, but also by the men and women who comprise the parent body of our society.

In an environment of curriculum competition, theories such as post-modern deconstruction, whole language learning and fuzzy maths would have to stand the rigorous examination of the market and their influence would be proportional to their efficacy. If these theories produce the results the parent body seeks then they deserve to flourish, if not, their influence should be confined to the communities who are dedicated to such a philosophical position.

Rather than leaving the debate mired in the trenches of the progressive v conservative battle which is confined to the committee rooms of centralised educational bureaucracies, the student body would be far better served if the merits of various educational approaches were put to the test of the market.

Welcome the Edupreneurs

2005-03-21T02:10:00.000-08:00

Published in Policy Magazine, Spring, 2005. A footnoted version of this essay is available on request.

At the beginning of Pierre Boulle’s classic novel The Bridge Over the River Kwai, the commanding officer of the British prisoners-of-war, Colonel Nicholson, asks his Japanese counterpart, Colonel Saito, to reconsider his command that the British officers work alongside the other ranks to construct the bridge. Unbeknown to Nicholson, Saito has a deep seated antipathy to anyone questioning his authority. In a paroxysm of rage he beats Nicholson senseless and inflicts a punishing work regime on the rest of the prisoners.

Saito’s reaction reminds me, in vehemence if not in kind, of the response of the education bureaucracy whenever the words “profit” and “education” are mentioned in the same sentence. Teachers’ unions in particular are vehemently opposed to “edupreneurs”, companies which wish to provide service for profit in the education marketplace.

For example, in early 2004, it was announced that two for-profit companies, Springfield Land Corporation and ABC Learning Centres Ltd, Australia’s largest private sector childcare provider, would be working in partnership with not-for-profit company, Independent Colleges Australia Ltd to open a new school in Springfield in the south-west of Brisbane. The spokesperson for the Queensland Independent Education Union responded to this news with the comment: “schools … should be run for the singular purpose of enhancing the students’ education - not with an eye on the profit margin.” Former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner, went even further saying, “Over my dead body,” she said, “schools … should be run in the interests of children”. In response to ventures similar to the one described above, the Queensland education minister, Anna Bligh, recently introduced amendments to ensure that such partnerships would be ineligible for government funding, and consequently economically unsustainable.

Even the slightest hint of the possibility of interaction between the private sector and government schools seems to invoke the ire of some teachers’ unions. In the lead up to the last election, the Howard Government announced a plan to make reading vouchers available to families whose children had failed to learn to read at school. These vouchers could be redeemed with a certified private tutor. Maree O'Halloran, President of the NSW Teachers Federation described the plan as “another attack on public schools” and “simply preposterous”.

Clearly there is a deeply held assumption here – that education and profit are mutually exclusive - you can’t educate children well and make money at the same time. This is an unspoken assumption which runs through much of the debate over school funding in Australia. It is not always all that unspoken. Federal laws explicitly prohibit government funds being used to support for-profit schools.

It is important at the outset to distinguish two separate aspects to this question. The first is the principle or ethics of deriving profit from education. If it can be shown that the very act of deriving profit from K-12 education is somehow inherently amoral, regardless of the consequences, it could not be seriously considered as sound public policy. If it can be shown that there is nothing inherently amoral about deriving a profit from K-12 education, it still needs to be shown that an expansion of edupreneurial activity would raise standards in education. If it seems feasible that the introduction of certain forms of for-profit content delivery in the K-12 education marketplace would be beneficial in terms of both standards and efficiency then it behoves policy makers to take the proposal seriously.

What do we mean by for-profit education? The term is a general one which covers many different approaches to educating children in the K-12 age range. Nevertheless all such enterprises share all or some of the following characteristics in common. For-profit educators have the ability to provide education which meets parental expectations at a cost less than that which parents are willing to pay. They are free to vary the curriculum and teaching methods they wish to offer. For-profit schools may be run by personnel who privately own school premises and/or intellectual property in the form of curriculum and school management systems necessary to provide K-12 schooling. The term implies that the provider of education is answerable to market expectations and either flourishes or flounders accordingly, and that the market has the means to express its wishes, possibly through school vouchers or tax credits.

Edupreneurial companies are presently experiencing substantial growth worldwide. A recent survey of edupreneurs estimated that they constitute approximately 10 percent of the US$740 billion education market in the US. Nevertheless, the study found that “K–12 education is the most difficult sector of the education industry for companies to enter. Government funded competition and regulations make it difficult for companies to make a profit.”

In 1992, Sweden passed laws to promote school choice and ease the entry of independent schools into the education marketplace. Since then the number of independent schools has increased five fold, 30 percent of which are now run by corporations. Researchers in that country have found that the increased competition has benefited students in both public and private schools.

Since the fall of communism in 1989, the Czech Republic and Hungary have funded both public and independent schools equally on a per-pupil basis. Although most independent schools in these countries have been started by non-profit organisations, the influence of competition in these markets is informative. One in-depth study, which tracked student performance before and after the liberalisation and measured improvement in test scores (rather than absolute measures) found that all students in districts with a large number of new independent school benefited from the competition.

