Affirmative Action

 

It was different in 1968

Teaching has always been a tough gig, but these days it seems to be getting tougher.

The attrition rate for early career teachers is pretty constant, and remains a problem. 

This report provides some useful detail.

Recently, reports of misogynistic behaviour directed at young female teachers have appeared. This essay describes an experience that is, unfortunately, far from unusual. 

It's nothing new, of course, and the plight of the casual or relief teacher is well-known. I had the opportunity to do some relief teaching post retirement, but chose advisory visiting teaching instead. The idea of working with a different bunch of students each day did not appeal. 

Frankly, without the possibility of properly engaging with your students for more than one day at a time, it seemed to me a futile exercise, despite the fact that it pays well.

This issue overlaps with the problem of gender balance within the profession, or as it frequently labelled, the feminisation of teaching.

If the statistics weren't enough evidence of a problem, my recent experience as a consultant made it abundantly clear. I had been working for a number of years in support of the rural primary school where I started my career in 1968.

At the time I was a member of a staff of eighteen, eight of whom were male. During my sojourn in support of the same school between 2006 and 2017, the school which now has thirty full timers on staff had only one male teacher.

The janitor-groundsman was male, but that really didn't assist. The phenomenon of a staff of female teachers led by a male principal (the cliche we hear a great deal) was also absent, as the principal was female.

In any profession, a gender balance which has gone beyond say, 80/20 either way, is regarded as undesirable. This gender balance report was compiled from the standpoint of improving diversity in corporate structures.  Most contemporary writings on the subject adopt a point of view which discriminates between the raw numbers and the hierarchical structures as they apply to gender in the profession.  

The problem is complicated in that whilst a large majority of teachers are female, the hierarchical structures within the profession favour career paths for men because they don't have to manage the interruptions caused by childbirth and child rearing.

Does this mean that the problems encountered by the author of the essay above are insoluble? 

I hope not, as apart from creating a difficult path for aspiring teacher of either gender, they simply encourage a view of teaching as a profession lacking in clout and significance. There is some irony in the fact that teachers are roundly criticised in some (especially right wing) media for leading children astray in a political sense, whilst these same criticisms imply that the profession is not all that important.

Perhaps there is room for a campaign of affirmative action that attracts males to the profession, driven by the same energy used (for example) to attract women into the trades and STEM. There is ample evidence out there that boys need strong and non-violent male models who can successfully relate to both genders.

Given the current worthy emphasis on the message that "women can do anything", maybe we need another message that says that "men can do most things, including teaching".

Diversity, by definition, requires balance.

  

Shared Values?

 

Pic courtesy GovNews

Since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we've been hearing a great deal about our "shared values" when it comes to the USA.

The contrasting attitude to gun control is perhaps the most stark evidence of this. In this country you may own a gun, but generally people only do so if they are hobby shooters or live in rural environments. Gun ownership is not seen as a fundamental right, based on a constitutional amendment that was made two hundred and thirty years ago.

The real world outcome of this would suggest that Australian values on this issue are pragmatically superior, and it hasn't made any difference to freedom across the two countries. At least it didn't when I travelled to the USA a few years ago. If anything, we were trammelled with more petty restrictions over there than we are here, ironically enough, many of them stemmed from precautionary scenarios implemented in a fearful community with almost universal gun ownership.

We don't, for example, need control measures in schools such as single-access points, fencing, or internal door locks to enable teachers to lock shooters out at proven intervention points.  

The comparative firearm fatality rate is probably the best example of one result of this different set of values. 

Then there's the contrasting attitude towards health care. In Australia we have a system which provides access to health care which isn't directly related to wealth. Not so in the USA. More than two-thirds (73.4%) of Australians reported being satisfied with their healthcare, whilst only a slight majority of Americans (54.2%) said the same.

Apart from satisfaction rates, a comparison of some important statistics is even more revealing. Life expectancy in Australia is nearly four years longer than the USA. In addition, infant mortality per one thousand live births in Australia sits at 3.14, but it's 5.44 in the USA. It seems that the satisfaction rates are based on a realistic appreciation of the situation in each country.

The firearm laws and health systems in each country are based squarely on opposing values of individualism against egalitarianism.

Then there's the contrasting welfare systems. In contrast to the USA, we don't worship the rich and despise the poor. We have created a welfare system that shares the nation's wealth more equitably than the USA whilst still valuing entrepreneurship and innovation. A wide collection of Australian inventions provides ample evidence of that. 

