The Young Liberals’ “Make Education Fair” campaign, which I wrote about a few months ago, has resulted in a Senate inquiry, one of the last legacies of the Coalition’s majority in the upper house. The terms of reference are:
The current level of academic freedom in school and higher education, with particular reference to:1. the level of intellectual diversity and the impact of ideological, political and cultural prejudice in the teaching of senior secondary education and of courses at Australian universities, including but not limited to:
1. the content of curricula,
2. the content of course materials,
3. the conduct of teaching professionals, and
4. the conduct of student assessments;2. the need for the teaching of senior secondary and university courses to reflect a plurality of views, be accurate, fair, balanced and in context; and
3. ways in which intellectual diversity and contestability of ideas may be promoted and protected, including the concept of a charter of academic freedoms.
I would imagine this inquiry will produce next to nothing useful, because even if you concede the good faith of those proposing it, it’s conceptually deeply flawed, as Andrew Norton argues.
Though there is precedent for the idea of academic freedom for students, I don’t think this is a useful concept, especially not for school students or undergraduates. Their main task is to master a body of knowledge, the content of which is to be determined by those with expertise in the field.
I’d broadly endorse the rest of his post.
Update: Katharine Gelber from UNSW writes about the Senate Committee in On Line Opinion.
This one has major backfiring potential. Grant government a power (such as academic oversight) and by god it will get used.
It was an iffy campaign in the original form, but this is just not thinking ahead.
According to the line of reasoning behind that enquiry, there ought to be the same proportionate representation among senior school and university teacher of terminally stupid idiots as there is in the general population.
This proposition of course would be strongly supported by terminally stupid idiots, who are under-represented everywhere with the exception of amongst politicians.
How should academic bias be dealt with?
what academic bias?
A very un-liberal thing for Young ‘Liberals’ to suggest.
In fact, it’s very un-Liberal as well. Government enforcing diversity? “cultural prejudice”? Sounds like a recipe for ‘moral equivalence’, that bete noire of the Right.
http://andrewnorton.info/2008/06/do-students-have-academic-freedom/#comment-17202
conrad’s comment is spot on
I just marked around 200 second year assignments. I mark for quality of argument first, if it is an essay.
The Young Liberals have become that which they hate the most; proponents of feel-good policies which attempt to encourage diversity.
I agree with Andrew Norton that this idea is useless in the undergraduate and school level. If there’s a place where this would pose a problem it’s at the Postgraduate level where potential supervisors can gang up and refuse to take on a student with an unorthodox topic/agenda. Even then, the supervisor doesn’t play as strong a role in an original research degree as they do in an Honours degree. There are plenty of ways around “academic bias” even if it does exist.
MikeM at 2 – one could argue, then, that Andrew Bolt is effectively providing an affirmative action program for over-representing stupidity on blog threads.
Andrew’s core point about “bias” is spot on – if what we are talking about is educating, there is no such thing if we’re talking about introducing students to critical thinking and debates within the academic literature and how to evaluate them. To take an example from political sociology and/or public policy, understanding how power works in the decision-making process has been approached from a number of perspectives. It may be that there are some normative claims in some of the paradigms employed (for instance in American style pluralism, but also in neo-Weberian elitism and various Marxisms or radical theories), but what’s more important than “balancing” that with another paradigm is understanding what role normative assumptions play in theory construction, and moving on from that to understanding which theories best fit the data. You could construct hypotheses for explaining decision making in, say, the response to global warming, and test them in various ways. None of that would imply any partisan conclusions, though it would involve foregrounding political assumptions which (inevitably) factor in to social science work on politics and public policy.
In teaching this stuff, my own political opinions are of very little relevance, and most of the time it would be pedagogically wrong to discuss them. But some sort of “balanced” presentation is neither possible, nor desirable, because the relevant criterion for evaluation should be the best approximation to truth not the representation of opinions. That’s a social science example, of course, and things are different in other fields of study. But what remains true is that conceiving higher education in terms of “bias” is actually politicising it.
This is a perennial problem for right-wingers, as the most basic tools of critical thought tend (not inevitaly, but tend) to encourage the rethinking taken for granted assumptions.