In Brazil a number of large corporations vie with each other to provide K-12 school as well as subsequent university and vocational training. The largest of these, Objetivo/UNIP, has 450 franchises which teach around 500,000 students and an annual turnover of approximately US$400 million.

In Southern Africa, the private education corporation Education Investment Corporation Limited (Educor) caters for over 300,000 students through primary, secondary and tertiary education, to post-graduate and corporate training. It has an annual turnover of US$26 million and, is about to be listed on the NASDAQ.

The Ethics of for-profit K-12 education
It is difficult to see how there is anything implicitly unethical about deriving a profit from K-12 eduction when we view teaching as a vocation comparable to the practise of medicine, law or accountancy. Teaching is similar to these professions in many important respects. It is a service provided by trained professionals who hold recognised degrees or diplomas and as of this year in NSW will need to be accredited by the NSW Institute of Teachers.

The community recognises that there is nothing wrong in principle with making a profit from the provision of profession services such as medicine, law and accountancy so long as these services are conducted in accordance with the profession’s code of ethics and within the relevant legislation. These regulations aim to protect the rights of the consumer and mitigate conflicts of interest. Therefore, with similar guidelines in place, there is no reason, in principle, why profit could not be derived from K-12 education.

Furthermore, it is generally agreed that many other types of education including private tuition, coaching colleges, professional development, vocational training and some private tertiary institutions may ethically be run on a for-profit basis. This indicates that there in nothing in the nature of education per se which should necessarily exclude it from the for-profit marketplace.

It may be argued that K-12 education is a special case, unlike the services provided by the other professions on a number of grounds. One feature of K-12 education which at first appears to be unique is that it is compulsory for all children. Although this initially seems to distinguish K-12 education from the other professional services, in practice this is not the case. For example, seeking medical advice from a qualified practitioner becomes essentially compulsory when a child falls seriously ill, not through legislation (although one may argue that child abuse regulations would come into play here) but through the instinctive desire of a parent to care for her child. The same goes for seeking legal advice whenever a matter of significant legal complexity is entered into. In theory, employing the services of a legal professional may be optional, but in practice it is unavoidable. Thus K-12 education cannot claim unique status on the grounds of being compulsory.

It may also be claimed that K-12 education is unique in the manner in which it influences a child’s life. Second only to his parents a child’s teacher has the opportunity to impart deep-seated attitudes and values which can influence the rest of the child’s life for good or ill. There is no doubt about the importance of the teaching profession and its impact on the welfare of society, but this argument in fact strengthens the imperative to find the most effective means to educate K-12 students. Since education is such an influential aspect of a nation’s character, policy makers are obliged to discover and utilise the most effective means to educate the young, and if for-profit educational enterprises will raise standards across the board, they must be encouraged. This brings us to the subject of the efficacy of for-profit education and its effect on the K-12 education market.

The benefits of for-profit K-12 education
Since there is nothing wrong in principle with making a profit from K-12 education if it is conducted in accordance with suitable professional guidelines and, if necessary, regulated by minimal legislation, the benefits of such a development in the education marketplace needs to be explored. If the benefits of encouraging for-profit education can be shown to be significantly superior to the current system then policy makers need to justify why such reforms are not being undertaken.

In common with any for-profit enterprise, schools which exist only by their ability to ascertain and meet the expectations of the market, which in this case is the parent body, are attentive to and responsive towards changing needs of the marketplace. They are aware that inefficiency and complacency will be reflected in falling enrolments and consequent job losses. The benefits to pupils of such sensitivity is that they are not subject to outdated modes of teaching, progressive fads, irrelevant curriculum or ideologically loaded subject material for any period longer than it takes the market to ascertain the futility of such approaches.

Frederick M. Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has recently made a strong case for K-12 schools to be subject to market forces rather than top-down government regulation. He argues that unless schools are rewarded for their successes and made accountable for their short-comings, no real progress can be made in school reform. In a system of top-down regulation, schools are assessed on processes and procedures in the classroom, on the curriculum they purport to teach and on the qualifications of their teachers. Hess argues that to drive improvement, schools need to be assessed not on internal procedures, but on what they produce, that is, on what the children have actually learned. Schools responsive to market forces would be assessed in exactly this way as their reputation would be dependent on the quality of their graduating pupils and on the schools performance in standardised tests. For-profit schools would face meaningful, unavoidable consequences for failing to teach their students adequately, and this may prove to be a significantly better safeguard of students’ interests than further attempts at top-down government regulation.

A second benefit of for-profit K-12 schooling is that excellent schools would expand, allowing more parents the opportunity of sending their children to schools which have a proven track record in successful education. Any successful business tends to expand as customers and employees alike are attracted to its culture of excellence and as demand for its product grows. In the current system, a government school may, on account of its excellent leadership, build a fine reputation as a centre of excellence. The students at the school flourish and the waiting list grows. What then? Do other schools start up along the same lines, spreading the influence and expertise of the outstanding leader of the first school? Is that outstanding leader given the incentive and additional financial rewards for making the effort to expand and grow? No. There is little room for innovation in the centrally directed government monopoly.

