The trouble with American Pandora’s box, is that they cram it full of junk-as you so rightly say.

“We don’t deliver the kids milk any more, but we do give them hours of torment at the dentist.”

The only time they ever got repaid for their crassness, was when Coca, without the cola, industry got a whole new lift off. Thanks to the sordid machinations of American overseas interference.

Having a vasectomy, and contrary to your butcher’s opinion, makes you a hero, not a figure of fun.

The butcher was probably a closet gay, anyway.

I just want normal milk that tastes like real milk.

We all had school milk in bottles each day at the school in The Hague. Then, all of a sudden the Coca Cola trucks arrived and each school and each student given their first taste of Cocka Cola.
That was part of the US Marshall Plan to help Europe on its feet again after WW2.
I never thought that was part of the Pandora box.

I feel sorry about female circumcision and associated horrors. The vasectomy back in 1972 by Dr Barbara Simcock was the closest I came to in that division.
That item was deemed newsworthy enough to be taken up by Chanel 9 after which the local butcher and others though it was an item of endless and great hilarity. ” Ha, ha, y’ve had it chopped up, ha, ha.” und so weiter.

The only depravity which exists in my above comments, is the depravity committed on female children of the Muslim faith. A depravity committed on some young, female Australian Muslims.

Anyway I have terminated my comments on the cartoon section. Yet still you are gunning for me on philosophy

I think that’s about it. Don’t you?

GERARD: Certainly, this Pandora’s box of diversity of schooling seems to be excellent, but I have a couple of queries.

I would not like it to be institutionalised. The reason being, look at the sacred word of ‘multiculturalism’ and the way this has been abused, and how patronising it is.

“Let young Muslim females-if their parents so desire-have their sexual organs surgically removed. (I refer to female circumcision) because, morally we show our tolerance of cultural diversity.

Forget the screaming agony of the wretched bride when the stitched-over remains of the pudenda are being fiercely penetrated, by the male, on her bridal night. Forget the stench emanating from this uncleansed organ. Forget her shame and embarrassment when her school friends have not been treated to this form of torture.

Let the religious quacks who impose the burqa (Yes, the bleeding hearts who scream ‘multiculturalism’ who solemnly preach that it is her right to wear this garment, if she so chooses) However, let these same nitwits pay for the rickets and other diseases which the lack of sun promote.

Also, let them pay for any accidents caused by her driving a car into someone else, owing to her peripheral vision being impeded.

Forget the riots at the tennis and the soccer where ancient feuds are given free rein (it’s a horse term, not a monarchial one) to have their day in the sun. Serbia versus Croatia, Macedonian Greek, versus Orthodox Greek, Cypriot versus Greek. It is all good clean multicultural fun. How patronising is that attitude?

This Pandora’s box should be in everyone’s home? What about the fascist Christian right-wing who won’t allow their wives and children to watch this box, nor to use a computer, read newspapers, not vote. The Exclusive Brethren are but one cult with these rules. All at the same time as their men have wheedled their way into a monopoly of water-trading rights. Thanks to the support given them by John Winston Howard.

Then there is your suggestion that the government support all different forms of schooling. Can you imagine the howls of outrage of the community, going along the lines of, “Our money would be better being spent on our hospitals, and giving aid to overseas countries”-when the dictator of the country trousers three quarters of the incoming cash.

It’s a big nasty world out there. Anyway, I loved your remark about your mother being horrorfied (sic) at school classes being delineated by height.

I’m a bit jaundiced about life at the moment so please don’t take my remarks too much to heart.

Granted we all know fear, awe, wonder; but fear is the paramount feeling which led us to have superstitions. But hey! Today we know why there are eclipses, tusanamis, that earth is not the centre of our universe, that there is no such thing as ‘intelligent design’, that man is a work in progress, that space is a vacuum, that black cats are no more inclined to bring bad luck than any other colour cat.

