But I’d caution any parents who are thinking of sending their children to a private school to first ask the school whether all the teachers there have been through each of the above steps.

I was a practicum supervisor for some years.

In NSW some teachers have not gone through those stages. In the transitional arrangements which converted two- and three-year-trained teachers to four-year-trained (compulsory in NSW DET) some in the private sector missed out.

If the teacher fulfilled a role as, say, a religious education teacher or sports coach, they were often left there.

This is not to say that these people were/are “bad” teachers or even “incompetent”. After all teachers are a lot of things, not just instructors.

But in terms of the pedagogic skills they could pass on to beginning and student teachers, they could be somewhat lacking.

And the example given, academically qualified though she is, may well fall into a heap when confronted with a class of disruptive adolescent boys. They exist in the private system too, and in spades.

1) A compulsory unit on Child Protection procedures, which include understanding how to identify children at risk of abuse, recognise the signs of abuse, and how to protect children in accordance with ethical guidelines.
2) A compulsory unit on educating children with special needs such as physical, intellectual, behavioural or emotional disabilities.
3) A compulsory practicum component to test whether the teacher is ready for the classroom.
4) Compulsory unit(s) on their chosen subject area(s).

Now, I’m sure Ms. Stone will be an asset to her school. But I’d caution any parents who are thinking of sending their children to a private school to first ask the school whether all the teachers there have been through each of the above steps. If you’re sending your kids to a public school, you needn’t worry about this because all public school teachers have done at least these four minimum things in order to gain or retain their accreditation.

Did you read about that woman Rhodes Scholar, who despite having degrees in Maths and Law, and taught at university could not get a job in the public school system as she did not a fricking Dip. Ed (1 year Critical Literact indoctrination boot-camp). The public system lost their jewel to the private school.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23172235-13881,00.html

Liam , you might also appreciate his ‘Guide to Shakespeare ‘.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov’s_Guide_to_Shakespeare

It helped me get through high school English .

On the other hand, we all learnt an awful lot athat was never on the official curriculum, didn’t we? It’s all basically about socialising the young of the community. And if you have a good teacher, giving you a taste of what might be interesting to explore further at the tertiary or vocational level.

I had a great English teacher that got me into thinking that playing with words could be both fun and profitable, a great sports teacher that introduced me to the fun you you could have on team junkets and how to fiddle the expense accounts afterwards and a great history teacher who encouraged us to take the piss out of the received textbook wisdom.

And an inimitable drunk of a Physics teacher who taught us fuck all about the periodic table and such like but provided a fascinating life lesson in how to successfully go through the motions when you just don’t care about your job anymore.

However once you got him talking about his time flying fighter jets in the RAF until his nose exploded during a high-G turn, he was fascinating. He spent a whole period once, with his “fruit juice tonic” in hand, trying to demonstrate with a bunsen burner, the silver foil wrapping from his ciggie packet and other props, exactly how a afterburner worked. And how it didn’t work if you weren’t paying attention to your level of jet fuel or fruit juice tonic consumption. I can still smell his burning polyester shirt even now.

It was about that point that it dawned on me that grownups were often making it up too as they went along. Suddenly I felt better about my future. But you wouldn’t find that kinda explicit lesson in any secondary school set texts or courses.

“Of”, in this instance, is understood. Or elided, if (as Gable said to Harlow in Red Dust) that makes you feel any better.

I’d be happy to send postcards from America to an Australian audience, because it will be the only chance I get to write using proper spelling and phraseology. Note to self: It’s “couple hundred� not “couple OF hundred�. And “color�, “..ize�, “center�…etc.

While you’re on about proper spelling it’s souvenir, not souvineer.

You could at least pay me the courtesy of addressing my more more explicit points about your “ideas”.

Sorry JG, but I lost interest in paying you any courtesy round about the time you described me as “the problem” and my views as “evil and to be resisted by all level-headed congnisant (sic) beings.”

