Education theory, debates, and information as we can get it from thinkers in the field. And some local good news.

Shoulder to shoulder parenting

By Andrew McKenna

6 September

‘We need small town mindsets with our kids. We need to look out for each other’s kids. Child raising needs to be shifted back to a group endeavour.’

Those words are comforting to those of us living in small towns, but also reassuring to anyone who has thought that a nuclear family is inadequate to raise children.

Nationally renowned ‘boy expert’, international presenter and author of eight books Michael Grose presented a talk at Sacred Heart College in Kyneton last week with the topic ‘Raising Mighty Boys’.

He is the Body and Soul parenting columnist, and reaches six million Australians every Sunday.

His latest release is Thriving!, and his books include the best-selling Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change it.

He has an education background, and holds a Master of Educational Studies with research into what makes healthy families tick. He has conducted over 1,500 parenting seminars over the last two decades.

Kyneton’s presentation was wide-ranging, and there was a goldmine of information in there for parents of boys. He probably knows his material so well he jumped around a bit, but CI captured as much of it as we could.

Grose trained as a teacher in the 1970s and he says the training was lacking in one important point.

‘What was left out of my training was that boys and girls are fundamentally different,’ he said.

‘The differences are fairly obvious but sometimes we forget. What is important for boys in learning is behaviour and confidence building.

‘Boys are heuristic learners – they learn by trial and error, which can be a hard gig for parents. The best way to parent kids is to get into their space. Boys live in the now. The best way is to walk along beside them.

‘It’s what you do with kids, rather than for them. What we lack is time, and sometimes it’s easier to do something for them rather than with them.

‘You’ve got to be patient to grow a boy. Boys are approval-seeking missiles.’

He says you have to get comfortable with your boys, and while they don’t come with a manual, we do – our own experience and baggage as adults.

‘I open my mouth sometimes and my dad comes out,’ he said.

Many of us who are parents have heard that, no doubt.

Draw a box

Work life balance. They can see it. Boys (as they get older) need practical structural things if they are to find their way:

Growth/development

0-5 early

5-10 middle

11-18 adolescence

19-26 ‘adultescence’

In the early years the pre-frontal cortex is developing.

It’s important to talk a lot to boys at age 0-5.

‘Little kids are all arms and legs, the synapses are developing. It’s an age of language development. A high indicator or reading at a later age is their language development at a younger age. Mothers are better to help boys at this age as they do a lot more talking.

‘Children can hear 600 words an hour. They’re developing gross motor skills, visual and spatial skills.’

At age 5-10 they stop saying no and start asking why. This is a latency time between two periods of brain development. They grow taller and that will let them learn what they can do and fit in. It’s a competency and self-esteem time.

US psychologist Martin Seligman set out on a project in the US to depression-proof America, to teach people how to be optimistic, but the theory didn’t hold as there are physiological – and no doubt environmental – issues at play.

He found a correlation between boys and girls and the mother’s explanatory style by the age of eight, about how children see, view and explain the world. Be very careful how you explain the world to children.

You need to have a ‘talking home’.

It’s a time to be with them, a time they are downloading the software about how to be a male.

At 11- 18 they’re the ones not smiling.

Boys drive parents crazy up to age 10, girls do it from 11-18. (Grose explained of course, that these are generalisations.)

Girls convert their feelings to words, boys convert theirs to movement.

At 10-13 boys battle with their brain to a degree, and it’s not an easy time for them. They grow with testosterone, get gangly. Parents may need to be the boy’s brain for a while on adolescence. And you have to stand up to them.

Age 13-18 a boy’s brain decreases by 1 per cent. Boys are making decisions from their limbic or ‘reptilian’ brain – the fight or flight part of the brain. As adults our pre-frontal cortex usually controls our behaviour (maybe not on a saturday night outside many pubs), so we need to parent in a different way for our sons.

Age 15-16 is the next testosterone stage.

Boys may not want to be with their Dads at this stage and some men experience real grief about their sons.

Never say to an adolescent that thee are the best years of your life, because it’s ‘bloody hard’.

There’s a space for mentors at this age.

It can be easier encouraging other people’s sons now because with your own son all you see sometimes are the faults.

The pathway for adolescent girls is about relationships, but for boys it’s more about taking risks, testing yourself out.

They don’t assess risk very well.

From 18-26 boys are the most at-risk group, and they need adults to guide them: viz Ben Cousins and many other young men who get in trouble at this age. Ben Cousins ‘fell down to a fair degree’.

In males, the adult brain arrives by about age 28.

Conclusion

Boys think two things: what are the rules and who’s in charge? Boys are born and it’s all about me. Our job is to develop them for society.

Be firm and interested, remove them from self to social interest.

You have to be interested in them otherwise you won’t get far. Good relationships at a young age will give you leverage as they get older and enter their own world.

‘Shoulder to shoulder parenting’ works with boys – that is if there’s a pair of parents on the job. Be in concert with your partner – present a united front.

‘I feel sorry for children after their parents have been to a parenting seminar,’ he said.

‘Don’t go home gung ho.’

Go to Michael Grose’s website

Local senior Reg McAmish gains some new computer knowledge from volunteer trainer Jennie Owen

Castlemaine elders embark on computer learning with new kiosk

Government funding has been provided to establish a NEC “broadband kiosk” for seniors in Castlemaine. Volunteers of the SIT (Seniors Information Technology) Club are running it, and it is open Mondays 9:30am – 12:30pm at the Castlemaine Senior Citizens Centre in Mechanics Lane, with the possibility of another two hours each Wednesday morning.

It is open for all those who are over 60 in the community in need of some support learning about computers or learning whether they need to learn about computers.

Many people who attend have their specific computer problems to be solved; some bring their own laptop computers; others have never used a computer before and are taught the basics of email, internet and word processing by the volunteers. Volunteers also help to set up members’ new laptops and help connect them to the broadband network.

The funding has provided two new computers added to the two existing desktop computers in the Centre.  This will improve computer access for more attendees each week at the Senior Citizens’ Hall.

Please contact volunteers Betty Johnson on 0408 510 627 or David Sime on 0418 242 977 for further information.

Attendees become members of the Seniors IT Club (SITCLUB) with a $5 membership fee. This will entitle you to a quarterly newsletter and public liability cover while in the building. Morning tea is provided and all users are asked to donate $2 for computer use. Future developments will see the registration of the club with Ancestry.com helping those interested in documenting their family histories to access this necessary database. A skilled volunteer will be there to assist those wanting to use this resource.

The ABC wants to broadcast your students’ stories!

The ABC’s Heywire competition gives people aged 16–22 in rural and regional Australia a chance to ‘tell it like it is’ on the ABC. All they have to do is submit a story to the Heywire website about life in their neck of the woods, or an issue in their community. Their story might be about something they’d like to see change in their town, or an incident that had an impact on them, a place they love to go or simply why they like living where they do. Stories can be in text, audio, photo or video formats.

Students can enter stories they have already produced in class, or teachers can download our Heywire study guide (developed in partnership with ATOM) to run a specific Heywire unit <http://blogs.abc.net.au/heywire/heywire-for-educators.html>.

The ABC selects approximately forty winning stories from around Australia to be produced and reworked with the help of ABC staff and played on Radio National, ABC Local Radio, triple j and abc.net.au! Winners also score an all-expenses-paid trip to the Heywire Youth Issues Forum in Canberra in February where they learn leadership skills, and stay at the Australian Institute of Sport. There’s even a reception at Parliament House!

Entries close 8 October 2010. Find more information and upload stories at <http://www.abc.net.au/heywire>.

The Steiner School goes Latin

The Castlemaine Steiner School last week enjoyed its annual multicultural week, with a celebration of all things Latin American and Spanish. There was dancing, singing, music, food, a play or two, and in keeping with the school’s philosophy everyone participated: the Spanish fiesta week was a huge celebration of a vivaz new element in the Steiner curriculum.

Against the Flow: issues regarding ‘independent learning’

By Darryl Coulthard, Deakin University

I learned that the best way to ruin something was to let an open-style teacher near it and make a project out of it … It seems to me dishonest, hiding real relationships of power and knowledge under the cloak of participation and democracy.

**

I have a number of remarks regarding independent learning and life long learning as well the means to get there. Some are based on my experience as a university lecturer; others are simply personal, referring to the way I think I learned best and what my sons say.

Independent learning is of course the Holy Grail. I read of TH White, that as he had achieved First Class Honours in Distinction in English Literature from Cambridge, he had ‘the advantage of being able to read’. White after a long and intensive study had at some time come to the point of being an independent learner. At university we often preach to the students about independent learning. Most, even at university, find this difficult, if not impossible, and prefer the easy option of being taught. It drives me to distraction and when you hear of ‘dumbing down’ at universities; the lecturers are not only talking about declining standards but significantly, a decline in independent learning at university and the rise of ‘spoon feeding’.

Most recently, the idea of ‘independent learning’ is being increasingly talked about in secondary colleges. Indeed I observe that its apparent resurgence correlates with a decline in independent learning at university. The correlation may be spurious but it does give pause for thought.

Independent learning at secondary school, as I understand it, is a handbag of interrelated ideas:

• Making or providing the opportunity for the student to ‘take control of their own learning’
• Allowing the student to ‘work at their own pace’
• Introducing projects and assignments that excite the passion in the student
• Problem based learning
• Student-centred learning generally, where the curricula focuses on where the student is at and empowers the student to take charge
• Increased relevance, or demonstration of relevance, to the students
• A more ‘democratic, participatory’ environment rather than a ‘hierarchical, authoritarian’ approach
• Less structure and more open class rooms

The image of the student and teaching is optimistic and expansive. I would suggest utopian. Underpinning all this is asking the children to do a lot to take responsibility for things that they are far too young and inexperienced to do. Secondly, it reminds me of something of a puppet government: the strings are still played by the teacher but we all pretend they don’t exist.

Finally it provides the pretence of teachers and students as being on equal footing with regard to curricula and teaching. Of these three issues, the first is probably misguided, while the latter two are perverse.

At this point I wish to express that at some points, all teachers will and should use the handbag of ideas associated with ‘independent learning’ to motivate, reward and teach, students. My issue concerns the extent they are used and that they comprise the underlying philosophy of education.