A third beneficial consequence of for-profit K-12 education is the emergence of quality control and research and development. As companies start chains of schools and compete with each other for business, they would be motivated to maintain tight quality control on their franchisees to ensure the quality and reputation of their brand name. They would also be motivated to invest in serious research and development to discover and implement more effective ways of educating the K-12 student and to stay ahead of the competition. Such research would not be the ideologically motivated exercise in sociology or cultural studies which so often passes as educational research in our universities, but a scientific, evidence based inquiry into learning styles, content delivery and curriculum development which would stand the test of the market.

Objections
It is worth noting here that privatisation does not necessarily mean competition. It is possible that with privatisation a small number of large corporations could monopolise the industry resulting in little choice for parents. There could be a role for government regulation to ensure such factors as entry into and exit from the market, economies of scale, variety of educational products on the market and susceptibility to the cost of technological change do not make it prohibitively difficulty for new participants to enter the K-12 market.

Some commentators object that privately run for-profit schools would fail to inculcate values needed for a free democratic society. In fact, such schools, being answerable to the parent body as a whole and not to a small committee of educationalists, would be more likely to teach the democratic ideals valued by the community.

Another significant objection to for-profit education is that parents will be unable to make an informed choice. This is usually argued from two perspectives, either because school performance cannot be measured and reported accurately in a meaningful and unbiased way, or because parents, even if they did have all the information they needed, would not be able to adequately synthesise it into an appropriate choice to meet the needs of their child. The issue of reporting school performance is certainly a controversial one, but it is defeatist to say that it cannot be done. At the moment information on school performance in Australia is guarded like the crown jewels and, up until recently, it has been illegal to release such information. Recently there have been some changes in legislation which make it compulsory for schools to publish an annual report which provides information on school performance in state wide tests, retention rates and teacher qualifications. The NSW Teachers Federation opposes these changes in school reporting, claiming that they will lead to school league tables. If parents are to be able to make informed choice between competing for-profit schools, they would need open access to accurate, up-to-date information on all aspects of school performance. Just as there are regulations governing the reporting of publicly listed company performance, so guidelines could be drawn up outlining performance criteria which schools would need to disclose at regular intervals.

On the second issue of parental ability to assimilate school performance data into a optimal choice for their child, we can see that there are a number of factors which would make it highly likely that parents would be successful in this regard. Firstly they would be strongly motivated to choose wisely, especially as the democratic shift in Australia is towards smaller families. As parents choose to have children later in life, they are doing more than ever to ensure their children’s welfare and to protect them from harm. Society trusts parents to make informed choices on such complex matters as real estate, retirement funds and medical procedures and there is no reason why they should not also be allowed to assess the relative merit of schools.

A further objection to for-profit K-12 education is that no one would operate schools to educate the disadvantaged. Critics of such privatisation ask why an entrepreneur would open a school in the worst suburb where many children come from broken homes, where English is a second language and drugs and violence are rife. They claim that church or other altruistic groups may do so because they are doing it as a service to the community but the hard-nosed investor would look for a safer and less troublesome way to turn a profit. This objection is based on the fallacy that underprivileged children are the most expensive to educate. This is not the case. Often parents in the higher socio-economic strata are more demanding and insist on specialised courses, individual attention and a greater range of extra-curricular activities for their children. Just as companies provide other goods and services to all strata of society, and do so profitably, so companies will be motivated to compete with each other to provide education for the disadvantaged – and, on account of this competition, the education on offer will be of a higher standard.

Conclusion
For-profit K-12 education and the resulting competition in the education marketplace will have a number of benefits for both students and teachers which will never be achieved by centralised government control. Schools of excellence will flourish and expand, enabling access to successful education for more families. Research and development into practical, effective teaching will be encouraged. Efficiency will be promoted, bureaucracy minimised and parents will see a greater return for their education dollar. Teaching would be a more attractive career option in which excellence is rewarded and there is scope for innovation. Unfortunately, much of the antagonism voiced towards the concept of for-profit K-12 education is the result of vested interests under threat and fear of the unknown rather than a serious consideration of the welfare of students. It is time for our policy makers to show leadership in this area and start welcoming the edupreneurs.

Friendly Advice

2005-01-27T02:56:00.000-08:00

Published in the Heckler column, Sydney Morning Herald, 27th January 2005

Stop reading this article now! Turn immediately to another section of the paper or click on the nearest hyperlink. I have no idea what I am talking about. I have been told this since the age of five and I recommend that you cease reading this column immediately.

For those of you who have been foolish enough to ignore my warning, let me explain.

“Maaaate, you have noooo idea…” The phrase is with me still. As a teenager, as soon as I showed the any hint of an interest in the opposite sex, I was promptly told by anyone who was more that a couple of years older than me that I had “noooo idea” what I was in for. “Girls, they’re a different species, nothing like us. Forget it. It’s a minefield. They’ll have you for breakfast, gobble you up, make mincemeat of you and for dessert, spit you out in little pieces.”

