While ideologues such as Kevin Donnelly deserve to be taken to task for the unique ability to condemn education policies via a quirky command of English, one of the battlegrounds on the NSW election illustrates an greater problem with public education. The lack of adequate school facilities due to poor maintenance.
When children go to school with blocked toilets, no hot water, poorly maintained classrooms etc they receive a message education is not a priority. When certain politicians talk of the need of teaching students the idea of ‘values’, they fail to realise that the students already being instructed in the worth of ‘values.’
That is not to say that ultra-modern, spic and span facilities will turn everyone into model students. But maintenance of basic facilities so as to not undermine essential personal dignities of staff and students is something that needs to be addressed by State and Federal government. It is just one component of the education debate but it is just as important (and often overlooked) as discussions on curriculum and teacher performance.
Not that I expect the winner of the NSW election to hold to any promises in this regard.
Shaun Cronin
I just cannot believe these stories. Why is that some of these schools end up with broken toilets? I attended one of the most downmarket comprehensive public schools in the state and even we never had broken toilets. Me smells a bit of the urban myth in this trope. A bit like the legendary ‘flag-kissers’ at the BDO.
Either the principal is a fool or these schools are just passive victims of Stalinist centralized bureacracy.
Oh, and by the way, what the hell does Kevin Donnelly have to do with second rate maintenance strategies?
Did you mispell the title ironically or accidentally?
I blame new baby induced lack of sleep. Fixed now.
I have just finished reading ‘Tipping Point’ and while I don’t agree with everything it says, it makes some very interesting points about immediate environment and its influence on attitudes and actions. I think schools would be a case in point. And as you have already alluded to – why should children think education is valuable if others (adults) don’t value it highly enough to make sure students have heaters, or working toilets, or play-grounds, or whatever. It is a bit sad when you think the amount of money that will/is probably thrown at writing ‘values’ into curriculums, including paying educational consultants, hosting talk-head fests, printing materials and then educating teachers, which could go towards things like adequate plumbing and new sports equipment. Or, heaven forbid, new books for the library or musical instruments.
Also (sorry, should have put this in last post) has anyone considered this is part of the reason for the exodus to private schooling – for all the talk of ‘values’ and ‘discipline’ and such, maybe parents think a school that looks nicer IS nicer?
NSW is not alone. In QLD, for example, state Governments on both sides of the political fence, have neglected to maintain schools for at least three decades.
I should add that the neglect of schools is just part of the wider picture which sees all government buildings lacking proper care.
While I forget the detail as to what percentage of a building’s worth ought to be allocated for maintenance, only half that percentage in spent in QLD. The backlog is enormous.
I would be surprised if NSW was any different.
JG:
This *could* be down to the cheap plastic toilet lids in favour these days. Those old hard ones (almost Bakelite at my HS) could take a real pounding. No pun intended.
Wait, that wasn’t even a pun.
No double entendre entendred then.
I can tell you what it is after working on upgrading public and private schools. Typical working class Lutheran outer suburban college. Kids are neat in uniforms and observe all their staff’s prior instructions about facilitating the construction workers for their new facilities. They’re friendly and helpful. The school is spotless litter wise and mulched garden beds never walked across and although buildings range in age, they are all spotless and well painted and maintained. That’s because they hardly need to be. Then your same suburban public school. Some weak attempt at uniforms, litter everywhere and as for the gardens, it’s clear you couldn’t plant anything fragile with this lot around. Driving in means waiting for sullen cheeky kids to saunter out of the way and while your back is turned some little bugger is scratching his tag on the new equipment you’ve just installed. You call out to him to stop and he nicks off, while a teacher on yard duty looks at you and rolls here eyes toward the heavens. While you’re there for a week the glaziers roll up twice to fix busted windows. Chalk and cheese really.
The RAT Institute suspect Kevin Donnely of smashing up toilets and are raising money in cyberspace, or anyplace to have him followed by a private Dick.
I don’t know if I’ve ever met a Kevin I could trust come to think of it.
These elections are making me depressed.
