We must be tolerant and dissent is not allowed
Have had a bit of a bout of presentation and observation being remarkably congruent recently.
A couple of weeks ago, read a long feature article in The Age about the difficulty in getting people to apply for principal jobs in Victorian schools. The large, growing and complex regulatory burden they had to deal with was cited as a prime cause. Seems plausible: but which media outlet is notoriously keen on regulation as the solution to all social ills? There is a certain mordant amusement to be got in watching The Age providing a report that reveals unintended consequences of activist policy, that social protections are not costless.
On Wednesday May 10, listened to a talk on problems in schools (particularly the literature curriculum) by a very experienced teacher from a top private girls school. During the presentation she mentioned being on the selection panel for the next principal, and how poor the field of applicants was.
She also talked about how pervasive and one-sided the ideological bias was, both in the curriculum and among the results of teacher training. She is struck by the lack of any sense that any alternative approach or view is possible (except maybe as pathology). Everything is viewed negatively. (If go on and on about how dreadful one’s society and culture is, folk may take you at your word: preaching at students about how flawed Australian society is is, of course, a great way to compete against salafi propaganda among Muslims.) The so-called “future” industry seems to be really the despair industry.
A member of the audience, currently doing teacher training, spoke of the latest nonsense-that the teacher is not an authority source. (Only a system of folk insulated from the consequences of their ideas could engage in such wilful nonsense-paid for by our taxes, of course.)
The teacher pointed out that one result of the shift in curricula was that teaching is also made easier in one sense, because less and less serious content is expected. Marking exams Victoria-wide for VCE, she was struck by the high levels of functional illiteracy in answers by students who had gone through at least 12 years of schooling.
Today, Nigel and I did a (very enjoyable and amusing) “presentation” at the campus assembly for a state school at the local Town Hall. I dressed as a samurai, he as a Western knight and we “kidnapped” the Principal and argued over who got to kill him and how. (Nigel was for beheading, my option of disembowelling was much more popular with the students. The conceit was that I had been hired to kill the principal by the students to ensure better quality of violence at the school, Nigel had been hired to kill the principal by the teachers to ensure a better quality of torture at the school. We each tried to argue for the superiority of “our” culture and in so doing demonstrating that both medieval Europe and medieval Japan had lots of very similar things. It was fun, and the staff and students seemed to love it.)
While we were waiting, we listened to, among other things, short presentations by the male and female campus captains. Both of which were deeply ideological and cloying short sermons of Political Correctness. Some of their points were perfectly reasonable, it was the pervasive Our Culture And Society Are Awful without any sense of countervailing virtues which was depressing.
And clearly perfect representations of what they had picked up was The Proper Things To Say.
Since government provision of education inherently involves an attenuated level of consent, and the regulator is the producer, it is always at risk of capture for propagandising. As the May 10 speaker went through citing chapter and verse (she loves literature but refuses to teach it because she regards the curriculum as such an abomination), Ray E asked how come the takeover had been so pervasive and successful.
I argued that it was a matter of motivation and capture. The motivation comes from the sense of being of Higher Status. Selling status is usually pretty easy, ludicrously so if all that is required is to Have The Correct Opinions. So we have a status-oriented intelligentsia, not a service-oriented one. The capture comes from the regulator being the producer, a pervasive conflict of interest that corrupts the entire institutional structure and destroys serious accountability.
As examples were discussed, again and again Matt Ridley’s comment that political correctness is about inferring is from ought was borne out. The notion that truth is plastic to moral convenience. So empirical disagreement is a moral affront. Both the speaker and a member of the audience told tales of women being threatened by violence by other women for raising dissenting opinion (the speaker when she suggested that perhaps the globe was not being trashed quite so drastically as was being suggested; a female lecturer known to the audience member when she commented that post-modernism was so yesterday).
As parents vote with their children and exit the government system, the push is now on to attempt to extend the regime they are leaving by using government funding to impose it on private schools. Dissent is not allowed! (Next stop, homeschooling?)