Strangely enough, no doubt by sheer good fortune, I managed to make the acquaintance of a number of wonderful women, some of whom I had the privilege of seeing on a regular basis. I took then to movies, dances and dinners and even went on holidays with some of them. Much to my dismay – we actually got on very well.

Not long after, I heard the same advice again. “Maaaate, you have noooo idea…” I had committed the cardinal sin. I’d expressed an interest in marriage. I was promptly told by all my wedded friends that I was “crazy” Such sagacious advice as “Why buy the book when you can borrow from the library? It’ll ruin your life. You’ll be tied to the ball and chain for the rest of your days. Don’t sign up with ‘she who must be obeyed’”, was heaped upon me.

Again, no doubt, by nothing but sheer good luck, I found that when I did marry I enjoyed the company of an intelligent, witty, practical and interesting wife whom I love very much. I was honoured to find that she was there for me every day. My life was not impoverished at all. It was enriched.

“Maaaate, you have noooo idea…” Soon I was hearing it all again. I had mentioned that we might be thinking of having children. Sure enough, the unsolicited advice started pouring in. “ Make sure you see plenty of movies before the little brat arrives because you sure be seeing anything except the Wiggles afterwards. Oh, and go to a few good restaurants now, because it’ll be nothing but left over baby food and fish fingers from now on. No more lie-ins on Sunday mornings.”

Strangely enough, my wife and I found that we enjoyed having a child. Sure, life was different, but different doesn’t necessarily mean worse. We still manage to maintain friendships, go to weddings, read books, have holidays, talk to one another and bring up our wonderfully entertaining son.

Of course, if we ever mention this to friends who have more that one child, the response is predictable. “Maaaate, you have noooo idea…. Your baby, he’s sooo good. Wait until you have two. Your life will be turned upside down. It’s so easy with one…” And so it goes on.

Well, I obviously have no idea, but I reckon I’m up for whatever may come. So far I’ve managed to get by, so obviously, having “no idea” is not such a bad thing after all.

A Personal Commitment - Fr. Peter Quin

2004-07-19T02:47:00.000-07:00

Published in Threshold Magazine, July, 2004.

At a time when the divorce rate is at an all time high and fewer Australians are getting married, we may be forgiven for thinking that the institution of marriage is terminally ill and that it is only a matter of time before it gives up the ghost completely. Despite this rather gloomy prognosis, marriage continues to show that it is the most beneficial living arrangement for men, women and especially children - and there is one priest in Sydney who has dedicated his life to seeing that as many people as possible are aware of this fact and experience it for themselves. Fr Peter Quin, parish priest of the North Sydney-Lavender Bay-Kirribilli parish, has found a formula which results in only 3% of the couples he marries terminating their marriage in divorce. Fr. Quin's example shows that with a single minded commitment and an intensely pragmatic approach to human relationships, healthy marriages are possible.

So how does he do it? First Fr Quinn arranges a series of dinners with three or four couples at whose weddings he is about to officiate. The couples bring a course each and they meet at Fr Quin's presbytery in Lavender Bay. The aim of the dinners is to get the couples to share their thoughts on a number of topics which are central to marriage. The dinners give the participants a chance to hear each other's thoughts on these matters, and to face some important issues in a challenging yet nurturing environment. Quin starts off with ice breakers such as the participant's employment, family background, how they met and how the men proposed. He then moves on to more personal matters such as parental background, how they communicate with one another, how they handle conflict, children, finances, and sexuality. Everyone is invited to answer and Quin is careful to not let anyone get away with what he considers to be a shallow answer. If he thinks people are just giving platitudes or evading the question he gentle probes to get the person to reveal what he or she really thinks on the issue.

The couples find that these dinners act as a catalyst for them to deepen their thinking on important issues and to share their thoughts with each other. They also find it very useful to hear answers from the other couples as this give a different perspective to these issues and suggest other avenues they may explore.

How the couple resolves conflict is a very important and Quin likes to delve into this question quite deeply. "When I ask them how they resolve conflict, the conversation goes much deeper," say Quin, "and that is the beginning of the real preparation for marriage. They all have conflict and they're all helped by knowing that they're not the only ones".

As part of their marriage preparation, Quin recommends each couple undertakes the 156 questions FOCCUS survey and both a facilitator and Quin discuss the results with the couple afterwards.

On the wedding day, Quin is able to include a relevant sermon in the service. He tries to stay in touch with couples at social events which he organises for that specific purpose. He holds golf day, balls and an annual end-of-year barbeque. When children arrive on the scene he is further involved with baptisms and mothers and babies groups. In the late 1990s Quin was instrumental in the foundation of the Parent Infant Foundation of Australia (PIFA) which caters for mothers of babies under five. He also organises local dinners to which he invites all the couples he has married who live in an area. Through these dinners he tries to build support networks of like-minded couples.