To the extent that there is a slight anti-Conservative bias – its an indirect product of post-rennaisance mode of inquiry.
Before that, one would consult the classics to see how may teeth a horse had – rather than just go count them.
I hasten to add, this mode of enquiry was and is the very lifeblood of liberalism: of its charges against the arbitrary authority (and epistemology) of aristocracy and tyranny. I therefore use the term “anti-Conservative” bias in its narrowest politcal sense.
So, unless you’re a hoodwinked, backward looking hardline fundamentalist old monarchist twit who’s suspicious of modern science, there really should be no issue.
Ahhhh… right….
Norton gets it right:
How does one seperate a legitimate sociology of the working-class from ’socialism’ for example. One can’t. The people behind this organization and the inquiry are only talking about a different kind of Academic Unfreedom anyway.
Exactly. Students should be made aware of the broad range of debate and research in the field. And naturally entitled to pursue their own way thru it insofar as the displine allows that. You don’t even have to pick a side. I wrote essays using, say, MH Abrahms and Terry Eagleton oblivious that one was of the Academic ‘Right’ the other of the ‘Left’. To my knowledge no-one was ever punished for their ‘politics’.
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However I have talked to undergards recently and they do feel that they are being fed a line (ie not being aware of a debate) and also might be punished. So perhaps ‘professionalism’ needs a look see.
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But it’s not Parliament’s business.
Adrien, there are decided benefits to introducing students to debates and positions within the literature, but what I want to emphasise is that the skills of evaluation and fostering critical thinking and evaluation are inseparable from that. In my experience, one of the hardest things for students to grasp is where particular authors or theoretical perspectives sit within academic debates. It’s worth trying to explicitly teach this, but one big factor working against it is the growth of instrumentalism in student approaches to learning – “how many articles do I need to read to get a pass?”, “how will this course help me get a job?”, etc.
That’s all perfectly true Mark.
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In fact 85% of students don’t have to be aware of ‘debates’ and couldn’t care less. Likewise one can regurgitate Marxism for three years, not be a Marxist and glean valuable skills of research, application, analysis and composition.
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And then go of to work as a marketer for a multinational.
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But as anyone who knows and respects the great Graeme Bird is aware, you are a Neo-Gramscian agent under deep cover taking your orders from Kim Jong-il. So you would say that wouldn’t you.
MikeM wrote, inter alia: “This proposition of course would be strongly supported by terminally stupid idiots, who are under-represented everywhere with the exception of amongst politicians.”
Would you be so good, MikeM, as to lay out the empirical bases for your hypothesis? Are you using the Standard Australian Idiot Index (with parametric adjustments based on the Quinceland Social Surveys)? Or do you incline to the “Look Whom They Elected This Time? Guffaw Chronicles” vols I-LIII, loc cit? You may be interested in some very recent work concerning the deconstruction of “idiot” qua and re class positioning. It’s not a pleasant narrative.
Ibid.
Conversely, Adrien at 11, I might be a sellout to teh evil Rupert Murdoch if you believe gandhi… You can’t please all of the people etc.
Btw, the Young Libs seem to have ignored their own strictures on “balance” by hosting a forum featuring Kevin Donnelly and Keith Windschuttle.
http://www.makeeducationfair.org.au/
It’ll be interesting to see whether those two learned gentlemen appear before the committee. Or perhaps it could be the first Senate Committee evah where op/eds are produced in evidence?
Op/eds? It could descend into farce if students appear, whingeing that their low marks are ENTIRELY the result of their Liberal beliefs. Will the Senate have their scorned essays blind marked by an independent adjudicator? A new promise: “By 2015, no child shall fail an essay just because she is related to Prue Goward!”
The fact is that many curriculums are biased to the left, where feminism and Marxism are given undue emphasis, and libertarian or conservative theory is rarely given a look in.
I don’t see any issues with diagnosing the problem. The real difficulty is proposing solutions.
I too have blogged on this, and Jacques Chester has helped reinforce the point: the right despise pointyhead intellectuals to the point where no Young Lib wants to become one.