Its like Max Schactman asking Trotsky in 1938 about what Stalin thought he was up to ‘ liberating’ Finland. I think Leon suggested that the Finns were about to be liberated from capitalist exploitation and landlordism…for about five minutes. Then the iron bureaucracy would clamp down and snuff out all thought of social revolution. But in fact this would still be an overall plus for the proletariat comrade. Imagine something like France under Bonaparte – a progressive and positive advance on feudalism in Marxist terms.
I get the feeling NSW …and even Canberra are about to liberated soon.
Is our children learnin’?
I wanna be a democratic Dhimmi!
I don’t know about NSW, but in Victoria we have this situation:
Premier Steve Bracks St Patrick’s College
Deputy Premier John Thwaites Melbourne Grammar
Treasurer John Brumby Melbourne Grammar
Attorney General Rob Hulls Xavier College
Minister for Finance Tim Holding Haileybury College
These guys have no skin in the game when it comes to state schools.
The only parents that would send a kid to a state school these days, are those too lazy to work a 2nd job or crazed ideologues who hate choice.
Thats a pretty huge call right there…
Firstly, no one should HAVE to work a second job, and not doing so should certainly not be considered ‘lazy’.
Secondly, surely in an environment where there are various options for educating children (traditional private, independent ‘steiner’ types, small catholic, large or small state), then sending one’s child to a state school, (unless you are very financially pinched) IS AN ACTIVE CHOICE. Which should be respected and supported.
wbb, I can’t tell what sort of satire or sarcasm you’re indulging in. Of course, about 70% of Australian children are in state primary schools, so a lot of parents, the majority of parents, choose state, although ‘choice’ is a word I don’t much like in this context. (I know it’s a smaller percentage in state high schools, but still more than 50% I believe.)
Interesting point you raise about where the politicians were educated. Another thing which interests me is where they educate their children. I’d like to see stats on where all state and fed politicians educate their children. It’s considered a matter for public discussion in Britain but apparently not here.
Observa, your picture of a state school – presumably a high school – is absolutely nothing like my child’s state school, where all children are in uniform and children are active in maintaining the gardens.
My kids went to a public school too suz, although have a guess where public school teacher, lefty tinged mum wanted them to go? Sheesh! Teachers are the worst bloody hypocrites.
No, not all public schools are like the one I described. My kids’ tightly zoned one was protected from riff raff by high coastal house prices, but nevertheless is not as well kempt as the private ones they could have attended. As much as some schools are zoned like this, they still have to take allcomers within their zone, which privates clearly don’t. Consequently troublemakers who want to knock around the fixtures and fittings don’t last and that culture quickly rubs off on the whole student body.
That’s where the public system needs Borstal schools of last resort. Three strikes with the stiff talking to, behaviour management plan, yada, yada and yer out, or rather in the Borstal. There, if it don’t go in the ear, it goes in the rear matey. That’s the way it was in my day and why the public system worked so well across the board. Too many nanny staters and girliemen for that now, so inevitably the middle classes piss their kids off out of it. Dilutes the public system of parentally disciplined kids even more. That’s the tradeoff for lack of corporal punishment in our schools nowadays.
The bitter & twisted variety. Sorry.
I’d like to see where our political leaders educate their kids too. Of course they can send them where they like, but it would be interesting to see if any of them think the state system is OK for their children.
Never mind, wbb, I thought it was funny.
Obby, I recognise the private school you describe. It produced a troubled young person of my acquaintance who was constantly in trouble there and the trouble was always hushed up, and in the meantime they enabled his non-studying, teacher-baiting, ratbag-in-class behaviour in every possible other way and at every turn, and the teaching sounded lacklustre and mediocre.
His uniform was always neat and tidy, though, so there can’t have been anything really wrong.
Yeah, and Navy discipline would be improved enormously if we went back to the old regime of rum, bum and the lash.
What the hell, let’s have corporal punishment in the workplace as well. And summary, employer initiated execution for anyone trying to organise a union. Screw the weak and the powerless – people are just too damn soft these days.
