So many days the pond has spent amongst the brownshirts; so often the pond has contemplated the Reichstag moments offered up by News Corp, proponents of a man keen on a military coup; and yet this was Friday, and so the pond knew that the reptiles down under, on the march with their US brethren, wouldn't go there ...
Instead the pond anxiously searched below the fold for something or someone different, perhaps an old familiar face, an old flame with all forgiven, returned to dwell amongst the faithful ...
Eureka! Forget the Swiss bank account man admiring Putin - Vlad the impaler simply achieved his wilder Gold Coast fantasies.
Instead, look over there, on the far right - good old dashing Donners back for his standard rant.
Truly it's been so long, what with Donners a sterling Speccie man, and so overlooked by the pond in its trimmed down form ...
Strange, it's been awhile since he did a piece for the Speccie mob, and yet there he was, banging on about the national curriculum and cancel culture on steroids (as you do if you're a Speccie loon), way back in early May ...
So it's shop-soiled and a little worn, and certainly tired, but at least the reptiles are back in the game ...
Let's face it, there's an epic fail right there. How much better, in reptile speak, is a headline about cancel culture on steroids than blather about an epic fail?
And speaking of epic fails, how about the epic banality of that uncredited illustration? These days the cash-strapped reptiles daily wander into the valley of the pathetic when it comes to their pictorial work.
But the pond has said this before, and as repetition is good, an excellent way to promote learning, the monotonous parroting of tedious dates about the Kings and Queens of England, why not turn to the returning in-house Catholic parrot for another good parroting?
Ah yes, the importance of coal. And here's one news item that will never make it into dashing Donners curriculum ...
Graudian away here, and don't worry children, dashing Donners is doing his best to help fuck the planet with his eternal devotion to dinkum clean pure virginal Oz coal...
Oh fucketty fuck, talk of a black armband - it's so long since the pond has heard that one - followed by a come to Jesus moment, and yet recently there has been much talk of that come to the orange one moment ...
Of course it's not all grim news when tracking the arcane ways of the Franco fascists and the lickspittle brownshirts of Newscorp. There's also a chance for some light humour ...
And so to a rousing final cliché from a man eternally doomed to repeat himself ...
Yes, what a relief, nothing has changed, dashing Donners is still the amiably moronic alarmist that he's always been ... and the pond once more felt safe in a world of Catholic banality.
Of course, if you happened to be an indigenous child, and woke up to a BBC world service report on the horrors that unfolded in Saskatchewan - as the pond did this morning - you might wonder about blithe tyke spirits talking so gaily about black armbands ...
But enough of dashing Donners and black armbands, because the pond's gaze moved up to the top of the page and sure enough there was ongoing consternation amongst the reptiles, what with Gladys and her removalists breaking quite a few bits of china, as happens with bulls in china shops ...
Oh look, there's the reptiles being reptile by staging a lockdown face-off, and best of all we have an ancient historian and wizened philosopher, magically transformed, by ineffable reptile powers, into a state of the art epidemiologist offering expert advice ...
What to say? Perhaps a matching scintillating observation, say: Our hole in the bucket man is not a bucket, but neither is he a piece of straw ...
And again with those banal images, this time credited to Getty, and the pond knew what it must do to lift the illustration performance at which the reptiles are routinely a dismal failure ... a cartoon for each hole in the bucket man gobbet, and what better way to start than with an infallible Pope?
Ah the good old gold standard. Talk about hits and memories, and the platters that matter ...
Vaccination? What an astonishing insight. Here, have a cartoon ...
Oh okay that was two, but the pond could sense that perhaps Cicero would not be providing the answer this day, and strength would be needed to carry on and make it to the end ...
Striking? What's so striking about a government recommending a vaccine to people of a certain age, bunging on television commercials for the demographic, and so on and so forth, and yet not having said vaccine to hand? That's a great way to avoid interminable queues ... and as for political footballs, can the pond join the reptiles in their game by suggesting a few rules of play?
And there you go, only more more gobbet of Henry to go ... and it's just like getting a shot in the arm with a placebo ...
On the one hand, unrelenting banality, and on the other hand, unrelenting banality, and not a single word about how the ancient Romans or medieval scholars had tremendous insights into the current situation, and so the pond must sadly judge this week's hole in the bucket man outing an epic fail ...
