Saturday, October 21, 2006
Killing the light on the hill?
Kevin Donnelly has once again evoked the Western tradition in his criticisms of contemporary schooling, dismissing as left-wing radicalism attempts across the western world to ameliorate social disadvantage through education.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20611053-7583,00.html
Upon reading Dr Donnelly’s latest piece, I was left wondering what Plato and Aristotle – to name just two venerable ancients- would make of Donnelly’s ideas on what is "reasonable" in education.
Plato equated learning with moral improvement. He argued that justice requires that the strong look after the weak. As such, society has a moral compulsion to ensure the good of the many.
Aristotle described the good life in the following terms: "the happy person is one who expresses complete virtue in his activities, with an adequate supply of external goods, not just for any time but for a complete life." This definition draws attention to Aristotle’s belief that virtue demands the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. To offer a leg up to one individual is to virtously assist him or her on the path to the good life. To refuse this same helping hand to another is to make it more difficult for them to achieve this same goal - an action lacking in virtue.
Indeed, the great enemy of moral conduct according to Aristotle is the failure to behave virtously when one's deliberations have resulted in clear knowledge of what is right. Given that Aristotle believed that a central function of education is to make people virtuous, it seems hard to imagine that he would oppose the idea of addressing issues of social inequality and disadvantage in schools both systemically and through the curriculum.
We now understand that the Australian education system actively discriminates against the most disadvantaged students. Summing up the implications of OECD testing for this nation, Barry McGaw (an Australian and Director of Education for the OECD) http://www.aspa.asn.au/Confs/vassp2004/mcgaw.htm has suggested that Australia can be described in international terms as having a ‘high quality, low equity’ education system. In other words, Australia has an education system in which the most advantaged students are even further advantaged, and the most disadvantaged are even further disadvantaged. McGaw has contrasted the way Australia has ‘ignored equity’, with the better outcomes being achieved by disadvantaged students in countries such as Finland, Canada and Ireland.
There is a very clear rejoinder in McGaw’s words, and it is one that accords with the wisdom of the ancients. Virtue demands that we recognise and act upon the moral imperative to do something about the inequalities which exist in and are reproduced through schooling in Australia.
Which brings me back to Kevin Donnelly’s piece. Dr Donnelly appears to believe that it is a national moral imperative to sort students into winners and losers through ensuring ‘failure’ for some. (Barry McGaw has identified who these students typically are: those who start their schooling already suffering from significant disadvantage.)
Without irony or apology, Donnelly decries the focus in schools on ‘victim groups, such as women, migrants and Aborigines.’ The fact that victim is not qualified in his piece (“victim”) is telling. The word is not tentatively offered to the reader; it is not a word to be questioned, challenged or resisted. It is now a fact, if not an inevitability; a label putting these people in their right and proper place, in keeping with his desire to sort out the successful from the failures.
The fact that Donnelly is suggesting that attention (and one presumes resources and assistance) should be turned away from such groups, indicates an apparent belief that it is “right” to in fact ignore the causes of social inequality and disadvantage. Rather than focussing on pressing social questions related to the fulfillment of human potential, we should instead turn our gaze to ‘events’, ‘significant figures’ and ‘milestones’. Reading this list of supposed curriculum essentials, I was reminded of the way in which Graham Parr and Natalie Bellis evoke the spirit of Dickens’s dour schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in their recent English in Australia piece on neo-liberal ideology and literacy teaching in Australia. http://www.aate.org.au/journals/englishinaus/latest.html
Tellingly, by the end of Hard Times Gradgrind abandons his inflexible demands for facts in favour of "Faith, Hope, and Charity". I am not sure Kevin Donnelly is going to have a similar road to Damascus experience any time soon.
In characterising as left-wing radicalism attempts to address issues of social inequality through education, Donnelly inexplicably makes a case for the morality of entrenching social disadvantage.
Surely a defining virtue of this nation has been an enduring heart-felt belief in a ‘fair go’ for all. That belief is now evidently under attack. It adds insult to injury when those doing the attacking then seek to suggest that they do so in the name of the western ‘tradition’. Plato, Aristotle, and Dickens would not recognise the virtue in Donnelly’s clinical social Darwinism.
And neither would, many might argue, Jesus. This is a point Kevin Rudd, Federal Member for Griffith, has made recently in speaking and writing about the wholly admirable German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rudd emphasises the way Bonhoeffer reminds Christians that faith means nothing if it does not lead to social action. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1755084.htm
In his Monthly piece, Rudd evokes Ben Chifley’s famous ‘light on the hill’ as an enlarging vision of the way that values of decency, fairness and compassion are “still etched deep in our national soul”.
http://www.chifley.org.au/jbc/lightonhill.php
Some, it would seem, would like to switch off that light.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20611053-7583,00.html
Upon reading Dr Donnelly’s latest piece, I was left wondering what Plato and Aristotle – to name just two venerable ancients- would make of Donnelly’s ideas on what is "reasonable" in education.
