Now that the Howard gubbermint is ancient history – except in the memoirs of the ghost of Peter Costello who wants you to know that Howard LIED six times and failed to hand him the leadership on a platter (ps. don’t waste your 55 bucks on his stoopid book – it’s been scooped, and that’s about it, except Pete WAS TEH BEST TREASURER EVAH! and could have singlehandedly sorted the international credit crisis) – there’s very little force, I’d have thought, in a claim that “the history wars have been revived”. A claim made by the usual suspects – particularly Dr Kevin Donnelly – that teh Communists have their hands on the history curriculum under a Labor Government. Read all about it here – in Crikey – by Jeff Sparrow – who skewers this nonsense without even raising a sweat, I suspect. As you were. No narrative here. Look away. There’s commies under your bed though.
Also, and just asking, how does Anna Clark, who did a lot of actual research into what high school students in Australia and Canada thought about their national histories (answer – boring as) get pinged constantly as “Granddaughter of Manning Clark”… ZOMG! Probs a Commie too! Just like Stuart MacIntyre! We await the family tree of Dr Kevin Donnelly and Mr Keith Windschuttle. We trust their antecedents are pure. Or maybe this silliness only happens because Anna is… (shock!) a female. And therefore presumably unable to be distinguished from her Grandfather.
Taking this nonsense seriously for just one second, has it occurred to teh History Warriors that maybe Stuart MacIntyre is actually performing a bit of a public service? Not everyone is an underemployed “education consultant” or thinktank “Fellow” and able to drop everything to ensure the teh kidz learn teh Story of Australia.
Or, maybe this nonsense shouldn’t be taken seriously at all?
Elsewhere: Carlton’s lone classic liberal Andrew Norton on conservative educational delusions.
Elsewhere: Carlton’s lone classic liberal Andrew Norton on conservative educational delusions.
We are at war with Stuart Macintyre. We have always been at war with Stuart Macintyre.
Impervious to irony as always, The Australian…
1) …rubbishes the notion that the teaching of literacy is a “moral, political and cultural decision”. This from the same newspaper that wants more more more teaching of Shakespeare, Austen and T.S. Eliot. On what grounds? Their scientific merit?
2) …seeks to vet the political backgrounds of new appointees before it decides whether to agree with them. This from the same newspaper that decries ‘political correctness’.
Yet Matthew Arnold, when arguing to establish the first Chairs of English Literature in the 19th century, made much of the moral, political and cultural advantages of widespread reading of English and British literature. Maybe Matthew Arnold’s cultural supremacist arguments are closer to the Oz’s political taste, and Arnold is dead, white and male enough, for the Australian to accept what it won’t accept from those pinkos?
Further back, the first proponents of public education and mass literacy programs argued for them on the grounds of improving the moral fibre of the lower classes, saving their souls from depravity, and making them into more useful and obedient servants of the political classes. It certainly wasn’t argued from a “scientific” viewpoint. I guess the Oz just regrets it when the people who receive this munificent boon of literacy get all uppity and no longer know their proper place, which most certainly isn’t on the NCB.
Well, in a Leavisite sence?
I went to that link and was told I’d have to register to read it. Some sites I do register but I’m a little leery of the Eric Beecher run ‘Crikey’ site Kim. Sear
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2349569.htm
Beecher said something about working with the police on that episode. Then Jeff Sparrow IS a fairly famous supporter of Police-state style Red-Fascism. Sear Leftwrites. ‘ Bourgeois’ human and civil rights don’t mean shit to a Left-fascist.
Most of us know already they don’t mean much to the Austrian, I suspect.
Bottom-line I’d rather the Australian wins than the Green Left Weekly and the sooner Crikey drops off the better imho. Beecher is the penultimate creep.
Gosh I hope we’re not all judged by our grandfathers, one of mine enjoyed writing encouraging letters to B.A. Santamaria. Or does it only play against you if your grandfather was a lefty?
From the Donnelly’s character smear published in the OO:
No Kev. Macintyre doesn’t dismiss “a grand narrative”. He argues against it. He is a leading figure in a longstanding historical debate.
Debates such as this debate are one of the central rationales for the existence of history as an academic discipline. If we didn’t have debates like this then we may as well not study history.
What do you have against free and frank debates Kev? Are you a communist, or something?
BTW Kev, what on earth do you mean by this: “a grand narrative”
Surely for a grand narrative truly to be a grand narrative it must be the grand narrative.
More than one grand narrative? Treason! Stop corrupting moppets, you horrible moppet corrupter, you.
MacIntyre was indeed once a member of the CPA. In his strong left phase he wrote a book about Red coal miners unions in Wales. From memory, I think he’s said he was in the CPA for a year or two at most.
His history of the CPA, “The Reds”, takes a suitably academic and sardonic view of the Party, to circa 1940. Some reviewers thought it a bit too indulgent and kindly towards the Party. Perhaps too inclined to follow the “Aarons line”? But it doesn’t shy away from the early Soviet (Comintern) sponsorship of the formation of the ACP; nor of the factional wranglings, the harsh internal discipline, and the flip-flopping of ACP policy in the 1930’s, again at Soviet behest. Nor does he conceal the fact that the ACP attempted to work through “front” organisations. So it’s all there – most of the wickedness of the Aussie commies is laid out. Easy to see why so many joined the ACP and left it again quite soon after.
Apparently Professor Stuart Mac is well-regarded by fellow historians. Though of course they, like so many intellectuals, do not and have NEVER spoken with one voice. Katz is right: only under totalitarian regimes do historians cleave to one true, authorised worldview.
B*gger that for a joke!!
And not only fellow historians. He’s not only a distinguished, productive and well-regarded scholar, he’s also a formidable character. I worked one floor down from Stuart for seventeen years and I once saw him take on my whole department singlehanded over a faculty issue and win, partly because he was in the right but mostly because he is very, very good. He could swat the likes of Kevin Donnelly clean out of the park with one well-constructed sentence, if he could be bothered, which I doubt.
Macintyre worked on citizenship education under the Howard government in an inquiry to which Donnelly was tacked on as a consultant. Melleuish’s first book tried to annex V G Childe for free-market liberalism, his second book is useful but he was done nothing for years, a very unproductive researcher.
PC, a link to Macintyre’s book review of Donnelly’s Dumbing Down: Outcomes-based and Politically Correct – The Impact of the Culture Wars on Our Schools in The Australian
(via Crikey)
I must admit to knowing her personally, but I’d just note that Anna Clark’s work is stand alone and top notch. End of story. Tackle it on its merits, or otherwise.
It is hilarious, though, that these soon-to-be-forgotten-if-they-arent-already culture warriors imagine the association with Manning to be some sort of negative.
Thanks Nick, I can’t believe I missed that link yesterday. And then there’s this.
From the Macintyre review of Dumbing Down:
From Kevin Donnelly’s Online Opinion author bio:
‘Why our schools are failing’, indeed.
“He could swat the likes of Kevin Donnelly clean out of the park with one well-constructed sentence, if he could be bothered, which I doubt.”
The review pretty much proves this, sentence after sentence. Clearly he could be bothered, which is something I’m thankful for. It is rare for the likes of Donnelly to be met with such clarity and confidence since they tend to be so relentlessly inflammatory. Mess with Stuart Macintyre at your own risk, is the main lesson I’m taking from this.
Well indeed, and with considerably more than one well-constructed sentence, too. Rarely have I been so happy to be wrong.
An excellent and devastating response to Donnelly’s desire for a ‘grand narrative’ in the study of English calls it for what is.
