I was struggling to remember the other one, but yes it’s Angel Rendle-Short.

As time went by we carried the burden of advice on controversial material. That is the Ministerials usually came to us to draft a reply.

I remember when we got a youngish staff member who was a terrific speed reader to read James Baldwin’s Another Country. He came back two hours later saying he found it a lacerating experience which every growing boy should have. So we gave it to one of the mature women to have a go.

The problem really was that there was some sympathy for the Rona’s and the Angel’s amongst the directors, not to mention ministers like Lyn Powell. I recall a certain DG who came out of technical education telling me that there should be no words in novels in our schools that he wouldn’t use around the breakfast table. That was when families had breakfast around a table, obviously. So if Ivan Denisovich let one rip when he saw the temperature was just above -20C and had to go out and work in the snow, it didn’t matter, if the DG didn’t use it in front of the missus and kids it was out.

We got around this by suggesting that it was a matter of community values and developing guidelines for procedures the schools could use.

But I’m sure many schools didn’t know about the guidelines, or if they did, pretended they didn’t, and it didn’t save the principal from taking the easy way out and just banning the thing anyway if he (almost always he) wanted to.

I still have a complete set.

I well remember engaging Rona along with Angel Rendle-Short (Sp?) in many public meetings including one that was televised on the ABC on the 7:30 Report or whatever it was called at the time.

I’m not sure that I have the same fond memories of Bill as you have. Bill lectured me at Teachers’ College and later I heard he was somewhat of a religious bigot. Seems he had a thing about Catholics, or so the gossip went.

He also intoduced Maths in Modules, as I recall, that became known as Maths in Mothballs. A complete and expensive failure. Nuffield?

As to your main point, yes Queensland Education was retarded for years. Labor in the fifties thought ‘primary’ was sufficient and subsequent governments tended to agree.

It was through Whitlam’s Disadvantaged Schools Program that MACOS arrived. Whitlam had a profound, positive effect on QLD education through the DSP.

Memories, memories …

People with sick minds will see genitalia in everything

Or people who’ve just read Freud for the first time. .
>
Bolt should be trying to get Surrealism banned. There are genitals in everything those people do.

So he didn’t suffer the Bjelke Petersen years of cultural oppression as an adult.

Queensland primary education was very bare boards, talk and chalk, focussed on the three R’s and with very large classes until the 1960s and into the early 70s. In the late 60’s the then Research and Curriculum Branch with the Social Studies syllabus committee introduced the so-called ’social studies mini-libraries’ into classrooms to extend from the single text approach. Central school libraries were often of the broom cupboard under the stairs variety.

They also introduced the Man: a Course of Study (MACOS) and boy did that cause a storm. It was clear to certain moral campaigners that kids were being taught incest, for example, because obviously there would be incest if Netsilik families slept in one igloo. STOP (Society to Outlaw Pornography) and CARE (Campaign Against Regressive Education) fought and raged against the forces of darkness. The redoubtable Rona Joyner it is said asked only one commitment from members apart from money – that they agreed in advance with whatever she might say.

Around the turn of the decade a dynamic Director of Primary Education was appointed who was determined to drag the system out of the 19th century. At the same time Supervisors in Art, Music and School Libraries were appointed as well as a San Hose trained (that’s probably the right word) media man to promote all the new and some old audio-visual technologies.

(Ironically, if you google Rona Joyner you’ll find stuff, whereas the said director, a bloke called Bill Hamilton, you won’t.)

With the inputs of the Whitlam years schooling in Queensland pretty much caught up with the rest of the country.

By the 1980s Queensland had very good art and music education throughout the schooling system.

Rudd’s education was defective, he was out of here before things improved, and I’m afraid the early deficiencies in his education were never remediated later.

I just suggested, tongue in cheek that mark should pick the controversial pics to illustrate the post, rather than the landscapes.

An assertion has been thrown around at different places that none of hensons pics show underage girls ‘below the waist’, or only if they are shadowed.

I just think that is misleading in terms of this debate.

As for the age of the girl in ‘the age’ picture – she may not have been chronologically thirteen, but unless she is developmentally delayed she appears around his age, or more likely 12.

And no, i do not consider that picture pornographic.

Also, nothing in the article says how old that model was, only that she was a teenager.

Let’s get the facts straight.

If that is the case, anybody who cannot understand the furore (or why police were involved) has severe cognitive problems.

So why imply he has no right to give his opinion, or, without evidence, that it was not an honest one?

FDP do not fear.
“Scrotum”, as a word, should have been given the sac years ago.

Pottery even.

As my dear old Ma used to say, if you don’t have anything correctly spelled to say, don’t say anything at all.