Schooliness

Something I found interesting from the blog page on Change.com called “On the Evils of Schooliness”

So what is “schooliness”?

I have no idea. But that’s not a problem: I’m a teacher. I’m quite comfortable speaking with confidence on subjects I know dangerously little about. That’s why I don’t believe in computers in my classroom. My students have me. I’m the teacher. And they have the textbook. What more could they need? Pluto’s a planet, the Soviet Union still exists. The textbooks say so in text and maps, and that settles it. Next question?

Fans of Stephen Colbert will note that “schooliness” riffs on Colbert’s “truthiness,” which won the Word of the Year awards from the American Dialect Society in 2005, and from Merriam-Webster in 2006.

Colbert, in a serious interview as himself, instead of as his Bill O’Reilly satire persona, had this to say about “truthiness”:

“Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word…”

I think “schooliness” is tearing something apart too: our students’ – and some teachers’ – attitudes toward school. Something about the hell of school at its worst does violence to the heaven of learning at its best.

I know it’s not actually news… But interesting nonetheless

Teach Human Rights

From the SMH.

This article came from a push by human rights lawyer and member of the Queens Council (QC) – Georffrey Robertson in comments made at Canberra’s  National Public Education Forum held over the 27th and 28th of March.

Robertson is advocating teaching a compalsary human rights course in all Australian public schools, similar to that introduced in British schools.

Mr Robertson said the departments of justice and school education had evaluated a trial of the new subject in Hampshire and found it helped energise students and improve their behaviour. It also helped improve their self-confidence. Teachers reported it had made their jobs more enjoyable.

Among the course tasks, students were asked to consider a fictional set of school rules that included statements such as “teachers may hit students at any time”, “students must convert to the head teacher’s religion”, “teachers can go through students’ bags at any time and examine their property” and “anyone who criticises the new rules will be punished”.

Students were also encouraged to call talkback radio programs and write letters to the editor to develop their ability to think critically about world events.

Mr Robertson said the new course would form a solid basis for teaching students about values. He was critical of the approach former education minister, Brendan Nelson, had taken with posting value statements on school walls.

However, it seemed like the underlying motive of Robertson’s comments was to advocate for equality between the public and private sectors of education:

After hearing the Education Minister, Julia Gillard, address the conference on Friday night, Mr Robertson said she had failed to address the need to make public education a first priority.

“A real [education] revolution will come when state schools set the standards,” he said. “Then, and only then, will we have equity.”

The article relies on a conflict and comparison to captivate readers, and is another article in the debate on how and what should be taught in schools.

It seems like topics reported on education to come down into 3 catagories:

• What should be taught
• How should it be taught
• Scandal (teachers with students, cheating etc)

And really; all of these come down to the basic premise of conflict.

Laptops for learners. Vietnam’s Youth Month campaign.

This short article on the editorial page is form the Vietnaese online publication “Thanh Nien” on the 5th of March.

 

Thanh Nien newspaper and PetroSetco Distribution Co. have donated 100 laptop computers to needy school children in the central province of Quang Nam as their contribution to the National Youth Month campaign.

Valued at over VND10 million (US$572.22) each, the laptops were given to twelfth-graders with good marks as enticements to keep studying hard.  Youth Month, which calls on young people to work for the betterment of society, was launched by the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union on Saturday. PetroSetco Distribution is a unit of PetroVietnam and engages in a variety of fields.

This publication is an official organ of Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League (Đoàn Thanh niên Cộng sản Hồ Chí Minh) whose main focus is on youth affairs. As Vietnam is a communist nation, content distributed would very likely be a method of encouraging socialist ideas and the media sector is controlled by the government. However, some newspapers remain relatively outspoken. Hopefully this publication is one of them.

This short editorial shows support for their publications assistance of school kids, as well as promoting the ‘PetroSetco Distribution’ who is part of the ‘PetroVietnam’ which is the trading name for The Vietnam National Oil and Gas Group who provides petrol and gas for Vietnam.

This is an example of media implanting and encouraging the ideaologies of those who control it. Even though it would be obvious coming from a communist nation, it reflects the workings of other corporations such as the Rupert Mordoch’s empire.