Hang on, didn’t Windschuttle used to be a commie before he was a RWDB?
I tried recently to read something he’d written in Quadrant, btw. Bloody unreadable, so I have no idea what point (if any) he was trying to make.
“The book alleges that students now complete their schooling and come to university unable to construct an essay. Dumbing Down reveals an inability to construct a sentence. Its author almost invariably begins his with dependent clauses, often left dangling and frequently lacking syntax.”
Doesn’t that, with a degree of irony, prove the point? Donnelly clearly went through university…
In my experience, the recent grads my work employs are universally incapable of constructing a sentence, let alone an essay, and most of them look at one blankly should one mention such revolutionary concepts as sentences needing to include a verb, or nouns and verbs being two entirely different parts of speech and not interchangable, or leveraging not being a word…
Next, Henry Reynolds on the board of ABC, replacing Brunton.
Philip Adams for the lunatic Albrechtsen.
Kostakidis for Zampatti.
Carlton for Stone.
Yes, the ultras are sweating. No Howard to gerrymander for them.
“Give me the child; I’ll give you the adult”, as the current US political landscape demonstrates.
And that landscape demonstrates why qangos, MSM etc and their captive subjects and audience deserve to to be retreived, for they and we deserve better than, a Ray Bradbury-esque Dystopia.
Windschuttle and McGuinness both, as far as I know.
Windschuttle … moderate commie? hung around with commies?… wrote on “Unemployment” in late 70s
McGuinness …. more yer libertarian, anarchist, Sydney Push sort of guy back in those earlier decades… ? … more like yer Germaine Greer, though Prof Anderson (spiritual father of The Push) had dallied with commie-ism in the 1950s, si?
I thought McGuinness was a Trotskyist at one point, but I can’t say I’ve looked into it. Windschuttle was a self-fashioned ‘outsider’ leftist during the ’70s and ’80s, cutting his polemical teeth on imported controversies over Althusserian Marxism and emergent cultural studies approaches to media, and writing popular, quasi-scholarly books, like ‘Unemployment’ (1979) and ‘The Media’ (1984). I thought Paul Norton’s article from a few years back was pretty good on explaining the former-leftist inheritance in the new right.
FWIW, Windschuttle on the matter:
(The Quadrant article is showing an error but I’ve linked the Google cache version.)
I feel a bit icky having posted all of that Windschuttle…
In some ways he’s an interesting figure – and it’s certainly been interesting doing close readings of his texts and tracing out all of the rhetorical sleights-of-hand and the slight mutations of others’ arguments as they are stated and restated. I’ve done a few chapters in ‘Fabrication’, and it was quite enlightening. It does make you wonder how deliberate it all is.
A good book to be sure. However it might interest Mr Windschuttle to know that Thompson, as good a scholar as he was, is not some pure version of non-Stalinist Marxism (as opposed to the tedious and batshit Louis Althusser). Like a lot of Communists he ignored all of the plain data that said that Stalin’s Russia was a totalitarian nightmare on the spurious basis that it was ‘bourgeois’ propaganda. He lambasted George Orwell for, of all things, political ‘quietism’ (without ever as Orwell had done taking a bullet in actual revolutionary struggle) and only admitted the obvious when Kruschev did in ‘56.
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Rather than learning his lesson viz the dangers of political theology he then turned to that alternative idol – Leon Trotsky whose claim to moral superiority given his various nefarious acts is beyond me. He spent the rest of his life in various Peoples’ Front of Judea vs Judean Peoples Front type useless bollocks.
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Mr Windschuttle appears to have failed to learn that vital lesson as well. He too has merely changed idols.
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What these people all fail to do. And what Orwell incidentally succeeded in doing is realizing that it’s idol worship that’s the problem in the first place. These quasi-religious adherence to political creed bears more resemblance to ancient pagan cultic activity than it’s ever born to the various Enlightenment screeds of reasonable discourse from which it’s born.
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It’s not going to end anytime soon. This can be seen clearly. Whenever the ‘History Wars’ are mentioned by anyone it’s only with reference to those on the ‘other side’. ‘We’ never do that kind of thing.
thanks Nikolaus, why icky? He was only recouting his own past development.
thanks Adrien, staunch as usual. A book may be beguiling even if the author is a fool.
We’re all fools Ambigulous. Like drunks. Sometimes some of us have moments of clarity. Thompson like Hobsbawm were political romantics and excellent historians. Live and learn.
Please pardon me for butting in on this lovefest. I apologise for any dependant clauses, lack of syntax, neologisms and false unity of collations.
Apart from learning how to write a letter without being bogged down with all of the above, we were also taught common sense.
In the real world, the dumbing down is there for all to see, unless you live only with such exalted company as exists here.
“In the real world, the dumbing down is there for all to see, unless you live only with such exalted company as exists here.”
Show us the evidence.
KLause K
Read any job applications lately?
Now I’m curious. What vacancies are you filling, W?
BBB
Only the vacancies here BBB
Ambi: just indulging in a little ad hominem distaste. That particular passage isn’t so awful in itself (although I don’t have a huge amount of time for people who start throwing around words like ‘fashionable’ as a way of foreclosing a discussion). But I’m generally not too fond of the chap.
I’ve also tried reading Paddy McGuiness at times, and while he wasn’t quite as tedious as Windschuttle (not still refighting squabbles with Manne from 40 years ago, for a start – you should try reading the Letters page in Quadrant!) he’s pretty bloody incoherent. What is it with these ex-lefties-turned-RWDBs that they can’t string a coherent paragraph together? Maybe it’s the Fuehrerprinzip worm in their brains.
With Windshuttle, it really comes down to religion. This is the giveaway. Religion is always the motivator of those trying to destroy the public education system. It was the motivator with Howard, and it is the motivator with Rudd and Gillard. Religion and secularism cannot live peacefully together. One will inevitably destroy the other. We must destroy religion, otherwise it will destroy the public system.
Well I wouldn’t mind getting rid of the public education system and I hate religion. And are destroying religion and the public education system at the same time, the former in the right way and the latter in the wrong way. So you’ve got that one wrong.
BBB
Hmmm… insert “we” between “And” and “are”.
BBB
I’m inclined to disagree about the religious thing as some kind of underlying cause with respect to attacks on public education, although advocates of religious education may find themselves taking similar positions to the mainstream education warriors on certain issues. If I were to do a psychoanalytic reading, I would say that what is shared is a particular fantasy structure where it is public education that takes the position of a barrier which for all of these people seems to be in the way of them attaining their various desires with respect to the nation, but is actually necessary to the constitution of the fantasy. So it’s less important what the different educational fantasies are, and more important how they are structured and where public schools fit in relation to the fantasy. If public education were dismantled entirely, everybody would go and find other objects to ’stand in the way’.
I’m also wary, in spite of a certain sympathy, of criticism that attributes a quasi-religious character to these polemical figures moving from left to right. For one thing, I don’t think it explains a great deal, since religious sentiment is fairly widespread and not everybody carries on in this way. Perhaps we need a material explanation?
I think there’s probably a psychoanalytic explanation for that as well, to do with the need for attachment to a group or to some sort of all-encompassing belief system that provides a rational outlet for rage. Whether it’s the Maoists, the Church, the Liberal Party or whatever is largely immaterial. So to speak.
I’d like to know that stats on how many of these people come from a happy and well-adjusted family of origin; very few, would be my guess.
