Chrissy Pyne loves himself the phrase “part-time Education minister”, concluding most of his poncy press releases with the Julia Gillard smear. His latest effort is no different:

“Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being paid to State Government appointed contractors. Quotes are being inflated beyond all reasonable levels. School communities are being regularly sidelined as faceless bureaucrats dictate what will happen in their schools

[...]

“It is clear that this Minister has a set against programs designed at empowering parents and local communities, and prefers giving money to state education department bureaucrats. We have now seen the waste and mismanagement that naturally follows.

“Australia deserves better than this part-time Education Minister.”

Pyne took some time out of his busy leader-of-opposition-business-and-lobbying-for-leadership schedule to write this press release; a press release that readily admits that the Howard Government’s school infrastructure program ($1.18 billion) was “more modest” than the Rudd Government’s school infrastructure program ($14.7 billion). But, you know, what’s a lazy thirteen billion clams between empowered communities?

I was leafing through DVDs in the school library yesterday when I came across a disc from Narcanon — the drug rehabilitation arm of the “Church” of Scientology. How it got there I have no idea, but I simply had to borrow it out and take a look.

How cool is that ’80s German indoor sports centre-style font and logo?

Reading the accompanying literature I quickly worked out that it was a free promo kit sent out by Narconon to try and convince the school to pay for drug education talks run by the Scientologists. Now, the Narconon approach to drug education and rehabilitation has been pulled apart quite comprehensively elsewhere so I won’t waste much time here on Grods, save to point out how hilarious this particular DVD and leaflet were.

Let’s start with the video which I’ve helpfully uploaded to YouTube for your enjoyment. Try really hard not to picture Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko while you keep in mind my favourite bits:

* Picture of a young schoolgirl, full of hope and promise. Dissolve to a depressed looking emo kid with smudged eyeliner. V/O: “What a terrible waste it is to allow something like this… to turn into something like this, just for the sake of learning a few facts about what drugs are and what they do.”
* The brilliantly meaningless scribbles on the blackboard.
* The highly scientific and charisma-free claim by the educator (sic) to the strains of corporate video soundtrack that, “A drug is basically a poison. (Leans forward, leans back.) Okay? (Claps hands.) A small amount makes a person (walks like a chicken) hyper. Some more of the same drug puts a person (feigns sleep and snores) to sleep. And a whole lot of the drug (holds arms wide) in a short period of time (brings hands together and claps loudly) knocks a person dead.”

Nowhere in the Narconon video or the leaflet is the link to Scientology disclosed. The credits note the influence of L. Ron Hubbard in small print while the book simply says this.

Narconon was founded in 1966 by William Benitez, who was an inmate of Arizona State Prison. Benitez read a book by American author L. Ron Hubbard, and became familiar with Mr. Hubbard’s drug rehabilitation methods.

But the “educator” shown in the video, Charlie Tonna, is extremely active in the “Church” Of Scientology (he became an Operating Thetan IV in 2002) and the patron (Kate Cebrano) and board of Narconon are all Scientologists. Plus, Narconon Australia pays a percentage of its gross income to Narconon International which belongs to a company with strong Scientology links.

However, if the freaks are going to talk to the kiddies without referring to any Scientology and without spruiking their Scientology-based services, then why not give them a chance? Here’s what the book says.

Narconon found that the drug education methods currently in use are not always getting the desired result with children or adults. The use of drugs and alcohol amongst young people is still on the increase and both children and adults, once hooked, find it very difficult to escape the addiction.

Fair enough. But what exactly have they got to offer that’s so different to other drug ed programs?

Narconon has also discovered the powerful role of humour in getting through to people. We found out through survey results that the more humour we used, the more dangerous people thought drugs were and the less likely they were to try them. We don’t just tell people to “say no”, we educate them to come to that conclusion on their own.

Well, I certainly laughed my arse off at Charlie Tonna and the video, but probably not for the right reasons. I doubt this is the comedic reaction they were after.

The whole Narconon spiel screams “scientific basis” about as loudly as the theory of intelligent design. It’s all about vitamins vs. drugs, simplistic statements about drugs’ effects on the body, and “mind pictures”.

The mind is basically made up of pictures, and all the information that a person uses in one’s life comes straight from pictures. This talk graphically demonstrates this phenomenon and shows the link between drug use and the blank spots that occur in one’s mind following the taking of drugs. It also covers which drugs actually scramble one’s pictures and how this can lead to further drug abuse.

The most surprising thing to me was that schools in Victoria have actually let these freaks inside their buildings, if the testimonials on the Narconon Education website are true. But seriously, ask yourself as a parent (or a potential parent): would you let these people near your kids?