So here is my discourteous response:

1. It is truly asinine of you to state in one breath that people are “voting with their feet” about public schools, while in the next breath questioning my claim of an erosion in public confidence. What a pity you don’t possess the level of critical literacy that might have prevented you from making such an embarrassing discourse error.

2. Given the excellent standards of higher education in Australia, even 1st year students of anthroplogy understand that religion, language and culture somewhat pre-date the “1980s identity politics” that you seek to demonise, and that religion, language and culture also pre-date by millennia the recently-arisen national identities on which you place such priority. And if you had been paying attention at all during the last 30 years, you would also know that globalisation raises some rather more urgent questions of identity than your assumed primacy of nationhood.

3. Yes, JG the claim that we are raising a generation of illiterates is indeed flatulent. It *is* a beat up by conservative cultural warriors and the Murdoch Press. The people making these claims don’t compare apples with apples, and ignore the fact that our education system is teaching many more Australians both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population, across more subjects, to a greater depth of inquiry, across more advanced skills, than at any time in our history. It is also as wrong, disingenuous and irrelevant to claim that the young are witless as it was when a NSW Deputy Director-General wrote in the 1940s that he didn’t think the people taking their leaving certificate that year would ever amount to anything, or when the Ancient Greeks lamented the dissolution of youth. It has always been impossible for elders to see beyond their own magnificance and to understand that they are being eclipsed by the young.

4. And you know very well, or would know if you had been paying attention in critical literacy class, that my comment about the generation of 2050 was simply to make a rhetorical point that today’s generation will be just as blind in their dotage as every other generation that complained about the young. But still, it’s very considerate of you to save them some time by being obtuse in this decade to avoid the rush.

5. Education Ministers are politicians first and educators a very distant last. Since conservative commentators have made it the fashion these days to talk about ‘falling standards’ and ‘choice’, that is what the politicans find it politically effective to talk about. They will parade these false idols before the voters because they don’t know any better. They will serve up s**t and call it ice-cream and be believed right up until the voters take the pegs off their noses and realises they’re all paying thousands of dollars a year for what their parents got for free. That is what ‘falling standards’ and ‘choice’ are all about.

6. As I said, the critics will remain strident and cloth-eared. Go on, prove me wrong.

And thanks Adrien for giving us the word ‘choreographical’. It’s such a…deliciouvistic word!

I was aware of its constructionality. And you’re most welcome.
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Kim – My comment isn’t illogical. I am in favour of innovation and I believe I’ve made a case that it’s desirable. I don’t think decentralization will fix everything. I think it may allow teachers more leeway for experimentation, schools even. I believe innovation will lead to improvement. I’ve long given up the idea that humans will ever fix everything. Or that we should, what would we do with ourselves? There are many ways to educate we don’t use most of ‘em. Obviously there is a limit to decentralization of, say, curriculum design. We’d have all sorts of batshit courses on offer.
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Providing school education is not akin to selling a product in a market.

I agree that education itself is not reducable to a commodity. It’s too sublime. However providing tuition can be and has been. Again I am not saying it should be necessarily. I am advocating choice and I am advocating creativity. What best facilitates this is a matter of interest and I have been searching for a non-ideological discussion about these issues, thus far to no avail. However:

They don’t have the staffing levels to have people working on policy and innovation. Actually trying to successfully exist in a classroom is more than a full time job for most teachers.

As you yourself here indicate the current situation is hardly ideal.

The increase in numbers of enrolments in these high schools are a direct result of state Govt. investment in these areas. (Which sort of negates some of the comments following JG’s.)

If the Rudd-led education renaissance (a much more apt title Mercurius – thanks ) gets underway nationally, there is no doubt that parents will increasingly move back into the public system.

The flight of middle class parents from co-ed comprehensives was a result of the under-resourcing of public schools, at the very time when education in this country, was ‘extended’ to include working class boys in particular, who in previous generations left to pursue apprenticeships or blue collar jobs, that no longer existed.