Because Fr. Quin has been involved with their relationship from the beginning of the engagement, the couples whose weddings he officiates tend to know and trust him and they will turn to him for counsel and advice if they are having difficulties in their marriages. He talks with them and tries to help them through the problem and then if they need further help, he recommends they see one of two trusted professionals, whom he knows can give excellent advice on marital problem. This has proved very successful. "If a couple come to me and then see the marriage counsellors, I very rarely loose them," says Quin.

This encapsulates much of what is effective about Quin's approach. He is committed to seeing that the marriages he helps create stay intact and feels a personal sense of loss whenever a couple divorces.

Young Minds, Ancient Wisdom

2004-04-10T02:41:00.000-07:00

A review of Zen Tails by Peter Whitfield, illustrated by Nancy Bevington.

Published in Education Today, October 2004

Zen Tails is a unique series of children’s books aimed at ages 5 - 8. It sets out to convey to young readers some of the profound wisdom contained in the vast store of traditional stories of the East. The Zen Tails are enacted by nine animal characters who are grouped into three group: the teachers, the students and the fools. The teachers (a St. Bernard, a wombat and a turtle representing action, love and knowledge) are the enlightened ones. The students (a beagle, a hippo and a beaver representing courage, compassion and studiousness) are striving to emulate them. The fools (a cat, a monkey and a bear representing laziness, agitation and anger) are living in selfish ignorance. In case you don’t get all this from reading the books, it’s spelt out for you on a three bookmarks which comes with the series.

Nancy Bevington’s illustrations are skilfully drawn watercolours. The washes are clean and crisp and the characters are full of personality. They avoid the sentimentality of so many animal picture books and yet they are attractive and appealing to a young audience.

The first story in the series, “Bruno Dreams of Ice Cream”, tells the story of Bruno (the beagle) who is fixated with the idea of getting an ice cream. When he is drawn into helping the beaver who is in a spot of bother, he forgets about his desire for an ice-cream and is freed from his desire.

The intention and structure of the series is very clear, but do the stories and the characters themselves achieve Whitfield’s purpose? One of the potential problems with this sort of approach is that the characters can be one-dimensional and unrealistic. After all, no one is sole an incarnation of anger and without any redeeming feature whatsoever. I decided to put one of the stories to the test. I read “Bruno Dreams of Ice Cream” to a group of seven year olds at my school and asked them to name the distinguishing feature of each character. I was surprised how well the children understood the story and connected with the characters.

One child said, “I liked how Bruno forgot about the ice cream when he helped his friend, and how the St Bernard watched everything from the top of the hill.”

Not bad. They described the cat as “mean and selfish”, the beagle as “kind and strong”, the monkey as “naughty” and the hippo as “sharing”. No doubt the children’s understanding of the characters would develop further as they read the other books in the series.

Whitfield has undertaken a worthwhile task to make traditional stories available to today’s children in an attractive and simple form. Too much modern children’s literature aims at the lowers common denominator. Books which concentrate on bodily functions, slime, mucus and other excretions try to appeal to youngsters’ obsession with these rather deprived aspects of human life and do nothing but reinforce children’s fascination with gross-out episodes and toilet humour. Children deserve better. It’s an insult to their intelligence to serve mundane literature up to them. The Zen Tails series aims high and appeals to the young philosopher which can be found in every child. But children also love riveting plots with tension and drama and believable, humane protagonists with depth and substance. Books which can combine both will not only be successful, they will also add to the national character.

Civilisation here on Earth

2004-03-21T00:49:00.000-08:00

Published - Sydney Morning Herald - 21st March 2004
My heart sank when I read of Paul Allen's pledge to the search for extra-terrestrial life and to establish "what other civilisations may exist elsewhere". At a time when the human race can't work out how to feed itself, live peacefully together or establish harmonious, lasting relationships between men and women, could the money not be better spent seeking to establish a little more civilisation here on Earth?

Why Study Shakespeare?

2003-08-19T02:23:00.000-07:00

Published in Sydney's Child, August 2003

Many of us have mixed feelings when we think of studying Shakespeare at school. Such recollections can range from the depths of boredom and anguish to the heights of sublime joy and intellectual awakening. But regardless of our opinion of Shakespeare, we speak his language everyday. It is estimated that Shakespeare added around 1500 new words to the English language. Whenever we use our mind’s eye, to find method in someone’s madness, as they eat us out of house and home, because we thought they had a heart of gold and a spotless reputation but we were actually living in a fool's paradise; whenever we decide that discretion is the better part of valour or detect something in the wind; whenever we remark that brevity is the soul of wit, that love is blind or caution someone that all that glistens is not gold or advise someone to be neither a lender nor a borrower; from the salad days of youth, through the pomp and circumstance of marriage to the sea change of retirement, until we exclaim what the dickens!, accept the unkindest cut of all, and shuffle off this mortal coil, we are speaking Shakespeare’s language.