Behold the sheer brilliance of the Brumby-Pike plan for educational reform:

Principals will help burnt-out teachers find new jobs under reforms proposed for Victorian schools.

They’ll sack ‘em.

Education Minister Bronwyn Pike released a discussion paper yesterday addressing ways to remove under-performing teachers. “It’s true there are some teachers who become disengaged from the educational process,” Ms Pike said.

They’re shite.

“I think there needs to be an opportunity for them to consider an alternative career.”

They should piss off. 

Ms Pike said some schools had lost the confidence of parents and their community.

They’re shite too.

Under-performing schools would face greater scrutiny and more hands-on management from outside.

We’ll take those ones over and kick arse.

Australian Education Union state president Mary Bluett said the paper failed to acknowledge the need for more money for Victoria’s teachers, the nation’s lowest paid.

‘Give us more money’ – leftists.

The Rudd government, through education minister Julia Gillard, has flagged a strong policy focus on LOTE (Languages Other Than English) in primary and secondary schools.

THE Federal Government is moving to significantly increase the number of students graduating with foreign language skills by pushing the states towards a nationally consistent language curriculum.

New government research to be released tomorrow has found that students are being turned off languages because they believe the subject will affect their university entry scores or because they are told by parents and career teachers that language skills are not relevant to their future.

Gillard says that Australian students need second language skills to remain internationally competitive — and this is true — but there are other major advantages to learning foreign languages in school.

1) Learning another language improves one’s English skills.
Getting your head around the grammar, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation and formatting rules (and contradictions!) of a foreign language makes you pay attention — perhaps for the first time — to the same rules that you use intuitively in the English language. However, to use a language well you’ve got to do more than just use it intuitively. A lot of people can write and speak seemingly sophisticated sentences in English with fancy words and complicated structures, but are relying on reciting them from memory without a basic understanding of the underlying rules that govern the language they’ve just used. Learning another language from scratch helps you learn how to better use the building blocks of your native language that allow you to “play” with words, get creative, and better communicate in a range of genres and situations.

2) Learning another language improves one’s thinking.
More to the point, it improves your metacognition — thinking about thinking. The process of forming connections between foreign and native vocab gives you an amazing insight into the way your brain ticks. People who understand the way that they think, and can manipulate their thinking and actions while engineering situations to best match their thinking styles, are better overall learners than people who have poor metacognition.

3) Learning another language improves one’s cultural understanding and relations.
Pretty obvious this one but very important. Language is a window through which you can understand a culture and its history. Everyone’s heard the story about how Eskimos have forty words for snow or something like that, but there are less obvious ways to read history through words. The literal English translation of a foreign word may reveal a between the lines truth about the way other people think. Also, what are the first words you learn in another language? Foods and other interesting cultural tidbits.

When we travel overseas we expect practically everyone to speak English and, lucky for us, they usually speak enough for us to communicate. Just because English is basically the universal language of travel isn’t an excuse to get lazy and refuse to learn anything else. Making an effort to learn another person’s language shows respect — even if your efforts to hold a conversation fail and you both need to default to English.

4) Learning another language increases one’s sense of the world and decreases one’s insularity.
This is especially crucial for Australia. We’re a young country and rather isolated and insular in our corner of the world. With our close cultural ties to other English speaking countries, and English one of the “global” languages, it’s easy to forget that it’s not the mother tongue for the majority of Earth’s citizens. By failing to force students to learn another language at school, combined with the fact that we can generally get by with English alone when travelling, we reinforce the false primacy of English and a lack of need for other language skills.

Overall, it’s hard to justify the current attitude to LOTE in schools. We should really be requiring primary and secondary school students to study at least one language up to grade ten. Western European languages are most commonly taught at schools but the focus in future should be on south-east Asian languages as they will become increasingly relevant to our lives. Oh, and there are dozens of live Aboriginal languages that exist within our very own country. What about some of them?

We’ve bashed teachers for everything from being greedy and money-hungry, to being resistant to further training, to only working five hours a day, to failing to teach our kids good. Its pretty standard stuff and it’s the kind of ill-informed scrutiny that few other professionals have to deal with on a nearly daily basis. But it’s not enough for Andrew Bolt who has seized on a story in this morning’s Hun like an excited dog finding a juicy bone. The story:

FRUMPY or sexily dressed teachers would be forced to spruce up under a crackdown recommended by state MPs.

Schools would have the power to stamp out inappropriately dressing by teachers under new guidelines recommended by a state parliamentary inquiry.

[...]

In a submission to the education and training committee, Mont Albert Primary School principal John Gow said he’d had difficulties with staff dress.

“This year already I’ve had to suggest to female teachers that I don’t believe singlet tops and thongs are professional dress,” Mr Gow said.