The Liberal student activists from the mid ’70s (Costello, Abbott) to the late ’80s/early ’90s (Sophie Panopoulos, Joe Hockey) cut their teeth on AUS and VSU, and Lib students are looking for equivalents for the current generation of students.
Hopefully this will become a lesson in good public policy: for some problems, no amount of sloganeering will change a situation that you want changed. Conservatives need to take the chance in sponsoring academic pursuits – there is, to use a rightwing catch-phrase, no alternative. The last Australian conservative who actively encouraged young conservatives to hone their intellectual skills was C D Kemp. With the failure of American conservatism months away, this need will become all the more acute.
What about Chandran Kukathas, Andrew, surely he’s younger than Kemp? Though I acknowledge he’s joined the brain drain.
The spectre looming over this campaign is the paradigm of the market. Education as a commodity there to meet the needs or wants of the consumer/student. The rhetoric of “balance” or “diversity” is code for consumer choice, with all of the ideological implication that entails.
Re Leon at 16. One basic academic skill those who are proponents of the “bias” argument might cultivate, seeing as they are so concerned with the quality of education, is the fundamental one of citing sources and supporting assertions with evidence rather than making ungrounded generalisations.
“The fact is that many curriculums are biased to the left, where feminism and Marxism are given undue emphasis, and libertarian or conservative theory is rarely given a look in.”
Indeed. The majority of people enrolled in tertiary courses here in Australia are studying in areas like science, medicine, law and commerce where they are constantly exposed to the teachings of the likes of Marcuse and Dworkin (Andrea) at the expense of their core subjects. It’s a bloody wonder our buildings stay up, people survive operations, contracts actually work and our businesses can balance their books.
Hmm, reading that back now, I realise Leon probably won’t realise it’s satire. On the other hand I’m confident it’s not the first time he won’t realise the joke’s on him.
Mark,
I’m always happy to provide examples: leonbertrand.blogspot.com/2008/02/griffith-law-school-leftist-clique.html. I do believe the Young Libs had plenty of examples on their website. You might wanna take a look.
Nabakov,
If that’s the best you can do then you are pretty much admitting that arts and law courses are biased.
CITAYSHUNS: UR DOIN IT RONG
So, Leon, in support of your assertions, you cite…yourself?!?
Thanks for the coffee-through-the-nose moment.
Leon is always good for a laugh
As for the ‘evidence’ on the Young Libs’ web site … well let’s just say it’s less than compelling.
The campaign is a remnant of Howard’s culture wars and his attempt to impose a ‘balanced’ curriculum in history and English. The purported balance consisted of taking these subject areas back to the 1950s when white Anglo-Saxons ruled the world as god’s agents. It’s good sometimes to reflect on the damage we were spared by the last election result.
Mark at 11 – perhaps they can invite David Horowitz to appear as guest speaker to balance the two locals. After all, like most of Howard’s culture wars obsessions, this whole exercise is pathetic mimicking of what the wingnuts get up to in the USA.
Even the Liberal aligned students who run the UQ Union at the moment want nothing to do with this campaign. I think that says something about its worth.
Well I’d agree that it doesn’t sound like a job for government to address. Insofar as there could be a problem, it’s got to be one of institutional culture, and would have to be addressed at that level. Indeed, calm, sustained, clarifying, non-accusatory and open discussion is probably the best and maybe even the only antidote, given you’re talking about the professional handling of ideas and not say a toothbrush factory.
But it may well be that those who are quick to dismiss the very notion that this sort of a problem could exist, may simply be the ones sitting in the comfiest chairs at the moment, atmospherically speaking. It’s at least worth the trouble of getting up and walking around the room to check.
It’s possible to create a subtle climate of fear without resorting to overt intellectual persecution, (esp. amongst undergraduates, who are young and socially vulnerable and know little about the world) and this does go on to an extent that is at least noticeable; and there’s opportunity cost involved in creating such a climate. Whether it’s the norm or simply noticeable depends where you are, of course, and naturally I wouldn’t have a sense of things in Australia. But it’s not out of the question. Think of little things like a paper comfortably saying something like “As Foucault has shown,” instead of the much more accurate “as Foucault has argued, or proposed, or attempted to show.”