Thanks Nikolaus, thanks Adrien. Yes: moments [let us say months] of clarity in which one might write a beguiling book; while in the rest of one’s life one beats one’s spouse, kicks one’s pet, drinks excessively, farts noisily in public places, fails to declare taxable income, worships some political dictator, and barracks for Collingwood.
Nowt queer as folks.
The other feature – which Paul Norton identified – is the prominence of thinking and arguing in terms of ‘chains of equivalence’, wherein feminism is equivalent to postmodernism is equivalent to socialism is equivalent to environmentalism and so on. This is definitely a way of thinking that appears across the political spectrum, but I wonder how we could explain adherence to it? It verges on paranoia, but is also linked to a kind of residual idealism, wherein a common ideological ancestor is enough to damn whole groups of thinkers. Some of the dumber versions of left-critical approaches seem to lapse into this also, although they don’t have the same public platform for reproducing those positions.
Klaus, I think you should read my link at number 15 from which Silkworm is quoting. It’s not placing quite the emphasis on religion as you think, but Lucy & Mickler are right in identifying the motives for Donnelly’s desire for a ‘grand narrative’.
Thanks Sam, I missed that comment and the review. I’m actually quite sympathetic to Lucy & Mickler’s reading of the culture warriors – I liked their book from a few years back. My response to silkworm was more about his reading than theirs. I’ll have to get to the Transformations piece later.
Odd here is the profile of Melleuish. A fairly unproductive academic with only two commercially published books in a longish career. Before 1996 he seemed to be a free-market liberal type disliking Howard’s social conservatism but he has since become a culture warrior and Howard devotee, a trajectory like Gerard Henderson in some aspects.
On Windshuttle’s evolution in his left days he was part of that anti-theory Sydney left populism also represented in part by the ‘political economy’ movement. Windshuttle’s book on unemployment wheels out the crudest version of falling rate of profit theory indifferent to any critique.
Thanks Klaus. Let me know what you think of the Transformations piece when you get around to reading it.
P’sC: “I think there’s probably a psychoanalytic explanation for that as well, to do with the need for attachment to a group or to some sort of all-encompassing belief system that provides a rational outlet for rage. Whether it’s the Maoists, the Church, the Liberal Party or whatever is largely immaterial. So to speak.”
Well, psychoanalytic or psychological…. Good point, Pavlova. Instead of saying “adherence to X looks like religious belief” we might say “strong political adherence and religious adherence BOTH resemble X” and go on to look at causes of X. Could there be a survival advantage, conferred by group membership? Yes, when sabre tooth tigers are about.
When the tigers need to be kept at bay, we don’t need some damn theological maverick or some political dissident, breaking ranks and scaring the troops. No sir! We must speak with one mind and act in concert, you bloody rabble!!
35 Silkworm:
I’m not entirely certain that religion is really a motivating factor in Rudd and Gillard’s willingness to keep the private system. After all, whilst Rudd is a committed Christian, Gillard is amongst the (many?) in the Labor cabinet that opted for a non-Biblical oath.
I’m as big as a cheerleader for the public system as the next guy: public school make an utterly essential service available to all of our citizens at a reasonable cost. However, the Roman Catholic system alone constitutes 18% of the nation’s educational needs; independent schools pick up another 14%. It’s makes sense for a sensible government to preserve institutions that provide an essential service to a significant proportion of the people (that’s an awful lot of ’s’ words in one sentence). As much as I would prefer to see heavier investment in our state schools, I would be loath to support any government that severely disenfranchised the private system.
For the record, below is a book review that balances the bile written by Macintyre.
Best wishes,
Kevin
Kevin Donnelly is a first-class polemicist hammering the progressivists wrecking our schools, writes Ross Fitzgerald
Dumbing Down
By Kevin Donnelly
Hardie Grant Books, 230pp, $24.95
AS a liberal-humanist and member of the Left, I still find it disconcerting that so-called progressivists continue to oppose selective schools, unambiguous academic standards and the teaching in our schools of distinct disciplines such as history, geography, science, mathematics and English. This is because, for the working class, high-quality education represents the most effective avenue for social mobility and for ascending the ladder of economic and intellectual opportunity.
Kevin Donnelly is a first-class polemicist in the best sense of that word. In his regular contributions to The Australian, his provocative book Why Our Schools are Failing (2004) and now in Dumbing Down, he focuses attention on the pernicious effects of outcomes-based and politically correct curriculums and the impact of
the so-called culture wars on our primary and secondary schools and, by implication, our universities.
For the record, Donnelly and I were both on a committee appointed by then federal education minister Brendan Nelson to introduce the teaching of civics in our schools.
Unlike Donnelly, I am a member of a committee reporting to Education Minister Julie Bishop, which oversees the teaching of values in our schools.
In Dumbing Down, Donnelly is particularly strong in dealing with the teaching of history and English. With regard to Australian history, it is difficult to disagree with his contention that many students leave school “with a fragmented and superficial understanding of the past”.
He usefully reminds us what the distinguished conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey actually said in his now famous-notorious 1993 John Latham memorial lecture. Blainey argued that what he termed the black-armband view of Australian history “might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced”.
Blainey in fact acknowledged that the stories, contributions and sufferings of women, indigenous Australians and of non-Anglo-Celtic migrants had too often been ignored. Hence he maintained that “it is wrong to ignore the sins of the past and that what is needed is a balance between celebrating our achievements and acknowledging our past mistakes”.
Donnelly is also right on the money when he discusses the deleterious effects of English departments in Australian universities being recast as centres for cultural studies and of school children no longer required to be taught the basic rules of spelling, grammar and syntax. He rightly accepts that there is “a certain amount of truth in the argument that education can be used as an instrument to enforce control and to impose a one-sided view of the world”. As Blainey acknowledged, the way Australian history was taught in our schools in the 1950s and ’60s “undervalued indigenous history and uncritically promoted Australia’s British heritage and the benefits of Empire”. At the same time, it is important to stress that the rules of grammar and syntax, and of basic mathematics, remain the same “whether taught by a socialist or a capitalist”.
In his 1869 article, On General Education, no less a person than Karl Marx argued that “Nothing [should] be introduced either in primary or higher schools that admitted of party and class interpretation. The rules of grammar, for instance, could not differ, whether explained by a religious Tory or a free thinker.”
Sometimes Donnelly’s stress on proper style and correct spelling, grammar and syntax comes back to bite him: too often in Dumbing Down he resorts to the worn-out phrase “of course” and once at least refers to “its principle conclusions”.
Nevertheless, he usefully attacks the stupidity of entrenched notions of cultural relativism, which maintain that there is nothing inherently worthwhile about particular cultures and that all cultures are of equal worth. As he argues, this approach “ignores the fact that some cultural practices such as female circumcision, misogynism and sati (where wives throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres) are unacceptable in the West and that values such as tolerance, compassion, the rule of law and being committed to a free and open society are culturally specific.”
Both the Coalition Government under John Howard and the ALP under Kevin Rudd have rightly nominated education as a key issue leading up to this year’s federal election. It behoves us all as citizens and parents to ask, for example, why it is that competition and academic excellence, a belief in our best students being rewarded and in the central importance of an intellectually rigorous academic curriculum are so often attacked by educationalists as “elitist and socially unjust”.
To the contrary, an understanding of the basic building blocks of science, mathematics, history, geography and English is the surest launching pad for culturally and economically disadvantaged children, as is an education system whose standards are assured via competitive examinations, discipline-based curriculums and more formal methods of teaching.
Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 28 books, most recently The Pope’s Battalions: Santamaria, Catholicism and the Labor Split.