And so to the Rowe of the day for the closer, with more Rowe to hand here ...
"...an old familiar face, an old flame with all forgiven, returned to dwell amongst the faithful ..."
ReplyDeleteBut, bg butt, Donners would have us believe that "It's [school curriculum] ... weakness in maths..." Now I'd like to lay a bet that Donners understands little or nothing of any of the maths covered in any school curriculum. I 'studied' maths - and I mean mathematics, not just arithmetic - for my entire secondary schooling and later at a tertiary level and I can honestly affirm that apart from just a very few of my fellow students who went on to what was not yet termed 'STEM' studies, none of my schoolmates with whom I still have any contact remember or know any of the maths they "studied".
I barely remember any of it myself though I still know some basic probability maths and can grasp fairly simple statistics (I do recognise the normal distribution curve and the exponential curve and the well known 'bent knee' curve aka the 80/20 rule curve). And I can still handle a vector or two but I never made it to tensors or quaternions - but I can still recognise an 'unreal number' in 3 dimensions..
I once had the 'privilege' as a casual fill-in teacher of trying to instruct a bunch of year 8s (or second-formers as we called them) on the arithmetic of fractions. Just simple fractions like what's 2/3rds of 4/5ths not those terrible (infinite) continued fractions. I think after a whole school year, perhaps about 20% of the kids had some basic understanding of the matter.
So just to emphasize: mathematics is a very non-simple field of knowledge that requires much study to get any grasp of. And also that after about 2300 years since Euclid, mathematics has progressed in sophistication and subject matter so that very few 'research' mathematicians know anything much about other mathematician's work.
Then how much of 2300 years of very broad and sophisticated mathematics can be covered in a school syllabus ? Would you try to cover Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem ? Let me quote: "Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is a proof by British mathematician Andrew Wiles of a special case of the modularity theorem for elliptic curves. Together with Ribet's theorem, it provides a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem. Both Fermat's Last Theorem and the modularity theorem were almost universally considered inaccessible to proof by contemporaneous mathematicians, meaning that they were believed to be impossible to prove using current knowledge. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem
Yep, that'd go down real well with a bunch of "second formers", wouldn't it. Personally, I don't understand a word, or a symbol, of any of it.
We should all spend more time in libraries, like Thomas Hobbes:
Delete"He was forty years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the forty-seventh proposition in the first book. He read the proposition. 'By God,' said he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proof; which referred him back to another, which he also read. ... at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry." from Aubrey's Brief Lives
Ah, but what if he'd lived long enough to encounter Lobachevsky and Riemann geometries. How many parallel lines can be drawn through a given point external to a given straight line:
DeleteEuclid - 1; Lobachevsky - infinite; Riemann - 0.
And then there's Minkowski spacetime too: "A combination of three-dimensional Euclidean space and time into a four-dimensional manifold where the spacetime interval between any two events is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which they are recorded. Although initially developed by mathematician Hermann Minkowski for Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, the mathematical structure of Minkowski spacetime was shown to be implied by the postulates of special relativity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space
Oh this mathematical stuff is just never-ending, isn't it. And it will all have to be added to the school mathematics curriculum, won't it.
Yeah, yeah - any of this stuff requires a level of curiosity not found among traditionalists of the Donners type. Those perverts probably liked the idea of overturning an orthodoxy.
DeleteFor Donners the books have been closed, all the necessary facts recorded, unchanging and immutable. I really wonder if he sees any difference between education and indoctrination.
So, sayeth the Donners: "One of the strategies employed by John Howard as prime minister when contemplating an election was getting rid of the barnacles inhibiting electoral success." Boy, that sure worked all kinds of treat back in 2007, didn't it. Let me summarise: lost 22 seats, including his own, had a swing against of 5.44% and scored 5,874,178 versus Labor's 6,545,814 two-party preferred votes. Yep, so sure "cleared the barnacles" that time.
ReplyDeleteBut this is the issue: "Such is the concern that the new curriculum will do nothing to stem Australia's substandard performance in international tests such as the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment - where results have fallen from 524 in 2003 to 491 in 2018 ..." Now that residual bit of mathematics in me wants to know whether that decline was steady or whether the scores oscillated up and down a bit, however, the OECD publication shows it was steady downwards decline:
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_AUS.pdf
Anyway, I still have to ask: if this decline has basically been going on over 15 years (2003 - 2018), then what has been going on in the syllabus over that time ? Has the syllabus changed a lot over that time, or little ? And if the answer is "little" - as it appears to be - then why not try a radical change or two ?