Nabakov: “The majority of people enrolled in tertiary courses here in Australia are studying in areas like science, medicine, law and commerce…”
Yeah, that’s a fair point, but surely you’re aware that the neatest trick in the lobbyist’s tool-kit is to so completely envelope the target with instances of your own point of view, that he gradually becomes unaware that any other points of view might even be out there. The hard sciences might not be directly involved in culture skirmishing, but they’re taught and practiced on the same block as all the other critters, and often the walls are pretty thin, you could be surprised how much you overhear, and how often. Osmosis is an amazing thing.
Some notable blogger or other (forget who, possibly Steve Sailer) said an interesting thing a while back (and pace Mercurius above, this isn’t evidence strictly speaking, just an observation). I think it may have been in the context of the James Watson ruckus. He said that on average, most hard-science researchers and academics (in America probably) espouse a moderately left-of-centre politics; but that then again, what most scientists are looking for more than anything else, is a quiet life so they can go on doing their research undisturbed.
When I hear a Liberal talk about “balance” I assume its the same “balance” they inflicted on the ABC or of the Windschuttle sort – just as RQF was an extremely “balanced” way of determing funding.
Ambigulous @ 13
In the absence of adequate independent validation of the Standard Australian Idiot Index or the “Look Whom They Elected This Time? Guffaw Chronicles”, I was forced to fall back on the Lynn Academic Religiosity Index, which provides a plausible surrogate for the phenomena under study, http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Intelligent-people-less-likely-to-believe-in-God-Study/321879. Confirmatory evidence about politics attracting a high representation of the terminally stupid is demonstrated by the New South Wales government’s idiotic restrictions in preparation for World Youth Day.
In no way do I wish to suggest though that the Lynn Index explains the phenomenon of Andrew Bolt.
I have to say even as a Liberal, in my personal view this campaign is pathetic.
I am all for holding academics to account when it comes to teaching quality student assessment, feedback, academic integrity, rigorousness of research output and publications record. However, to vilify someone for their personal political views is McCarthyist.
While I am a Liberal (who would one day like to be an academic) I admire a large number of academics with often very hard-Left views because they are fantastic researchers with innovative ideas and approaches. (Small and big “L”) Liberals shouldn’t be afraid of being exposed to those with very different views. It sounds as if these conservatives are actually afraid of “Left-exposure” for fear of being “tainted”!
There are so many things about Australian academia that need to be urgently addressed (most importantly the “brain drain”) – why can’t these things be the focus of political campaigns? Furthermore, from a liberal perspective, if a student doesn’t like a particular lecturer or the ethos of a particular department then they should exercise their CHOICE and change subject/degree/university. There are a wide and diverse range of university experiences in Australia and more than enough scope for students who feel so incensed by the pervasive influence of Marxism in Mining Engineering (or whatever) that those students can simply vote with their feet.
Moreover I think this is poor politics that plays to a relative minority of the right-wing base. My experience of those “rat warrens of the Left” – Arts departments – is that most of the lecturers (on a personal level) are pretty much moderate leftists with a smattering of cynicals, liberals, marxists and postmodernists. That said, despite the personal political affiliation of the individual lecturer, what students ACTUALLY care about is whether or not their lecturer is engaging, charismatic, passionate about the subject matter, a fair marker capable of giving useful and thorough feedback and a competent researcher.
It’s really unfortunate that these conservatives seem so out of touch with the interests and concerns of the average student.
That said, despite the personal political affiliation of the individual lecturer, what students ACTUALLY care about is whether or not their lecturer is engaging, charismatic, passionate about the subject matter, a fair marker capable of giving useful and thorough feedback and a competent researcher.
All that, but of course the main criterion is ‘did the lecturer show enough videos?’ I had three evaluation repsonses last year indicating a studently desire for more showing of videos.
MH at #19 is dead right. This farce is the logical outcome of the overarching and too rarely challenged assumption that education is a commodity and students should behave like consumers.