Scientists such as Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and the Frenchman Pierre-Simon de Laplace, to mention but three, have educated millions of people to know what really does go on in our universe.

So what happens? As knowledge, art, literature, creativity, burst out in an unimaginable profusion. A profusion which would make the thinkers of the Renaissance pale with envy, we have millions and millions of people in thrall to the superstitions and witchcraft of the middle ages, aka religion.

Why is this so? As a TV scientist used to ask of the viewing audience. My reply would be-here I’m not talking about the mentally challenged adult who suddenly opts to join some weird cult such as Catholicism, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Hillsong, Ring of Fire or Exclusive Brethren.

The main reason for superstition with a halo still continuing to thrive, is because parents feel obliged to brainwash their children to follow their own inane, and unquestioned beliefs. If this pattern of behaviour was not bad enough, these same parents make sure their children attend religious schools.

Thus does does mindless superstition keep regenerating itself. Add to this the power that the men who run religion have to play superstition at the basest level and the ability to make religions into a gaol. From which the criminals placed in these dungeons keep up an eternal siren song to entice the non-believers into the same gaol.

Ordinary people locked up in the slammer spend days, weeks, months planning to get out of the damn place. But not the believers, they want everyone to be at the same abysmal level as themselves.

Then we get a self-described Conservative Catholic-Steve Conroy-as an arbiter of what is, or is not to be, allowed to viewed by a public which is probably better educated that the Senator anyway.

Plus the ultimate tragedy, if the winner of the next election turns out to be the Coalition we will have the twenty-first century version of Savanorola, Torquemada, or this century’s very own Bin Laden as leader of the county, in the form of Tony Abbott. And as leader of the National Party, we have Barnaby Joyce, whose Catholicism rivals that of Tony Abbott.

What a primeval farce, and a primeval disease religion is.

Here endeth the lecture.

This brings me back to my hypothesis

I totallyagree that it is important to open the Pandora’s box of diversity. The problem is that the box is sold to the highest bidder and those with the dollaria then get the best bits and most benefits.
The box should be freely available and paid for equally through taxation and no part of the box should charge fees to the kids parents.
Another part of the problem is how to make the box available at all schools and places of residence. Ideally, kids should have all that within walking distance without the need for buses or Bazooka trained mums in hummers.
I survived because of schooling in Holland, my brothers did not have that benefit. Believe it or not, my mother was astonished they would pass to the next grade because of their height. Brother Joseph thought they were’ too tall’ to stay in the class they were in. They were more interested in socks and shirt liftings and flag raisings at assemblies than teaching.
My grandkids, fifty years on,apart from the same attention to school uniforms now carry towering school bags, as if on their way to Mount Everest.

Have schools ever heard of lockers? Or is this a separate subject?

Yes I think there was a generous serve of that. A bit of the old proletarian reverse snobbery; a bit of trying to redesign the mind of the future body politic. And a bit too much reliance on one or two books in vogue at the time, within the sort of intellectual closed feedback loop that bureacrats sometimes create when they rely on each other for career progression.

I think government departments go through cycles of enlightenment and decay. Sometimes it works really well - the public-school students I had to catch up with when studying for a second degree (another state, another generation) were brilliant, some of them had minds that could light up the deepest tunnel. But mediocrity is at best just a few elections away. There will never be a time when people can no longer grasp Joseph Heller’s meaning: “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22.”

I’ve come to believe that while bureacracies out of Heller or Kafka will always be with us, structurally we can limit the damage they can do, by ensuring that a single organ cannot hold an entire population in its thrall. When people have somewhere else to go (however inconvenient the choice may be) they have the strength of choice on their side. The constant comparison of results ensures that charlatans and petty tyrants will always be operating on borrowed time.

The Catholic church is a good example of this (a topic I know you’ve commented on before). Once the Reformation was strong enough to protect its own, the stranglehold of the “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” on intellectual thought, its power of torture and excommunication for heretics, was broken. By degrees, it ceased to be an empire and was demoted to just a church, one whose members today have the option of crossing the road and joining another church (or none) if they think they’re being enslaved.