Studying Shakespeare benefits students in a myriad of ways. Shakespeare's language is tricky to read aloud and comprehend, and it is harder still to perform in front of a theatre full of family and friends. If children can understand Shakespeare they can understand anything. Some may argue that this is a reason not to teach Shakespeare in schools. But students gain strength, determination and the capacity to deal with minor hardships (like forgetting your lines on stage) by studying, memorising and performing Shakespeare. Obviously they need to be taught in an appropriate manner with support and understand and not be pushed too far too quickly. But with skilful teaching and gentle encouragement they grow in stature through the study and performance of Shakespeare’s plays.

Performing a Shakespeare play also builds class unity. Students learn to rely on one another and learn that they themselves need to be reliable, and that others are relying on them. You only need to miss your cue once in a performance to learn what it is like to let people down. Acting also takes students out of their small circle of friends and forces them to connect with and cooperate with all members of their class. My own experience of taking a number of classes through Shakespeare performances is that by the evening of the final performance the class has been transformed and there is a magical sense of unity, happiness and lightness. The simple fact of compulsory cooperative action seems to bring about these qualities.

It may be argued that the advantages, of character building and class unity would accrue from the performance of any dramatic work. But Shakespeare has an added benefit. There is greatness about Shakespeare which cultivates the spirit and raises one to a level of transcendent reflection and pure sentiment. Shakespeare represents the pinnacle of the English speaking world’s contribution to literature. A study of Shakespeare connects the students to their cultural heritage, and equips them, in time, to make their own contribution. The experience for the student acting out a play is much stronger than say a lesson on morality or a discussion on human nature. The play involves them for that period of time in that space together. Without necessarily comprehending every the word and allusion, each child understands the drama to his own level, and is taken up in the play to experience the consequences of each character’s actions. Vicariously the students experience what life would be like if they enacted those motivations which are driving the characters. They see people in confronting circumstances struggling to know what to do and relying on their inner resources to survive a crisis. To the degree that the students experience the drama, to that extent they can undergo the catharsis the ending brings. The catharsis of being involved with murder, deceit and betrayal and experiencing the consequences of those dark emotions can free the student from the need to enact those traits in his or her own life. Because Shakespeare portrays these emotions so accurately and perfectly the students can fully experience those character flaws and be freed from them. Performing the plays on stage ensures that the children learn their lines (and the lines of many of the other characters) by heart. The words stay with them for life and form on important part of their intellectual capital.

Not only is the language of Shakespeare sublimely beautiful and richly poetic, the subject matter of his plays covers the whole gambit of human experience. Within his plays we find the martial ardour of Henry V, the jealous ambition of Lady Macbeth, the evil scheming of Iago, the doubting hesitation of Hamlet, the dereliction of duty of King Lear, the degradation of Caliban, the wisdom of Prospero, and the arrogance of Coriolanus. The children are exposed to some of the most excellent practical advice for life and observations of human nature expounded in pithy and memorable speeches. For example in Measure for Measure man’s arrogance is describes thus:

But man, proud manDress'd in a little brief authorityMost ignorant of what he's most assur'dHis glassy essence, like an angry apePlays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs makes the angels weep.

Shakespeare’s ability to uniquely blend the familiar and strange makes his plays both accessible and fascinating. He expresses a profound knowledge of human behaviour and offers insight into the world.

Shakespeare can be used as a pivot point for introducing students to: mythology, fantasy, marriage, Greek Tragedy, Italian Comedy, Elizabethan culture and history, Catholicism, and English, Scottish and French history. His writing can also be used as examples of plot, characterisation and poetry in English classes. Moral questions and philosophical concepts are also addressed in his works.

For example the puzzling question, particularly relevant at the moment, of who takes the blame in an unjust war is addressed in Henry V. Are dutiful and loyal soldiers to blame if their political leaders order them to fight in an unjust war, or do the leaders take full responsibility themselves? Shakespeare addresses this question when Henry V is walking disguised among his troops on the eve of battle.

KING HENRY. I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable. WILLIAMS. That's more than we know.

BATES. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough if we know we are the King's subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.

WILLIAMS. But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'…Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

Here Bates and Williams expresses the view that it is not the concern of the soldier whether or not the cause is just and that by showing loyalty to their king they are placing all responsibility on his head. Henry rebuts this argument saying that each man is the master of his own conscience, that the King is not responsible for the acts of his soldiers and that each of them must fight with a clear conscience or not at all.

KING HENRY: …You may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation. But this is not so: the King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services. … Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed- wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained.

Whether or not you agree with the King, it’s a great way to raise the issue and get discussion going.

Study of Shakespeare also gives the students an appreciation of the craftsmanship and innovation of Shakespeare the playwright and allows the students share in the knowledge base that is our human right and cultural heritage. Exposure to the greats of English literature gives the students a benchmark against which they can compare other works. It refines their taste and teaches them a cultural vocabulary which they need to understand and enjoy further works of art and literature.

There is a growing number of opportunities for school students in NSW to study and perform Shakespeare. John Bell, director of the Bell Shakespeare Company is a strong supporter of youth education in Shakespeare. He believes that young people should study Shakespeare because “his vision, his understanding of the world was so big - his understanding of people - how they work and think and operate. Also he doesn't judge people. He is very generous, but also very critical, so he's not soft centred but nor is he unfeeling.”

