School Curriculum

When my daughter told me she felt stressed one Saturday morning, I did a double take. She’s 10. She sleeps with a stuffed bear and has drumsticks and dirty socks strewn across her bedroom floor.

In my eyes, she’s still a child. Yet here she was, “stressed”. I asked her what it felt like (“Like I can’t really enjoy myself”) and why (“Because I have to write a speech and then do all this maths homework”).

I wrapped my arms around her and declared it a homework-free day. Instead, we went to the park. Later, we baked her favourite cake and read The Encyclopaedia of Immaturity together, in which we learnt how to make vegie-proof tongue covers and take photos that look as if your head’s fallen off.

Continue reading "Childhood isn’t preparation for life, it is life" »

What is the point of a “non-judgemental” ethics centre? It’s a serious question.

In my naiveté, I had always assumed that the whole point of ethics was to arrive at some sort of judgement about what is right and what is wrong. But take a look at the secular St James Ethics Centre’s website and it would appear I was wrong.

The St James Ethics Centre - headed by Dr Simon Longstaff – bills itself as offering a “non-judgemental forum” to explore ethical issues.
It won’t investigate unethical behaviour. It won’t help you make an ethical financial investment. But the biggest problem is that a “non-judgemental” approach lowers the stakes. It means your standard of ethics can only be judged by whether you are being true to yourself or not.

Continue reading "Who’s teaching the ethics teachers getting their ethics?" »

The most dispiriting intellectual spectacle of the past decade would have to be the so-called “history wars”, where academics, politicians and commentators on the extreme left and right battled for domination in telling the story of modern Australia.

The history wars were essentially an exercise both in understatement and overstatement. The right-wingers tried to pretend that Australian history was nothing other than a happy story involving the orderly and humane progression of European civilisation on these shores, where no indigenous children were ever stolen, no families ever broken up, and whatever dislocation or hardship Aborigines experienced was at worst an accident, brought about by the purest of motives.

The left-wingers retaliated by branding the conservatives as liars, and telling a version of Australian history which reads like a long string of human rights abuses, with repeated acts of savagery against a wholly peaceful indigenous populace.

Continue reading "Taking off the white blindfold and black armband" »