Ross Fitzgerald taking time out from being a mouthpiece for The Borg’s office?
While I think there is a (partly) religiously motivated attack on public education in the States I’m not sure you can say the same thing here. There’s a certain ‘obligation’ felt by the Libs and the Catholics in the ALP to ‘take care of’ private schools but I don;t see the wholesale attack on public education on the basis of Godless Darwinism or sex-ed here.
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Gillard? Christ that’s reaching.
Kevin,
I’m not sure how Fitzgerald’s piece is meant to ‘balance’ MacIntyre’s review.
Even Fitzgerald is forced to concede: ‘Sometimes Donnelly’s stress on proper style and correct spelling, grammar and syntax comes back to bite him’. Fitzgerald may try to dismiss MacIntyre’s concerns regarding your ‘inability to construct a sentence’ by relabelling your numerous errors as mere inconsistent stylistic niceties, but even this is still a bit of a problem, given you are on the record for attacking academics and teachers for declining standards.
Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s ‘review’ is not a counter to MacIntyre’s at all, but an opportunity to indulge in a hysterical rant against postmodernism. Fitzgerald’s ‘review’ is easily dismissed, then, by the Lucy and Mickler article (which discusses your book at length) . They point out just exactly whose interests are served by the ‘war’ on English and postmodernism.
I’m a bit confused.
I’m not sure how Kevin Donnelly has managed to come on this ‘alternative’ media site (despite having ample access to the mainstream media), to post a favourable review of his book, and have this met with what is effectively silence.
Doesn’t anyone on LP have anything to say about that? Doesn’t anyone have any criticisms of Donnelly? Doesn’t anyone have any problems with what Fitzgerald is saying in his ‘review’? No one’s got any problems with Donnelly’s use of LP to promote his work?
Yes, Donnelly’s got the right to post on LP. We know all that liberal clap-trap. But what’s LP got to SAY about Donnelly posting on it? Isn’t LP a forum for progressive thought and criticism? Isn’t Donnelly opposed to progressive thought and criticism?
How come the posters on LP who never tire of posting on behalf of ‘the left’, have got nothing to say to Donnelly, a leading RIGHT-wing public figure?
Have I missed something?
Because we’ve said it all before, Sam. We’ve had endless stoushes with Kevin Donnelly right here on this blog. It’s an index of the changing times that we can’t be bothered now – his schtick just isn’t that relevant anymore after the defeat of the Howard government. If you want to engage with him, then be my guest. But life’s too short, as far as I’m concerned, and there’s more important stuff to talk about.
What changing times are those, Kim? We have an education minister who supports performance pay for teachers, is critical of their unions, and is on the record aghast at the possibility that postmodern literary theory, whole-language approaches or critical literacy are a part of the curriculum. That would seem to me that she has a lot in common with Donnelly’s positions, then; as well as with those of the Howard government. I certainly don’t think she’s a signifier for the ‘index of the changing times’, but just more of the same that’s gone before her.
And for someone whose ’schtick just isn’t relevant anymore’, Donnelly sure gets a lot of space in the public sphere to share his irrelevance. Last week alone he’s in the mainstream media dissing humanities PhDs for their lack of academic rigor and reliance on ‘new age theory’, as well as criticising the appointments of MacIntyre and Freebody to the National Curriculum boards. He also gets to come here and promote his book!
The defeat of the Howard government was the defeat of the Howard government. It was not the defeat of anti-progressive thought and criticism by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Rudd’s managed to take it further in a way that Howard never managed.
As for you having more important stuff to talk about, I actually don’t think there is anything more important to talk about in terms of Australian politics than the fact conservatism is as strong as ever — and that this is all happening under a LABOR government. Nothing progressive about that.
I don’t necessarily disagree with all that, Sam, but I would think it’s better to address those issues substantively rather than wasting one’s time on tedious ideologues like Donnelly. The fact that the “get MacIntyre” campaign won’t get legs indicates what sort of influence his ilk have now. If you’d been reading you’d note that we’ve discussed a number of the issues regarding education from a perspective critical of the Rudd government, and no doubt we will do so again. It’s completely open to you to start talking about what you want to on this thread, but I’d rather you don’t frame it in terms of what you think “LP” should be doing. You’re “LP” too insofar as you participate here, and that’s the way it should be.
I’m not a post or comment on demand machine, I’m afraid!
And you sound so surprised.
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Australia’s ‘natural’ political ideology is a very soft form of National Socialism: social conservatism and regulatory economy. I don’t the ALP has been significantly more progressive then the conservatives socially except perhaps during the Whitlam years. Economically however change tends to come from them.
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The only MP who defended Henson recently was the leader of the opposition.
I’m not surprised at all Adrien. I was just concerned that Kim believed that Donnelly’s position was irrelevant and not worth the bother because we no longer have a Howard government, and that times they are a-changing.
In an unchanged political context of government-backed attacks on teachers and teachers unions, and attacks on progressive theories and criticisms, how could anyone believe that Donnelly’s ’schtick’ is no longer ‘relevant’?
Indeed. BTW-
An anecdote: I was in the company of some PhD candidates from Australia’s most prestigious Arts’ faculty once upon a time and proposed writing a short story around the theme “The Emperor’s New Clothes” about the contemporary arts scene. I was called a fascist and a conservative and never asked what I actually meant or was going to say.
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Now these labels are not the same thing and neither of them apply to me by any stretch of the imagination. I was going to write about the place of a certain kind of Art Theory in the arts scene which, in my reasonably extensive experience, is something that most artists regard as a colossal pain in the arse.
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I attempted to defend my psoition and found myself unable tomutter more than a few words before I was shouted down and subjected to intimidation, distortion and demonizing. Funnily enough these are the favorite debating techniques of the fascist.
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I’m afraid there must be something wrong if candidates for PhDs are unable to deploy deductive reasoning or participate in open conversation to the extent that they fail to see that conservative tastes in art do not make one politically conservative. Witness Antoni Gaurdi and George Orwell. Orwell hated Gaudi’s unfinished cathedral which evidently modernist. However it was Orwell who was the revolutionary and Gaudi who was politically reactionary.
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One’s tastes in art and one’s political opinions are not of a piece.
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That said criticizing the current mode of artspeak swill has nothing to do with having conservative tastes let alone make one politically conservative. Considering the amateurish gramaphone mindset that made itself obvious that day, the total absence of consideration of what I was actually attempting to say, the ignorance of the fact that artspeak and artists rarely go together – I have my doubts that such persons upon receiving their doctorates are really qualified to say anything the least bit interesting or even barely competent about culture.
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But of course as I’m sure someone will say soon enough I don’t know what I’m talking about.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
That makes two of us.
Fun-nee!
Which bit of his schtick, though, Sam?
The bash the teachers agenda, which we’ve been highly critical of, is relatively independent of Donnelly’s history or grammar wars. It’s the whole “battle for position” nonsense that has now been binned, and I’m happy to see it stay there. As you rightly point out, he has endless opportunities to say the same thing over and over again. It’s a matter, for me, of picking the grounds I want to fight on, and giving him what he wants (ie loud denunciation) draws unnecessary attention to a nonsense debate, when the real debate is – as you again correctly point out – about much more urgent questions having to do with the public education system and the status and conditions of work of teachers.
I also tend to get very irked by demands that I post on this or that, because I’ve been on the receiving end of loud condemnations from teh Right far too often for “not condemning this” and “posting on this rather than that”, and it’s a tactic launched from whatever direction I think is unhelpful. Why don’t you refute Donnelly?
It’s not all up to me!
