Ross Farrelly

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 ...

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 unspecifie...

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 dom...

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 soc...

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 ch...

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...

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 la...