The ideas of independent learning are certainly not new and I was subjected to them as a child in the 1970s. I hated my open classes and liked my structured ones. My maths went backwards in the open classroom as I struggled with the projects. I felt an enormous sense of inadequacy. I hated assignments where I had to go and research. I loathed school excursions. In classes that asked me to express my opinion, I shuddered as I listened to my gormless peers express opinions aimed to please their teachers. I knew that I didn’t know these things, felt inadequate and shut up. I resented those peers, the ‘Hermione Grangers’ who always piped up with the current ‘right’ opinion on whatever we were doing and would invest a disgustingly long time on some stupid project. I learned how to wind them up but also to keep my interests quiet.

I learned that the best way to ruin something was to let an open-style teacher near it and make a project out of it. Teachers weren’t my friends, although I admired, liked and respected quite a number. I feared and respected some too. To borrow from Marx, if there is such a thing as class consciousness, I and my peers had ‘teacher consciousness’. Having a teacher sit beside me doesn’t even bear thinking about: “Yes Miss, no Miss, can I go now Miss?” Listening to my own children at the kitchen table I find that their attitudes to school, teachers and ‘sucks’ are not that much different to what mine where.

It seems to me dishonest, hiding real relationships of power and knowledge under the cloak of participation and democracy.

As you might imagine, such an experience certainly colours my attitude towards whole scale implementation of open learning. It seems to me dishonest, hiding real relationships of power and knowledge under the cloak of participation and democracy. I knew that I knew nothing; that doing less work was preferred to doing more. I knew that I couldn’t go home and ask my widowed lower middle class mother in a working class area to assist me in some project on the French Alps. Both social and financial capital in our home were in short supply. I’d much rather conjugate verbs than do such assignments. Get me to learn the quadratic formula by rote before giving me a ‘relevant’ statistics exercise.

It’s not always beer and skittles, icecream and iPods.

Lest I be misunderstood, to repeat my point is that such exercises, projects, assignments and approaches have their place but to recognise their limits and may be counterproductive if done for too long or too often. Such projects can motivate and excite. They might also ‘engage’ the ‘disengaged. However, I have learned that learning can be and often is difficult, tedious, frustrating, seemingly irrelevant and requires a fair amount of effort, patience and discipline to get over such bits. It’s not always beer and skittles, icecream and iPods. Independent learning cannot be given, it can only be earned. That what is needed may not seem relevant.

How children are taught has more urgency now here in Castlemaine as we commence the master plan of our new school. How the community wishes our children to be taught will determine how the school will be planned. I would like to think that we can develop a master plan that embraces a form of teaching method pluralism. Some teachers, some subjects, some times, some student cohorts lend themselves more to open than structured classrooms and vice versa. I would also like to think we can develop a master plan that produces a ‘living school’, one that can change and adapt with some grace to changing demands and fashions of school pedagogy.

Music – A Cultural Journey

Music is a part of most children’s lives and culture. Musical experience for children has the potential to build confidence, sense of well-being and willingness to engage in learning. The music of diverse communities can be actively and simply included into the daily lives of children. In this practical workshop we will explore ways to encourage educators working with children to incorporate music into their programs.

Topics to be covered

The value and importance of including music into everyday programming How to source and make cost effective, culturally diverse music and age appropriate instruments Connecting with families through music

Learning outcomes

For participants to: • Promote positive and meaningful musical experiences when working with children • Gain information about sourcing and creating culturally diverse music and instruments

WHEN: Monday 13 September.

Children’s Services: 9-11 Stewart St, Richmond

COST: $25 (funded) $50 (unfunded)

For more information and bookings, email fka Children’s Services: fkacs@fka.com.au

Phone: (03) 9428 4471

or visit:

http://www.fka.com.au/professional- development/calendar/september#3

To download booking form:

http://www.fka.com.au/professional-development/book-now

Melbourne Writers Festival 2010 School’s Program

Join us for four jam-packed days of events at Federation Square, with discussions, meet-the-author sessions, debates, performances, readings and more for students from primary school through to VCE and beyond.

Guests include David Metzenthen, Jackie French, Alice Pung and Andy Griffiths and session topics cover everything from mermaids to monsters. With very special appearances from songwriters, such as Archie Roach and Shane Howard, and a live video link with none other than Neil Gaiman, it’s set to be a feast of books and writing. Don’t miss the Big Ideas series specially programmed for senior students!

WHEN: Monday 30 August to Thursday 2 September All tickets $6. All welcome. Teachers with a group of ten students will receive a free ticket.

For schools’ program events and bookings, visit http://www.mwf.com.au or call (03) 9999 1199.

My God you’re here from Planet Boring

By Andrew McKenna

‘Dear Dr Michael, at times I think my son is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.’

This was in a letter Dr Michael Carr-Gregg received in one of his roles as Agony Uncle for various magazines. Dr Carr-Gregg was in Castlemaine last week giving a lecture with the topic ‘Demistifying Adolescence’, and he gave the packed hall at the Steiner School plenty to take away.

Dr Carr-Gregg has worked with adolescents for 25 years and is is one of Australia’s highest profile psychologists. He works  in private practice in Melbourne, and is a founding member of the National Centre Against Bullying. He is a columnist (or ‘Agony Uncle’) for  Girlfriend Magazine and Australian Doctor,  and is a regular on Radio 3AW.

‘The science of neural imagery tells us what’s happening in a teenager’s brain,’ he said in opening.

‘I couldn’t have given this talk ten years ago as the knowledge didn’t exist.’

And the knowledge that has been accumulated over the past ten years in the realm of adolescent brain development is extraordinary.

‘We used to think the brain was fully developed at fifteen when the skull stopped growing,’ he said.

‘Then everything changed. Magnetic Resonance Imaging was used over thirteen years to look into the brains of 1800 teenagers, and it was found that they only mature much later.

‘The pre-frontal cortex – the voice of reason – reaches maturity last. We now know it’s fully developed in girls at 23, but the male brain is not developed completely until age 29.

‘This explains emotional outbursts, risk taking. They weren’t thinking. They need guidance as their brains are not fully developed. They are unable to predict the outcomes of their actions.’

He referred to a ‘tattered cloak of immortality’ that a lot of teenagers seem to have around them, that they can’t foresee the results of their actions and hence the rule breaking, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

A 14-year-old boy has just undergone an 800 per cent increase in testosterone levels, so along the way blind hormones take the driver’s seat.

Cory Worthington, the young man who invited the world into his parents’ house and the world then proceeded to wreck it, was interviewed and asked ‘what were you thinking?’ His answer was, ‘well, I wasn’t really’. That’s precisely the point. They don’t and they can’t.

‘Adolescence has been redefined,’ Dr Carr-Gregg said.

‘It’s no longer 13-19, but more like 10-24. This extends the “period of vulnerability”. There’s a primacy of materialism in their lives, and a huge pressure on academia and careers.’

He described the role the hormone leptin plays in the teenager’s body. It’s the hormone responsible for secondary sexual characteristics, and is stored in fat, so larger kids – more fat cells – will mature physically more quickly.

Chemicals in the environment also mimic the actions of sex hormones. That ‘plasticky’ taste you get from a water bottle left in the sun sure enough is a plasticky taste, as the sun leeches some of the chemicals from the plastic into the water. Many man-made chemicals can mimic the actions of hormones in the body, or act as ‘endocrine disruptors’, messing with the body’s endocrine system, of the natural ebb and flow of hormones in the body.

More highly sexualised television plays a role in the early onset of adolescence, the sexualisation of children … he pointed to an ‘amalgam’ of reasons for the early onset rather than one simple reason. And he said he put himself out on a limb in speaking out against the photographs of Bill Henson. Henson recently defended his work in The Age, saying ‘our zeal to protect innocence should not come at the cost of violating artistic experience’. You can argue around that statement for ever, but Carr-Gregg has come down firmly on the side of innocence.

He quoted a longitudinal study in New Zealand, which demonstrated that puberty is delayed in girls with good relationships with their fathers. But all males emit pheromones, and those from an ‘alien’ male in a household bring on puberty earlier in girls. Think of the millions of ‘blended’ families in Australia and it’s not hard to see where semi-trailer loads of stray pheremones are coming from, and imagine they may be playing a role in early onset of female puberty.

**

‘Storytelling has been hijacked by Hollywood,’ Dr Carr-Gregg said.

‘One in four British homes no longer have a dining room table.’
While brain research has shown adolescence may have become elongated, there is nevertheless also ‘developmental compression’ in teenagers and adolescents, which is bound to – and is – causing psychological problems.

He says the early onset of puberty short circuits childhood. Children are going straight from the Wiggles to Britney, which is like taking a cake out of the oven before it’s cooked. And if we think this is nothing to worry about, think again: our young people have record levels of depression, anxiety and eating disorders. Teen suicide is rampant. As a society we are off course. Carr-Gregg argues that the early adultification of children is just plain wrong.

**

3 stages of adolescence:

He suggests there are three stages of adolescence.

In early adolescence kids are asking am I normal? They’re incredibly embarrassed about everything and need reassurance.

By early adolescence children are starting to look at their parents with adult eyes, and they may say ‘oh my God, you’re here from Planet Boring’.

In middle adolescence they’re asking who am I? This is the key question through adolescence.

‘Art, music dance, drama offer young people the opportunity for definition. The great enemy of young people is boredom, which is when they can engage in unhealthy risk taking.’

The family focus shifts to peer focus, but he says parents can remain firm: This is my house, these are my rules, they need to say. (Good luck! We tried it at home. Our early adolescent child laughed to scorn in our faces.)

‘Teenagers are the most sleep-deprived segment of the population,’ Dr Carr-Gregg said.

‘If kids come to school sleep deprived and haven’t had a proper breakfast, they can’t learn.  I may sound like my mother, ‘make sure they have a good breakfast’.’

See the sidebar for a little more on peers.

Carr-Gregg says young people need to explore and discover their ‘islands of competence’ – those things they do well, whether it be in sport, or art, or business or something else altogether.

‘Every child has a set of key inner strengths and our job is to help the child locate and consolidate those strengths and help them design their life to use them. Having meaning and being engaged in what they do.’

As if early and middle adolescence weren’t trying enough, he says late adolescence is also a time also of great uncertainty, but also a time for young people to find themselves.

Some kids go through an identity moratorium – postponing making that decision by travelling or doing voluntary work. Some are forced into ‘foreclosure’: being forced into something by their parents, which he says is disastrous.