It’s not all up to me!
.
Yes it is.
.
I demand that you post extensively on the Rosecrucians, their influence on Ezra Pound and how it ties in to the holographically disguised missiles that really brought the World Trade Centre down.
Well, there goes MY book…..
Actually the Rosicrucians probably did influence Ezra Pound…
Yeah they did. It’s my favourite anecdote from Old School Humanties bits o’ Uselessness.
.
But vhen will you post on zis vidal izzue? I demant it. I alzo deamnd you poot ze biofuels in yaw HumVeez.
Kim,
Firstly, I’m not sure why you’ve presumed that when I asked why isn’t LP responding to the fact that Donnelly has come on here to promote a right-wing agenda, that I meant (or ‘demanded’) it was your personal responsibility to take up my question on behalf of LP. I don’t hold you personally responsible, Kim; my point was, and remains, that it’s interesting to say the least that regular ‘activist’ bloggers on this site (presumably whose interests are opposed to Donnelly’s) have remained silent in response to Donnelly’s abuse of it to promote a right-wing agenda.
In my view, Donnelly’s agenda has little or nothing to do with the ‘grammar wars’. His agenda is about the promotion of power and privilege. That’s why powerful conservative institutions like The Australian newspaper and the former and present Federal governments, use him as a prop to attack things like teachers and teacher unions.
Those interests, and those institutions, have not ‘binned’ the ‘battle for positions’. At present, those interests and institutions appear to have won the battle. Anyone who thinks otherwise thinks politics is about parties and winning government.
Whether Donnelly and other conservative figures are denounced loudly or otherwise on LP has no effect on those conservative interests and institutions. Nevertheless, if sites like LP don’t denounce such figures, what is their point? Public sphere ‘influence’ (let’s say, the control of representation) is still largely in the hands of the mainstream media. It is a fantasy to think that a blog site could, at present, compete with such influence. Influence is not the question. So what is?
Whatever is or isn’t said about Donnelly on this or any other website cannot effect his public sphere ‘influence’, because it can’t effect his ‘reputation’ in the public sphere. Stop pretending otherwise. Donnelly’s influence can’t be raised or diminished by discussing him on LP. His influence is already undemocratically excessive — that’s the problem.
We need to deal with a bigger idea of politics here which isn’t reducible to parties or individuals, so that we don’t make the naive political mistake of saying that the representation of conservative interests in the mainstream press — or on an ‘alternative’ website — ‘isn’t that relevant anymore after the defeat of the Howard government’.
As for the question as to why I don’t refute Donnelly directly: that is precisely what I did in my original post on this thread which refers to a devastating critique of Donnelly’s politics by Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler.
Well, I think Lucy and Miller are quite wrong in the weight they place on the culture warriors. It’s a mirroring thing.
I’m not in disagreement with all your points, but I still see you as making some sort of demand that we write something you want us to write. If you’re so concerned, you have the opportunity to do so yourself. Me, I’ve been working all day and I’m tired now.
And you don’t evoke much sympathy for your position by casually ascribing mine/ours/whoever’s as “naive”. I could explain it more rigorously, but this is a debate I don’t choose to have right now.
Oks?
By the way, I’m responding because the convention around these traps is that the thread author responds to stuff.
But promote it to whom? How many of the people here will be in the slightest bit influenced by the Donnelly self-promotion, do you think, or even have read it? What do you mean by ‘interesting to say the least’ — do you think there’s some kind of conspiracy going on? Who is that you want to speak, and exactly what is it that you want them to say, and to whom?
But if you think that, why do you think anyone here should waste their valuable time loudly denouncing him? We all have lives. I honestly don’t understand who you are criticising here, or for what.
Thanks, Dr Cat!
I was also going to point out, had I not been rather exhausted, that I doubt Donnelly’s posting of the review was meant to be an ad – he knows we’re more likely to buy $weetie’s tome than waste our hard earned on his.
And on the former, I’m with Zoe:
http://crazybrave.net/2008/09/16/the-pillow-book-of-peter-costello/
Presumably the scare quotes around activist in Sam’s comments are meant to be an implicit loud denunciation of us? We’re not real activists because we don’t loudly denounce on demand. Or something.
You know, just like we’re not real feminists because Tim Blair says so. Or whatevs. That’s my problem with these denunciation demands.
Those that can’t do, teach. Those that can’t teach, consult. Those that can’t consult anymore, opine.
“Yes, Donnelly’s got the right to post on LP. We know all that liberal clap-trap.”
that’s the bit that got my goat, because silly me – i do believe that liberal prophyllaxis; i think free speech does act as a protection against all knds of tyrannies, major or petty. my goat has now recovered.
It’s amusing that despite the many political points I made in my previous post the one that seems to have people bristling is my use of inverted commas around the word ‘activists’. One interpretation of this would be that the posters on here self-identify as ‘activists’ and therefore take umbrage at the mere suggestion that their postings may have to do with something else: not activism, but self-representation.
I have demanded nothing of anyone, and it is a complete misrepresentation of my posts to infer that I have. I have simply pointed out the inconsistency between the self-professed activism of posters and their silence in relation to Donnelly’s post. Asking a question is not equivalent to making a demand.
As for the claim that I have levelled an accusation of conspiracy here, well, in a sense — and I stress, in a sense — that’s true. The ‘conspiracy’ takes the form of an apparent consensus (or at least a dominant editorial line) that when it comes to political criticism the Australian Labor Party must be allowed to continue to stand as a viable left political alternative. In other words, this site performs the role of always apologizing for the ALP even when it appears to criticise it. Therefore this site is complicit (and I believe it is consciously complicit at the editorial level) in making the ALP look like a political alternative to conservatism. This, despite the fact that, for example, Julia Gillard (a woman, and former ‘left radical’) is currently undertaking a leadership role in attacking the labour movement.
Whatevs, dude. Get a blog if you don’t like this one.
And that’s a silly and false dichotomy.
Although you claim that you’re not demanding that we write posts that you want us to write… that’s hard to square with comments like:
All sorts of point, but I can only read that point as a criticism of the fact that we don’t write the loud denunciations of Donnelly you demand. Which, actually, dude, we do. We just don’t write them when you want us to.
And how can ‘activism’ be automatically equated with loud denunciation, or for that matter, how can activism be separated from ’self-representation’?
Anyway, I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith here, if you decide in advance of any response that there’s some conscious conspiracy or complicity here “at the editorial level”, whatever that means.
I’ve been a little frustrated with the tone and thrust of your comments, but I think you’ve let some sort of weird cat out of the bag now, and you’ve just become rude. And a bit pompous too.
“I have simply pointed out the inconsistency between the self-professed activism of posters and their silence in relation to Donnelly’s post.”
Ever arrived at a party at 2am, fossicked around the music selection and whacked on some fave album laying to hand next to the sound system, only to hear groans from everyone else ‘cos they already heard it twice before that night?
Do let me know what bit of that metaphor needs the volume turned up for you.
Why the mention of Julia’s gender here?
Kim,
Because Julia Gillard is a woman (and as it happens, so am I), and that gender is used politically to signify a ‘different’ (more caring, more responsible, more encompassing) politics. But much more to the point, her political identity is defined by her being a former ‘left radical’. What’s ‘left’, what’s ‘radical’, what’s ‘caring’, what’s ‘responsible’, what’s ‘encompassing’, what’s ‘different’ about bashing the labour movement?
Well, Sam, here’s some criticism of Julia Gillard published here for you:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/07/15/guest-post-by-senator-rachel-siewert-award-modernisation-whats-going-on/
… written by a woman (and a Greens Senator) just by the by.