Public high schools were totally unprepared for this significant policy direction of massively increasing the numbers of children nationally, who completed Yr 12, during the late 1980’s and 90’s, and unfortunately, this period coincided with significant changes in school discipline policies, uniform policies and other student focused reforms.

The apparent lack of faith in the public high school system does not reflect on the public system overall – many, many parents happily ‘use’ the public system for infants and primary education and then opt for a private high school, making it very clear that parents are not wedded to private education, and would choose a public high school, if a suitable opportunity was available.

Hopefully, we will also see an integration of vocational opportunities through a reinvigorated TAFE system, and of course the opening of more schools for children with serious behavioural issues – a not insignificant factor in dysfunctional public high schools.

The other point – to which JG always refuses to respond to – is that public selective high schools ‘win’ the HSC in NSW every year…..every year!

This is either due to superior children or superior public school teaching – and I think we’d all accept that it is exceptional students, often will much poorer facilities and some excellent teaching, which makes these schools outperform even ‘selective’ private schools like Sydney Grammar, year in, year out.

Why then, is it so hard to accept that public comprehensives, which by law, must take any child living in their geographical boundary, are therefore doomed to always ‘perform more poorly” than any private school in the same area, which selects it’s students?

What is however, becoming apparent to many parents, is that the so-called ‘investment’ of a private education is just not worth the money. With private school fees rising exponentially over the past decade – educating 2 or 3 children in the private sector for 13 years, is equal to, or greater than a second mortgage, with no guarantee of any capital gain to show at the end.

There is already a steady flow of parents back to the public high school system, where there has been significant investment in those schools. Rudd actually doesn’t need to do anything about the private-public divide. Parents as JG keeps stating, will vote with their feet.

My local public co-ed comprehensive high school now has a waiting list, after being considered ‘slacker central’ for a decade or two.

You could at least pay me the courtesy of addressing my more more explicit points about your “ideas.”

http://www.newmatilda.com/2008/02/12/smarter-teachers-not-answer

And I’m not saying ‘one change fixes everything’, I’m saying many small changes may lead to great improvement.

That’s illogical if it rests on the premise that decision making should be decentralised to school level. Providing school education is not akin to selling a product in a market. Schools aren’t really “competitors” and have enough to do without looking over each others’ shoulders to see what’s working elsewhere. They don’t have the staffing levels to have people working on policy and innovation. Actually trying to successfully exist in a classroom is more than a full time job for most teachers.

Diffusion of ideas is actually the role of the dreaded educational bureaucrats and academics – to find what works best in a particular school and see if it can be more widely implemented.

Even with a voucher system, and league tables, choosing a school for your kids is not akin to choosing a brand of shoes on the basis (say) of price, style and comfort. You don’t walk into a schools bazaar and make a purchase. The decision is much more “sticky” and much more constrained by exogenous factors. Though people sometimes do move suburbs for the purpose of their kids’ school, you can hopefully see how this is a big thing. And it’s pretty deleterious to most kids to be moved around too much – you wouldn’t yank your kid out of a school four months into semester because you’d heard that there’s a better one across town. In any case, if the same curriculum wasn’t being taught, there’d be an obvious problem!

As to the Per Capita mob, what happens to the kids when their “bad school” gets closed down?

If social cohesion isn’t encouraged or at least potentially provided for indirectly in our schools creating a common public space in which children can be socialised (in the psychological, not political, sense), then I can’t think of any other domain more capable of producing it…can you?

Thanks JG for the ‘evil’ comment. I shall frame that one as a souvineer on the wall of my misty castle while I cackle maniacally and play the pipe organ to the accompaniment of the approaching thunderstorm.

And thanks Adrien for giving us the word ‘choreographical’. It’s such a…deliciouvistic word!

I’d be happy to send postcards from America to an Australian audience, because it will be the only chance I get to write using proper spelling and phraseology. Note to self: It’s “couple hundred” not “couple OF hundred”. And “color”, “..ize”, “center”…etc.