Get out your pen and paper, it's larnin' time with the Caterist, Simpleton "AI" Simon, Geoff chambering a Pauline round, and the Major doing Major ...

Reasons not to vote Labor, part 3 ... in which Jason Clare goes full luddite ...

The header: By Nick Cater
Jason Clare demands return to pen and paper as school computer experiment backfires

The use of a bot voice while deploring computers: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the snap of demonic child-ruining machines: The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Education Minister Jason Clare was first elected to parliament. Picture: Alan Place

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This is precisely the sort of stuff the pond might expect from the beefy boofheads and his minions: a sudden revelation that computer literacy causes the decline and ruination of impressionable young minds.

Instead it's Jason Clare doing their work for them, and receiving the approval of the quarry-whispering Caterist...

Jason Clare wants to reverse the digital saturation of the classroom, reacquainting pupils with pen and paper.
“If you look in the average classroom today, you’ll see tablets and laptops on every desk,” the Education Minister told Seven Sunrise this month.
Clare’s aversion to computers in the classroom is surprising. 

Damn right it is, though anyone underestimating the capacity for Labor to pander to the lizard Oz hive mind has only themselves to blame for being surprised. 

The flood water-whispering Caterist seized on the back flip ludditism with delight ...

After all, Labor put them there in the first place. The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Clare was first elected to parliament as the member for Blaxland.
Rudd promised that under a Labor government no child in years 9-12 would be left in digital poverty. Each one of them would have a toolbox of the 21st century – a device known today as a computer – connected to the $4.7bn Information Superhighway, which became the $51bn National Broadband Network.
The evidence was clear, according to Labor’s policy document: “Students with better access to technology can receive a stronger education and achieve better academic performance.
“Computers at school should not be seen as recreational relief from studying, but instead as being crucial to helping students to learn.”
A loose citation attributing this pearl of wisdom to the OECD gave the proposal a veneer of authority.
Yet, like much progressive policy, Rudd relied on untested assumptions that had hardened into orthodoxy among the intelligentsia without any supporting evidence.
Today the received wisdom has turned full circle, as it frequently does when academic theory rubs its chin against gritty reality.

A snap of the Caterist-approved Clare ...Minister for Education Jason Clare. Picture: Jeremy Piper

“All of the evidence we’ve got,” Clare told viewers, “is that the more kids are using computers, the lower their results are.
“If you use a pen to write something down, you’re more likely to remember it than if you type it down.”

Well not all the evidence. 

The odd hint of ambivalence can be found: Pen and Paper Versus Laptop: Is There a Clear Winner in the Note-Taking Olympics?

Anyone who thinks you can reverse the trend towards digitisation and the full to overflowing intertubes is attempting a Canute ...

Personally the pond refuses to use phones and social media, but anybody who thinks that genie can be stuffed back in the bottle by a bit of banning simply hasn't studied the way that censorship usually fails in its mission. 

Except of course that banning is the go-to of conservatives of the Caterist class...and Jason Clare ...and what a chance to pile all-in on former chairman Rudd:

The theory that students needed one-to-one access to computers to prepare them for the so-called knowledge economy appeared plausible in the days before smartphones and social media colonised young lives.
Taxpayer-funded computers hit the policy sweet spot for Labor: middle-class welfare disguised as social justice. It was further embellished with the jargon of human capital, the rubbery argument progressives turn to when real economic logic runs out.
“The research and evidence show that the best way to boost productivity is to invest in human capital,” Rudd claimed in January 2007. “This is why education is the pathway to prosperity.”
If only Rudd’s assertion had been true, rather than an arbitrary proposition that sounds plausible in an address to the Education Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. Perhaps then the Rudd and Gillard governments might not have been the waste of time, space and money they turned out to be.
Rudd made good on his pre-election promise of a quantum leap in education spending, locking in a spending trajectory that successive Coalition governments would struggle to reverse. Real spending per pupil has risen by almost 50 per cent in the past two decades, from around $14,900 in 2003-04 to $22,185 in 2023-24.
In Rudd’s terms, we should now be reaping a healthy return on the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has invested in human capital over the past 20 years. Yet, as the OECD noted in its 2022 PISA results report, Australian students’ performance in mathematics, science and reading has steadily declined since the mid-2000s.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of former chairman Rudd: PM Kevin Rudd claimed in 2007 that the best way to boost productivity was to invest in human capital. Picture: Philip Norrish

The presence of former Chairman Rudd gave the Caterist a golden chance, and he took it, even as the reptiles at the lizard Oz tentatively embrace AI and seek to overcome the irrelevance their paywall produces ...

Ask a bot to generate insights from the Caterist? That's way too Beta for the pond ...