And here’s some more:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/03/private-education-revolution/
… written by a woman – me, actually.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s some more over the next little while on what’s going on in the AIRC and prompted by the Unions NSW discussion paper.
Now if you think this is all a feint, or something, I really don’t know how I can respond in any sensible way to that, beyond asking you what you think “a viable left alternative” actually is. If you’d been reading here carefully, and I don’t think I can charitably assume you have been, you might find that I’ve defined my politics as “libertarian socialist”.
If you want to make an argument that it’s not “viable” to support the Labor Party against the Liberals as a viable alternative – noting that no one here thinks that the Labor party is any real sense a “left” party – and I can find you explicit citation for that if you like, that’s your choice, but I don’t think it will lead in any particularly productive direction, nor be awfully relevant to the subject of this thread.
“But much more to the point, her political identity is defined by her being a former ‘left radical’.”
Not anymore. Which bit of “former” don’t you understand? Striving for power and then actually achieving wielding power turns everyone’s chalk into cheese. Not saying this is good or bad, it just is.
More criticism of Julia Gillard and the neo-liberalisation of the Labor Party on this thread:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/26/were-theyre-all-neo-liberals-now/
(Read the comments too)…
And this one looks at the exhaustion of the social democratic project:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/29/on-the-futility-of-arguing-about-hayek-or-whats-in-a-name/
Lucy and Mickler (not ‘Miller’, BTW) have nothing to say about culture warriors. They make this unambiguously clear in their book _The War on Democracy_. Their target is conservatism, which they argue is a political force that opposes at every opportunity and at every level the idea and the ideal of democracy. That’s why Gillard, for example, is not a ’social democrat’ or a ‘libertarian socialist’ or any other kind of ‘left’ political subject: her current political formation is conservative through and through, and therefore it is opposed to democracy — and therefore it is opposed to any meaningful idea of the left.
Therefore any ‘critique’ of Gillard’s politics on the grounds that she is not a ‘true’ so-called ’social democrat’ or ‘libertarian socialist’ is a meaningless political critique. The relevant political point — admittedly, a difficult one — is that she isn’t a left political subject’s bootlace. But if it’s true, as you say, that this site doesn’t regard Gillard or the current Labor government as ‘left’, then why do you claim that politics has changed since the defeat of the Howard government? So why, Kim, assert that Donnelly is irrelevant since the change of government and then list all this evidence of just how right wing the Labor government is, according to LP threads? You can only claim a change on the grounds that one political party has been replaced by another: what if ‘politics’ has got nothing to do with parties, but rather with the opposition of conservatism and democracy?
The myth of the ‘culture wars’, Lucy and Mickler argue, serves conservative interests, and the perpetuation of that myth (by the right or the so-called left) furthers those interests. It is a misrepresentation of their position to say that it contributes to, or intervenes in, a thing called ‘the culture wars’. Their work, it seems to me, is directed on behalf of the interests that people like Donnelly opposes. Anyway, that’s my reading of their latest piece (posted above).
I guess this is sufficiently on topic: Ive just done a post on the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which I had a look around. http://bitemylatte.blogspot.com/
Adrien @ 58:
Wow, they are terrible phd students. PhD students are meant to allow you to deploy every possible argument-based weapon, and then deftly turn them around mid-prehension (Matrix bullet-time style) to use them against you. The art is to use your own triumphant sensibility to imbalance your confidence (a bit like rhetorical inertia). Bewilder your opponent by using their words and arguments, point out the contradictions, etc. Give them every opportunity, because each opportunity given to your opponent actually has the potential to be your opportunity. (a dialectical and neo-liberal managerialist mode of argument, give your workers ‘opportunities’. lol) Otherwise arguing isn’t fun. I mean, if you can’t allow the other person to say everything they want and still fail, how else, when they still feel like they could’ve said something, can they come to the miserable realisation that they are, in fact, stupid?
Let’s take Donnelly’s argument as an example. Does Donnelly break it down into the different dimensions of the problem?
I agree with him to the extent that my impression of many of the 400 or so first/second/third year students I have taught so far this year across three universities have problems with writing. I work extremely hard to help them mostly with the generic coventions of writing at university, mainly so those in danger of failing don’t fail. The rest of the skills they need can be gained through practical experience.
The key issue with learning grammar, basic writing skills (spelling, sentence construction, etc.) and a correct use of grammar is not that students are intellectually deficient, or that teaching resources and quality is insufficient, but because most of the kids I teach could not care less about writing. The really troubling cases do not understand, or have any way of comprehending (through use of the analytical tools that would enable them to figure it out), why they should participate in these (university) discourse games. It is not just university level writing, I mean basic stuff.
To a certain extent, the problem is not one of expression, students can express themselves fine. I see this all the time and through class discussion and so on. Figuring out why they should bother expressing themselves, at a university level, through academic discourse is seen as a problem that is imposed upon them. Therefore, the inadequacy of their writing skills can be viewed from two perspectives (teacher and student) and present two very different dimensions of what is at stake.
If Donnelly addresses this problem, the problem of (at least) two problems, then his book is well worth reading. If, on the other hand, he relies on culturally conservative valorisations of some ‘intrinsic’ worth of good writing skills then his book is actually worse than useless, because it diverts attention away from the real problems of teaching AND learning. From Lucy and Mickler’s essay it is clear that Donnelly’s work suffers from the latter.
Lucy and Mickler invoke Kant at one point in their essay:
How to challenge students so they have this ‘capacity and willingness to dare to know’? Kant talked about the sublime, for example, as something that forced those that experienced it to enlarge their capacities for critical thought through the power of their imagination to grasp at the ungraspable. Lyotard uses term impasse, and I join it with passage, for impassage to describe this paradoxical shift in the capacity to critically apprehend.
Perhaps to exemplify this dimension of the problem (the third dimension) it is worthy drawing a homological relation between Donnelly’s relation to what he calls ‘postmodernism’ and the students’ relation to the burden of writing skills. They are structurally equivalent. Donnelly wilfully chooses not to actually engage with any specific theories, or even gain some appreciation of how they are useful. Similarly, some students wilfully choose not to actually engage with specific techniques for acquiring writing skills, or to even gain some appreciation of how they are useful. In both cases, the refused object of engagement is mobilised purely for outcome-based reasons (Donnelly to further his socio-political argument, students to gain the necessary marks they need to pass through uni). Both of these are stupid, i.e. expressions of a profound, if not antagonistic, contentment with ignorance, the challenge is not to dare to know, but to not know.
So the first two problems are problems of perspective. Teachers are trying to demonstrate that they teach skills and knowledge (which, at university, is assessed by students according to satisfaction ratings), and students are trying to demonstrate they have learnt enought to pass. The third problem is one of a capacity or willingness to engage, to be threatened with not knowing, and to be willing to attempt to enlarge one’s own capacities to know once the not-knowingess becomes apparent. This is surely where we need to begin with addressing the actual pedagogical problem? How to connect with this innate ‘capacity and willingness to dare to know’? (I think it is an innate socio-biological component of what it means to be human, how else do we learn as kids?)
In other words, Donnelly is disavowing an essential human quality. He is anti-humanist.
See how it works?
Sam, we discussed Lucy and Mickler’s (sorry!) argument at length last year. I’m not convinced by it, and not that interested in it now. It does appear to attract people who will vociferously put their point of view forward, but I don’t like the fact that this seems to strongly resemble some sort of “lefter than thou” sort of attack, which it seems to me has also been the thrust of a lot of what you’re saying.