Because our immigration system is skills-based, we don't need an endless supply of cheap immigrant labour and we pay wages comparatively higher that those across the Pacific.  As of the latest data the minimum wage in Australia is AU $20.33 per hour as against the US federal minimum wage of USA $7.25 per hour.

Travelling in the USA exposes the social divide that becomes evident whenever you walk into a supermarket or a subway. I am beginning to notice the same situation developing here. It's not a positive trend.

My time in Vietnam where we had intermittent contact with Americans made these differences in values stark, particularly when it came to race. I remember being cautioned a number of times by white Americans that socialising with African American GIs when we were on leave was not a good idea.

The irony in this was that the black GIs were far better company that their white counterparts, and their sense of humour resembled ours, which was probably why we gravitated towards them.

And that's another difference. Our laconic sense of humour is a reflection of the fact that we don't take ourselves all that seriously. There is no such thing as Australian exceptionalism.

And that's a very good thing. Shared values? I think not.....

One Unheralded Possibility

 

Image courtesy People's World

Yesterday's UK general election has had a range of consequences, the most obvious (and predictable) of which is  a change of government.

There has been, however, a largely unacknowledged outcome in the seven counties of the United Kingdom across the Irish Sea. The counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone comprise the slice of Ireland that is part of the Union.

Back in 2022, after the shambles created by Brexit at the Irish border, the Democratic Unionists lost power in the Northern Ireland Assembly to Sinn Féin.

After the 2024 UK general election result, Sinn Féin's continued emergence as the party with the greatest number of seats will intensify debate around the region's future.

The complicated makeup of the governance of Northern Ireland makes it difficult to predict the constitutional future of the seven counties, but Brexit put a bomb under the old structures and split the Unionists. Sinn Féin seems disinclined to exploit the situation at the moment, and the attitude of the Irish Free State is unclear and malleable.

A poll conducted on unification in February 2020 indicated support south of the border, but not in the north.

Northern Ireland opinion

Republic of Ireland opinion

The architects of Brexit have broken some kind of record for creating unintended consequences.

If one of them is the unification of the emerald isle, it would be an ill wind after centuries of hate and violence.

Groundhog Day

 

Image courtesy awareness days

Right now, gentle reader, we're observing the onward march of Australian politics against a background of fear and loathing.

There are two prominent threats - climate change and an emerging China. The fear refers to climate change; the loathing to China and its system of government. 

Across the two issues we see the two major parties adopting largely opposing positions. It was ever so. In this country for the last twenty years or so, if one party takes a position, the other opposes it. 

You could say that this is how it is, how it should be, and how it always will be. Isn't democracy a contest of ideas? - I hear you say.

Perhaps there is another way of looking at it. If these two issues are about existential threats (and we are told they are) wouldn't it be a great idea if the two major parties formed a war cabinet to deal with them? History shows that this has been successful practice in the face of existential threat in the past.

In the case of energy policy, each party talks about a mix of energy sources, but with one party locked into total renewables, and the other using nuclear as a foil and a point of separation, the investors will be just as confused about the future as they have been for the last decade. Lack of investor confidence will delay any solution to the loss of energy capacity caused by the closure of the coal fired generators. 

A bear of little brain would understand that if our elected representatives got together and produced a joint statement, clarity would emerge, and we wouldn't be stuck on the merry-go-round that got us into the invidious situation that we're in now. If indeed the various lobbies (both fossil fuel and renewables) understood whatever the carve-up of energy sources provided them, the competition might end up in a draw, and we'd all be better off.

The fear of China has produced nothing of benefit except the AUKUS agreement, that is if you believe that we will ever see these boats actually in the water. Frankly I doubt it, and I'm in good company. The US Studies Centre describes the AUKUS agreement as a "hospital pass". Given the political volatility evident both in the USA and the UK, there are too many minefields to cross, if you'll excuse the military metaphor. 

More fundamentally, why do we need submarines capable of cruising waters off China and Taiwan, given we are an island, and could build many more modern and stealthy diesel boats that could prowl our littoral and defend our sea lanes for a fraction of the cost? There are those who believe the era of manned boats, nuclear or otherwise, is coming to an end. How many underwater drones could we acquire for the price of one nuclear sub?