“I had three evaluation repsonses last year indicating a studently desire for more showing of videos.”
I just ordered about 6 classes worth! Good to see I’ve anticipated a trend.
Perhaps we could open a new “fair & balanced” educational institution…name it O’Reilly University. I’m sure the Lib students would find it RIGHT up their alley.
The Uni motto could be
Veritas
“So, Leon, in support of your assertions, you cite…yourself?!?”
What? Something dosen’t exist unless some academic has published something about it?
That would require academics to write about their own left bias…
“What? Something dosen’t exist unless some academic has published something about it?”
I don’t think anybody was asking you to supply evidence from a peer-reviewed academic publication, Leon.
Just some evidence.
EVIDENCE!!!!
There’s evidence of settlements
With one long village street.
Farmsteads, hamlets, little towns,
The framework was complete.
By the time…
BACKING VOCALS: Of the Norman Conquest!
…the rural framework was complete.
MikeM @ 28, I too share your apparent scepticism concerning the Standard Australian Idiot Index, as it appears to under-report the number of drongos per square kilometer in Spring Street (Melbourne).
Prof Andrew Bolt is indeed unique, but surely that provides an extra challenge to the keen researcher, does it not?
Mark said: “the relevant criterion for evaluation should be the best approximation to truth not the representation of opinions”.
The ‘Make Education Fair’ Campaign is – like much of the right wing’s intellectual base – has nothing to do with truth, and is in fact about obscuring truth. The history of right wing politics in the past thirty years or so across the globe has been about obscuring from working class people the destruction of democracy for the benefit of the plutocracy. The MEF Campaign is more of the same.
It is not about “is this true because it meets standards of reliability against observed facts”, it is about whose ‘truth’ should be priveleged. And the truth they want priveleged, is the ‘truth’ of the priveleged.
That may well be so, Kevin, but they don’t seem to have a very coherent notion of what that truth might entail. I read it far more as part of the right’s co-optation of what they think is the core of identity politics American style – claiming victimhood because the precious petals don’t get sufficient affirmation and recognition of their “beliefs”… which is a very standard and a completely boring move in the bogus culture wars.
They do have a point, thought, Mark. People don’t tend to affirm and recognise an agenda to transfer massive amounts of wealth to sickly rich people without having the wool pulled over their eyes. The poor bubs are feeling under-appreciated …
It is always interesting to see how students from different backgrounds respond to some of the facts of international political economy, Kevin, let me just say. But I think what I’m trying to get at with the desired pedagogy of the anti-bias-ists is that their idea of what would constitute “truth” in “education” is radically incoherent.
Agreed!
Marxism is old hat. I’m not sure why this assertion keeps getting made without data to back it up. I’ve encountered academics with bias: left and right, in the Arts. Generally there’s an assumption that lecturers in the humantiies tilt to the left. There’s the oppositre assumption im commerce faculties. Have a guess why. Trying to purge Universities of ‘left-wing’ bias ends up with a witch-hunt. The question is professionalism not political correctness of any stripe.
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I did some very valuable courses that advocated a philisophical line that could not be classified as ‘left-wing’ really. More ‘anti-humanist’. There was no debating this line in the course. However the assessment required the development of excellence in a range of skills. Nowadays I endorse some of the propositions of my teachers’ idiosyncratic philsophy, reject others and know why. There was no brainwashing.
Mark –
Brilliant! You’ve thrown the enemy into total confusion. Are you working for Karla? Is your typewriter a bug that produces two kinds of intoxicating liquids when it likes what you’ve written.
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That what’s wrong with the Arts these days. No Mugwump jism. Seriously.
Is the hidden curriculum guilty of bias?
Ah, a dialectician!
Perhaps the privileged Right could send their yoof to a Uni that’s run like a hotel?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNspFSUv0nM
(Barton Fink (1 of 3) – “Checking In”)
There’s always Bond, I spose, but it’s probably full of teh postmodernism. Or something. Maybe that Catholic “liberal arts” college that’s been such a success in Sydney? Western Civ, Cardinal Pell approved curriculum, etc. Haven’t heard of it? Funny that!