Well, what if it doesn’t? “Democracy” is an empty space, a floating signifier. It’s not a politics.
My point is a very pragmatic one, and that’s the only level on which I’m prepared to argue it just now. Donnelly and his mob have less significance insofar as the sorts of complaints and witch hunts they launch against individuals as part of their culture wars will now no longer either cow those individuals (not that MacIntyre would ever have been cowed) or result in individuals like Donnelly being appointed as state intellectuals.
So I don’t see that buying into his crap does anything other than dignify it with an attention that it does not deserve. MacIntyre will still chair the curriculum committee, and while whatever comes out of it will be worth scrutinising, and indeed trying to influence, it will not be shaped by the same sorts of “culture wars” considerations that it would have been under Howard (although, as argued both here and by Sparrow, even then the result of a “unitary narrative” was impossible of attainment). Paddy McGuiness and Brendan Nelson will not be rejecting ARC grants.
That is a real change, and it’s also a real change in that the delinking of the right wing punditariat with the state means a measurable difference in the degree to which those of us on the left can participate in the public realm.
That’s a result of some contigent relations between politics and culture.
The neo-liberal stuff with schooling doesn’t need “grammar wars” and “history wars” to give it permission. Its discursive turf is a different one – because it’s now framed in terms of “social inclusion” – outrageously wrong though that frame is. Fighting Donnelly is to pick the wrong fight. You need to – at least up to a point – oppose what the Labor government is doing on the ground on which it is actually operating.
So, for the moment, I couldn’t give two figs for Donnelly.
Now, as I said, I am just not that interested in Lucky & Mickler’s analysis, because I think it’s wrong, and (ahem) it’s a metanarrative that floats free of any actual left politics and the changed configuration of political and cultural forces both.
So I won’t have any more to say about Lucy & Mickler. If you’re interested in long discussions of their work, I repeat my suggestion that you start a blog devoted to same.
Speaking of history wars: I’ve done a post on the infamous Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, over at Bite My Latte. Did the intrepid reporter routine.
Kim, am enjoying your conversation with Sam, et al. It is, a legitimate conversation between interested parties rather a flame war caused by trollidiots.
For my part, I can’t find much to quarrel with as to Sam’s basic thrust.
You don’t think you been a little technical in a couple of your responses to Sam’s thesis, if that’s the word to use?
I realise that’s occuring is more about nuance rather something adversarial.
Sam, please. Education issues have been debated up hill and down dale on this blog for years.
Please grab a copy of Chris Bonnor & Jane Caro’s book as a useful primer — I reviewed it here:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5504
I think it’s great that Dr. Donnelly keeps posting here and posting his reviews here. He is always assiduous in correcting the public record about himself and leaping to his own defence. As well he might be.
However, the appointment of Professors Macintyre and Freebody, to howls of protest from Dr.Donnelly (“My worst fears have been realised” I believe was his reaction, or words to that effect) rather proves Kim’s argument about the extent of his influence.
Outside of The Australian newspaper, that agenda-setting vehicle that successfully promoted Peter Costello’s bid for the Liberal leadership…oh, wait…he hasn’t the influence to do much damage.
And I say this in full knowledge that the new Leader of the Opposition actually wrote the foreword to Dr.Donnelly’s first tome on education “Why our Schools Are Failing.” If I recall correctly, I believe Malcolm Turnbull wrote in the foreword of the Menzies Research Centre-sponsored book that ‘Dr. Donnelly’s views are his own…’ So I wouldn’t expect you’ll see much happening with the change of Liberal leaders either.
Another thing to bear in mind about Dr. Donnelly is that he is sincere, determined, personally committed and absolutely asking the right questions for the right reasons. But, like many, I think his answers are based on a rose-tinted nostalgic view of some outmoded methods and curricula that failed to meet many students’ needs decades ago (they were excluded from the exams altogether, and so didn’t show up in the results) and would fail them even moreso today.
And, for a swiss-army-knife solution here is a generic reply that can be used wherever Dr. Donnelly’s agitprop shows up:
http://thisteachinglife.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-be-education-expert-and-warrior.html
I guess that’s why nobody much responded. It’s all been said before. There are more productive things to be goin’ on with, matey.
paul, I think my basic disagreement with the position Sam is defending is that it seems to slip very easily into “you’re not left enough” without defining what relationship exists between left activism and electoral politics, and downplaying the latter because it’s supposed to be more conservative than democratic. I don’t find our current electoral and political system anywhere near ideal, as most people would know, but conversely I don’t see that just refusing to play on that terrain gets us anywhere either.
It doesn’t seem to me to get us anywhere towards what a “viable left alternative” might be except at the level of theoretical disputation.
At the most basic level, I make no apologies for preferring a Labor to a Liberal government, and in thinking that difference matters – not least in human rights issues for instance – but that I don’t advocate any sort of uncritical support for Labor but rather an intervention on its terrain.
Personally, I think Sam is under a misapprehension that I’m a left Labor supporter. I’m not. Some here are. I’m just as likely (if not a bit more likely) to vote Green rather than Labor. But while I don’t think that the left is co-extensive with party politics, I think that party politics does matter.
Sam, I’m not sure what point you think you’re making. I said I thought you were being rude, and I didn’t like either your claims about conspiracies here or the”lefter than thou” tone your adopted. Hence a bit of frustration. You may well be responding to paul walter, but his view on what’s taking place isn’t necessarily mine.
I still think the assimilation of “LP” as if it isn’t partly constituted by what you’re saying is wrong, and I’ve also indicated that I don’t wish to engage in lengthy discussions of Lucy & Mickler’s arguments. It’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that if you think my politics or those of “LP” are not to your taste, you find somewhere more to your liking, and if your interest is in lengthy discussions of Lucy & Mickler, then… Their particular take on things is not the subject of this thread.
Anyway, that’s enough. I’m going to bed.
Kim,
Briefly, because I’m going to bed, too.
My previous post was not directed at Paul but at you. You said (1) LP is inclusive; and then you said, on more than one occasion (2) if it doesn’t include what you want to hear, go start your own website.
Do you acknowledge that 2 contradicts 1?
When 2 is invoked against 1, who’s being ‘rude’?
Sam, as I read the comments, (1) was suggesting that by virtue of being able to participate on this thread, it made little sense to suggest that “LP” was condoning Donnelly’s contribution, or somehow failing in not refuting it, or whatever, as you – forming part of the thread which is part of the thing called LP – were taking issue with it. I think you’ve mistaken that point.
(2) is clearly – among other things – a point about moderation. The thread is about a specific topic. While you may well think Lucy & Mickler’s arguments are valid and worth discussing, no one else is under any obligation to respond or to discuss them if they don’t find them valid or worth discussing in this context.
Here I’d refer to the comments policy, which prohibits:
We make the assumption that you’ve read this – and that’s an excerpt from what we consider to be unacceptable commenting practice – because the comments box asks people to read and abide by it as a condition of proceeding further. I think you need to consider this exchange in light of those points.
I’m also quite able to see that Kim might find it “rude” to be told that what she and others write here is supposed to be part of some political conspiracy.
The topic of the thread is not LP’s politics, the best way to advance the left’s politics, or Lucky & Mickler’s theses about democracy. Please take note. Should you wish to discuss Lucy & Mickler’s ideas at length, I’d have thought it was an eminently reasonable suggestion that you establish or find a forum where such a discussion would be the topic in question. It seems plain to me that your comments don’t go directly to the topic, but seek to extend it in a direction that turns it into a discussion about LP, your opinions about LP and what LP should and shouldn’t do, and the comments about “conspiracy” clearly impute ideas to others.