More fundamentally, we could give a strong message about our sovereignty to both "friend" and "foe" alike if we separate our fleet from those of countries who seem intent on a policy of containment of China and redirect it towards an emphasis on littoral security. The last time the US attempted to contain an emerging Asian power did not end well. My use of quotes around friend and foe by the way, is more than accidental.

Our Westminster system does not hold the formation of political parties as absolutely necessary. They have grown out of a convention largely of convenience, which should ensure stability and consistency. The achilles heel of the party system is paralysis caused by two parties adopting contradictory positions on critical issues. That's what we're seeing now.

Perhaps the growth in numbers of independent candidates elected is evidence that the situation is self-correcting. I hope so.

What we're seeing now is dysfunctional. 

 

A Small Life Retrieved

A montage from that time.

One of the most satisfying aspects of a long and varied career as a teacher, is remembering the amazing people encountered along the way.

Let me take you back, gentle reader, to the late eighties, when I had the privilege of opening a new special school in North Queensland.

Because it was a new school, it was staffed with graduate (first year) teachers. What they had in common was youth, enthusiasm, and dedication to the students with disabilities enrolled.

These children were predominantly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. Itinerant health clinics visiting their communities had identified them as being at risk, and over the years they had been  brought to live in a residential home run in those days by the North Queensland Crippled Children's Association (now Cootharinga). 

There they received excellent care, but they were separated from their homes and families. These days, they would probably be cared for on their own country, but that was not the practice thirty-five years ago. When the new school was opened in 1987, these children, for the first time in their lives, began to share an experience shared with children living at home with family, by attending a school located separately from where they lived. Previously the school was an annexe of the nursing home. In that situation the children ate, slept, and went to school on the one site. It was a pretty restricted environment, and once removed from their communities, they rarely returned. It was institutionalisation writ large. 

One of these children was a seven year-old from Boigu Island, living with just about every sensory disability possible. He was hearing impaired, had low vision, and microcephaly. Of greatest concern was that he was failing to thrive. There were a number of reasons for this, but a major issue was his capacity (or rather incapacity) to chew and swallow. It took literally hours to patiently feed him, much in the same fashion as a baby is fed, and finding the time to do this, both at the nursing home, and at school was a major challenge.

He had to be carefully positioned and supported and his special food presented to him one small spoonful at a time. The nursing staff would attempt this in the morning before he left for school on the bus, but time was severely limited. Much the same was true in the evening, given the staffing at the home, and he was steadily losing weight. The "failure to thrive" diagnosis would have meant a hospital admission, and tube feeding.

His teacher was determined that this would not happen, so she took the whole hour long lunch time at school to set him up and feed him. This meant she had no lunch break herself, and I'll admit turning a blind eye to her continuing to feed him past the end of the designated time, whilst a teacher aide looked after the rest of the class. Conventionally, the feeding task should have been allocated to a teacher aide, but he refused to take food from anyone else.

After a few weeks of this process, he ceased losing weight, but he was scarcely thriving. The teacher had a bright idea, based on what she had learned about him. He had been born and reared within the sound and smell of the sea, so she decided to take him to the beach to feed him. This was straightforward, as we had a bus at school, I had taught most of the teachers to drive it, and she booked it for a weekly trip to Rowes Bay, pretty close to the nursing home. She would put him on the sand, and feed him there. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he seemed keen to eat there, and it became an enjoyable experience, rather than an ordeal. The rest of her class enjoyed the beach, as well.

The teacher's theory was that this little boy's olfactory sense was critically significant to him, and the familiar smell of the sea helped him relax enough to chew and swallow. Based on his weight gain as this protocol continued, it seemed she was correct. Across a period of six months, his weight improved, he became more alert, and he began to respond more often and more clearly to other students and staff. By the time this teacher was transferred away, two years later, his life had been transformed.

Over the years, I've lost track of both teacher and child, although I did encounter the teacher at a principal's conference in 1997. She had done well, and was by that time, a junior principal. That cohort of beginning teachers were high achievers.

Most of them are now in senior positions.

Review - The Forever War

 

Today, gentle reader, I'm reviewing Nick Bryant's The Forever War.

This is the second of Bryant's books I've read, and like the first one (When America Stopped being Great), it's an enlightening read.

It's also a little depressing, given the possibility that Trump may be "elected".

