Wednesday, January 11, 2017

In which the pond keeps track of the Broady boy ...


The indefatigable Donners is back with a double dose of educational mayhem and malarkey, and right from the get go, he had the pond rolling jaffas down the aisle with his rather strange sense of humour ...

You see, as diligent students of Donners will remember, freedom and flexibility, close kissing cousins of agility and innovation, really mean ... rote learning and memorisation ...


It probably helps explain why the Donners repeats perhaps the most meretricious American nonsense about "choice" - as if everything is fixed by having a choice of 54 doughnut stylings ...

Choice is a preferred substitute for those who have no substance, weight, or gravitas ... and if the pond could banish one word from the language, choice would be it ...

Now deep in the silly season, the pond received a communication from someone claiming to be Donners. The pond's first reaction was deep sympathy, and memory of the first rule of the full to overflowing intertubes ... don't feed the troll ...


What to say? Talk about feeding the troll ...

Cheap trinkets of the OA kind are meant to impress the pond? 

The pond was reminded of a recent OA mentioned in educational despatches ...


That story here,  with the usual Fairfax forced video, providing a timely reminder of just how the privatisation of education has led to deep distress and profound rorting ... all the result of blather about choice ...

Some meaningful scribbling about this disaster might be more to the point than blather about trinkets and superstitions and choice ...


Yes there's many a useless, meaningless gong in the world ...

And so to the first reading of the day, in which Donners, having sorted out the Australian system, sorts out the useless Canadians ...


Now the pond thinks the Canadians can look after themselves, and spot the obvious desire of Donners to line the pockets of the Catholic church with more government funding. Socialise the religion, then deplore the state!

And besides, there's much more to read, so we need to wrap up this offering quickly ... (don't forget that brown paper envelope full of taxpayer tithings for the church)...


There it is again ... idle chatter about innovation and flexibility (close kissing cousin to agility), and yet we all know it's about being a parrot, and doing rote learning and memorisation ...


And so to the second Donners reading of the day, because the prolific scribbler seems to be the only one they bother to publish in reptile rags these days on the subject of education ...

They once did have an interesting writer, one Maralyn Parker, but she's long gone, forgotten and her links apparently not working ...  and now we're left with Donners ...


God? What's She got to do with it?

Might as well invoke Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy or when in South Australia, the bunyip ...

The header for this invocation of a mythical deity was even more provocative because the illustration was even larger, and contained the same implicit mockery of meditating students ...


Now the pond personally doesn't practise meditation, but has nothing against it as a way of inducing relaxation and freedom from stress, there being plenty to stress about in these Trumpian times where unemployment is a way of life for the young, and they can all just forget about buying a home. Oh they might get the pond's home in due course, but it'll be like trying to prise that rifle from God's cold, dead, lifeless hands ...

In fact, as anyone with the foggiest awareness of the Catholic traditions of mysticism and meditation would know, the concept plays a big role in the church ... 

Don't take the word for it, sample How to meditate like a Catholic ...


And so on. 

So starting a story with a shot of meditating kids and accusing them of cotton wool lifestyles is about as idle as the pond starting with shots of meditating Catholic children and accusing them of cotton wool lifestyles...



May God help these cotton wool kids ... or may She help them to meditate using the rosary?


That 1720 example found here, but it's a reminder to the pond that, while already deep in meditative thought with only a zillion Hail Marys to go, we haven't even got on to the dashing Donners' text for the Terrorists ...


Yes, now we're into tough guy Donners, a sort of amalgam of Dirty Harry and the Duke. 

Fancy providing trampolines with safety nets. Much better that children fall off and break a leg or even a neck or a back. That'll harden them the fuck up ...

Somewhere back in the distant past the pond can imagine the Donners in frock nun uniform, bringing out the strap and smacking heartily the naughty children. Yes, there's nothing like Catholicism and a little discipline, is there ...

Now for the bit about teaching kids they're dropkicks, losers and failures, so that we can adequately prepare them for a life in the prison system, or perhaps abject recipients of charity, dished out naturally enough by churches grown fat on the taxpayer purse ...


Not more visual mockery of meditation?

Why not these as illustrations for failed, meaningless activities that are a waste of time?




Okay, better stop, because the usual cry will go up about sectarianism. 

It seems it's okay to bash meditation, but it's probably wrong to have a go at prayer and meditating rosary beads. So the pond had better wrap up this sojourn with the Broady boy ...


Oh dear sweet absent lord, boys learning to be brave and resourceful? So the world can keep its warrior class intact, and we can go on having wars for all eternity, or at least until the rapture sets in, evangelicals head off to heaven and Catholics are sent to hell for their wicked papish ways?

Well the pond is getting closer to dating the Donners' mindset. It's somewhere between ...




And ...



And Donners probably still talks of what a slug fourpence ha'penny was in the good old days ...

The first Biggles was published in 1932 - or so Greg Hunt bravely southern walri discovered - and the first Lion in 1952, before it expired in 1974. That about covers it for brave warriors and for Donners ...

A couple of world wars, a holocaust, and still we get idle chit chat about Star Wars, and David and Goliath,  and don't you worry that the fix was in, and that anybody who relies on God turning up to help them in the own battle with Goliath might discover She's remarkably deaf ...

It should go without saying that Daesh is heavily into Star Wars, and the idea of crusades and endless battles ...


Never mind, for those who want to remember how the Iliad ended in Iraq, try this at the Graudian ...

Well enough of all that - goodbye to all that if you like - and to warrior Catholics and imaginary deities.

That way the pond can rejoin the real world, and celebrate along with a genuinely infallible Pope - and as always, more papal infallibility here ...


Damn you meditating socialists, damn you to Bronnie hell, you ruin everything ...