So, while I can appreciate the arguments of various emphases and methods in education, my response is: open up Pandora’s box of diversity, let parents be the judges. Let no national organ ever gain a stranglehold on a whole generation of children. Parents spend a great deal of time discussing and comparing the merits of different schools. Individually, many of them may be subject to the biases and limitations of their own backgrounds. But they’re not all fools, and collectively, their combined judgement is better than any single state or private organ can match.

I suppose I would rather it was this, than a deliberate Government policy. I think most of the world’s children go though hell. Certainly the powers concerned have to pitch knowledge at the centre of the collective whole. If they pitched knowledge and learning at the most intelligent pupils, most students would fall out. If for no other reason than children mature at different ages. If they pitched it at the bottom end we would be a race of road-makers. (No comment please!)

So, I just don’t see any other way than pitching the curriculum, at the middle part of a class. I speak with feeling. I was ripped out of school at the age of fourteen by my stupid mother. The rest of my life has been a huge effort to educate myself.

I can’t tell you how, at the age of fifteen, in a foreign country, I had to work beyond reason, to bring myself up to a university standard. I used to think I was a martyr, until I started to realise that all the people who have succeeded in life seemed to have overcome hideous school careers.

Even the ones perceived as being born to succeed, haven’t had it nearly as easy as we all think.

Anyway, my comment was at least to show you that someone was listening.

Now if one million public students costs the taxpayer about $10,000 a year each, and if that’s about two-thirds of students, then the government has a choice. Some parents will never send their kids to public schools, no matter what. Others weigh the costs against the benefits before making a decision. Subsidies of private schools target the last group.

Suppose subsidizing private students to the tune of say $3,000 (including school buses and all the rest) caused 10 per cent of parents to change their mind and use private schools. Then the taxpayer would break even. The cost would be $3,000 x 500,000 = $1.5 billion. A subsidy affects some parents’ decisions, while having no effect on others’. If the effect were to divert 150,000 students out of the public system, this would save the taxpayer $1.5 billion worth of public student places, so the taxpayer would break even.

Any improvement on that, and the public student comes out ahead. Otherwise the $10,000 per student has to be diluted between more students, or else the taxpayer is up for a bigger education budget.

So the question is not whether privileged kids deserve a bus while kids are starving in Africa or Timor Leste or wherever. The question is whether the bus and other subsidies to private students improve on the break-even benefit to public students. If a subsidy costs too much for the number of parent choices it influences, then it’s a pork barrel. If it influences a lot of parents’ choices relative to its costs, then it benefits public students at the same time as the more obvious beneficiary, and is good value for taxpayer money compared to the alternative.

This kind of private subsidy is almost always a necessary corollary of publicly funded social services. And it’s one of the hardest things to explain to the public, because most people can’t see indirect chains of cause and effect.

I pity you your history. As husband of a teacher, I have seen her fight against the trendoids and suck-ar_es of the “system”. Thankfully, most of these trends have been curtailed.

Some of the newer systems, such as Reading Recovery for the littlies, are amazing but they require very substantial additional training. Not needed for private schools, though - they seem to simply advise the parents of kids with reading difficulties that, after Y1, the school cannot help them. Lazy buggers. Yet they still want the same value ticket.

I remind you though, I introduced not a discussion of private schools per se, but the principle of additional transport becoming a cost to the state, although it is to me a wholly personal decision to incur the additional component of the travel to a more distant school.

The guesstimate of $700M per annum is set out above.

I still reckon that there are much deserving uses for this kind of largesse, including support of remote schools in Australia and schools of any kind in Timor Leste.

For a concrete illustration of my point, let me recount some of the teachings I myself received from these “university educated” teaching theorists, who commanded from the top down the public school system in which I was, shall we say, processed. (Some insiders will be able to pick my age and home state from what follows.)

