"Fix the edubabble" - the curriculum?

I mentioned the "national curriculum" recently didn't I?  It appears again in this morning's paper. It appears alongside those who have been given "honours" for the King's Birthday - which we, oddly, celebrate today with a public holiday.

One of those so honoured is Terry Tao, mathematician. Terry went to school with cousins of mine. They thought he was "odd but nice". He was much younger than them of course, about seven years younger by my reckoning...and in the same year level for maths.

I did not like maths at school. I am no mathematician. I managed to get through "statistics" at university. I had to look up the formula for something recently because it is years since I used it - but at least I knew where to look and, once I had found it, what to do. Perhaps I am one of the lucky ones. Still, I prefer languages to sciences. 

This morning's report is more than a "we need to get back to basics" sort of report. There is a strong element of "we need to be rid of some of the garbage" in it. 

School was not "exciting" and it was often not very "interesting" for me. I expect it was the same for most children. We went to school because we had to go to school. Once there we worked because we were expected to work. We were taught to read, to write, to do arithmetic. We were taught about plants, about animals, about explorers and other countries.  We painted and cut paper and threw balls to one another. At the end of it we were not considered to be "educated" but to have the foundation on which to get an education. There was no mention of politics or sex education or "feelings" or "race" or other religions. Those things were taught at home, if they were taught at all. 

We had no television, let alone the internet or videos on phones. I read as many books as I could find. There must have been other children like me and we all grew up. Many of us went on to get better "educated" as apprentices or as students at colleges and universities. We survived without bars on the campus or the demand to do extra "politically correct" units as compulsory parts of the course we had chosen to do. 

Our knowledge of the world has expanded since then. It has sizzled and bubbled and risen over the top and then down the sides at a rate with which nobody can manage to keep up.

Looking at it that way I would have thought that knowing the basics really well would be essential. It is surely like me knowing my basic maths so well I can look up the formula I needed and then use it. Yes, I have to know about the formula and how to use it but I cannot do that until I know the basics. I need to know that two and two make four here and know it instantly.  I need to know my basic number facts before I learn how to "code" to use a computer.  I need to be able to read well to do this. I need to know how to find and understand the meaning of words which are new to me. 

Is this about more than "the basics"? I think it is. It is about knowing them so well they are the deep foundations on which the rest of our knowledge is built. Learning these may not be fun and it may not be interesting but it is essential. It is about learning to work, not about being entertained at school.  I suspect those who have written the most recent report are correct - and that they will be ignored. 

  

Reaching 112yrs of age

is not something most of us will achieve. The woman who was celebrating that extraordinary milestone was the subject of an article in yesterday's paper. 

Her advice on how to do it was "take an interest" - in life. 

I thought about people I have met who have reached, or almost reached, the century.  How did they manage it? Was it taking an interest in life?

Our much loved, indeed adored, Senior Cat was close to the century. He might have made it but felt he'd "had enough". He told us this. He didn't want the fuss that might have come with waiting a few more months for that marker. Up until then though he certainly took an interest in life, in other people and the world around him.

My godfather did reach that far. He was also keenly interested in other people. "Tell me..." he would say and then listen carefully despite his hearing loss. It was always an extra effort for him.

I knew someone who was a hundred and three. She only moved into aged care for a short time - and was not impressed. Her children had insisted. It might have been kinder to leave her where she was. With a little help from the neighbours she was doing very well on her own. One of the boys next door is doing his final year at university courtesy of her tuition in mathematics. Interested in life? Interested in young people? Yes, very much so.

Occasionally I have reason to go into one of the local nursing homes. The residents who are intellectually able soon seem to become less able. There is little, if anything, to challenge them. They do not want "bingo", "community singing", "concerts", old films or simplified church services.  The books on the shelves of the "library" are "romance" or "westerns" and I am told to "get me a good crime yarn Cat" or "can you get that new biography?" 

I will be dropping in to one such place today with the order of knitting wool which arrived yesterday. The boy who delivered it knew what it was as I had asked him to look out for it. He was fascinated by the idea that someone who is five times his age is still taking an interest in life. 

"Would she knit me a football beanie?" His team apparently has no commercial merchandise available.

"She will teach you to knit one for yourself," I told him. He did not look at all sure about that idea. He is much more interested in computer games. I do not see those as the same sort of "taking an interest". Perhaps that is the problem.  

Taxes do not always work

the way they are seemingly intended to work. 

The UK government has apparently added VAT (our GST) to their "public" (private) school woes. What has happened is possibly the reverse of what has been intended - or apparently intended. Pupils are leaving those schools and going to state schools. Every time they do I am told the taxpayer has to fork out another £8,600 for another student. They would not be getting that back in VAT.

So, why did they do it? 

The same issue comes up regularly in Downunder. There are complaints about "funding private education", about the way it gives "wealthy" families "advantages". 

The reality is different. If every student who now attends a fee paying school went to a state school the actual tax burden would be higher on everyone.  It is cheaper for the government to provide some of the education funds to the fee paying school system. It does not stop the complaints but the government is trying to find a balance between getting students where they want them and keeping taxpayers happy. 