I put "elected" in quotes, because it is completely obvious, that even if you haven't followed US history, or read Bryant's book, the USA is not a democracy.

Stalwarts who admire America have always been honest about this. It's only non-Americans who seemed surprised when they come to the understanding that the country is a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

Bryant is in a good position to write about the USA. He's a Brit, who lived in the USA for years until his children went to school, and were obliged to participate in active shooter drills.

At that point he made the decision to move his family to Australia.

His thesis has two significant themes. The first describes the thread of violence that runs through American history. He describes violence as having been regarded as an acceptable means of managing power and politics across American history. 

The fact that four sitting presidents have been killed: Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James a Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald) makes that thread obvious.

Violence in the form of a civil war, the obscene regularity of mass shootings, and incidents such as the Oklahoma bombing and the Waco siege are cited by Bryant. This first element of his thesis is convincing.

Then he moves to an argument, which put simply, maintains that the Civil War has never ended. He traces the history of the pro-slavery Democrats, Lyndon Johnson's reforms, and what is known as REDMAP (Republican gerrymandering) that seeks to suppress African American voters. 

He maintains that race has been cynically used by both Republicans and Democrats as a tool to seek and hold power. He writes that despite the cliches surrounding the Kennedy brothers, that Lyndon Johnson (like Guy Fawkes perhaps) was honest about his intentions when it came to race, wheras the Kennedys weren't. Or put another way, the Kennedy's, especially Jack, used the issue to display their political morality, but Johnson did the hard yards in putting the reforms into practice.   

Given that both Kennedys were assassinated before their work was finished, it's difficult to make judgments about their sincerity.

As noted above, I find his narrative depressing, as he contends that the US constitution is largely incompetent, and written in a way that reflects the mores of the age. Those mores reflected a real fear of democracy, driven perhaps by the French Revolution.

He uses the events of January 6th 2021 to frame this narrative, and argues that Trump's coup went within a hair's breadth of succeeding.

In other words the American Republic is less a noble experiment than it is a reactionary exercise.

Time will tell, but unfortunately for Australians, the actions and fortunes of the USA influence life in this country. I learned that in 1970 in Vietnam.

It's beautifully written, carefully researched, and suffused with wit and irony.

It's a must-read.

  

Getting Square

Image courtesy Reddit

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. 

If this is the case, (and I agree with Twain), it's interesting to apply the aphorism to the Gaza conflict.

Back in 2001, terrorists killed 3000 plus Americans by flying hijacked airliners into buildings in New York and Washington. Two years later, the invasion of Iraq by the Coalition of the Willing led to a protracted armed conflict that Lasted to 2011, and was followed by the rise of Islamic state.

It took until 2017 for the Islamic State (in the form of ISIL) to be defeated.

Estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq between 2001 and 2017 range from 600000 to 1 million. 

The war hurt Bush's domestic popularity after an initial surge and also was responsible for Tony Blair's eventual resignation from politics. 

It has also been interpreted as weakening the West's high moral ground when it was revealed that no weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq. What has become perfectly obvious twenty years on, is that the invasion was really an act of revenge for  the 9/11 attacks.

Remember the "mission accomplished" banner?

Revenge was exactly what the terrorists sought.  

From that point of view, their act of terror was successful. They controlled the behaviour of the west, and set the agenda.

Now we see terrorists attack Israelis on October 7th 2023, and the Israeli response (or perhaps, more accurately, their reaction).  

The Israelis have killed tens of thousands of Gazans, and are saying that at least seven more months of conflict remain. 

There is a striking resemblance between the US reaction to 9/11, and Israel's reaction to October 7th 2023. In both cases, this reaction passed the agenda to the terrorists.

The Israelis have announced that their goal is to eliminate Hamas. To believe that they can be successful in this is to assume that Hamas has no support in Gaza. This is simply not the case.

A survey conducted in Palestine in April this year found that around 70% of respondents support the terrorist acts on October 7th. 

This outcome is hardly surprising. If your home has been destroyed or your family members killed, it is likely you'll support any action taken against those responsible. 

That is, after all, what can be called "human nature", just as taking vengeance is "human nature".  When I was growing up, it was called "getting square". We knew exactly what that meant. 

So forgetting about any moral basis for the current Israeli strategy, it is most likely destined for failure.

Reminds me of the war in Vietnam. History rhymes....