Wow, I just had a look at the website for the campaign. Oh my God! ppl are like putting up posters up around campus and stuff! I know many, many people that have trouble ignoring posters espousing far left economic theory.
Also, ppl have classes full of Labor and Green supporting students! The government should introduce some sort of affirmative action policy to increase the number of right wing students at universities.
Tick. Howard did. Full fee paying places in Law Schools for domestic students.
This is the key. This must be the policy. In fact demand it now. We need to ensure that the political spectrum is porportionally represented. In every discipline.
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We need to make sure that people who want to read history read marketing for the good of society. And people who want to read marketing must study the data viz Ettienne de Coucy’s days after the siege of Constantinople, as the Sultan’s prisoner, in the opening years of the 15th century.
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They must spend their lives in this pursuit. Society can only be benefit from wasting money producing people who’re both useless and unhappy.
I’d actually like a traditional Humanities academy in Australia. Not all of them. But at least one. There’s good stuff in old books. The above could be really good with a little editing.
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Just change Western Civ to Civilization and remove everything that comes afterward.
As I am sure has been remarked before, the John Howard (who?) school of history was not, despite its rhetoric, about prioritising facts over narratives, but rather about wanting to mandate different narratives to be taught.
I remember Howard on a Hypotheticals program arguing that the Gallipoli story shouldn’t be over analyzed because it was such an important foundational stroy for Australia. (It was the 80s but I don’t think his historical approach really changed.)
The website itself seems to have been set up by a bunch of raving lunatics who have an obsession with certain sexual practices. If you can be bothered following the link to the photo gallery of the ‘campus environment’ you are treated to a weird collection indeed. Interspersed among the shock horror socialist posters (not at a university, who would have thought – how unfair) are pages and pages of extremely educational information about non-mainstream sexual practices and how to carry them out without doing to much damage to yourself or your partner/s.
I congratulate the Young Libs for sharing this info with a wider audience to promote safer sex and therefore making education fairer. Or something.
Warning: Not necessarily work friendly.
Aaah – make that ‘too much damage…’ Guess I just got over excited.
That’s right. Whatever you do don’t mention the genocide. Robert Manne did once but I think
they took him round the back and shot himhe got away with it.“Guess I just got over excited.”
adrian, it’s a worry if Young Libs can have that effect on you. I’d suggest a cold shower, but not having visited their website, I can’t be sure they’re not advocating those ’special’ Finnish cold showers in the snow with plenty of ……
ummm {sorry}
Update: Katharine Gelber from UNSW writes about the Senate Committee in On Line Opinion.
It is important to distinguish between the impact of educational bias at a high school and the impact at a university level.
High school kids are like sponges. Particularly in their younger years, they may not yet have a political orientation and keenly absorb what their teachers tell them. They are politically malleable and susceptable to influence. That is why the education system has a responsibility to present both sides of the political spectrum. The youth needs to be exposed to political diversity in order to form an educated opinion.
I know I do not constitute a fair samply study, but in my high school experiences there was certainly a severe lack of political diversity in the classroom. My teachers made daily flippant remarks about Mr Howard/Mr Bush/Mr Windschuttle/Israel/[insert left-wing target] whereas a conservative input was non-existent.
Yet it appears that you, lara, were not just a sponge who keenly absorbed these daily flippant remarks that your teachers told you. Is it that you were particularly non-malleable and non-susceptible to influence, unlike all those other weak-minded saps who agreed more with the teachers than they did with you?
Or did those other students just come to a different conclusion based on different premises?
Most high school kids in my experience tend to react to their parents more than their teachers when it comes to politics, religion and much else – they either generally follow their parents’ line or absolutely rebel, and in either case it’s because of parent-child dynamics, not parent-teacher dynamics. The rebellious child may find a teacher to whom to tie their rebellion, but that would still happen even if there were only one flippant left-wing teacher in a school of conservative teachers – it’s not caused by the teacher, it’s caused by the family dynamics.
It takes a few years away from home before most people truly make adult decisions about major matters where huge differences of opinion exist.