- Reciting multiplication times tables was strictly banned along with all forms of rote learning, enforced by random surveillance and grave career consequences for defiant teachers.
- Students do not need to study the works of past thinkers; you get full marks for blurting out your own opinions, however ignorant and vapid.
- A new form of handwriting based on block capitals which made all of us atrocious writers and is now threatening arthritis in my right hand.
- World history consists of a vague and tragic blur of class exploitation until Democracy and the Australian Labor Movement came along and fixed everything.
- The political basis of Australia is … a democracy. No further explanation needed or given.
- Aboriginals didn’t know how babies were made until clever anthropologists came along and explained it to them.
- All famous literature is superflous; the only books worth reading are those which strongly suggest that ethnic differences are only skin deep, or that all rich people are depraved, or similar moral lessons.
- It’s better to write poetry than to read it, and meter and rhyme are just elitist barriers to try to stop people from expressing themselves.
- Don’t over-analyse problems in science or mathematics (see the contradiction?), it’s more important to express your views verbally on how important it is.

I could go on but I think you get the picture. Nor do I begrudge the CPA members who ran the department from trying out their innovations. Because at least there were other people out there being educated with other frameworks - some conservative, some new-age, and everything in between - according to their parents’ tastes and, yes, their means. Other contemporaries brought up on different intellectual diets, whom I would later come into contact with and realize I had a bit of catching up to do.

If it had been a monoculture, an entire generation would have been condemned to live the rest of their lives on the drivel that was taught to me, and would have seen nothing wrong with it, because they would have had nothing to compare it with.

As I said earlier, I’m not a raze-it-all-to-the-ground-and-start-again person. I’m a work-with-what-you’ve-got person. And I think the greatest strength of public schooling in Australia is that it is not a monoculture. There are separate public school systems in each state. There are also church-run schools, non-church private schools, Rudolf Steiner schools, Maria Montessori schools, and so on. All of them, I believe, can learn at least something from each other.

So I speak up not only for private schooling but for keeping the state education systems separate. And I dread Julia Gillard’s move to impose a national educational monoculture. It may start off top notch, but who knows what the next generation of university-educated theorists could impose on an entire generation?

Am I making my point a bit clearer now?

There should be one system for all children to be taught the same level of knowledge. Yes there will be different levels of ability, aptitude and engagement – but it should be to a standard level commensurate with being able to operate and function successfully in our current society.

Education is too important to become a competition involving private money and exclusivity.

Stupidly now increasing numbers of parents are spending thousands of dollars and kids are missing out on their childhood as they spend all their spare time outside school attending private tutoring – not to increase their knowledge – but to learn how to pass the entrance exams of selective government high schools or private schools. Kids are suffering because of this crazy desire of the parents to get their kids into a school that they perceive is better – when in reality it offers no real benefits – just a higher cost for a “Gucci” brand school.

I went to a country public high school and learnt Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Agriculture, Music, Maths, ComeerceEnglish, German, Economics, Geography, History, Art, Woodwork, Plastics, Metalwork, debating, PE, cooking, health and I even sewed a few bags & seat cushions.

I certainly didn’t lose out or was disadvantaged by not attending a private school.

There is no need for private industry or religious organisations to provide education in Australia.

Religious schools should be banned, for the reasons I wrote in my last comment.

PINS: Are you a politician? You sure have an answer for everything.

If education is done in too much of a vacuum, innovation becomes effectively experimentation without control groups, and unsuccessful experiments compromise the education of an entire nationwide class. I’m not just talking theoretically here, I’m thinking of some of the disastrous bureaucratic fads that ruined much of my own public education along with the careers of a few courageous teachers who tried to defy the system.

A great compromise is to have competition between state education systems within a federal structure. That’s what we’ve had for many years in Australian public education. Note that Julia Gillard is in the process of destroying this competitive federalism with her new uniform national education system.