Text2Teach

Elementary school students in the Philippinese will now be texted information via their mobile phones in hopes to enhance the learning experience as reported by the Inquirer.

MANILA, Philippines—While students are banned from using mobile phones during school hours, many public school teachers are using the ubiquitous gadgets in class to serve the “higher purpose” of “bringing to life” math, science and English subjects, according to Education Secretary Jesli Lapus.

Elementary teachers in selected areas are using the mobile phones under the Department of Education’s “Text2Teach” project, which aims to present “interactive, multimedia educational videos” that enhance the learning experience of students inside the classroom, Lapus said.

This article brings up the question; how many kids in grades 5 and 6 have mobile phones? And what about children in poverity stricken places. Could all this effort be better spent in another area of education?

Using a Nokia N95 8GB mobile phone, 387 interactive, educational videos in math, science and English are preloaded into the phones for the teachers to use in class.

A teacher simply plugs the phone into a TV and plays the video lesson for the day in the classroom for the students to enjoy and learn.

According to Lapus, the educational videos created for the project, which would last 3-5 minutes, will “bring science, math and English subjects to life, illustrating key concepts, skills and competencies that students are expected to master.”

These video lesson plans also help make teachers’ lives easier and are compliant with the Basic Education Curriculum, he said.

The education department began the project in 2003 with more than 700,000 public elementary students from 203 schools enjoying Text2Teach technology. It had the cooperation of the Ayala Foundation, Nokia, Globe Telecom and Seameo-Innotech.

The article is pro this program, describing no possible pitfalls or negative views about this program. It’s straightforward, basic reporting with no different angle on a story that could have had much more oppions. The paper describes itself as catering for a youth audience.

Subliminal messaging curriculum

The Australian has reported on a trial to radically change the way students would learn to read. Under a trial called ‘MULTILIT’ (Making Up Lost Time In Literacy), teachers would put less emphasis on phonics but focus on the sentance as whole.

Suggestion on how to do this?

Subliminal messaging.

In a group email sent to a network of literacy educators, associate professor in education at Wollongong University Brian Cambourne proposes flooding Ms Firth’s office with emails that associate phonics based approaches with failure “at an almost subconscious level”.

Professor Cambourne suggests messages, including linking phonics to “readicide”, which he defines as a noun meaning “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools”.

He points to “evolution theory” and non-Western forms of writing such as Chinese and hieroglyphic scripts as evidence that decoding sounds in the written word is not a prerequisite for being able to read alphabetically based scripts.

The article which was published online on March 19 also gives the reader an idea of the politics and background of education in Australia; the conflict of ideas, schemeing and what seems to be a constant battle to influnce minds.

Ms Firth said the purpose of the trial was to provide evidence of what methods worked best, and to “stop arguing about what we believe, and start talking about what we know”.

Professor Cambourne denied he was proposing a campaign and said he was “just using my right as a member of the community and my friends to inform the minister of things we think she should know” to counter bias propagated by MULTILIT and supporters of phonics.

Asked why he had to resort to a subliminal campaign instead of relying on evidence, Professor Cambourne first said: “You don’t really believe we can influence the minister’s subconscious?”

When the email was quoted back to him, Professor Cambourne said he and his colleagues had to rely on cognitive science’s “framing theory”. “It’s a way of making ideas change based on new theories rather than just denying or trying to argue with people you can’t argue with,” Professor Cambourne said.

“When you rely on evidence, it’s twisted. We can also present evidence but we never get a fair hearing. We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true – framing things that you’re passionate about in ways that reveal your passion.”

Professor Cambourne said the best example of the use of framing theory was former US president Richard Nixon, who was “framed a crook by newspapers … It didn’t matter how many times Richard Nixon said ‘I’m not a crook’ … every time he denied it, he reinforced the connection between himself and being a crook,” he said. “It didn’t do him any good.

“It doesn’t matter how many times we say all the evidence that’s been presented about whole language. Because of the way whole language has been framed by people like MULTILIT, we don’t get anywhere. We have to use the same kind of tactics that have been used to demean and demonise whole language.”

Professor Cambourne then said that, if The Australian reported his comments: “I will deny I ever said this.”

Even education and journalism has come to clash in this article. It seems to exposes the sinister side of educating children.