In late adolescence kids are seeking individualisation by spurning adult control and support. They need a guide to nourish their individuality, they need to feel safe, loved and listened to. And by late adolescence the storm can be over.

No improvement in resilience

Over hundreds of years of material gains, and psychological, medical and technological advancement, Carr-Gregg argues that we haven’t improved young people’s resilience.

‘Why?’ he asks.

‘Is it cultural intangibles? Our focus on materialism? Under-fathering? Excessive individualism? The media?’

He says it is all of these.

‘Dr Leonard Sax talks about the toxic elements in society and pinpoints five: video games, teaching methods, prescription drugs, endocrine disruptors, and the devaluation of masculinity. While you could write a tome on each of those, my notes began to peter out and this is what I came up with.

Murders, murders and more murders – is this a joke?

‘Why would violence (in video games, films etc) not desensitise a young mind to violence?’

Turn on the television any night – and you may notice it more if you haven’t watched the box for a week or more – previews for shows coming up are about murders, murders and more murders. Is this a joke? How did we get to this stage in our society? Violence as entertainment saturates our media.

We’ve already read a little about endocrine disruptors.

The medical profession and drug companies are increasingly turning to the magic pill to save our kids (and us) from the mad society we have created, which is a little like handing out burn cream to someone who habitually presses their hand on a hotplate, and not counselling them to remove their hand.

Carr-Gregg said that 75 per cent of all mental illness starts before the age of 25, and fully one in five Australians have a mental health problem, half of which are never diagnosed.

‘You should be the world expert in your child.  Keep an eye out for changes, and you have to act if something is wrong.’

‘As a parent you must observe your child’s self talk,’ he said.

‘The happiest kids are the ones with flexible thinking. The key is self talk, positive, optimistic thinking.

‘Parents need to be a mentor, not a mate.’

Resources:

Hanna Modra on the ABC website – Australian Story.

Mood GYM online behavioural cognitive therapy. Six modules your child can do online can change a child’s way of looking at the world. Similar is Reachout Central

Dr Carr-Gregg is the author of:

Princess Bitch Face Syndrome
Boys Adrift
Girls on the Edge
When to Really Worry

Go to his website

The Ultranet and education

By Darryl Coulthard, Deakin University

I have recently been to two presentation of the new Ultranet education network of the Victorian Education Department. The Ultranet is a $60 million dollar educational software site. The first presentation was by the project manager of the project to the ACS, the second by the Castlemaine Secondary College to the school council, of which I am a member.

The management of the project impresses me and I am impressed by the professional and thorough response and preparation for the Ultranet by CSC. Our school will be one of the best-prepared schools for its wide scale introduction this year.

I don’t blame people for liking the Ultranet and the laptop in schools program. I don’t even blame them for loving it. ICT promises so much to education. Kids (they are rarely called children) love computers.  Information, other kids, the world is at our fingertips. It promises an ease of access to knowledge – a panacea to the sweat and tears of study, disengaged kids, poor communication to others, prepares kids to for the new globalised and connected world, provides teachers with new tools and so on and so on.  The Ultranet is, I think a pretty red-hot go, possibly  ‘world’s best practice’ attempt to bottle the thing.

Maybe, but I’m a doubting Thomas by constitution. The more the hype the less I believe it, the more sceptical and some say cynical, I get.  I’m not one for evidenced based knowledge as I think it is too narrow, but I do want evidence and argument, not bluster and promotional material.

Certainly, the story of ICT is littered with hype, bluster and failure. Remember the dotcom bubble burst, any version of Windows, any new computer being just so much the answer to all your needs?  And then again Myki, the RMIT people soft debacle, the French railway booking shemozzle, the Denver airport baggage handling fiaso and the list go on and on … Information systems mostly deliver far less than promised, many end in disaster.

So what makes this any different? I ask. At the ACS meeting those present were reassured that the Ultranet won’t end in a Myki (it nearly did apparently) but I did get the impression that many of the heralded features won’t be implemented or put off to later.

I find the revolutionary claims made for education by ICT very much overstated and very much self-serving and any reservations or dangers are summarily dismissed.

A second thing that raises my scepticism is that if it sounds too good to be true, and as we never tire of telling our children, then it probably is. Maybe I’m sceptical too because I have worked with computers in a variety of capacities since 1976, the internet for nigh on twenty years and have taught distance education programs for around ten years. I find the revolutionary claims made for education by ICT very much overstated and very much self-serving and any reservations or dangers are summarily dismissed.  Such claims need to be taken with a grain of salt. There is a huge gulf between the getting of information and the gaining of understanding, or as Socrates may have put it, the resemblance of having knowledge and actually having it.

A key argument for the Ultranet is that we now live in the information age and our kids are different and that we have to use ICT to engage them. Chalk and talk and old-fashioned approaches simply won’t cut it any longer with our modern kids with their short attention spans. Topics and delivery style must be relevant, student centred and interactive. The Ultranet supports and facilitates this new approach to teaching using a ‘cool’ kid friendly interface.

There is some good reasoning behind this. Paolo Freire, an education professor tired of hearing of failure to teach slum children to read, went into to the favelas and discovered that making reading relevant made those children willing and eager to learn and they did learn. Primary school teachers in the early years of learning found that being child-centred similarly increased numeracy and literacy. Moreover being relevant and working around the pace and interests of children make sense.

However, relevance and engagement doesn’t simply or necessarily equate with ICT or always with learning.  I am reminded all those years ago that the studies of the learning effect of Sesame Street essentially boiled down to teaching children to like television. The educational circumstance of a five year old is also quite different to a fifteen year old, a slum child in Brazil to a child in Castlemaine.  To be sure, there is an argument to be had here, between the straw ‘talk and chalk’ teacher and the gushing ‘I let the kids do what they want’ teacher.

My point is that relevance and child centredness should be two carefully qualified aspect of teaching not a carte blanche licence. The sad fact is that some key aspects of learning are going to dull and where the relevance to the student isn’t immediately apparent. Nor is ICT a cure for patience, diligence and hard work.

One aspect of student centredness that I find disturbing for secondary school children is that it can put the children ‘in charge of their own learning’. I find it a dereliction of the duty of the adult to the child and of our culture to the future. That’s our job. If we don’t do it, some marketer will try to make the children grow up in their image. Sometimes we think that our own difficulties, inadequacies and anxieties about ICT and our world disqualifies us. Rest assured, in my experience at university in a information systems schools suggests that our students entering university are less well prepared for using technology professionally and critically than a decade or even two decades ago.

Somewhat paradoxically, the package is being promoted as a means by which parents can keep in touch with assignments, reporting and excursion and all those things you find out at the bottom of bag with the rotten banana. “let them do their own thing” may mean watching them more closely, at least for the middle class.

I could imagine myself as a teacher saying, ‘do you want me to teach or piffle away on the laptop’?

I have some further reservations, more deeply hidden.  As I saw the presentations, coupled with my familiarity with similar, if lesser software was the thought that you need a pretty organised mind to use them. I thought of the teachers working away on the laptops, organising their work, undertaking reports and proformas, filling in spreadsheets and answering emails. Classroom work, real teaching seems so far away. I could imagine myself as a teacher saying, ‘do you want me to teach or piffle away on the laptop’?   But then again I thought, everything on a laptop can be monitored.

Everything teachers and students do on the Ultranet can be scrutinised. Some might say this is a good thing. For me it is a bit too Orwellian. If I were a teacher, I’d like to think I know better than a pointy-head in Collins Street or in a regional office in Bendigo for one thing. I also wonder that if we are teaching children to trust (now that might be a big if these days) then maybe we should have trust ourselves.

My final reservation is that successfully using the Ultranet by parents and students may require more rather than less social capital. It requires organisation and follow up. I recall that the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointing out that assignment work involving research disadvantaged the working class.  Middle class kids could draw on the resources of their parents to help them do their assignments, check that they are doing their work, read teacher’s comments and progress reports and make note of upcoming work and email the teacher.  Absolutely marvellous for a highly organised, motivated and computer resourced home.  However, one can imagine some children getting further behind as they play computer games or consume Facebook for hours rather than their homework. Indeed Bourdieu claimed that traditional chalk and talk methods were more levelling as each child had at least the same resources available within the classroom.

So I remain sceptical of the Ultranet and computers in schools. However the Ultranet is here and we have to be realistic and work with it and try as far as possible to avoid the problems that I identify and to critically but constructively adopt it.  We must be like Socrates and critically evaluate our technologies.  We simply cannot uncritically accept them. I think though we are fortunate because we do have a school that is rising to that challenge but help is always welcome.

Darryl Coulthard is a Castlemaine Secondary College Board Member and a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, Deakin University

Steiner students keep on planting

National Tree Planting Day (Friday 30 July) was hugely successful again this year at the Castlemaine Steiner School and Kindergarten. Heavy rain the night before prepared the ground beautifully for the many parent volunteers and enthusiastic children who worked hard all morning to plant out different areas of the school grounds.

Older classes teamed up with more junior ‘buddy classes’ to work together, enjoying both the planting and the many deep puddles left by the rain! Over 450 trees, shrubs and grasses were planted by students under the guidance of the school horticulture teacher, Lisa Hall. The school site continues to be transformed after only 14 years on the Muckleford site. What was once a barren sheep paddock, flourishes with the regular planting of trees and gardens.

How To Improve Your Grammar and Punctuation

(Originally published in Edarticle)

Individual words too can have relatively different meanings in different cultures depending upon expectations, values and experience of the two persons, the speaker and the listener. For example a word such as ‘far’ when applied to distance, may convey something totally different to a city dweller in North America who practically never walks anywhere, compared with someone who lives on the land in the middle of an African country.

Similarly words such as ‘big’ or ‘large’ when related to size of an object or a contract.??In the various languages, punctuation marks and other symbols such as the full stop (.), the comma (,) the colon (:), the semicolon (;), the question mark (?), the quotation mark (‘) and many others are not necessarily written in the same way, nor positioned in the same manner within text.

Many different kinds of diacritical signs and marks are used, and some specialist signs and ligatures, such as the ampersand (&) or the ‘at’ sign (@) may not be understood.??All languages using romanised script are written from left to right on a horizontal line, while many others including Arabic script and languages in Asia and South East Asia are written from right to left. Chinese characters, pictographs or ideograms are printed from top to bottom in vertical columns shifting from right to left, but sometimes also from left to right in horizontal lines. There is a saying in diplomatic circles, that when a diplomat says yes, he means maybe; if he says maybe he means no; and if he says no, he is no diplomat.