Des James, Associate Artistic Director of the Bell Shakespeare Company, has this to say on the subject: "Shakespeare’s plays remain the greatest in the English language and despite the passage of time, his works endure and grow in popularity. This has much to do with the range of their moral and philosophical concerns, the richness of their characterisation, the lyrical beauty and dramatic power of the writing, and the extraordinary story telling and theatrical structure at the heart of all his plays."

Shakespeare’s writing was clearly designed for the stage and his performance forms include high and low comedy, grand tragedy, romance, historical chronicle and metaphysical speculation. Above all Shakespeare’s works capture the spirit and complexity of the human condition and remain the finest examples of character study for students to engage with today. When given the opportunity to interact with Shakespeare, students enter into a bold, vital and imaginative world. They also have the opportunity to recognise and identify aspects of themselves in Shakespeare’s vast array of characters and situations, and to share in his profound understanding of humanity.

As part of their commitment to encouraging school students to study Shakespeare, The Bell Shakespeare Company tours Australia each year performing plays specifically aimed at a younger audience. They provide resource material and support educational programmes. They have a program called “Actors at Work”. This program comprises two teams of four actors, one based in Melbourne and one in Sydney. These teams visit school and explore scenes and characters from Shakespeare and demonstrate to young audience how an imaginative approach to a text can illuminate the works for Shakespeare for young and old. Experts from the BSC also conduct master classes with teachers to help them bring the magic alive for their students.

The Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia runs a National Shakespeare Youth Festival for secondary school students. Started in 1993, it now attracts young actors, musicians, and dancers from throughout Australia. This festival cumulates with the announcement of the Young Shakespearean Artist of the Year and the Shakespearean Teacher of the Year Awards.

The University of New England holds an annual Outdoor Shakespeare Festival. The Festival is held in March-April to coincide with the UNE Graduation. One of the goals of this festival is to allow senior school students from around New South Wales to participate in Shakespearian performances, both as audiences and actors. The productions are accompanied by a series of supporting events, including lectures, workshops, and other performances, some by school students from the region.

John Colet School in Belrose holds a four-day Shakespeare Festival at Glen St Theatre each year. Each class performs an excerpt from a Shakespeare play and the festival culminates in an hour long performance by the 5th and 6th class.

So whether it is team building, cultural enrichment, philosophical insights into the human condition or just great fun, Shakespeare provides and excellent addition to your child’s education.

Why Study Philosophy?

2003-04-19T02:25:00.000-07:00

Published in Sydney's Child, April 2003. Reproduced on http://www.goodtherapy.com.au/ February, 2006.

The unexamined life is not worth living. - Socrates

Amazing isn’t it how much faith we put in our schools. Right from the tender age of five when our children are so impressionable we send them off day after day to be taught by a teacher we have hardly met. How much do we know about the teachers who will educate them, the friends they will meet and the ideas they will be fed? Very little I suggest. Nevertheless with very little knowledge of what they are about to receive we gaily send them off the school trusting that they will learn something of value and not come across anything too horrific.

What do we expect our children to learn at school? The list is long and varied depending on who you talk to. It normally includes: literacy and numeracy, art and music, sport, languages, history and geography, discipline, social skills, perhaps religion and certainly something which will prepare them for the workplace. This list of expectations seems to be growing ever longer, so what justification could there be for adding yet another subject to the curriculum. Why study philosophy at school?

It comes down to what you think education is all about. If you think education is solely about preparing a child to get a good job and earn a large salary, then there may be very little justification. If you think that education is about becoming a better person and learning to live a happy, fulfilling, well rounded life then there are many reasons to include philosophy in the curriculum.

Whether we know it or not, we are all philosophers. We all have views on what it means to be human. We all have views on the purpose of life. We all have views on how we should live and how we should interact with one another. The question is, have we examined our views on these questions and do we have coherent, well founded and workable approaches to life’s big questions? Philosophy helps children clarify their thinking on these sorts of questions and to helps them to develop a consistent, coherent and purposeful world view.

Philosophy encompasses many aspects of study. Some people believe it includes reason, religion, faith, experience, meditation and practical exercises to develop a more truthful mode of living. Others believe that human reason alone will reveal all that is to be known and is sufficient to discover the truth.

Philosophy deals with the big questions in life. Is there a God? What is the Good? What is Truth? What is a human being - mind, matter or a combination of both? Is there life after death? Is there a purpose to life and if so, what is it? What is justice? Why is there so much suffering in the world? The answers to these questions are of merely theoretical interest. They have an immediate and profound impact on how a person lives their life, how they treat other people and how they feel about themselves and others.

