Posted in Economics, Education on 22 May, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Today the teachers went out on strike in NSW - over recruitment policies for schools. The SMH had two conflicting letters next to each other from teachers:
The Government’s tinkering with a fair, time-tested and successful transfer points system is just the latest unintelligent act that will make recruiting quality teachers more difficult.
and this one
As a [...]
Posted in Economics, Education, global warming on 15 May, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Mr Penguin alerted me to this interested article in Wired. As you would expect, in the US, Republicans are more likely to be sceptical about global warming than Democrats. Environmentalism has always been found more on the left than the right, and Republicans have more to lose from action that makes energy more expensive.
But college-educated [...]
Posted in Civil Liberties, Education, Parenting on 31 March, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I’ve written before about how annoying I find the rules about religious education in NSW public schools. In 1880, the NSW government established the Public Instruction Act, which introduced compulsory free education in NSW. In a compromise with the (non catholic) religious schools, the government also took over most of the poor, parish schools. As [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Education, Parenting on 5 March, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Around here, one of the common topics of conversation among the parent community is, “where are you going to send your kids to high school?” We genuinely have no idea. Our options are made much more complex by the fact that all of the six high schools within walking distance of our house (two public, four private) [...]
Posted in Education, Parenting on 24 January, 2008 | 5 Comments »
The school holidays are nearly over here. Chatterboy goes back to school next Wednesday, and Hungry Boy has his first day at big school next Thursday. So they will both have had five weeks of pretty relaxed holidays - going to the beach, and museums, visiting friends and other bits and pieces, but a lot of [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Education, Parenting on 20 January, 2008 | 3 Comments »
This week, in the post, I got a cheque for $50 from Morris Iemma, Premier of NSW, which included a cheesy message reminding me that he is the father of four children. It was the back-to-school allowance for Chatterboy (I get Hungry Boy’s in a month’s time after he’s actually started Kindergarten).
In 2006, according to the census, [...]
Posted in Education, holiday on 9 December, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Mark Bahnisch in Larvatus Prodeo has a post celebrating the start of the festive season (for political junkies, who had to get the election out of the way before they even noticed that the decorations were up in October). In passing, he comments that:
it’s interesting to note, just quietly, that it’s almost always business groups [...]
Posted in Education, Parenting on 26 October, 2007 | 4 Comments »
There’s an interesting article in a recent Economist about some McKinsey research on improving school performance. I couldn’t find the original McKinsey research (presumably they charge governments a lot of money for it), but even the bits summarised in the Economist are different from most of what you will read about improving education. The McKinsey research [...]
Posted in Education, Life, Parenting on 19 September, 2007 | 10 Comments »
One aspect of education that has somehow become incredibly political is learning to read. There are proponents of the “whole language” method and proponents of the “phonics” method. In a quick google search I found 150,000 articles on the topic. The phonics method has become the property of the right wing - so much so that [...]
Posted in Education, Life, Parenting on 26 August, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Every now and again somebody panics about the state of community these days (e.g. Bowling Alone). My experience, generally is that community is what you put into it. I was reflecting, though, on where most people of my demographic (family with children) tend to put their community efforts these days. A hundred years ago it would [...]
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