It is to oversimplify matters to state that?in Western European countries and in North America the word ‘yes’ means the affirmative and ‘no’ the negative, in many other countries and cultures even these two words are often the cause of serious misunderstandings. In France people will often say ‘no’, when they actually mean — maybe, but try and convince me. In most European languages the response to a question is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ according to whether the answer is positive or negative, as in the following examples:

Question Answer to be conveyed Answer

1. Is your name Peter? (My name is Peter) Yes

2. Is your name Peter? (My name is not Peter) No

3. Isn’t your name Peter? (My name is Peter) Yes

4. Isn’t your name Peter? (My name is not Peter) No

But in many African and other languages the choice of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is made in the light of whether the question and answer are both negative, when the answer is ‘yes’, but if they are not, it will be,’no’. The answers to the four questions above are therefore:

1. Affirmative question + affirmative answer = Yes

2. Affirmative question + negative answer = No

3. Negative question + affirmative answer = No

4. Negative question + negative answer = Yes

A typical example could be the reply to a negative question, such as ‘You have no underground railway in this town?’ The reply in?many African countries might well be: ‘Yes, we have none.’ During conversations, discussions and even negotiations with?people who live in Asian countries one will notice that they seldom say no. This is not, because there may not be an equivalent?word in their language but because they wish to save face or embarrassment for both parties. Instead they may use euphemisms ?or vague, neutral or indirect words and phrases rather than a direct or unforgiving — no.

It should also be noted that in many cultures people will tell you what they think you would want and like to hear, even by the way of giving you directions. They may use words such as ‘not far’, when the destination may well be a long way away. Often the answer to a language problem is the need to read ‘between the lines’. This indicates that one has to analyse what has not been said rather than what has been said.

In some languages such as German and most of the Scandinavian languages the information conveyed by the language is explicit and words have specific meaning, while in others such as Arabic and Japanese it is not necessarily so. There are sometimes hidden or subtle meanings in words and expressions which are not obvious to foreigners even if they have a good knowledge of a language. There is the story of a tired businessman telephoning the reception desk in a hotel in a country in the Middle East requesting ‘an extra pillow’, and to his surprise immediately being sent up a girl. If he made a similar request in a British hotel he might well be asked, whether he would like the pillow to be feather or foam filled.

There are basically two types of languages. There are the dead languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit which are learned for historical or religious reasons without being part of everyday linguist exchange and living languages currently in use worldwide. Because languages in current use are alive, they are the method of conveying new ideas, innovations and concepts. There is therefore a constant stream of new words which enter languages, as well as changes in the interpretation of existing words. This too can cause of misunderstandings, even when people talk the same language and even the use of identical words could mean different things. ??Changes take place more rapidly in the context of the spoken language than when it is written. The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, state that around 1,000 new words, worth recording, are added to the English language every year. Sign language is a central part of the deaf culture. There is no universal sign language and every country, with a few exceptions, has its own form of sign language, for example:

ASL — American Sign Language
LSF — Langue des Signes Francaise
DGS — German Sign Language?BSL — British Sign Language

STANDARDISED TESTING: A RACE TO NOWHERE

By Lisa Y Johnson-Collins

Race To Nowhere is an excellent description of the standardised testing movement. The (US) No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, increased the role of the federal government in public education and also expanded the role of standardised testing. This morning, I had a conversation with another educator who was ending a California State Testing week. The dedication of this teacher is commendable; although exhausted and stressed, this educator was hopeful that her students did well. She wanted them to have a chance at the best education possible. When I mentioned to her the best education possible is not based on state testing, she went through the myriad reasons why testing is a benefit. These alleged benefits of standardised testing permeate the public educational system causing harm to students, teachers and the future of public education as a whole.

According to the California Department of Education, the purpose of standardised testing is “to measure how well students are learning the knowledge and skills identified in California’s content standards.” In addition, standardised testing results will assist with focusing curricular instruction and organising teaching methods. The goals of standardised testing seem to be falling short; instead of measuring student knowledge and focusing instruction and methods, the rigor of testing seems to be a silent erosion of our school system. A recent documentary, Race To Nowhere, chronicles the culture of today’s youth in public school. According to the documentary, the epidemic of standardised testing has produced a culture for cheating, disengaging students, stress-related illness, depression, burnout, and of compromised young adults seemingly unprepared and uninspired for the future.

“Only a handful of scholars and practitioners have argued in defence of standardised tests,” wrote Lishing Wang and fellow researchers Gulbahar H. Beckette and Lionel Brown. The Educational Research Newsletter analysed the pros and cons of standard-based assessments. According to the website one of the pros of these assessments are a common core of knowledge. These common standards assist in comparing grades across teachers and schools. Students should be expected to meet common standards that are challenging and are more than just minimum requirements regardless of socioeconomic status, race or disability. The other side argues that by imposing standards on students’ minds they are constricting intellectual freedom. These standardised tests oversimplify the core knowledge and do not test higher-order thinking. Cookie cutter standards either dumb down instruction or condemn low-ability students to frequent failure. Students can become disengaged and burned out.

Regardless of the side of the argument, all students, teachers and schools are not created equal and this fact is not taken into account when examining the practice of standardisation. The practice of standardised test are to meant to level the playing field when in fact the playing field with struggling learners in school is never level. In other words the interventions that are being utilised to assist struggling students are not individualised or unsuccessful. According to the California Department of Education website’s data for July of 2008, 13, 237 students took the Math portion of the California Exit Exam and 13, 373 students took the English portion of the exam. 29% of the students passed the Math and 30% passed the English portions of the test for the state. When we superimpose the same standards on every student, teacher and school, we receive results that are disappointing—a race to nowhere.

These disappointing results are rooted in non-profit school communities maintaining for-profit activities, i.e., test scores. Data has become the catch phrase and teacher’s names are associated directly with their student’s scores. Improvement has been demanded on the back of a shocked system, and therefore an increase of assessments and pacing guides has followed. This increase of standardised testing is big business for the private sector. There are four companies that dominate the testing market: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson- three test publishers and one scoring firm. Press reports value the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million. There is a top-down chain between policy, content, materials, and instruction. Policymakers dictate the content, textbook companies convert the content into materials and schools purchase these materials for consumption by teachers and students. According to a blog entitled, When Pedagogy and Policy Collide written by Brigitte Knudson, what America is experiencing is called “commodification” of education. In others words, education has became a commodity or moneymaker. Knudson goes on to state, “Education – the process of learning – has been co-opted by an alliance of business and government interests, for the dual purposes of maintaining the government’s economic interests and propelling the private sector, all while fostering a climate of continual educational crisis in the country that places blame on a system of its own creation that is intentionally underfunded to perpetuate the cycle.” This marriage of big business, government and non-profit school communities continues to lead to disappointment and a move toward privatisation of public education. It’s a lose-lose situation as reformers concentrate on splintered areas of need while big business and government erode the core, destroying the public education system right under our noses.

“Race to Nowhere is a call to challenge these current assumptions and mobilise families, educators, and policy makers for how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens,” Race to Nowhere website. Check the website to find a screening, go see it. Spread the news to educators, parents, students and your community. Join the Race to Nowhere Facebook Page in your area. This link is the  Los Angeles page. If a page or community group is not available for your area, start one. Let’s continue to examine the facts regarding our educational system and make it our own again.

About the Author

Lisa Y Johnson-Collins brings complementary skills in education and child development.  Lisa  has thirteen years of experience in special education classrooms.  Lisa  also has worked in the field of social work, assisting children and families. She has a master’s degree in special education, a bachelor’s degree in psychology, reading certificate, and is a credentialed teacher in both special and general education, kindergarten through high school.  She has taught children with, among other things, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, emotional disturbance, autism, and mental retardation, as well as children in general education classes.

The World in One Room

World in One Room: Managing Contentious Issues in Schools

Workshops: June- November

For more information, contact: Nuangwong Boonyanate Senior Project Officer Multicultural Education Unit DEECD

PH: 9637 2136 Email: Boonyanate.nuangwong.n@edumail.vic.gov.au

The Languages and Multicultural Resource Centre (LMERC)

LMERC staff have developed new resource lists on Tigers and endangered animals, Global education and International year of biodiversity. LMERC is currently in the process of compiling a resource list to coincide with the Immigration Museum’s Australia’s Muslim Cameleers exhibition. Email lmerc.library@edumail.vic.gov.au to request an electronic copy of any of these lists.

The Asia Wise Competition

The Asia Wise Competition provides schools with the opportunity to improve students’ knowledge of the history, geography and cultures of Asia. The competition is:

• an easy-to-implement method for improving Asia literacy for all students in your school • can be run as an extension or homework project in history, geography or SOSE

• is a self-paced program that requires one lesson to introduce to students who can then complete the activity in their own time

• Can be used as a stand-alone program or the “big issues” it raises can be used as a basis for class debates and discussion.

Registration due by 1 July. For more information, visit www.GiantClassroom.com.au or email Darren@GiantClassroom.com.au.

Mid-winter at the Steiner School

On Friday, 18 June, mid-winter was celebrated at the Castlemaine Steiner School, as it is every year. Everyone in the school community looks forward to this festival, and even the preparation for the festival, with the children making lanterns and cooking soup to eat on the day.

On the day of the festival, the children in every class take part in a spiral walk, during which they light a candle, to represent the return of the light. Everyone is welcome to write a wish on a piece of paper, and the children put theirs in a basket when they walk the spiral. These wishes are then put into the bonfire.

In the evening, children and parents gather, light lanterns and take part in a lantern walk along a pathway marked out by hundreds of candles to where the bonfire is set up. The Year 8 students light the bonfire, with all the wishes in it, and we all look forward to longer, warmer days ahead.

**

‘All of Us: Multicultural perspectives in Victorian schools’ provides teachers with a practical guide for assisting students to explore and understand cultural diversity and the values and practices common to ‘all of us’. The resource consists of: a 15 minute video ‘Why include multicultural perspectives in your curriculum?’ (with professional learning program for staff) plus activities and suggestions for embedding multicultural and global education within the Victorian Essential Learning domains and cross curriculum perspectives including values education, Asia education and global education.’ To order this FREE EDUCATION RESOURCE KIT for your school, please download an order form from http://www.multicultural.vic.gov.au/images/stories/pdf/education%20kit%20cropped%20form.pdf

Cut out screen time for kids? You must be joking!