Governments like to have students under their control. It is why we have things like "the national curriculum". It is why there are demands to teach certain topics and how they must be taught. Fee paying schools cannot ignore the national curriculum but they can teach it in other ways and with other emphases. The same applies to "home schooling". In this state your "homeschool" family is monitored for that very reason. Is your child being taught what the state demands? 

  The same ideas also apply to the recent tax changes. They are not designed to make it easier for young people to own their first home. The changes to items like the "capital gains tax" are not aimed at young people at all. They are being applied to houses bought before 1985. Economists, who generally know something about the consequences of these things, are saying there will now be many more people who find they owe more than the "asset" they are paying off is actually worth - what is known as "negative equity". 

Why has the government made the changes? It is not actually going to solve their revenue problem but it will give them greater control over the revenue they are getting. People will move into the forms of investment the government prefers.

All this has been carefully explained to me. I do not pretend to understand "big" economics. I do know that the cost of everything has gone up so quickly that what I am being told about "intergenerational equity" is wrong. Perhaps someone can explain if it is supposed to work differently?   

A diagnosis of cancer

has come as no surprise to me. No, not for me so far but for a more distant cousin.

He has been a smoker, a heavy smoker until recent years. He "cut back" to twelve a day and then six a day but could never quite give the habit up. Now he is paying the price.

The first warning came a couple of years ago. He had a cancer growing under a finger nail. They removed it and part of his finger as well. 

Then, late last year, it was "prostate cancer". Oh it was not aggressive and it was "treatable".  Well yes, perhaps it is or was. I know other men with similar problems. One was diagnosed about eight years ago, had surgery and is "just fine". 

More recently other problems have developed for my cousin. His wife phoned me early last evening and said, "He's been diagnosed with an aggressive bladder cancer. They did a scan and it is in his hip and thigh bones as well."

He is currently enduring a month of radiotherapy. How much good this will do they have no idea. He is considered to be "too old" for surgery to remove his bladder. As the cancer has already apparently metastasized  I wonder about this.

It has come at a time when there is a government advertisement I see between the two parts of the news service I watch. It is an advertisement designed to encourage people to give up smoking. It tells people that smoking can cause "eleven different types of cancer". Bladder cancer is mentioned in it. 

I wonder if the advertising has any effect. I wonder if my cousin has seen it and, if he has, what his thoughts are about it. I wonder if he wishes he had never begun to smoke.

The Senior Cat, like the vast majority of men his age, smoked. It was a habit they took up during the war. The Senior Cat was never a heavy smoker. It would be the occasional cigarette here or there but he quit entirely when I was kitten in early primary school. He saw something on the desk of one of his lecturers at university. The lecturer concerned had been diagnosed with lung cancer. That was enough for the Senior Cat. He went over to eating peppermints instead. Never a fat man the little weight he put on was probably a good thing.  

I have never even tried to smoke a cigarette but it has not made me immune from the consequences of smoking. In my lifetime I have had to endure the second hand smoke of other people's addiction. While I genuinely believed the school library should always be open at lunch time I was also relieved I did not have to endure the smoke laden atmosphere. When there were staff meetings at university I would sit as close as I could to the always open window. My good friend A... would insist on it being open. We did not smoke. No female member of staff did. It was the men. 

"You don't think it is going to happen to you," one of the professors told us when he had to tell us that another one had been diagnosed with cancer. These were intelligent people but tobacco addiction is hard to kick, very hard.

Middle Cat and Brother Cat do not smoke. Their children do not smoke and their grandchildren had better not even think about it or their parents will have more than something to say. Most people I know do not smoke now. Some did but they have stopped. It has been hard but they have done it. Anyone who does smoke knows to stay well away from me. I will cough and sneeze and I feel as if I am choking on their smoke. Where is the pleasure in that?

I am so grateful I never felt the temptation to try. It may not stop me getting a cancer diagnosis at some point but at least I will know that it has not been directly caused by a decision I made to smoke. I just wish my cousin had made the same decision. 

We have a new member of the judiciary

and she has moved straight from being a member of parliament across to that position. She retired from politics at the state election.  She is now an associate judge in the Supreme Court on a salary of over $400,000 a year.

This alarms me. We are supposed to have a system of "separation of powers" in this country. 

You know what I mean don't you? The system which separates the government from the administration of law. It has not happened here. I am absolutely certain this woman would have known that she was going to be appointed to the judiciary before she "retired". The government had almost certainly worked out she would be considered "surplus to requirements" in parliament so they found a way of moving her to a position where she will be sympathetic to whatever else they have planned.

It might work I suppose. 

It has been tried before in this country and it will be tried again. There have been appointments to the High Court which have very definitely been political appointments. To the credit of the judiciary they have often produced results the appointees (or those appointing them) did not want. 

A member of the High Court also went on to be one of the best Governors-General this country has ever had. He worked successfully with two strikingly different governments. More than once he informed a government something could not be done. As a law student I, like many other students at the time, met him and liked him. He was a known thorn in the side of some senior public servants. It is what he should have been too. 