Tried to say that the curriculum developed by private schools differs from that used by public schools. Not so.

Assumes that if school buses were reduced, then 4x4’s would have to do the job. What about feet? Bikes?

Now assumes that improvements come from “rich” schools and somehow benefit others (“The most successful experiments of the rich thus become part of the mainstream”). This is somewhat counter-intuitive to me. Is not education taught at university? Are not the curriculums developed by collaboration? Do not the universities do a very substantial amount of research in their education departments? Are not religious institutions renowned for their conservatism and lack of openness to change? Are not the bulk of private schools run by religious organisations? And isn’t it true that these same schools see a significant opportunity in being able to inculcate kids into feeling superiour, apart and special, because they have a relationship with an invisible old man in the sky? Mainly, though, I would have thought that the rich would choose not to have their offspring “experimented” with by those entrusted with their education.

No amount of blather will hide the fact that, at the end of the day, it takes a village (read: community) to raise a child. Start splitting the children into culturally divided groups and you have gone backwards, big time. And Australia certainly has in this regard.

All this leaves the $700M on the table. I suggest educational efforts in East Timor and remote Australian communities, split 50/50. And in future, please consider getting your own kids to school or, better still, selecting a community school within walking or bike distance.

POWERISNOTSTRENGTH: It’s the vacuous blonde bimbos who drive the four wheel drives, that get on my quince.

One day last year a bloody great Hummer drove into the back of me. When I protested about it, she climbed down, out of the second floor, and came towards me.
She was dressed in the very latest sports gear and had her sunnies on her head, at the precise angle to hold them on to her thick blonde hair.

She looked at my little red Alpha and said, “Oh, my God, I didn’t even see you.” I could only reply, “That’s odd, most bus drivers do see me.”
 —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — -

IT’S THE RELIGIOUS schools the government should stop subsidising with OUR
money. Private schools are not the ogres that so many people believe.

Or in the words of Bob Hawke who, at the time was the head of the union movement. Some jouno had popped the question about his kids going to private schools. There was a howl from Bob Hawke followed by, “Me send my kids to a public school??????? Never.”

I thought, at that moment, he would go on to lead the nation. He had a certain deathless honesty.

People should try to pull out the other eye when it comes to private schools. They have, on the whole, a better level of teaching, less kids in the one class. Better equipment, and children who have some idea of how to behave. Thus enabling them to listen to what is going on.

Private schools mean the parents have to pay big bickies to send their offspring to these places, and yes, the schools receive some government subsidisation.

In Melbourne there are two crackerjack public schools. Melbourne High, and MacRobertson High, and in a city nearing four million people, two such schools is scandalous. We need another hundred of them.

The government should cease subsidising religious schools. On the grounds that the children are submitted to endless brain-washing, and taught to believe, blindly, as their parents believe. By the time they have their heads stuffed up with fairy tales there’s little room left for the real stuff.

Most especially, do I hate the Catholic school system. If for no other reason than they have taught succeeding generations to pronounce the letter ‘H’ as if it was spelt ‘Haitch’ instead of ‘Aitch’ as it correctly pronounced.

Listen to the verbal convolutions of newsreaders, politicians, actors, debaters and the socially, upwardly mobile, as they struggle to unlearn the dreaded Haitch. This habit has now taken hold in our public schools.

There was a time when one heard the Haitch one knew the person saying it was a Catholic. Nowadays it is merely the product, and the proof, of shocking teaching.

Across the pond in New Zealand, they are Haitch free. Perhaps they per capita, didn’t have the same overdose of Catholic teachers. Long live New Zealand!

Countries with the highest literacy rates are the former Communist &Eastern Bloc countries. Kazakhstan has a literacy rate of 99.9%
If competition leads to improvements in education, why then are we performing so badly?

By the way, how do we cater for disadvantaged kids? Are the ‘rich’ leading here?