Having worked as a teacher at both a public and a private school I can confirm this. Facilities at many schools (particularly public schools) are third-rate. Not only are there problems with working facilities, students also have the worry of asbestos-ridden rooves that have not been maintained and not given a second thought by either staff or Education Queensland.
Students work at desks that are falling apart, revealing more of the chipboard construction than the laminated cover, rooms without airconditioning (and sometimes without working fans), textbooks that are 10 years out of date (a particular worry with science textbooks) and teachers that have had any enthusiasm they might once have possessed long-since sucked out of them.
The entire situation is appalling and why newly-graduated teachers such as myself elect not to continue teaching.
MadameBoffin,
You spell the plural of roof as roofs, not rooves. I hope you didn’t teach English.
Richard, that’s not right. Check your OED. Both are acceptable.
Just like “spelled” and “spelt”.
Kim
Check out
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/2004/3810.htm
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rooves
Cheers
Richard
“What the hell, let’s have corporal punishment in the workplace as well.”
No, just give the employer the same right as the employee has to sack his boss. However when you force parties together by law or penal threat, that can have adverse consequences, although it may be deemed necessary to do so for children’s sakes at school. The problem then arises, what is to be your punishment of last resort? Suspending them is flogging them with a feather.
You can certainly love children to death as they do in some aboriginal communities, and other similar places. Let them do anything the liitle darlings want to and see what they end up like. That approach is not very conducive to a cooperative learning environment and the more of these overloved and underspanked darlings, the less cooperative things get and the more building maintenance is needed at taxpayer expense. Trust me I’ve been involved in Aboriginal housing and school maintenance. The luvvies sow what they reap and it’s a bit rich for them to be complaining that ordinary decent folk who don’t subscribe to their views and hence outcomes, should continually cough up for those outcomes. Hence much of the trashed and rundown schools and public housing too for that matter. Stick it all on the list of things to do as time and resources permit.
Oh and Gummo I also think we should get a lot more multicultural and take a leaf out of Singapore’s book. The rattan cane sounds a lot better than members of the gang of 49 running amok in Adelaide at present. (Yes the Dreamtime mob again). One 16 year old lad picked up in a high speed car chase and for criminal tresspass had over 100 similar offences against his name. Several strokes of the rattan at an early age would have cured him at a young age and also prevented the other 23 yr old gang member out on bail recently, from crashing at high speed and killing an innocent SES volunteer, just married. Mustn’t screw the weak and powerless though eh Gummo?
PC, you’re telling me nothing new that there are outliers in every system. I’m talking about the general operational rules of the game here. However, more fool the private school for not pissing him off,(since they’re not supposed to cane him) or the other parents for not spotting a dud teacher as the case may be. Don’t send (or perhaps your friend shouldn’t have) your kid to that school.
Richard,
Sorry, the OED beats both of those things hands down.
Maybe Kevin Donnelly is right.
PC,
I’m afraid I do not have online access to OED, but have just checked numerous online dictionaries and all come up with a response along the lines of â??word does not existâ?? or â??try roofsâ??. Perhaps some people think â??roovesâ?? is correct but not many on the web do. Perhaps Cambridge can out trump Oxford. Please see link.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Cheers
Richard
Well, if parents cared about their kids, they would send them to private schools.
Gummo,
You’re overdramatising the use of the cane in schools (and the rattan for petty street crime and violence) as a punishment of last resort. You don’t have to use it very often as, surprise surprise, the villains quickly work it out. Every now and again the odd one needs reminding of course. There’s an old saying- spare the rod and spoil the child, which really needs to be reinterpreted here as spare the rod on one occasionally and spoil it all for the rest. That’s the dilemma for our public schools of last resort now. It wasn’t always like that.
If Ozzie courts could sentence strokes of the rattan, there would be an immediate decline in street offences, to near zero, in my district.
So how exactly did we get from school maintenance to “every social problem will go away if we bring back the cane”?
Oh, that’s right, the segue was obs’ John Hewson renters moment – you can tell the public schools cause the grass is longer.