It’s also clear to me that this thread has become a discussion purely about your views. Should you wish to host such a discussion, it would seem logical that you do so, but we’re not obliged to, because we don’t encourage either stereotyping of motives/meta discussion about LP or assailing us and our blog on general ideological grounds. For obvious reasons. Among others, it discourages anyone who may wish to comment further on the substantive issues, because we get sidetracked into a discussion of the validity of departing from them. As we are now.
There is a wide range of free hosting services for blogs, and you would be most welcome to link here to any discussion you might wish to facilitate about Lucy & Mickler’s arguments and/or left politics, but not to post long comments about it which infringe our comments policy.
Please also note that the thread author is the arbiter of moderation on the thread, and that we do not enter into discussions regarding moderation.
Thanks for that. I’m also not unsympathetic to aspects of what you have to say, but I must ask you to agree to abide by the conditions for discussion on this site, and I’ve tried to be helpful in explaining them at some length and their rationale.
To quote: “But if it’s true, as you say, that this site doesn’t regard Gillard or the current Labor government as ‘left’, then why do you claim that politics has changed since the defeat of the Howard government? ”
ummmm, maybe because the new Govt is more centrist than the old (right wing) Govt.? There can be a change, without a full shift to the ‘true left’, can’t there Sam? A small change, perhaps, but a detectable change nonetheless….
I am not a woman.
Leftier than thou? How passe. Dude, the proletariat is the new Left.
Sam is raising an important point. That is, should the self-described ‘left’ in Australia be happy, comfortable, anxious, critical or what with the change in government? It is a ‘more centrist’ government and definitely more progressive in some ways than the Howard coalition government, but is it better? How do we assess these things? What is an appropriate socio-political metric?
But you’re right in that this is not the place to discuss it. I don’t mind writing a brief post about it for LP to further the discussion. If you want Mark or Kim?
Be interested, glen. Don’t forget those book reviews, though!
Glen – I don’t read Donnelly or any of these Culture Warrior stiffos.
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The phenomena you talk about is obviously present and the only people who seem to pay all that much attention to it however are the Culture War stiffos. The Culture War ‘commos’ tend to caricature anyone who might allude to the problem as “people need to learn Shakespeare in school”.
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Well I think people should learn Shakespeare in school but that’s besides the point. The logocentricity of education has been dealt a fatal blow by the rise of various technology driven modes of cultural expression. There’s a small circle of highly literate persons who’ve read Milton and Proust and can apply various esoterica from the history of philosophy to present-day situations. You can see their work in a script from The West Wing or one of those rare gems amongst the vast sea of tripe that passes for American polemica.
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But for most of us conversation is deliberately incoherent. I was, like, no. And she was like, whoah dude that’s so like 2005. And I was like yeah but that’s gnarly.
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What does that mean?. We’re devolving into gibberish.
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However this is part of a larger cultural transformation which sees much of our traditional culture recede into history and awaits the creation of new forms. (The graphic novel The Sandman expresses this wonderfully.)
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Still those things we appear to be losing will not be entirely lost because we require them. There remains a need, for example, for good manners, but we might find that the standard manners developed by the English and French courts are not relevant to a faster, paced, more democratic, capitalist technosociety. We will develop new manners as we go. In the meantime we lack certain etiquette.
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The same goes for the teaching literature and history. (And teaching in general I’d wager.) When I was at school, history bored most of my peers. They simply didn’t understand why Julius Caeser or Cleopatra were relevant to their lives. They didn’t understand the enormity of the past either. An old history teacher of mine ran into me once and said: I miss you, the other day I got an essay outlining the profound influence of Christianity on the Minoans.
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I reckon teaching history to postmoderns means reversing time’s arrow. Start now and go back.
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In many ways teaching writing and reading skills might need some kind of revamp as well. One that is neither ‘postmodern’ (ie about hegemonies or competancies or whatever) nor ‘traditional’ (trying to teach in some antiquated Dickensian manner would be worse than useless).
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I haven’t thought much on it. But I do understand that to make classics live one must needs reinvent them from time to time. The old 19th century take on Shakespeare, for example, that it’s all about heroes with tragic flaws should be shelved: it’s the bourgeois take – individuals and their psychologies. We’ve moved on. Those people once described as bourgeois do not exist anymore. And thier take on Shakespeare succeeded earlier takes. Teaching Romeo and Juliet to 14 year olds however should stay, it’s effective for obvious reasons. And despite the bad taste it might give to the purists such treatment as Baz Lurhmann gave it will switch people on. It’s a classic, it connects us to people who lived and died 500 years ago and does so by telling a story that resonates with every adolescent.
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Other media too have proved effective at making classics live.
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At bottom however exposing the young to the classics of their culture is a for the direct benefit of those select few who’ll appreciate them. The general benefit comes from the sense of continuity that can come just become some of us carry the torch as it were. The specific benefit of high literacy for the general populace is the technical capacity to express a wide variety of specific meanings with a variation of nuance.
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We ‘kids in America’ might not understand why we need to hear Poe when we’ve got Jay-Z (oh you ign’ant fools!) but it’s pretty simple to explain that having excellent communication skills will get you a better job and more money. If, as has been said by many tertiary level teachers, students’ literacy skills are poor – that is the literacy skills of university students are poor then they’re obviously not getting them.
I agree, the question of worth is central.
“I reckon teaching history to postmoderns means reversing time’s arrow. Start now and go back.”
AKA Genealogy! This is how Foucault did history. He did a ‘history of the present’. He asked the basic question, how the present state of affairs (or particular set of relations) emerge? And traced it back.
Them bourgeoisie can kiss my ass coz I’m prolier than thou at last.
“Prolier”??? Is that a proper word?
Speaking on behalf of the bourgeois Correct Spelling and Syntax Corps, may I say
i) we have no wish to kiss you anywhere
ii) we will not entertain your political views until you have corrected your many errors of English
iii) English is the language of many notable and glorious dissidents past
iv) Ingsoc has been abolished (Ingsoc Abolition Act, 1985; and regulations pursuant thereto)
God Save the Gillard !!!
Don’t worry Ambi.
It’s just Greenfield.
Speaking of culture wars – dont underestimate the power of Rudd dismissing Mathew Hayden with his offies yesterday!
Compare Howard’s notoriously hopeless deliveries in Pakistan.
“Compare Howard’s notoriously hopeless deliveries in Pakistan.”
Yes – one of the funniest pieces of TV footage from those years. Cricket Tragic? nuh: a Cricket Catastrophe
No Shakespeare where I was schooled but jeez I liked “The Play” by Cee Jay. Wont be around when Ginger Mick’s a hero tho’.
Sorta. Foucault’s concerned with that period (ca 1780-1830) where the modern world came into being and attempts to trace this by describing the change in political apparatus, the organization of knowledge, the relationship of the individual to the State, the nature of the subject itself.
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Foucault’s historiography has a certain utility, he asks us to look at different things for example: the design of schools and prisons and what can be gleaned therein regarding ideas and practices of power. But his history isn’t exactly the peerless. That doesn’t matter except insofar as people seem to forget this. They also seem to forget that there was a world before 1800 and that, tho’ much changed around about then, much did not.
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I contend that after the ‘discontinuous’ 20th century where all that was has been left in broken bits we need to make again the past seem continuous to reinvent what was once called tradition.
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To wit:
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
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Oh well.