Reproduced from John Allison’s Parent-Theses Journal

Reduce or eliminate screen time: Give your children a chance to flex their own imaginative muscles. They may be bored at first. Be prepared with simple playthings and suggestions for make-believe play to inspire their inner creativity.

Curtail time spent in adult-organised activities: Children need time for self- initiated play. Overscheduled lives leave little time for play.

Choose simple toys: A good toy is 10 percent toy and 90 percent child. The child’s imagination is the engine of healthy play. Simple toys and natural materials, like wood, boxes, balls, dolls, sand, and clay invite children to create their own scenes — and then knock them down and start over.

Encourage outdoor adventures: Reserve time every day for outdoor play where children can run, climb, find secret hiding places, and dream up dramas. Natural materials — sticks, mud, water, rocks — are the best raw materials of play.

Bring back the art of real work: Believe it or not, adult activity — cooking, raking, cleaning, washing the car — actually inspires children to play. Children like to help for short periods and then engage in their own play.

Reprinted from a brochure Time for Play, Every Day: it’s Fun — and Fundamental published by the Alliance for Childhood. The Alliance for Childhood promotes policies and practices that support children’s healthy development, love of learning, and joy in living. Their public education campaigns bring to light both the promise and the vulnerability of childhood. The Alliance acts for the sake of children themselves and for a more just, democratic, and ecologically responsible future. For more information visit their web site at www.allianceforchildhood.org.

Playing, being, working

© John Allison 2010.

A child is playing and nothing else exists for her in that moment. Few adults can give such attention to their immediate situation, so willingly, for so long. And it is real work.

Play enables the child to live into a whole world. It is a world of her own making which borders on to the world we think is the real world. Through manifold creative acts the child pushes back these boundaries, to increasingly inhabit the world we know but all too often have forgotten how to understand. Play is a participatory pathway into the reality of this so-called real world.

A child playing is ordering the world. Play is an experiment into the nature of reality. Things are either obedient to her imagination, or not. Play is a brave adventure into the possibilities and limitations of things. It is the true basis of problem-solving.

A child playing is discovering her relationship to the world. The encounter refects back into her developing sense of self.

A child playing is working out real situations. Play brings these situations into a coherent narrative that makes sense. In the world of play any thing can become anything. And everything. There is nothing missing within the whole world of play. It is always as minimal and elaborate as necessary. It is what it is.

We can summarise… A child playing is:

Perceiving and exploring situations

Learning about self and world

Initiating and enacting possibilities.

A child is playing. Our responsibility as adults is to protect and nurture this world of play, this realm in which anything is possible. Which leads to everything that works…

How American Public Education Became A Doomsday Machine

By Bruce Price

Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on auto-pilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.

The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the inhabitants had been killed. New arrivals would be killed.

I certainly wasn’t thinking about our public schools at that time but now I see a creepy similarity between what happened to that space station and what happened to this country’s Education Establishment. Both are running on an unintended auto-pilot and no longer serve the purposes for which they were constructed. Neither can be reasoned with or even approached.

Was this tragedy inevitable? Or an unlikely concatenation of events that should never have happened? In any event, we can look back a century and observe our doomsday machine in creation.

History circa 1900 was as turbulent as our own. Intellectual debates raged. Communist and Socialist movements boiled in almost every country. Revolutionaries were trying to transform the governments of Russia, Austria, Germany, etc. Wealth was growing at an extraordinary pace, as were technology and inventions.

The most brilliant people became Doctors of Medicine, Law, and Philosophy. What did the also-rans do? Cynics have suggested that they invented new fields where they could be stars and empire-builders. Education, Psychology and Sociology did not exist much before this time. Once these also-rans had Ph.D. attached to their names, they could build departments at colleges across the country and lay down the law to the next generation. They bestrode new frontiers of knowledge; it was heady stuff. Unfortunately, most of these young stars first studied in Germany where their brains were steeped in a mishmash of Hegelian, Prussian, Marxist, Freudian, and other exotic influences. They returned to America almost as alien invaders.

John Dewey spelled out a new approach to education, where academic pursuits would be devalued and social activity would become the primary purpose. He went further, laying out a scheme whereby his disciples would commandeer Teachers College, and use it to indoctrinate generations of young teachers. These eager propagandists would be sent to the small towns of America to spread Socialism. All this was in full force by 1910.

More and more, I tend to think of Dewey as America’s Favorite Quack. He said a lot of extreme things and he had a messianic belief that he was supposed to push all of them to fruition. Regretfully.

Then history got even weirder. By 1920 the Russians had finished their Revolution and already gone off the deep end. Lenin concluded that Communism must occur in all other countries in order to save the Communist Party in his country. I.e., to save what quickly became Stalin’s lurid dictatorship.

Hundreds of front groups were formed in the US to promote Communism. They meddled big-time, certainly in education. This was bad enough but things got worse in the 1930’s due to the Great Depression. This tragedy pushed our educators entirely over the edge. In their judgment, it had to be clear to everyone that Karl Marx was right, capitalism was finished, and the New World being created by Moscow was clearly the future.

George Counts, perhaps the leading educator in 1932, expressed the mood: “That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction.” Conquest! Willard Givens, boss of the National Education Association in 1934, stated: “[M]any drastic changes must be made. A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control.” Destroy and control! The NEA Journal expressed in 1936 the ultimate goal of all the gimmicks pushed by our Education Establishment from then to now: “Let us not think…in terms of specific facts or skills [that children should acquire] but rather in terms of growing.” No facts or skills!

In 1946 the NEA Journal proclaimed: “At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession.” World government! Stalin, who would live until 1953, was that year contemplating whether he could conquer Europe. In that context, “world government’ is code for “do what Uncle Joe wants.” Practical translation: a vastly expanded gulag.

In short, there may have been some big brains in education in the first half of the 20th century. Certainly there were some restless empire-builders. But by 1950 the field had shifted far to the left and become fossilized at that point. My impression is that the young people admitted to the field had to be yes-men who would support without questioning all the Received Wisdom. They were on auto-pilot.

At this point American education had become a machine that could not evolve or rethink its goals. In dumbing down the country, the Education Establishment had dumbed itself down!

American education pursued mediocrity with cunning and tenacity. As fast as one idea didn’t work and was ridiculed by the public, the Education Establishment devised 10 more. The “marketing department” at Teachers College et al has to be one of the great success stories of American history. These people invented Cooperative Learning, Constructivism, Self-Esteem, Reform Math, Open Classroom, Multiculturalism, Authentic Assessment, 21st Century Skills, and fifty others. All these things, I’d argue, were dumb and dangerous; but they sounded good enough that the public would pay more taxes to implement them.

No question, this doomsday machine was fixated on acquiring money, union jobs and power. Huge doses of all three. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of thought left over for the humble tasks of making sure kids can read, write and count. (Significantly, all the good minds appeared outside of the Education Establishment, most especially Rudolf Flesch, Samuel Blumenfeld and Siegfried Engelmann.)

But education was no longer the goal, and no longer the result. Education was the pretend product from a vast machinery whose real goals were ideological in nature. This doomsday machine manufactured education’s demise.

How do we stop the machine? For one thing, refuse to recognize its legitimacy. It’s no more legitimate than the auto-rockets and killer robots up there on my imaginary space station.

About the Author: Bruce Price is the  founder of improve-Education.org, which presents essays on education, culture and language.

Move to learn

By Dr Kari Miller

There are about as many nerve cells in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The unique set of connections between neurons that each of us develops determines how we view the world, shapes our future experiences, and indeed, determines who we are. Successful students have developed rich, connected networks of neurons. Many factors encourage neurons to branch and communicate with each other. Movement plays a vital role in brain development.

In our quest to fathom intelligent behaviour, we have failed to appreciate that learning does not occur strictly in the mind. Learning and creativity are a “whole body” phenomenon and cannot occur independently. We teach “to the head” only, asking students to sit in chairs for long periods of time, listening and looking almost exclusively at abstract symbols, even when they are very young. We don’t fully appreciate that the mind cannot excel without the support of the body. We don’t “get it” that we must move to learn.

What is the role of movement in learning?
Movement stimulates the growth of neural networks upon which learning depends. It affords us the opportunity to explore our world and gather the sensory data that fuels the development of intelligence, in other words, it provokes learning. Movement provides feedback that the brain requires in order to learn. Movement allows us to express knowledge and therefore advance to the next plateau in our understanding.

What can parents do to encourage stronger learning in their children?
Not very many years ago, children played in their yards for hours each day. They ran, climbed trees, built forts, made mud pies and pretended to fly. These experiences developed rich neural networks that supported brain development in these children. Young people today spend far less time moving. They watch considerably more television and play significantly more video games.
We can integrate movement into our children’s daily lives and augment their capacity to succeed. In particular, children who have learning issues benefit from the systematic inclusion of movement into their daily lives.

Each “body” learns in its own unique way. The following activities can be stimulating to the development of strong brain networks. Allow your child to experiment during homework time and find the particular combination of activities that are most effective.

Most students remember new information better when they talk, write or draw. Encourage your child to “teach” new information to others in the household. For those students who anchor information best by writing, provide them with a white board and erasable markers or encourage them to take notes on paper. It isn’t always necessary to keep notes or read them later in order to anchor information in memory. The act of writing down the information promotes the development of connections among concepts. Demonstrating the concepts of the learning is another powerful way to incorporate the new learning into existing neural networks. Allow your child to act out what has been read, build a model, draw a diagram or chart, sing or dance.

Many students attend, concentrate and learn better when engaged in a repetitive, low concentration task such as doodling, folding paper, rocking, or squeezing a ball. Your child can also try walking around the room while reading or studying. Suggest to your child that he or she do this every 15 minutes while completing homework.

Because the mouth is an important site of neural integration and is closely tied to brain development, some students find that chewing can be a highly integrating activity that promotes concentration and understanding. Chewing gum can actually be an effective way to focus! It’s best to keep it simple. Crunchy, spicy, salty or sour foods can be effective concentration boosters. Have your child try carrot sticks, sugar free gum, pretzels or a small sour candy.