9 comments:

  1. "Christianity provides an anecdote to anxiety". Go to the back of the class, Donners, and take your books, you won't be back.

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    1. It was just a small slip of the keyboard by Donners, mate: he intended to type anecdoche, not anecdote. Anecdoche is described thus:

      anecdoche. n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.

      And that describes Donners to a "T", don't you agree ?

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  2. Donnelly has been banging on the same drum for at least 25 years that I know of. And the pond picks the muddle in Donnelly's thinking immediately. Perhaps Donnelly has been too much wrapped in cotton wool for too long.

    He should know that Alby Jones, for example, CEO of Education in SA in the 1970s, put out his Freedom and Authority Memorandum which gave power to Principals and school bodies to make decisions about how the schools were run.

    Donnelly is obsessed with the idea that schools are dominated by top-down Canberra dictatorship - which is the criticism he made when Gillard continued Howard's beginnings to a National Curriculum. Donnelly had been demanding a "road map" of precisely what was to be taught - and how (by direct instruction). When education authorities created such "road-maps, he rejected them. When they put out flexible Frameworks to guide teachers, he demanded precise "road-maps".

    The favoured Education method for many years has been Finland's mainly state-run system, with its school and teacher autonomy and flexibility. Now Donnelly is getting excited about direct instruction systems where students study for 16 hours a day in order to pass some examination. Not much freedom and innovation there.

    Donnelly has not been in a classroom for decades and is bound by his own intractable education catechism.

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  3. Me thinks that Kev the dinosaur should become acquainted with the work of Alfie Kohn, starting with two of his books, namely: No Contest - The Case Against Competition and The Schools Our Children Deserve.

    No Contest gives a very comprehensive description as to why a "culture" based on winner-takes-all competition is destructive all the way down the line. This includes competitive sports.

    Never mind too that when "education" becomes or is reduced to a competitive rat-race, MOST students actually lose including the "winners", but especially those at the "bottom" of the rat-race ladder. In one way another most of the "losers" internalize the sense of "failure" for the rest of their lives.

    All of those millions of "losers" who now vote for the Trump the pussy-grabber-in-chief, and Pauline Hanson too.

    When I used to practice Aikido the motto on the wall was: we are here to be the best we can be.
    Implicit in that motto was the understanding that one becomes an exemplary Aikido practitioner by pushing against and through ones own presumed limitations, but NOT by competing, being aggressive towards, or comparing ones self to other practitioners on the Dojo floor.

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    1. The pond suspects that level of philosophical understanding is, like Zen, a little above Donner's pay grade ...

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    2. Talking about the schools our children deserve, Anony, I think it might be enlightening to contemplate a school dropout from many years ago: one Albert Einstein by name, of whom it has been written:

      "In his youth, Albert Einstein attended a traditional school in Munich, Germany, just like many other children of his time. He received good grades and was particularly accomplished in the field of mathematics.

      However, he absolutely detested school because he could not stand the way the teachers taught. He thought that everything was far too objective, there was no room for questioning or thought, with the classes instead focusing on strict memorization.

      Einstein wanted to be free to express his own thoughts, and to pursue the specific concentrations in which he was interested. Einstein found it very difficult to do that in such a rigid educational environment.

      When he was 15 years old, his teacher suggested that he leave school, and he took the suggestion and did not return."


      Read more at http://biography.yourdictionary.com/articles/how-old-einstein-quit-school.html#GrGoEz0diTZx7exH.99

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  4. Well done, Kev!

    A gong? Of your very own?

    You're in good company; Alan Bond, Rolf Harris and others including my brother who is a complete fuckwit.

    You're the gift who keeps on giving...

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  5. Hang on, Kev thinks boys should read the Iliad for its life lessons...the actual Iliad - "Goddess, sing me the anger of Achilles, Peleus' son; that fatal wrath that brought countless sorrows on the Greeks and hurled many valiant souls of heroes down to Hades…". That Iliad?

    For those that haven't read it, it goes like this: During a completely pointless 10-year war over a complementary woman, Achilles (a homocidal psychopath) chucks the shits with Agammemnon (his hypersensitive, sociopathic overlord) because the latter did a bit of pussy-grabbing with a woman the former regards as his personal possession. Achilles sulks in his tent expecting Agammemnon will return his trophy-woman, until his lover, Patroclus (pretending to be Achilles) gets himself killed by Hector the Trojan. Achilles, like a one-punch hoon, throws the mother of all tantrums, calls out and kills Hector, and then desecrates his remains dragging them around behind his chariot, until Hector's bereft father persuades him to return his remains. All the way being manipulated by the squabbles of the the most fucked-up pantheon of Gods ever conceived. The End.

    I wonder if Kev even read the Iliad at school. It's brilliant literature (especially if you are fortunate enough to be able to grapple with it in the original), but life-lessons? Not so much...

    In the fan-fic spin-offs, Achilles takes another lover, who is killed in similar circumstances and Achilles loses his shit again until Hector's brother puts a cap in his ass (or ankle, anyway). Of the rest of those model citizens? When Agammemnon gets home, he is murdered in the bath by his wife and the lover she took in his long absence, Ajax and Odysseus have a fight over Achilles armour which leads to Ajax going mad and committing suicide and Odysseus to his 10 year detour, leaving his wife to fend off another horde of pussy-grabbers. When Odysseus gets home, his son shows he's a mans mans with a bit of freudian phallocentrism, and together they kill all the people who have been trying to roofie his wife. (Again all with the meddling of their psychotic gods). The End.

    Fuck me drunk, if you're after virtuous life lessons, George R R Martin is probably better value for money. Or Breaking Bad.

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    1. The pond wants you to do all its synopses FrankD!

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