ADDENDA This post has been edited to not identify the school.
A couple of weeks ago, read a long feature article in The Age about the difficulty in getting people to apply for principal jobs in Victorian schools. The large, growing and complex regulatory burden they had to deal with was cited as a prime cause. Seems plausible: but which media outlet is notoriously keen on regulation as the solution to all social ills? There is a certain mordant amusement to be got in watching The Age providing a report that reveals unintended consequences of activist policy, that social protections are not costless.
On Wednesday May 10, listened to a talk on problems in schools (particularly the literature curriculum) by a very experienced teacher from a top private girls school. During the presentation she mentioned being on the selection panel for the next principal, and how poor the field of applicants was.
She also talked about how pervasive and one-sided the ideological bias was, both in the curriculum and among the results of teacher training. She is struck by the lack of any sense that any alternative approach or view is possible (except maybe as pathology). Everything is viewed negatively. (If go on and on about how dreadful one’s society and culture is, folk may take you at your word: preaching at students about how flawed Australian society is is, of course, a great way to compete against salafi propaganda among Muslims.) The so-called “future” industry seems to be really the despair industry.
A member of the audience, currently doing teacher training, spoke of the latest nonsense-that the teacher is not an authority source. (Only a system of folk insulated from the consequences of their ideas could engage in such wilful nonsense-paid for by our taxes, of course.)
The teacher pointed out that one result of the shift in curricula was that teaching is also made easier in one sense, because less and less serious content is expected. Marking exams Victoria-wide for VCE, she was struck by the high levels of functional illiteracy in answers by students who had gone through at least 12 years of schooling.
Today, Nigel and I did a (very enjoyable and amusing) “presentation” at the campus assembly for a state school at the local Town Hall. I dressed as a samurai, he as a Western knight and we “kidnapped” the Principal and argued over who got to kill him and how. (Nigel was for beheading, my option of disembowelling was much more popular with the students. The conceit was that I had been hired to kill the principal by the students to ensure better quality of violence at the school, Nigel had been hired to kill the principal by the teachers to ensure a better quality of torture at the school. We each tried to argue for the superiority of “our” culture and in so doing demonstrating that both medieval Europe and medieval Japan had lots of very similar things. It was fun, and the staff and students seemed to love it.)
While we were waiting, we listened to, among other things, short presentations by the male and female campus captains. Both of which were deeply ideological and cloying short sermons of Political Correctness. Some of their points were perfectly reasonable, it was the pervasive Our Culture And Society Are Awful without any sense of countervailing virtues which was depressing.
And clearly perfect representations of what they had picked up was The Proper Things To Say.
Since government provision of education inherently involves an attenuated level of consent, and the regulator is the producer, it is always at risk of capture for propagandising. As the May 10 speaker went through citing chapter and verse (she loves literature but refuses to teach it because she regards the curriculum as such an abomination), Ray E asked how come the takeover had been so pervasive and successful.
I argued that it was a matter of motivation and capture. The motivation comes from the sense of being of Higher Status. Selling status is usually pretty easy, ludicrously so if all that is required is to Have The Correct Opinions. So we have a status-oriented intelligentsia, not a service-oriented one. The capture comes from the regulator being the producer, a pervasive conflict of interest that corrupts the entire institutional structure and destroys serious accountability.
As examples were discussed, again and again Matt Ridley’s comment that political correctness is about inferring is from ought was borne out. The notion that truth is plastic to moral convenience. So empirical disagreement is a moral affront. Both the speaker and a member of the audience told tales of women being threatened by violence by other women for raising dissenting opinion (the speaker when she suggested that perhaps the globe was not being trashed quite so drastically as was being suggested; a female lecturer known to the audience member when she commented that post-modernism was so yesterday).
As parents vote with their children and exit the government system, the push is now on to attempt to extend the regime they are leaving by using government funding to impose it on private schools. Dissent is not allowed! (Next stop, homeschooling?)
ADDENDA This post has been edited to not identify the school.