Obs, of course, is a long time campaigner against the “barbarous” Sharia law. But corporal punishment administered by upright schoolmasters? Beating’s too good for them!
Now right there, PC, we have what’s known, usually, as funny.
Well, Methusala, we’ll have to rely on your vouchsafe here.
The cane won’t remove every social problem, Mark, naughty of you to use hyperbole like that.
The very real prospect of receiving corporal punishment will result in behaviour modification by many low level offenders.
Just as the prospect of being clouted by a bigger thug has an immediate behaviour modification effect upon louts, so too will judicially applied corporal punishment will have a similar effect.
I can guarantee that there is NOBODY on this forum, who when faced with a physical threat they have no hope of overpowering, (eg, a very big bloke threatening you in a nightclub) will back down, modify behaviour into whatever it takes to prevent him “cleaning you up”.
Street thugs, faced with the (admittedly slow) steamroller of legally applied rattan, will modify their violent behaviour, I guarantee it. Crime will reduce.
I don’t, and never have, shared Observa’s opposition to sharia law.
Shaun Cronin:
Not quite …. the messages to kids get are marketing messages. Messages that are designed too, to shame their parents into coughing up money to pay for a “proper” education in a “decent” school. And they are messages that are unotrusively promoted by administrators inside the public school system and are blatantly rammed home every day in the mainstream media.
The message is loud and clear “If you are going to a state school it is because your mother or father thinks you are worthless and they would rather spend their money on their own selfishness than on your education” and “The more money your parents spend on your education, the happier, the more admired and the more successful you will be”.
And, despite all their high-sounding slogans, in all states it is Labor that is far worse than the born-to-rule Coalition nong-nongs when it comes to the commercialization and commodification of education and the rapid degradation of the public school system.
In NSW at least, school maintenance is now done by contractors and would therefore be beyond the control of principals. I imagine there’s scope for endless disputes about what the contract requires the contractor to do, whether they’re entitled to extra payment for certain events and so on. The public sector lives by the maxim that the lowest tender price must be accepted, despite a century of experience demonstrating that this often leads to poor outcomes. Needless to say, pundits would be the first to scream in outrage if contracts were negotiated instead of put out to tender.
Having said all that, the lower classes in my neck of the woods haven’t yet expressed their self-hatred by trashing their schools and obby you could leave your car there with no fear of vanaldism. Well unless it’s a pink BMW with personalised BIACH1
number plates or something, in which case you wouldn’t want to leave it parked anywhere round here.
And I have no idea how that comment got split.
There are so many things wrong the public comprehensive system that are unrelated to funding:
1. The creation of 28 selective high schools in NSW has been an unmitigated disaster for the comprehensives. 2 things will guarantee the collapse of any society. The emigration of its Jews and of its bourgeoise;
2. Rigth up there is the dangerous overwhelming feminization of schooling. Far too few male teachers and far too much not-so-subtle “masculinity is wrong and we must socialize it out of boys;”
3. Far too much social science in the curriculum;
3. Far too little emphasis on sport;
4. Far too much indulgence of a child’s alleged “individuality” and “creativity;”
Since the system has failed spectacularly at being Athenian, I advocate a more enthusiastic embrace of Sparta, ESPECIALLY for recent arrivals.
I went to high school when the cane was still a legal punishment. Amongst the “hard” kids, taking their strokes of the cane without blubbing rapidly became an inititation ritual: they went out of their way to commit caning offences so that they could prove how tough they were.
Disruptive behaviour is disruptive behaviour. The sort of classroom discipline insisted upon back in the 70s is exactly what teachers want now, and nobody said that such discipline was “feminising” boys back then. It’s all part of preparation for being disciplined in the workplace, after all.
Can anyone explain to me when and where (certainly not in SA) what I thought was the British expression ‘comprehensives’ made its way into Australian education discourse?
Or is Greenfield a Pom, which would explain a lot?
I find it quite disturbing; it signifies an education system that is quite different from and — even these days — far more divisive than ours.
Moderated!
The only thing in that post that could possibly put me in the naughty corner is ‘Pom’.
No, PC, what put you in the the naughty corner was ‘Gr**nfield’!