I wonder how this woman will work. How will she feel if the law informs her she needs to go against the wishes of her former colleagues? 

The courts are there for us to test the law. They are there to apply it.  They are not there to do the bidding of the government.  

School buses are an essential

part of the life of many rural students here. They also serve other purposes.

I tried explaining this to someone yesterday. He apparently comes from a very wealthy enclave in a large American city. Students there apparently get taken to school by their parents in much the same way that students get taken by their parents and grandparents here. It was not something he knew much about.

He had asked me because one of the big yellow school buses had appeared outside one of our local shopping centres. He wanted to know about it. There was a well behaved group heading into the local cinema complex and they had obviously come on the bus.

It brought back memories of those buses. The Senior Cat was once the head of the school with the most bus runs in the state. They were also the longest bus runs. One started at seven in the morning and finished at around five at night. Two more of the destinations were not much shorter. 

The buses travelled across unsealed roads. They stopped at the rural mail boxes where the farm started. The farm house would often be another three or four miles away. More than one of the children would then need to walk home or, if they were lucky, there would be a vehicle of some sort sitting there and they would ride home. One boy began to drive an adapted "Mini" at seven. The distance to the house was simply too far and nobody could come to get him. 

The buses were never the Senior Cat's direct responsibility. His eyesight issues meant he could not have the "commercial" or "heavy goods" licence to drive a school bus. The buses were the responsibility of his deputy.  The buses were driven by the teachers. It was a very long day for them and for the children at the end of the runs.

There were no mobile phones then. Even the "land lines" were patchy. You could be miles away from one too. If the bus broke down or had a flat tyre you had to hope that someone might come along the same road or that the nearest farm house was not too far away.  If there were very senior boys on the bus then you might be able to fix something with their help. There was one "spare" bus at the school and the deputy might be able to drive out and collect the children and bring them into school. It was a constant worry. It is probably still a constant worry. 

At the previous school I had travelled on those buses once a week. We had to go to another school for "woodwork" and "domestic science". These subjects were a compulsory part of the curriculum but these were mostly farm students who knew more about woodwork, metalwork, cooking and sewing than their teachers. We endured the journey down the twenty-two tight bends in the hill and hoped the bus would not break down. I always felt ill. 

I never envied the students who needed to travel on those buses every day. The older students would try to do their homework because there would be farm chores waiting when they arrived home. The younger students would often fall asleep and be carried off the bus by older siblings or a waiting parent.

The service was, rightly, free. It is still free. The buses were not supposed to carry other passengers or parcels but in reality they did. It was sometimes essential. When the mail van needed a part that had to come from the city the school buses left the mail at the same places the students were left. Other people would collect theirs from the box at the gate. They would have been alerted by the family whose box it was. 

There was no internet. The phone service worked on a "party" line and the whole system only worked because people knew one another and worked together.

The stranger who had asked me the question looked disbelieving when I told him all of this.

"Did you get a bus like that when you started school?" he wanted to know. 

I shook my head. "I rode my tricycle. It was only a mile and half."

"But someone went with you?"

"Not after the first week."

He looked shocked. "They wouldn't let you do that now."

No, they would not - but I am glad they did then.  

 

"We should just get rid of them"

I was told yesterday. 

In between the heavy showers someone was out there "clearing up the mess the trees leave". He was not a happy man at all. 

There are some lovely street trees around here. There are not nearly enough in my view. This man thought there were too many. 

I know this man by sight, not name. I know his wife in the same way. She is one of those meek women who does as she is told. He's a bully. No, he has never hit her but I suspect he abuses her in ways neither of them recognise. 

He likes everything to be absolutely neat and orderly. Their "garden" is mostly paving with a patch of lawn and some rose bushes pruned to within an inch of their lives. I have never seen the back garden but I would guess it is more paving and a little lawn. He has complained to the neighbours about their trees.

The trees he was complaining about though are two street trees. They are both London plane trees and they are genuinely lovely trees. So what if they drop their leaves for winter? In summer they are home to a lot of bird life. As I pedal past on a hot day it is noticeably cooler under those trees. More than once I have seen older people just stopping for a moment or two beneath them. Young children race around them. One of the local boys climbed one last summer. It was not done out of mischief but to rescue a small kite belonging to a much younger child. A mother and child were picking up leaves and counting a couple of days ago. A friend who "scrapbooks" searched among the leaves for "that perfect leaf". 

Most people probably go past without noticing anything in particular but they would notice if the trees were not there. The idea of simply "getting rid of them" is not something I ever want to contemplate. 

I have been advocating for more trees for almost as long as I can remember. They make a vast difference to the urban landscape. We could cease all the "global warming" discussions if we planted enough trees and other greenery. Yes, it has to be right sort of tree, the right sort of greenery but once it is there it makes a difference. It can make ten or more degrees of difference on a hot day. We use less power to cool ourselves when there are trees there. 

We need more trees. The power demands of the AI centres mean we will need even more trees than before. The idea of getting rid of perfectly healthy and very useful trees just because they drop some leaves frightens me.  I pedalled on without comment.