And what's wrong with learning via problem solving ? Life is just replete in these complex days with problems that need to be solved.
Then: "Also ignored is the fact we are a Western liberal democracy in which Christianity is the major religion underpinning our political and legal systems." Oh yeah, sure - we just copied chunks out of the Bible into our Constitution and into our laws. So try this:
Census data on religion creates misleading idea we're a 'Christian nation'
https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/census-data-on-religion-creates-misleading-idea-were-a-christian-nation,15293
The Neil Francis study linked in that article is very interesting
Deletehttps://rationalist.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Religiosity-In-Australia-Part-1-final.pdf
Pulls the whole thing apart in a way that I suspect wouldn't please the Catholic Boys Daily writers at all. The institutional church's business model is starting to look like a Video Ezy franchise.
Anyway, I had the same uncharitable thought as you when I saw Donners bellyaching about falling standards. I immediately wondered what sort of record he had in STEM subjects.
The elephant in this room is the fact that the decline in student performance (at least on the PISA measure) coincides quite nicely with an increase in funding to private schools. Correlation ain't causation, but surely there is a question that needs to be asked.
Deletehttps://youtu.be/NIBfzvF15Kg
DeleteAnonymous - in my brief time as a tutor at what was then the only university in Queensland, most of my time was taken by the products of what were called Brisbane's 'Greater Public Schools'. Most of them came from the 'first' matric. classes - and had entered university with Straight As. Then they found that the 'facts' that they had committed to memory, or had had crammed into them, to garner those As, were not connected to any actual understanding of their subject. In short, they had no idea of how to do the most important part of education - educating themselves. A few received the revelation, or otherwise made the adjustment, but about half did not pass their first year in science.
DeleteThat was in another millennium, but, talking to the offspring of nephews and nieces, whose loving parents are paying for 'private', that still characterizes the 'first' classes in the schools for young gennlmen and leddies.
And that's really the core of it, isn't it Chad. I do believe that just about everybody who has made any kind of significant contribution to human thinking has a large component of 'self education' which began at an early age in their mental makeup.
DeleteBecause if they haven't, they're stuck with that nowadays tiny component of human knowledge and thinking that very limited teachers - and we are all limited - are able to convey to them.
The real trouble with curricula is that there is now way more really important stuff that people should learn and/or be taught than can be accomplished in a human lifetime and thus we are all appallingly ignorant. And the Donners of this world particularly so.
" and so the pond must sadly judge this week's hole in the bucket man outing an epic fail ..."
ReplyDeleteSadly so, because for a very short while there, he was making some sense. But of course rapidly fell into the reptile line without even a backward glance. I especially applaud this bit of pure reptile infantilism: "It is, however, surely undesirable to take the infantilisation of Western populations, and the erosion of civil liberties, even further than it has already gone."
Yep, it is the undeniable civil liberty of Western populations to insist on being free to catch a seriously nasty and often fatal disease - not as fatal as the 'black death' plague to be sure, but more fatal than even a very bad flu - and to pass it on to others. Personally, I thought that was tantamount to at least manslaughter which the last time I looked was not a Constitutionally guaranteed "civil liberty".
May I leaven the day for all the readers - I'm feeling a little lumpen after trying to work out what the Hole in The Bucket man was selling. So let's cross briefly to the prosecco and canapes twitter launch of an exciting new podcast.
ReplyDeleteYep. That's right...
https://twitter.com/aus_media/status/1415072416712126468
I liked the one and only upfront comment:
Delete"Good to hear if my Mum runs out of Diazepam.."
By the way, for anybody who would like to pick up a nice little bit of STEM:
ReplyDeleteHere’s the theory of relativity in 500 words
https://jabberwocking.com/heres-the-theory-of-relativity-in-500-words/
And if you don't go for that, or even if you do, pick up on today's Weekly Beast:
The great reset: Sky News flips on lockdown criticism
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/16/the-great-reset-sky-news-flips-on-lockdown-criticism