Encourage your child to engage in cross lateral physical activity for five minutes every hour. Cross lateral movements engage hand and foot on opposite sides of the body. Most of these movements are more effective when done standing. The addition of rhythmic music provides a boost. Some cross lateral movements students enjoy are:

Touch hand (or elbow) to opposite knee.
Lazy 8. Use one hand to trace a large infinity sign in front of the body, following the hand with the eyes. Alternate hands and continue.
Cross the arms in front of the face in the shape of an “X” tracing a lazy 8. Be sure to watch the path of the 8 while tracing it.
Karate Cross Crawl: Kick while punching or chopping with alternate hand and foot (right hand chops while left foot kicks).
Cross Crawl Sit-ups. While lying on the back with hands clasped behind the head for support, sit up and touch the right elbow to the left knee. Alternate touching elbow to opposite knee.
Double Doodle. Draw a design with both hands simultaneously. Be sure the designs are mirror images of each other, rather than facing the same direction.

About the Author

Dr Kari Miller is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and Director of Miller Educational Excellence in Los Angeles. She began her career almost twenty-five years ago as a special education resource teacher. She has worked with students in a vast array of capacities, including special education teacher and educational therapist. Dr. Miller has a PhD in Educational Psychology and Mathematical Statistics, a master’s degree in Learning Disabilities, Gifted Education and Educational Diagnosis, and a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education and Behavior Disorders.

To contact Dr. Miller
Email: klmiller555@sbcglobal.net
Website: www.millereducationalexcellence.com

Reproduced with permission from Edarticle.com

Educating kids about fire
The mobile CFA education unit was in town this week.

The Mobile Education Unit (MEU) is an education experience on wheels. This specially designed teaching unit focuses on home fire safety and travels to primary schools throughout Victoria, with an onboard, trained CFA presenter who delivers the fire safety program to kids.

The program involves an activity-filled one hour lesson that teaches students life-saving messages about fire.

This highly sought after program is busy, and visits over 10,000 students in

approximately 200 schools around Victoria each year. The interactive presenter-based program has multimedia and other displays and activities.

For more info click here

Rudolph Flesch Rules the World of Reading

By Bruce Deitrick Price

Rudolf Flesch wrote two famous books, “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (1955) and “Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read” (1981). I read both books twice, years apart, and had the sense that Flesch was intelligent, brave, and honorable. (You can find my book reviews on Amazon.)

In short, I had a high opinion of Rudolph Flesch. Recently, however, I have had to reevaluate my opinion. Not downward! No, here is the startling thing. I am more and more thinking Flesch was among the great intellectuals of the 20th century. He was able to tell the world in 1955 everything there was to know about a complex subject, namely, learning to read English. Perhaps that doesn’t seem so extraordinary to you. Let me make the case.

First of all, every part of “Why Johnny Can’t Read” remains as sharp and true as the day it was published. Of all the scientific and technical material written in 1955, how much would remain standing today?

However, it is not the book’s content but its context that places Flesch at the pinnacle. His book contradicted every truth about reading then taught in the schools of education throughout the land. All the experts rushed to attack him. Every professor of education defamed him. Flesch was alone in the arena surrounded by savage lions. Or at the very least braying hyenas.

Very few rallied to his defense. Many an ordinary citizen saw his wisdom. But I’m speaking now of the elite managers who claim to protect the flames of knowledge. These people shouted that Flesch was a crackpot, a malcontent, a misfit beyond the fringes of intellectual respectability. His insistence on phonics was entirely wrong, they said. Reading must be taught with sight-words. Indeed, these people formed the haughty International Reading Association (IRA) in 1955 precisely so they could gang up on Flesch and try to curtail his influence.

Here’s the kicker. These same people and their descendents are still saying the same things, still denigrating Rudolph Flesch. There’s a vast horde of these people, a veritable confederacy of dunces.

It’s precisely the magnitude of the opposition that has prompted me to elevate Flesch to the zenith of American civilization. There have been many lonely geniuses, But typically, after a time, the truth prevails and shortsighted opposition falls into the dust. None of this happened in Flesch’s case. He died in 1988 thinking his life had been a failure.

The vast extent of the opposition is proved by the fact that still today millions of teachers and parents ignore what Flesch said, and continue to teach reading in a way that doesn’t work. Here is a truly sad comment left, in the year 2010, on a website for teachers:

“I am desperate for help, advice, or a solution! I have a student who is in 2nd grade. He repeated 1st grade due to his reading inability. He turned 9 last fall. He’s a straight A student in all subjects, except reading. He struggles with sight words above the primer level. He can fly through pre-primer and primer words in a flash, yet if you take four or five of those same words—even the exact same cards—and lay them out in a sentence form, it’s as though it is a foreign language to him. After his first year in first grade, his parent had his vision tested and he did have a vision problem, even underwent vision therapy. His parents work with him at home, yet he simply cannot put it all together enough to read fluently….Anyone have any ideas that can help me help him? It is really wearing on his self-esteem.”

This pattern is very common now. A child is reportedly above average in every way…except this one little thing called reading. Invariably, such children have been taught with sight-words. This poor kid, it seems to me, is a victim of child abuse. The parents must suffer daily with the belief that their son is defective. This teacher was clearly miseducated in some goofy teachers college, an intellectual ghetto from which Flesch had been banished. This teacher is teaching sight-words EVEN AFTER massive failure spread over several years. Flesch wrote his book to stop exactly this scenario; but there it is, today.

Don Potter, phonics expert, gives us a sweeping picture of what the anti-Flesch forces have managed to achieve:

“The situation is dramatically worse that anyone can possibly imagine. When I ask the teachers why they teach sight-words, they inevitably tell me because their students are going to be assessed on them. They are totally unaware that sight-words are positively harmful. They consider sight-words part of a good reading program that includes some phonics, not realizing that sight-words create a reflex that interferes with phonics instruction. Sight-words are an obstacle to reading, not an aid.”

Now do you have some sense of why Flesch was one lonely G.I. Joe trying to subdue a Panzer Division?

Finally, consider the vast apparatus that makes all this craziness possible. For convenience we call that apparatus the Education Establishment. There’s little good you can say about these people, other than that by being so obtuse and rigid, they have made Flesch look smarter and better as the years go by.

(NB:  From what I understand, Canadian offcials have been more rigidly committed to sight-words than American officials. I’m convinced that these commissars, on both side of the border, have been able to keep sight-words in play for so long ONLY because book-reading adults, complacently literate for a decade or two, can’t begin to grasp what sight-words demand of a child. I’ve written a number of articles that try to put adults in the child’s place. Please see “40: Sight Words—The Big Stupid” on Improve-Education.org. For more articles about reading, see “42: Reading Resources.”)

When Boys Don’t Read, Here’s What To Do
By Bruce Price

I like it when the New York Times agrees with me. Nicholas Kristof’s recent column “Boys have fallen behind” (April 4) is an exact echo of my column on CanadaFreePress a few weeks before (March 15). My piece was titled “Our Schools Are Skilled At Making Sure Boys Don’t Read.” It’s longer, more aggressive, with more suggestions on how to deal with this very huge problem, namely, that boys don’t read well or they don’t read at all. (Also, my article drew helpful comments from readers in several countries.) If boys not reading is an aspect of your life, please see this article. Now I want to mention the big difference between my article and the one in the Times. Kristof earnestly discusses several theories  about why boys can’t seem to keep up with girls. It’s very helpful to discuss these theories, and as much as I like mocking the New York Times, Kristof deserves credit for that. But Kristof doesn’t mention the essential problem, which is that reading methods used in public schools are often ineffective and destructive. Specifically, the Education Establishment still pushes sight-words and Dolch words. All the phonics people say that the very process of memorising these words will prevent the child from becoming a good reader. So you see the crime is being committed in plain sight.
Let’s say a boy is 10 or 12 years old and he doesn’t like to read. You don’t actually know whether he is avoiding books as a matter of  preference, or he is unable to use books as a matter of never having been properly taught. This is a HUGE distinction. If the Times had thrown its authority behind investigating this distinction, we might make some progress. In any event, my piece on CanadaFreePress ends with some quick diagnostics you can use on this hypothetical boy so you know what his problem really is. I can sum up this issue by saying the big reason boys can’t read is not being taught properly, and then the bad results are glossed over. It happens, you know, that children can be in the fourth grade, unable to read, but taking home As on their report card. For me, that’s criminally irresponsible, and what we need to correct ASAP.     www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/21018
About the Author: Bruce Price is an author, artist, poet, education activist, and the founder of improve-Education.org. A big focus on this site is reading; there are now seven articles (see #42 to start).