I’m not sure about ‘comprehensives’ being part of Oz ed discourse, as I have an ear in both countries, but at least in Sydney we can’t say that
it signifies an education system that is quite different from and â?? even these days â?? far more divisive than ours
as the selective schools system here is pretty divisive.
Graham: The message is loud and clear â??If you are going to a state school it is because your mother or father thinks you are worthless and they would rather spend their money on their own selfishness than on your educationâ?? and â??The more money your parents spend on your education, the happier, the more admired and the more successful you will beâ??.
The first message for one thing assumes that people have surplus money to spend on their own ‘selfishness’. A lot don’t and so their children aren’t going to get any such message. Most of the kids I know are in state schools – primary and high – and they all just assume that state education is for everyone – including them.
However, I agree with you that children in private schools are getting the second message loud and clear, not just from their parents but from the schools and governments and, old-fashioned but still relevant term, the Establishment.
Pavlov’s Cat
In fact, the old English system has exited in NSW for quite some time. We have 28 selective government high-schools (the equivalent of the English grammar schools); the rest are known as comprehensives.
That should, of course, be ‘existed’ not ‘exited.’
Ken Lovell, you said
that’s the obverse side of the coin that make some people ouside of Australia roar laughing whenever anyone calls Australia “The Clever Coutnry” …. the reverse side of that same coin is the competitive-tenderer deflection and monopoly-supplier preference used in so much of Australia’ “defence”[wtf??] procurement – a real source of even more mirth at our expense.
Now, back to education …. or is it ersatz-education?
Graham
The worst thing about the current funding arrangements is that while about 50% of Australian’s families access the non-government schooling system, the other 50% is denied that choice because of the government’s insistence on denying access to funds to the poorest families should they wish to try the non-government system.
Schools both private and public in NSW have taken to calling themselves ‘comprehensive’ to distinguish themselves from both selective and specialist schools that concentrate on sports, arts, agriculture or whatever. Thus Arndell Anglican College claims to be ‘a comprehensive school drawing students from a range of backgrounds in the Outer Hills and Hawkesbury Districts’, whereas Campbelltown High is ‘both a comprehensive school serving the local community and a specialist performing arts (PA) high school.’ In other words it’s a vague term that means little more than ‘non-specialist’.
Ken Lovell
It is not a “vague term” and it most strongly is known to mean public schools not streamed by academically.
BTW there are still twice as many pupils in public schools as in private.
Translation? Evidence?
Suz:
Kids in the public system do get the message that they are “inferior” and they get the message that their parents are “inferior” too. Far from this encouraging all the best-and-brightest to “rise above their circumstances” [a delightful and persistent fantasy if ever there was one], it discourages and alienates so many of these young people. Australia will inevitably pay an even higher and more terrible price for allowing this folly to continue.
John Greenfield, you said
The problem of the extraordinary lack of male teachers in Australian classrooms, and especially of positive male role-models, has been obvious for decades. Politicians on both sides of the fence have been too timid to do anything about it.
Look, I’m one of the Viet-Nam War veterans who was kept out of a teaching career. We all hate Asiatics and love killing “slopes”, right? We all want to impose parade-ground discipline in the classroom, right? We would all urge the students to violence and war, right? I wasted a lot of time, money and effort fighting against discrimination and bureaucracy ….. then took an entirely different tack and, using my specific skills elsewhere than in a classroom, found that the parents of potential full-fee-paying overseas students did appreciate receiving alternative and accurate information that enabled them to broaden their choices about where their children were educated
People in the education system could practice all the unfair discrimination they liked but it came at a price; perhaps a cold cash price. So John, instead of mumbling into your beer about “far too male teachers” and so forth ….. just get up and do something about it!
[btw, legal officers of any educational institutions that feel aggrieved at my responses to unfair discrimination are invited to stack their writs on the hall table .....]
More Sparta and less Athens probably sums it up quite well and true we Spartans don’t like Persian law because it seems to come with fanatical Persians.
“So how exactly did we get from school maintenance to â??every social problem will go away if we bring back the caneâ???”