In 2007, Rudd cited “research” showing that if the average education level of the working-age population increased by one year, the economy’s growth rate would be 1 per cent higher. Yet the latest PISA results, released this month, show that average reading scores for 15-year-olds have continued their steady decline from 513 in 2006 to 491 in 2025. Mathematics scores have fallen even faster from 520 to 479. The overall picture is worse than it was in 2022, when the OECD delivered its damning assessment that 15-year-olds in 2022 scored at a level expected of 14-year-olds 20 years earlier.
On Rudd’s 2007 logic, a one-year slip in education levels would mean economic growth is 1 per cent lower. Setting aside the correlation-causation fallacy, omitted variables, and assumption of constant marginal returns inherent in such abstractions, the theory that falling education standards drive economies backwards has more than a ring of truth in our current circumstances.
Intangible investments in human capital, after all, do not turn out to be the most effective way to stimulate productivity. Business capital invested in plant, machinery and system efficiency is still the best way to increase the volume of goods and services and increase living standards.
The lesson from Labor’s fiscal adventures between 2007 and 2013 is to beware of hocus-pocus arguments that offer shortcuts to prosperity. The improvement in Australian living standards between the mid-1980s and late 2000s was the reward for the hard slog of economic reform. There is every reason to be sceptical of the Treasurer’s latest claim that AI will break the current productivity drought.
As Clare tacitly admits by committing to remove computers from the classroom, digital technology has so far failed to deliver the productivity dividends many hoped for. Indeed, productivity growth has declined steadily this century as the use, speed and sophistication of computers have increased. Somehow AI will be different, the Treasury wants to assure us, forecasting a steady 1.2 per cent annual rise in productivity until 2066.
Yet there is little hope that the stagnant productivity trend since Covid will reverse under the policy settings this government has put in place. On any reasonable expectation of future productivity, the promise of intergenerational improvements in living standards is about to be broken.
The greater tragedy, however, may be the educational impoverishment of future generations by the promiscuous adoption of educational fads like the digitisation of the classroom. Attempts to educate children in schools with libraries bereft of books, or worse, trying to teach kids remotely as we did during the Covid pandemic, proved to be a deeply dehumanising experience for kids and teachers alike.

And at the end the Caterist couldn't resist a rousing flourish ...

Rudd’s mistake was to conceive of education as an instrument of economic policy, forgetting that the highest reward of education is not material prosperity but a larger life: the capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation.
The real tragedy is not that we have made the next generation less productive. It is that we have made their world smaller.

If all the "capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation" results in the climate science denialism and routine stupidity of the Caterist, then we are truly doomed. That's not making the world smaller, that's destruction on a massive scale...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are haunted by AI, so as the cry is to haul digital out of schools, another cry comes about fear of missing out.

Take it away simpleton Simon ...

So while we de-digitise schools, we must do a lizard Oz, and go AI for fear of missing out? Seems so ...

To set up a refrain: so we de-digitise schools and at the same time, embrace "frontier model training" for fear of missing out or becoming a passenger? We must abandon computers in school, but at the same time seek relevance and leverage in the new AI world?

Ah, there's the solution. Arm students with pen and paper and we'll become the second centre for AI training in the Western world ...

Luckily kids in school will be fully armed with paper and pen, and ready to cope with the AI invasion, and theft of creative output, thanks to the Caterist and Jason ...

Meanwhile the reptiles continued their obsession with Gina's pampered pet ...

Back in the day, the pond would have sent such yarns to the intermittent archive, but these days, the pond must carry the burden alone, as it was left to Geoff to pump up the Pauline volume...

The more the reptiles talk up Pauline, the more they make it harder for the beefy boofhead, but you had to read deep into the stats to get there ...

It was only in the final gobbet that Geoff chambered a round aimed at the Canavan caravan, with the thought bubble that maybe the wheels might fall off in toad land ...

And there you have it. 

After all that blather about Labor came the line "If there's one leader who should be worried it is Matt Canavan".

Why wasn't that the lead? For that you'd need to arm yourself with paper and pen, and ask the lizard Oz's AI machine.

Now it's time for the ABC to take over, and regurgitate endless variations on the lizard Oz story, assuring everyone that Labor is doomed (and so, if the beefy boofhead and Pauline take over, is the ABC).

And so to the Major, relentless churner out of devoted Zionism for the Australian Daily Zionist News.

The pond hesitated as to whether to run the Major, what with Sharri - full disrespect - making an appearance, and Sydney University getting another bagging, and lordy, long absent lordy, is the pond beyond tired of this jihad ...

Express concern about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Syria? Not in Major land ...

And then as always happens, the Major went into full litany mode:

Usually the pond would turn to Haaretz for a story to balance the Major's rampant Zionism, and perhaps another story to balance the Major in deep north Pauline furriner bashing mode ...

The pond might also have wasted time noting the endless ability of the Major to show off his bigotry, what with his never ending DEI blather and ABC bashing, but the pond is tired, and decided it was better to let the Major show how stale and derivative he was, phoning it in from the golf links, and reverting to Killer Creighton for his insights...

And at the very end came a reminder of just how Emeritus Chairman Rupert had made this made man ...

2015?! And yet he still hangs around like a bad smell in a sinecure.

And what was it with that sentence, "Yet moving online will only accelerate", if anyone can dare to call it a sentence?

The reptiles would benefit from a lot more media scrutiny, but it's only when the stupidity is on view in another media organisation that they can dish it out ...

More than enough already, as another reptile does the Major's job, and so to the one cartoon for the day ... the infallible Pope's weekend outing...

You won't find that sort of story in the lizard Oz, but you will find it at SBS ...

Instead of a YouTube link, contemplate this, found at the Graudian ...

An ECU from the snap might help settle the nerves. Write 500 words on the world's prospects, using only paper and ink ...

Meet me in the crowd

People, people

Throw your love around

Love me, love me

Take it into town

Happy, happy

Put it in the ground

Where the flowers grow

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people laughing