Thinking about Steiner Education?
‘The proof’s in the pudding,’ we say, and the Steiner pudding is quite something. In terms of sheer achievement, the various outgrowths from anthroposophy suggest it is a successful contemporary spiritual movement. Most of us may know of Rudolf Steiner as the founder of a world-wide school movement; also as the originator of bio-dynamic farming, of therapeutic institutions for those in need of special care, and of a holistic approach to medicine. We might even know that the fashionable Dr Hauschka cosmetics have something to do with Steiner. In fact, Steiner’s creative impulse extended into every field.
Born in 1861 in the town of Kraljevec (in today’s Croatia), Rudolf Steiner was a notable door- opener to other realities. The breadth and depth of his knowledge is astonishing. What has happened to it since his time? We can see that a great deal of anthroposophy, as essential insight (‘Anthroposophy’ can be translated as ‘human wisdom’), has permeated intellectual, social and practical culture — finding its way even into institutions such as the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
A Path towards Insight
Steiner was not the only person thinking creatively in the first decade of the twentieth century; others seem to have been similarly inspired. He did not invent these ideas; he perceived them. For anthroposophy is not just a body of knowledge, but a ‘way of knowing’, which he had characterised as ‘a path leading from the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe’. Everything — the schools, curative homes, bio-dynamic farms, the medical centres, the cosmetics — originates from the pursuit of that path.
It may of course be practised as recipes, and often is, but its origins are in insight. And as with all faculties, the practice of insight must be cultivated. Today many people undertake meditation — but this word ‘meditation’ has many meanings. We can readily go to fields of bliss, for instance, and this may be refreshing. Rudolf Steiner does in fact advocate spending a short time each day seeking a state of inner tranquility, but most of the exercises on his path from the spirit in the human to the spirit in the universe are particularly rigorous.
I call it the ‘work-out in the soul-gym’. If we went to a regular gym in order to tone up some muscles, we would probably agree that the apparatus and the exercises are incidental to the desired outcome. We need the work-out just to get somewhere else. Similarly, in order to tone up some soul-and-spirit ‘muscles’, we need to do the exercises. As with physical toning, we would want the results to show, not just in the gym but in our lives.
So it means some hard work. In doing a work-out in a regular gym we begin to notice some differences, and so too in the soul-gym some differences can be felt. And just as within that flabby physical body we begin to sense another, toned body emerging, so too we may begin to sense another body emerging through the work-out in the soul-gym. We could call it an ‘other self’. As this develops, another experience then becomes perceptible. This ‘other self’ seems susceptible to something kindred in the surrounding world; we feel ourselves to be ‘in touch’ with something permeating the sensory world around us. We feel ‘connected’ with all
© John Allison 2007, revised from an article first printed in ‘Living Now’ in 2003    1
that is living in our environment — with the life-world, described by the scientist Rupert Sheldrake as a field of ‘morphic resonance’. This is a moving experience, and it is just a beginning. Such activity is an initial experience of the life and content of insights which can result in a holistic educational method, a farming method, a medical approach, and so on.
Testing the Pudding
No one needs to pursue this path in order to notice the efficacy of the insights. As applied, they become perceptible to healthy observation and reason. Anthroposophical practices do work — spirit works. I believe that the unease some people may feel is in relation to the challenges of the soul-gym, and the nature of the work-out. And that’s okay, and quite understandable, isn’t it? After all, many of us contemplate a work-out in the regular gym with doubt, distaste or apprehension. But we can also observe someone who does a regular work-out, and decide for ourselves whether it makes them better able to run a marathon, or play the game, or do anything else, or whether they are just a ‘gym-junkie’ (for meditation can be like this, too).
I think that Steiner Education should appeal to common sense. It offers a viable alternative to the generally-held current ideas of education — ideas which are either about the training of an animal, or the programming of a computer. Instead, in Steiner Education we recognise the need for young people to develop all-round capabilities which will be effective in whatever course of life they might choose. It values subjects not only for what they are about, not just the facts, but also what they develop in us as faculties.
An important example of this is the emphasis placed on cultivating the child’s fantasy in the early years. Some think we should be more concerned with the ‘real world’. However, I question whether this world is so real for the young child. Children who live in their fantasy when young tend not to stay there — the imaginative element transforms into a vital social faculty, enabling them to understand the experience of others. But the child who is over- stimulated in an intellectual hot-house, and thus deprived of imaginative experiences, will often escape into fantasy when older.
In a Realm where the Story is True…
A poor woman lived in a hut by the forest, and in front of the hut was a garden with two rosebushes growing in it, one bearing white roses and the other red roses. She had two children, who so resembled the roses that one was called Snow White, and other Rose Red. Snow White was quieter and gentler, and liked nothing better than to stay at home with her mother; Rose Red, however, liked best to run out into the world, to roam through the fields and wander in the forest. The two children loved one another dearly and always held hands whenever they went out together: ‘We will never be parted, as long as we live…’
Are such stories true? In the imaginal realm where a story is true, Snow White and Rose Red are living still. Where is this realm? Within each one of us, this story is being played out, in the white cells of the brain, and in the red cells of the blood. There is, on one hand, a quiet process of consciousness, and on the other, an intentional life of will — thinking and doing. Through their interwoven (‘hand-holding’) activity, our experience in feeling is formed. In
© John Allison 2007, revised from an article first printed in ‘Living Now’ in 2003    2
Steiner education we constantly work with the Snow White and Rose Red qualities in human life. Consciousness and action. We find this polarity not only in the stories themselves (in Class 11 for instance the students study the medieval story of Parzival, the red knight, who marries Condwiramurs, the white flower), but also in each particular subject: whether we are considering the contrast between sedimentary and igneous processes in Geology (so closely paralleling the paradoxical behaviour of fifteen-year-olds, when eruptive and unpredictable moods are in stark contrast to the steady deposition of thoughts and values within their minds); or similarly, in reflecting on conservative and revolutionary tendencies in World History; or contrasting Classicism with Romanticism in Literature; or perhaps in recognising Apollonian and Dionysian elements in the study of Art History.
These polarities mark out an exercising-ground for the formative challenges of real learning. For we find that matters are usually less an issue of ‘either / or’ but rather tend to find expression in the complexities of ‘both / and’. The world is mysterious — even light may appear to behave like a stream of particles, and simultaneously like a wave. What happens, and what we think about it, does matter; the paradoxes are the place where we practice true judging — not in the sense of judgment as opinion and prejudice, but of evaluation in the balance of observation and a range of considerations.
A Choice
Whoever loses out on childhood, later may tend to be childish. Teachers in Steiner schools are convinced that a fulfilled childhood and adolescence is the genuine basis for a fulfilling adulthood. The Steiner approach identifies what is appropriate learning, and meets the child’s need for growth at each stage. Then each individual is encouraged to become strong — developing true self-image, self-esteem, self-determination — in their sensitivity to what they find about them, and in capacities for effective living. Because we all want young people to be capable in every aspect of their lives. Don’t we?
A few years ago I was present at a twenty-fifth year reunion at a Steiner school. A woman whom I’d taught as a child, now an excellent adult educator, commented that she had learned about the processes of learning through ‘just doing stuff’ — making her own knitting needles in Class One by rubbing sticks on a stone, for instance, before beginning knitting; or cutting a turkey quill to make a pen, and squeezing out squid’s ink from its bladder (yuck!) in order to do her first cursive writing. Such fundamental experiences of discovery and processing are the basis of all learning and development, she said, and the academic learning skills simply followed in due course.
Treating children either as trainable animals, or programmable computers — these methods of education identify short-term goals, those of job-training or academic accomplishment. But children need real education for life — for being human is a learned activity, and most of our big challenges do not have either straightforward vocational or intellectual solutions. When I asked one young person in a Class 12 why he had returned to a Steiner school after trying out another form of education, he replied, ‘At the other school I found I was pressured to learn. Here I feel challenged to learn. It’s my responsibility.’ And another 17 year old, having been to another school, said, ‘You can do courses of study anywhere, even here. But education — this business of becoming a real person — that’s best found here.’
© John Allison 2007, revised from an article first printed in ‘Living Now’ in 2003

Viable, enriching, legal and happening in Castlemaine
By Emma Lewis

While many families are washing and ironing school uniforms, organising lunch boxes and homework, and locked into a tight weekly schedule, a growing number are snuggling up in bed for an extra hour in the morning, reading books together and discussing the meaning of life before breakfast, then spending their days living, sharing and learning together.

Home education is becoming an increasingly popular choice, and Victoria has one of the most flexible and supportive political environments – as well as social networks – in the whole of Australia.

Families choose home education for many reasons. For those who set out to home educate from the beginning, it is often as a result of a fundamental philosophical difference, contrasting with the schooling system, in understanding how children learn and the optimum ways to facilitate that learning. It also commonly stems from a desire to nurture individuals, well, individually, and not within the constraints of a system that caters generally and for the average (allbeit a wider average than a generation ago). Sometimes travel (either distance from a school, or extended periods of family travel) is a factor in the decision-making.

For families who subsequently remove children from the school system, it can be as a result of bullying, personality clashes with teachers, a child’s needs not being met, an unhappy or stressed child, the realisation that their child simply will not fit into the narrow framework a school system demands, a desire to encourage a child’s passion and individuality, or because of the personality changes their child displays on entering the school system, commonly believed to be ‘normal’ and age-appropriate, but actually unseen in school-free children.

The methods and styles of home education are as wide, varied and individual as the families themselves, encompassing the whole spectrum, from those who set up a school situation at home (homeschoolers) and adhere to a specific curriculum (either in line with local schools or bought from elsewhere) and timetable, to those known as ‘natural learners’, who fully include their child/ren in everyday life and learn alongside them, following where ever their collective passions and talents take them.

Most families would fall somewhere in between, although it is common for those who set out to home school to naturally become less structured, more casual and more self directed as their time out of the school system progresses.

Even in the formal homeschool environments, families quickly recognise that it takes a surprisingly small amount of time to cover the curriculum when working one to one or in a small group, without the interuptions, disruptions and limitations of a classroom setting. This in itself frees up significant time to further academic work or to explore and undertake new learning possibilities, opportunities and activities.

In Victoria, homeschooling families are legally required to register, signing a standard form that states their child/ren will receive instruction in the eight key learning areas. How the key areas are approached and covered is flexible, with some families working on all of the key areas daily or weekly and others as term-based – or even annual – units.

Other families fit them informally into a current area of interest – for example, the topic of pirates has the potential to lead (or be directed) to covering geography, history, English, maths, physical education, music, dance, science, politics, seamanship, carpentry and even cookery, puppetry and performance.

Socialisation is a common concern voiced about home education. However, there’s nothing naturally sociable about putting 20 or more young people together in a confined space on a compulsary basis due entirely to the year in which they were born. The fact is that the school system, by its very nature, bears little reflection on how real, healthy life/society works.

True socialisation is about being able to relate to lots of different people, of differing ages, backgrounds and abilities, in many situations. The evidence consistently shows that home educated young people generally have more – and more varied and meaningful – contacts than those in school. This is often simply because it is possible to achieve academic requirements in less time and as a result of not being confined to the school premises for 30 hours a week, leaving them more time to be in the community. It is also because school-free families tend to seek such opportunities.

Home educated young people join clubs, societies, teams and classes, as well as hold voluntary positions in the community, and socialise comfortably with schooled, as well as school-free, peers. They differ from their schooled peers in that they generally tend to mix more easily and often with a wider range of people.

Victoria hosts at least six (and often as many as ten) camps a year where home educating families gather for support, education and fun. These might be structured camps like three days of school (ironically) and life in 1851 at Sovereign Hill or environmental/bush camps. Alternatively, they might just be informal gatherings of up to 120 people (including second generation school-free children) by the beach or bush just hanging out together, creating fun and spontaneous adventures.

Castlemaine is now host to a fortnightly meeting of eight (and growing) school-free families of about twenty children. In the wider area there are occasional activities and events held at Guildford that attract up to forty people; a maths games afternoon, English sharing class and pottery classes in Maldon; a French class in Daylesford, and regular social gatherings (such as rollerskating, bike rides, cricket games) for fun.

There is also a huge number of regular events and activities, accessible from Castlemaine, scattered over thirty home education groups in Melbourne and surrounds (for example, at CSIRO, wildlife parks, museums, aquarium, gardens etc). The days of a lonely isolated homeschooled child are long gone!