Take for instance two common world views which seek to address the question, “Is there a God?” Those who answer “yes” are known as Theists. They believe there is a Supreme Being who is all knowing, all powerful, who created the world and cares for it. From this view comes the belief in an objective moral order, a purpose in life and perhaps life after death. There are many philosophical arguments for the theistic view of life. They range from profound personal religious experience to the view that the sheer beauty and intricacy of the creation indicates the hand of a Supreme Being.

One main objection to the theistic view of life is the perception of evil and malevolence in the world. The argument goes, “If there is a supreme, benevolent God, He would not have created evil. There is evil in the world, therefore God does not exist”. At first glance this seems convincing, but further philosophical study will reveal a number of persuasive arguments which attempt to refute this objection.

Philosophy also includes ethics: an enquiry into the nature of good and evil and how man should act, the right and wrong thing to do in any given situation and the principles by which the rightness and wrongness of various courses of actions should be judged. This clearly has many practical applications: business ethics, medical ethics and the ethics of immigration and government in general. Philosophers throughout the ages have addressed such questions as “Is there an objective moral order, or is good and bad simply relative?” There is a strong multicultural emphasis in many educational syllabi and an inclusive approach to religious beliefs. This raises the philosophical question of the relationship between religions. When two religions differ in outlook, is one right and the other wrong, or are they both "true" in their own way? This clearly calls for philosophical inquiry and discussion.

Some philosophers have sought to formulate golden rules of action such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, or “Act in such a way that you would wish everyone else to follow the principle which you are enacting.” (Kant’s categorical imperative). Aristotle proposed that virtue is a median state between two extremes. For instance generosity is a virtuous median to be found between excessive frugality and excessive largesse. In discussion, children often come up with a similar rules of conduct and they find it encouraging to hear that an eminent philosopher has also thought in a similar way.

There are movements in Australian education to teach school students the principles of philosophy. In May, 2001 Dialogue Australia, an organisation which caters for educators who are interested in finding new approaches to religious and values based education hosted, their first national conference at Canberra Girls Grammar School. There, Dr. Felicity McCutgeon, Head of Religion and Philosophy, outlined ways to help students “tidy up” their minds, and to find peace, joy and understanding. Her view is that an excess information clutters the student’s mind and creates a constant noise, “monkey mind” as she calls it, which never settles on one topic for any length of time. The conference explored themes of developing wisdom in the student, of tapping into a deeper kind of knowing which is not traditionally part of the school curriculum. Questions such as, “What is thinking well?”, and “What sort of life is worth living?” were raised and discussed.

Guest speaker at the conference was Dr. Peter Vardi of the University of London. He spoke about his five strand approach to religious and values based education. The five strands are: study of the Bible and Christian tradition, ethics and values education, philosophy of religion, study of world religions and an affective strand which teaches stillness and silence. He insists that this approach does not imposed ideas on children, but encourages them to ask questions and think deeply about important topics which helps them to become more fully human.

Another approach to philosophy in school places less emphasis on the principle and maxims of the philosophers of the past concentrates on the rational process of philosophy itself.

Sandra Lynch, president of the Philosophy for Children Association of NSW, believes that philosophy gives the child a whole range of techniques and approaches to knowledge which inform and underlie learning in all other subjects. It develops critical thinking - that is the ability to follow an argument, to see its strengths and weaknesses and to think independently about the argument. It also develops creative thinking, the ability to come up with new and original solutions to problems, to think outside the square, to think laterally and the ability to see the other side of an argument.

Against this approach some would argue that the ability to think critically without a firm grounding in the teachings of one of the religious or philosophical traditions of the past is a dangerous thing which can leave the child doubting everything and with no basis from which to lead his or her life. They argue that excessive scepticism is unhealthy and that some faith is needed to learn any traditional teaching, to understand it and to put it to the test of experience

On the question of why most schools don't teach philosophy, Ms Lynch believes that many teachers are already overwhelmed with the number of subjects they need to teach and see Philosophy as yet another subject in which they would need to educate themselves and then squeeze into an already jam-packed curriculum.

So should we learn Philosophy? Seneca certainly though so. It was his view that:

Wisdom is the perfect good of the human mind; philosophy is the love of wisdom and the endeavour to attain it.

Things to do if you would like your child to learn more about philosophy:

Read about philosophy and talk to your child about what you have read. There are many books on philosophy written for the general reader. Key words are: philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, theology, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion.
Join the association such as the Philosophy for Children Association of NSW or Dialogue Australia.
Lobby your school principal to include philosophy in the school curriculum.
Organise a group of like minded parents and invite a suitably qualified speaker to run a workshop for your children.

Books

2000-04-19T03:26:00.000-07:00

Books I've written

How to become a Primary Teacher, published by Australian Associated Publishing House, March 2007.
Zen Tails Primary Values Teacher's Guide, published by New Frontier Publishing, March 2006.
Zen Tails Primary Values Student Workbook, published by New Frontier Publishing, March 2006

Books I've edited

Zen Tails: Happiness is Sharing - A First Book of Happiness
Zen Tails: Love is Helping - A First Book of Love
Zen Tails: Wisdom is Listening - A First Book of Wisdom

all published by New Frontier Publishing, 2008