“To males I have had to suggest that beach shorts, sandals and collarless T-shirts are not professional dress.”

Bolta’s response:

Strange that we need new rules now to enforce standards you’d assume could be taken for granted… This after years of formal training and professional development.

So what are teachers, Andrew? Filthy, no-good, poorly-trained idiots or formally trained professionals? You can’t mix-and-match depending on which insult you’re going to throw each day.

Let’s make a deal then. If teachers have to adhere to a dress code then the State and Federal governments have to adhere to a facilities code for public schools. As Brian Caldwell says in today’s Age, “Most of our government schools and many non-government schools are run-down or educationally obsolete. It is no wonder teachers do not wish to stay in the profession when they are forced to work in substandard facilities.” When it pissed down rain the other day I had two buckets in the hallway outside my classroom stopping waterfalls from drenching my kids’ stuff. I cannot, for love nor money, find a class set of protractors or compasses anywhere in the school for my maths lessons.

With respect, Andrew, I think your priorities are wrong when you focus on teachers’ footwear.

Just had a job interview and in the middle of it had a bizarre out-of-body experience when I heard myself talking like Lachlan Connor. “You see a classroom is a community, and my students are part of that classroom, and so to build a positive school community I need to build positive students in my classroom.”

ps/- Why do I need to go to a job interview less than twelve months after getting a job? You can thank the Victorian Government’s over-reliance on contract employment for public school teachers. That’s one of the reasons that we’re stopping work tomorrow; along with the fact that Victorian teachers are on the lowest salaries in Australia. See you at Vodafone Arena at 10am.

Howard’s immaculate perception of Australian history, the Guide-to-the-75-events-all-Orstrayans-must-know, was released last week:

The Guide sets out a framework of topics, key events and people that have shaped our nation. It also outlines the range of skills which the study of Australian history can help to develop. I’d like to thank those who have shaped this Guide [including] Associate Professor Tony Taylor who was commissioned to do further work.

Only problem is that Associate Professor Tony Taylor himself thinks it’s crap:

The course, if implemented as it stands, is scarcely teachable and will almost certainly alienate large numbers of both teachers and students, killing off any long-term interest in the subject. 

The professor’s main criticism is that Johnny’s course isn’t feasible because it tries to cram too much content into not enough class time. Now I’m no high-school teacher (which shouldn’t matter; neither were those who wrote this tripe) but trying to teach 75 so-called key topics into 150 hours of class (an average of two hours each) isn’t going to work. There’s going to be a helluva lot of rushing, glossing over and simplification. A bad case of flu, some tonsilitis or a broken bone and some kid might miss the whole 19th century. Very little contextualisation, depth, competing viewpoints or critical thinking. No opportunity for anything remotely interesting like field trips, museum visits or research projects either; just lots of teacher-talking and read-this-answer-that stuff.  Boooooorring.

Way to kill any interest in the humanities, Johnny. Hopefully your next involvement with history is to become part of it.

Anybody who has lived in London will be familiar with the sight of 10 million pasty white Britons taking the day off work and lying naked on the nearest patch of grass when the mercury nudges 25 degrees. With litres of sunscreen on standby and barely a 30 centimetre gap between them, Londoners deal with “heatwave” conditions in their own special way.

But this is hilarious:

[British] teachers yesterday demanded the right to walk out of hot classrooms during soaring temperatures, claiming “glasshouse” schools were putting children’s safety at risk.

[...]

But [the National Union of Teachers] insisted teachers “should not and cannot be expected to work in any classroom or other internal teaching space where the temperature exceeds 26C (79F) for anything other than very short periods”.

It is pressing the government to introduce laws requiring all schools to adhere to World Health Organisation recommendations for a maximum 24C (75F) limit for “comfortable” working conditions.

Bring it on. I would only have been required to work for about half a dozen days last term.

Lynne Kosky is coming up with all the great ideas about how to improve Melbourne’s public transport system and none of them require the government to do a thing. Last month she admonished commuters for unreasonably expecting their trains to turn up on time, and now she wants schools to stagger their start times to ease demand on the transport system during peak times:

Public Transport Minister and former education minister Lynne Kosky wants to run a pilot scheme encouraging schools to change starting times to spread the commuter peak.

“If we changed some of our schools’ starting patterns, and it probably is the ones that are located close to the city, that would provide incredible capacity on our train system,” Ms Kosky said.”

For crying out loud, why can’t the government “provide incredible capacity” on the train network by investing some bloody money? The government’s public transport strategy at the moment seems to require commuters changing their behaviour to match the crumbling and inadequate system rather than building a system that matches commuters’ needs.