Another commonly-held concern regards school-free students’ access to higher education, but the reality is few families ever find this to be a problem. Some students do temporarily attend school full time or on a part time basis (an arrangement that Victorian schools are now required by law to accommodate). Alternatively they use an adult or self directed learning centre to obtain their Year 12 Certificate. Others start degrees directly on line from as young as thirteen, which gives them easy access to university when ready.

Many more home educated students gain places at universities based entirely on the strength of their CV or portfolio. Some spend a few months or a year obtaining requested/required additional qualifications and some come to higher education as mature students after years of employment, travel, adventure and voluntary work. Indeed, it appears that universities actively seek home educated students as their self directed learning style is ideally suited to the university environment.

Will home educated young people ever be able to fit into the constraints of the workforce, with its timetables, limitations and demands, after so much freedom in their earlier years? The evidence shows that home educated people are often more employed than their schooled counterparts. They are, however, less likely to tolerate compromised work situations or to be in work that is unfulfilling. Self employment is also more common.

There is no requirement to be a teacher – or even to have any formal qualifications – in order to teach a child at home. No one is better qualified than a motivated parent or carer who passionately wants to support their child/ren’s learning, happiness and fulfilment. It is, in fact, often advantageous – and empowering to both child and carer – to avoid playing the role of teacher and to learn, and seek answers, together.

For young people hospitalised long term as a result of injury or illness, the recommendation for the number of one to one teaching hours necessary to keep them academically level with their peers is between one and four hours per week. A schooled student receives, on average, fifteen minutes of individualised teaching per week.

With this in mind, if we add up the time taken to wash and iron those uniforms, prepare those lunch boxes, assist with homework, travel to/from school and other activities, it equals the time necessary to successfully achieve the academic requirements of home education, freeing up the majority of the week for further study, exploring new areas, being sociable and following passions.

As one wise academic once eloquently pointed out “How you gonna learn anything if you’re stuck in school all day?”

For further information, resources, advice and support please contact:

The Australian-wide Home Education Association (HEA)

and the Victorian-based Home Education Network (HEN), which also produces a magnificent quarterly magazine, Otherways.



ONE STEP AT A TIME
Jamie Oliver has made headlines in England with his attempts to revolutionise the nation’s notoriously wretched eating habits. But in Castlemaine, a group of parents is doing the same thing.

“They were yummy! I didn’t think I was going to like them.”

Two years ago parents at Castlemaine PS (South) initiated the Healthy Lunches program, and judging by the way the food goes down, it’s a hit.

A team of parents gets together fortnightly and makes it happen, and this week nori rolls were on the menu. Parents were rolling out sheets of seaweed and filling them with rice, tuna and vegetables under the eye of Yuzuri, a mother at the school with two children in grades 1 and 4. This week was not the first time they had Japanese food.

The nori rolls came with condiments such as ginger and soy, but they skipped the wasabe paste.

“You don’t want to give them too many options, and there is one child here seriously anaphylactic, so there are no nuts,” said Matthew Brownrigg.

He was one of the instigators, and he helps out most days.

“It started at the beginning of 2008 and we run it every fortnight. We did Cornish pasties one time, one side savoury and one side meat like the miners had.”

Has it been accepted?

“Yes! You can see the kids. It’s only $3, $2 for main and $1 for dessert.”

Louis Dingemans is a parent with a child in class 2.

“I always help and I come in and do serving and wash up,” he said.

“It’s great, and the children like to see the parents involved. You get to meet other parents so it’s good for us as well. Children have the advantage of exposure to different foods they may not taste otherwise.”

The object it to expose the students to different, healthy foods, and encourage them to develop healthy eating habits.

According to Matthew there’s approximately a 50 percent uptake,

“Any parents and grandparents are welcome to help,” he said.

“We’re trying to do things that their parents may not have done. One parent who came in to help had never made nori rolls and now they can do it at home.”

There are often leftovers, and some kids get to have extra fruit skewers

It’s not subsidised by the school, but it is by the parents in the form of occasional food donations and, of course, labour.

They’ve had lasagnas in the past, and they try and coordinate it with what’s fresh in the school’s vegetable garden.

As well as the fortnightly healthy eating program, the school has a “nude food” day, where kids are encouraged to bring their lunches without any packaging.

Castlemaine Primary School may not be changing the nation like Jamie Oliver is, but it’s one step at a time.

Building Better Futures
By Darryl Coulthard

The Castlemaine Secondary College had its community forum last Wednesday and focused on building a new secondary school for Castlemaine.  Our secondary college has won through the first round of applications and is now preparing for the second round, which, if I understand correctly, will determine when the school will have its demolition and rebuild.

I’m on the school board so I would be there, come what may.  There weren’t  many people there.  I vacillate between thinking that more people should be there to fight the good fight and the view that these others realised more quickly  that  resistance is useless against the Education Department, and that Australia’s Biggest Loser on the telly is the better option.

The Department have asked us why we need a new building: how do the buildings constrict us? (Or more precisely how do they constrict the teachers?) That the junior campus has passed its use by date and is about to fall down without some major surgery doesn’t seem to be a consideration. It seems like a strange competition where the winner must give the right answer, being the one that agrees with the view of the prize giver.

Our Board and the Executive are good people and true (present company excepted). They want the best and maybe getting a new school will make our school better. They, or rather we, posed the question, what should education be in the 21^st century, what should our philosophy be?  These are, I think, important questions.

Because of my day job, I know that whenever anybody thinks of the future they think of a fantasy. (The Jetsons are my favourite).  The future is usually a wonderful utopia where all students are “mentored” by their “personal educator” and the students reciprocate by saving the world from all greenhouse gases. Such wonderful kids, if only they would turn the lights off at home.

We nevertheless settled down to discuss this compound question: what is the role of education, what role does technology play and how do buildings help or hinder? At one extreme we have those who say that it should be about preparing students for the world of employment and success: more technology now.  At the other extreme those who say a good education is about citizenship, broadly defined: technology is irrelevant.  And of course those in the middle and those at home watching telly that say a pox on both your houses. Take your pick.

Returning to the houses of education, what exactly do we want and require?  I will give my answer:  a place that students feel justly proud of, a place where teachers want to teach. Such an answer reveals my views. I would love a place designed by local architects with the advice of MASG and others in the community, but as another Darryl said: “tell him he’s dreamin’ ”.

Why just for schools?

By Chris Bonnor

School league tables are out there, with the Federal Government’s much trumpeted My School. While this article is six months old, even last year it raised the spectre of the unfairness of the notion of making schools compete.

Have you ever moved house and had to start all over again: finding new shops, car servicing, schools, doctor? How did you choose amongst the array of unknown services in your new neighbourhood? We agonise over some of these choices, especially when it comes to schools.

But did you find a good local doctor? Did you ask around, try a few initial visits and plot the ebb and flow of your symptoms? It really is quite important – your health and even your lifespan can be on the line.

You have a choice of doctors so you really need to know how they rate. Anyway, they usually collect fees as well as a slice of your taxes, so as a citizen you have a right to know. How many people has your favourite GP successfully patched up? How many patients have actually curled up their toes merely weeks after gracing the local surgery?

Surely the government has a responsibility to measure and publicise, preferably on a website, the performance of doctors. What is their diagnosis strike rate? How many times do patients keep coming back with the same complaint?

Doctors could get marks for having healthy patients – and lose marks when patients just don’t get much better. If the mortality trend-line leaps up off the chart the surgery should be listed as a failed practice and everyone struck off. On the other hand, higher scoring doctors could be paid more.

Imagine the fallout if we did all this. The tabloid media would trawl the data and construct and publish surgery league tables. Low scoring doctors would be dragged through the toxic swamp of talk-back radio. Doctors would try to explain the complexity of health issues but no one would listen.

Practices in suburbs with chronic health problems would go to the wall as patients fled to higher ranking medicos. The newest doctors would serve the poor while others would insist that patients pass a health test or pay inflated upfront fees before they get in the door.

When it inevitably goes pear-shaped, health ministers would spin and recycle old favourite slogans such as choice, transparency, quality and competition. If that didn’t work they could just accuse the doctors, especially the bulk billers consigned to the poor, of having something to hide.

It should all sound familiar: this is what is now happening to schools. Julia Gillard and her entourage of increasingly compliant state education ministers have rushed to support the publication of what they believe is school performance data. Victoria has announced plans to release a deluge of school information and the New South Wales government has agreed – in faster time than it takes to say “cash from Canberra” – to scrap its current ban on school league tables

Of course the ministers have all voiced determination not to create league tables, and will be trying to balance raw data with other information (mostly already available – but that’s another story) about schools. At best this only means that a determined news sleuth might take a couple more hours to conjure up a juicy rank of the “best” and “worst” schools.

Because even if the education ministers do understand the complexities in measuring school achievement, something which cannot be assumed, the tabloid media certainly won’t trifle with such details. Why would they? Throwing in caveats about different school contexts, enrolment profiles, like-school groups and value-added isn’t going to help the ratings of a 240-second splash at 6.30pm on commercial TV.

Already two newspapers, in Hobart and in Brisbane, have published spurious school rankings created out of student results in national tests. The evidence is out there that the pious hopes of Gillard and the state ministers amount to very little. The ministers know this. It doesn’t matter that they are doing it directly or indirectly, the Rudd Government and the dependent states are already party to fraud.

How did a government – allegedly committed to evidence-based policy – come to this? It doesn’t and won’t improve schools. The commonwealth and state ministers know that it will further shift enrolments, for those with choice, away from schools in low socio-economic areas. It will further increase the gap between high and low achievers – a problem which is the subject of copious public hand-wringing among these same ministers.

So off we go, one of the better education systems in the world, on a journey down a discredited path already taken by education systems that are now arguably second-rate. Oddly enough we’ll meet some of them, especially the English, coming back the other way. They’ve tried all this and it did very little for school achievement and nothing for equity.

It’s more than enough to make you sick. But not to worry: I found a good local doctor without the help of tests, transparency, league tables or any other form guides.

About the author
Chris Bonnor is co-author with Jane Caro of The stupid Country – How Australia is dismantling public education, UNSW Press. He also manages a media monitoring website on education issues www.futuredforum.blogspot.com.
First published in www.onlineopinion.com.au on 24 June 2009. Reprinted with permission of the author and Online Opinion.