We didn’t. What I pointed out was that if you make schooling compulsory(and increase it to 16 and now 17yrs proposed in SA) and allow the lowest common denominator to ride roughshod over the vast majority, with ultimate impunity,(spare me the flogging with the feather of suspension here) it will probably show up in the hardware as well as impacting the software. Even more so if those that can afford to, escape the fundamentally flawed system with a fair chunk of the majority. Apparently it makes more sense to catch up with these lowest common denominators as adults and then lock them up and throw away the key (unless they change their name to Dawood strangely enough) It’s much more civilised and humane than the cane and Athenians all know it makes sense, even if the Spartans don’t.
Ken Lovell
What does that stat have to do my arguments? Translation? It means children are not sorted into two groups: a) smart b) not so smart.
Graham
First of all, props for seeing an opportunity and going for it. Second, while having never been anywhere near a war situation personally, I do know that the stereotype of the Viet-vet you use above is far from an accurate depiction of the realities of the diversity of Viet-vets.
Even my grand-father and great uncles went through processes of reconciliation with former Korean and Japanese enemy soldiers, and lived much happier lives for it!
Of course, you have a perfectly valid point in my stopping mumbling and do something about it. But seriously what would be the point of fora like LP if a pre-condition of standing on a soapbox was evidence of firm and active involvement in the issue off-line?
When the issue comes close to my own experiences (eg my own children or when friends/family are asking for advice for their own kids), I both mumble AND act; but in a ranking of issues for which I am willing to storm the barricades, I will let this one go through to the keeper. Besides, parents are voting with their feet in droves and moving their kids out of the public comprehensives.
In Qld some time ago school maintenance funds were decentralised. As I recall complex formulas were developed to establish school entitlements, taking into consideration such things as the area of the school grounds, the climate, the cost of services in the area etc. But most schools thought they were dudded and they probably were.
I think QBuild (the old Department of Works) now acts as a contractor. Some schools use private contractors, which are said to be cheaper, but I think don’t have the same guarantee.
I was in the schools a lot in the 70s and 80s and from time to time since. My overall impression is that there has been a dramatic improvement in the physical environment of schools, but there are exceptions. I suspect the main difference is in the administrative skill of the principal.
In the 80s the drift to private secondary schools had gone further that anywhere else in Victoria and the state system was even then thought of as residual.
If I were (benevolent) dictator I’d ban private schools.
Observa has made a point that the coercion involved in making schooling compulsory is not without its effect. Boarding schools certainly, but all schools to some degree, are total institutions as conceptualised by Erving Goffman. The three standard reactions to such institutions are compliance, overt compliance but inner resistance and overt resistance. You don’t need many of the latter category to cause disruption, and obs is right, there is no effective ultimate sanction in the state system.
The biggest problem is that coercion runs counter to the aims and values of education, and brutalising the coercive regime does not improve things. Of course there is a (conservative) view that civilisation is only a thin veneer, that clear hierarchies of power are necessary and natural, and we, when oppressive coercion is removed, naturally return to our anarchic, brutish and violent animal state.
Compulsion always has its cost.
BTW the Oxford Australian Dictionary gives “rooves” an alternative form, but “disputed”. So usage will ultimately settle the matter but it might take a while.
John Greenfield:
It is obvious that you really don’t know anything about the negative stereotyping and vilification of Australia’s Viet-Nam War veterans. There is a large body of research that details what both sides of politics, as well as a small clique of disgraced renegade ex-servicemen, did to veterans of the Viet-Nam War and of later conflicts and operations; see for yourself how few were allowed to enter tertiary education, let alone become teachers, before you repeat any more of that comfortable and inaccurate official party line. [Try reading "Well Done Those Men"- by one of the very few veterans who did become a teacher].