Plato equated learning with moral improvement. He argued that justice requires that the strong look after the weak. As such, society has a moral compulsion to ensure the good of the many.
Aristotle described the good life in the following terms: "the happy person is one who expresses complete virtue in his activities, with an adequate supply of external goods, not just for any time but for a complete life." This definition draws attention to Aristotle’s belief that virtue demands the good of the many outweigh the good of the few. To offer a leg up to one individual is to virtously assist him or her on the path to the good life. To refuse this same helping hand to another is to make it more difficult for them to achieve this same goal - an action lacking in virtue.
Indeed, the great enemy of moral conduct according to Aristotle is the failure to behave virtously when one's deliberations have resulted in clear knowledge of what is right. Given that Aristotle believed that a central function of education is to make people virtuous, it seems hard to imagine that he would oppose the idea of addressing issues of social inequality and disadvantage in schools both systemically and through the curriculum.
We now understand that the Australian education system actively discriminates against the most disadvantaged students. Summing up the implications of OECD testing for this nation, Barry McGaw (an Australian and Director of Education for the OECD) http://www.aspa.asn.au/Confs/vassp2004/mcgaw.htm has suggested that Australia can be described in international terms as having a ‘high quality, low equity’ education system. In other words, Australia has an education system in which the most advantaged students are even further advantaged, and the most disadvantaged are even further disadvantaged. McGaw has contrasted the way Australia has ‘ignored equity’, with the better outcomes being achieved by disadvantaged students in countries such as Finland, Canada and Ireland.
There is a very clear rejoinder in McGaw’s words, and it is one that accords with the wisdom of the ancients. Virtue demands that we recognise and act upon the moral imperative to do something about the inequalities which exist in and are reproduced through schooling in Australia.
Which brings me back to Kevin Donnelly’s piece. Dr Donnelly appears to believe that it is a national moral imperative to sort students into winners and losers through ensuring ‘failure’ for some. (Barry McGaw has identified who these students typically are: those who start their schooling already suffering from significant disadvantage.)
Without irony or apology, Donnelly decries the focus in schools on ‘victim groups, such as women, migrants and Aborigines.’ The fact that victim is not qualified in his piece (“victim”) is telling. The word is not tentatively offered to the reader; it is not a word to be questioned, challenged or resisted. It is now a fact, if not an inevitability; a label putting these people in their right and proper place, in keeping with his desire to sort out the successful from the failures.
The fact that Donnelly is suggesting that attention (and one presumes resources and assistance) should be turned away from such groups, indicates an apparent belief that it is “right” to in fact ignore the causes of social inequality and disadvantage. Rather than focussing on pressing social questions related to the fulfillment of human potential, we should instead turn our gaze to ‘events’, ‘significant figures’ and ‘milestones’. Reading this list of supposed curriculum essentials, I was reminded of the way in which Graham Parr and Natalie Bellis evoke the spirit of Dickens’s dour schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in their recent English in Australia piece on neo-liberal ideology and literacy teaching in Australia. http://www.aate.org.au/journals/englishinaus/latest.html
Tellingly, by the end of Hard Times Gradgrind abandons his inflexible demands for facts in favour of "Faith, Hope, and Charity". I am not sure Kevin Donnelly is going to have a similar road to Damascus experience any time soon.
In characterising as left-wing radicalism attempts to address issues of social inequality through education, Donnelly inexplicably makes a case for the morality of entrenching social disadvantage.
Surely a defining virtue of this nation has been an enduring heart-felt belief in a ‘fair go’ for all. That belief is now evidently under attack. It adds insult to injury when those doing the attacking then seek to suggest that they do so in the name of the western ‘tradition’. Plato, Aristotle, and Dickens would not recognise the virtue in Donnelly’s clinical social Darwinism.
And neither would, many might argue, Jesus. This is a point Kevin Rudd, Federal Member for Griffith, has made recently in speaking and writing about the wholly admirable German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rudd emphasises the way Bonhoeffer reminds Christians that faith means nothing if it does not lead to social action. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1755084.htm
In his Monthly piece, Rudd evokes Ben Chifley’s famous ‘light on the hill’ as an enlarging vision of the way that values of decency, fairness and compassion are “still etched deep in our national soul”.
http://www.chifley.org.au/jbc/lightonhill.php
Some, it would seem, would like to switch off that light.
# posted by Mark H @ 1:04 pm 