The worst propaganda I was ever exposed to at my (secular) school came from a couple of Christian teachers who were trying to convert us.
I would agree with tigtog. If a high school teacher touches a responsive chord with a student about a political issue, it will almost certainly be a case of accidentally watering a seed that has been planted by someone else, earlier in the student’s life and/or outside the schooling context.
And my first experience of political bias in teaching was in Grade 3, when our teacher stated in quite intense tones that we had to be involved in the Vietnam War because if we didn’t the communists would flood down from the north and “overtake us”. The next year we had a teacher in Grade 4 who subsequently stood for a Federal election as a candidate for the Democratic Labor Party. I don’t recall any efforts to spare us kids from the actual (in one case) or potential (in the other) political bias of these two individuals.
Why would teachers be less effective at influencing students on political issues than they are expected to be on issues such as say behavioural issues? Teachers are often credited with inspiring students into certain areas – is it really the case that it would have happened anyway and teachers have little influence?
Any expectation that teachers can be the primary influence on behavioural issues is also horribly misplaced, in my view. The commonly soundbited expectation that teachers should do all the heavy lifting in this area is a cop-out, used primarily by parents who have allowed crappy television to do way too much babysitting and then wonder why their kids have crappy attitudes.
There’s also a strong distinction to be made between large social movements such as politics and religion, and personal inspirations to follow a certain career. Teachers can be enormously influential regarding the latter, but in the former, as Paul says, they can only water the seeds that others have already planted.
How many inspiring teachers are there though? I can only recall a couple that really inspired me.
Same here, DJ. Most of the rest were perfectly competent instructors, many of them were pleasant people to converse with once I was a senior student rather than a wet and weedy grub, and there were only a couple of tossers.
Politics and religion may be large social movements, but they are also career choices for some as well, even if it is commonly only for a few years. Effective teachers can have a very strong influence on students,
good or bad depending on your point of view.
The fundamentals do have to be there (watering the seeds), but this also is true for careers as well.
“Yet it appears that you, lara, were not just a sponge who keenly absorbed these daily flippant remarks that your teachers told you. Is it that you were particularly non-malleable and non-susceptible to influence, unlike all those other weak-minded saps who agreed more with the teachers than they did with you?”
Tigtog, did I say that I was unaffected or unmalleable? I too caught myself inadvertedly forming left-wing opinions based on incomplete and partial information delivered to me by my teachers. I think that that is a normal response. I also disagree with you that being a thirteen year old who respects and absorbs the words of an older and wiser educator constitutes being a “weak-minded sap”.
“Most high school kids in my experience tend to react to their parents more than their teachers”
I don’t think that either of us can fairly quantify which of parents or teachers have a greater influence on children. This is entirely subjective and varies between individuals. School may be the primary or sole means of political influence/education for some students. Your vision seems to be one of chaos where children randomly find individuals or specific teachers to “tie down their rebellion”. Yes, this may occur in some cases but if you think that this is the common practise regarding political affiliation in high school then you are going too far. You are obscuring the broader issue: teachers as a whole have an influence.
Also, sorry for taking this long to reply. I didn’t realise anyone would reply to my post
No need to disagree, I was merely sarcastically rephrasing what I perceived to be your argument about your peers. I also don’t think that kids of that age are weak-minded saps, as the rest of my comment made clear. (Although I do think it is short-sighted for any parent to teach a child that “the words of an older and wiser educator” should be absorbed uncritically.)
Nothing random about it. Children/teens have a propensity to either rebel or not which is based on their relationship with their parents more than anything else: do they identify with their parents’ choices and aspirations, or do they find them jarring and doubtful?
Do the parents conform with the “respectable” community, or are they non-conformists? If non-conformists, do they belong to a supportive subculture, or are they isolates? All these aspects of the parents’ relationship with the community as well as their empathy with their own child and the child’s trust and respect for them will influence whether a child rebels against their parents or not, and whether they rebel against the community norm or not. That in turn strongly influences which teachings they will find attractive/convincing.
Teachers have influence on those students who want to listen to them. They don’t create that wish out of thin air.