Reconciliation with former enemy? No need to preach to me. Half my relatives fought against the Japanese Empire – yet that didn’t stop me visiting the Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo. The Viet-Cong had a damned good try at killing me and my mates – but that didn’t stop me visiting Viet-Nam only a few years after the end of hostilities and long before it became a tourist destination; many of my fellow veterans have also been back to Viet-Nam in happier circumstances than their first visit. Most of the blokes I know have no hatred whatsoever now for former enemy. So exactly how does that make us so “violent” and “racist” that as many of us as possible had to be excluded from the classrooms of Australia?
But to get back on-topic …..
After seeing a thorough “Bellevue Job” done on the whole public education system – with the likelihood of even worse to come – who could blame them.
Some glorious rants in the above comments – and interesting diversions into Vietnam, corporal punishment in the wider society and, of course, how to talk about more than one roof.
I’ve been a state high school teacher ever since I left Mark and his friends at Uni and got a job (I doubt he remembers me – I knew him in the cigar and port stage!) I suspect that school maintenance has always been and will always be a continuing headache.
Schools are (usually) big places – my metro high school consists of no fewer than 30-or-so buildings of varying age, design and purpose. Most other workplaces are not this big, and in many cases facilities are refurbished or rebuilt when a simpler economic choice would have been to move – except that schools (because they serve a specific area) generally can’t move.
When you combine these endless maintenance requirements with the various other endless requirements – technology especially – schools could easily spend twice their current budget.
One could choose to harp on about the things that need doing – the lack of carpet and the 40-year old blackboard in one of my classrooms, or the bank of flourescent lights that doesn’t work in another. These things will be fixed, eventually, and urgent mess is always taken care of urgently. However, I’ve been in enough private school classrooms to know that they have the same issues, even down to the graffiti on desks. That’s the main issue about the difference between private and state schools: there isn’t much difference at all. Certainly not $10 000/year difference.
Two issues from the comments above that I have to respond to:
Sorry, there is not enough social science in the curriculum. We run the risk of producing a generation that knows everything about science but has learnt nothing of the mistakes of the past, and thus (prosaically) is condemned to repeat them.
Also, Kevin Donnelly is never right. About anything!
I’m with you on this one, satp…
The first ones to be beaten with the rattan should be the dispensers of alcohol.
Moderated twice!
Hrmph.
I remember, Kev!
Good to see you still fighting the good fight!
Kev …. and Shaun:
How far can you go in enlisting the students themselves and their own families in helping with maintenance at your school?
Of course, that would mean seizing every dill who rushed in squawking about public liability insurance, blue cards, departmental regulation and any other bureaucartic trivia ….. then tying them up, putting them in a open wheelie-bin and parking them at the furthest point of the grounds for the day where they could not interfere.
I suggest this it the hope that doing so would instil some sense of pride and ownership in the school as well as doing something to improve whatever you have there. If only 1 in a dozen individual students and parents were able to do something, that would be a start. I have no idea what is floating around on the issue in overseas professional literature [I expect it would be rejected out of hand in Australian professional writings].
Kev. You can have plenty of Science AND plenty of Humanities. They are NOT mutually exclusive at all. [For example: my own Chemistry included some history of science and that certainly helped my understanding of the subject ].
Graham, my missus is a teacher, until last year a preschool teacher. At her preschool there were always parent working bees around the yard who could even do things like lay pavers.
But maintenance work of any kind on buildings was verboten at her school because of the legals and she doesn’t think any principals would get anyone to do anything major. There was a question of building an enclosure for the rubbish bins which didn’t happen at her school but she thinks may have at another school.
Brian:
Thanks for that. P&Cs, for instance, have the potential to do so much more the the stereotypical raffles-and-meetings but they are hampered by unwise, counter-productive legal restrictions. There are many experienced retired workers who would be able to tackle major jobs at their own pace but again, legal restrictions stop them doing so.
Sorry I haven’t got much in the way of practical suggestions at the moment ….. but, since governments are so tight-fisted about school mainenance, something effective does need to be done. But what?
It is my understanding that maintenace work on schools, e.g. plumbing repairs, costs four times as much when organized through proper Education Department channels than if a principal decides to organize it him or herself. This is a fundamental reason for the degradation of public schools.
Now if we could just spread those maintenance bills around like this
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article1567403.ece