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Education Aims To Nurture A Thinking World, Anthony Ashbolt
Education Aims To Nurture A Thinking World, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
One of the main tasks of education is to nurture inquiring minds. Equipping students with a capacity to think about the world is as important as gaining a formal qualification. Indeed, the two should not be separated - what use is a qualification which has not also enabled you to be a thoughtful citizen? A democratic system is dependant upon an educated and informed public. When both education and information are restricted, democracy suffers accordingly.
Us Failing To Heed Any Lessons From History, Anthony Ashbolt
Us Failing To Heed Any Lessons From History, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the world witnessed the cold ferocity of terrorism last week - the shattering loss of life, the enormous suffering of the American people - it became clear quickly that madness was to be met by madness. It is perhaps understandable that irrational policy flows from seemingly irrational events. It is not, however, good for world peace or even good for the fight against terrorism. Xenophobia, jingoism and racism are not logical or considered responses to international terrorism.
Latham Had It Right, Anthony Ashbolt
Latham Had It Right, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
While Tony Blair's war on civil liberties has been checked by the British Parliament, Labor in Australia fails to challenge the threat to democracy which the terrorism legislation represents. Instead, Kim Beazley is happy to declare that Labor is with Mr Howard in "the war on terror". That is somewhat remarkable, given that Mr Howard sees the invasion of Iraq as part of "the war on terror".
The Myths We Are Taught About Schools, Anthony Ashbolt
The Myths We Are Taught About Schools, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Certain mythologies pervade the assault upon public education. One of these is that Labor's education policy at the 2004 election damaged the party electorally. I will explore this next week. First, however, I will address a more recent intervention in the schooling debate which has received much attention. Emeritus Professor Brian Caldwell, publicizing his book published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), has pointed repeatedly to an AC Nielsen survey conducted for the ACER showing that a significant number of public school parents would send their children to private schools if they could. The survey, from July 2004, …
A Market Model Of Education?, Anthony Ashbolt
A Market Model Of Education?, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Milton Friedman introduced the concept of vouchers in education over fifty years ago. Thankfully the world ignored him. Nonetheless, the various victories of neoliberal doctrine from the early 1970s on in the USA, England and Australia placed vouchers on the agenda but not as a central platform. It is one of those policy ideas that is embraced with enthusiasm periodically only to retreat into the recesses of think tanks whose priorities are tax relief for the wealthy and real or imagined wars. When the governments of choice for these tanks are replaced by ones with a thin veneer of progressive …
Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
While thinking about the contemporary state of politics, it is very difficult to shake off a recurring image from the brilliant television series A Very Peculiar Practice. In that show, a wonderful aging character was writing a book about the parlous state of higher education in Great Britain. 'Death of the University' muttered Jock into a portable tape recorder, between swigs of Scotch, as he wandered around campus despairing at the shattered values and distorted priorities of the new university. Jock spoke for all of us who care about education. I hope to be speaking to all of us who …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial July 2006, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial July 2006, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the new Industrial Relations legislation prepares the labour movement for wider and more militant struggles, it is good to be reminded of industrial action that resulted in trade union victory.
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2007, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2007, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Class and the very concept of class struggle seem almost quaint today. They speak, it is sometimes assumed, to different times. Yet in the battle around WorkChoices, in the struggle for public education and the public sphere generally, class is ever present. Paradoxically, participants on both sides of the culture and history wars have tended to slide past class, elevating instead gender, race and sexuality, on the one hand, or national pride and economic progress, on the other. Terry Irving brings class back to life in his new book The Southern Tree of Liberty: the democratic movement in New South …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2005, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2005, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Labour movement struggles have a significant cultural dimension. The role of music has been particularly important. IWW songster and activist Joe Hill personified the intimate connection between songs and struggle. When contemporary folk musician John McCutcheon performs, as he invariably does in Australia, ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’, he prefaces the song with a wonderful tale about Paul Robeson singing for the workers on the steps of the Sydney Opera House (see John McCutcheon Live at Wolf Trap). Folk music is story-telling and it gives a voice to the oppressed, the marginalised and the working classes. In this issue of …
Public Education And Democracy, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education And Democracy, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As a political system, democracy depends upon a vibrant public sphere. Democracy in liberal democratic societies is sometimes confused with doctrines upholding individual rights. Thus it is that matters of individual choice come to be perceived as inalienable democratic rights when they are nothing of the sort. Private choices and desires fit neatly into a concept of social good defined essentially by the market. They are things to' be bought and sold, their value adjusted to the vicissitudes of market forces. If we begin to think of education in this way, we have begun also to sacrifice democracy at the …
The Student And New Left Movements, Anthony Ashbolt
The Student And New Left Movements, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
For some years now, the 1960s have been contested terrain. Many-commentators have rushed to specious judgements about the radical politics of the era, while others have struggled valiantly to keep memories alive. Much of the politics of the contemporary epoch is being played out through the lens of the sixties. This seems like a grand and perhaps foolish claim but it needs to be understood that the neo-liberal and/or neoconservative agenda (and I will include hawkish foreign policy in this) is substantially directed at burying the sixties, the radical sixties. The gains of the various social movements, in particular the …
The Red Clydesiders - An Interview With Alistair Hulett, Anthony Ashbolt
The Red Clydesiders - An Interview With Alistair Hulett, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Alistair Hulett, a Glasgow native, is one of Scotland’s finest folk performers and a committed socialist. During the 70s, 80s and much of the 90s he was based in Australia where he made a name for himself as a solo performer and for a period as a member of the highly acclaimed punk folk band Roaring Jack. From punk he moved back to the spirit and style of the folk revival of the 1960s. He is now based in Glasgow, where he performs solo and with Dave Swarbick, his collaborator on the CD Red Clydeside.
Siev X And The Banality Of Evil: An Interview With Tony Kevin, Anthony Ashbolt, Tony Kevin
Siev X And The Banality Of Evil: An Interview With Tony Kevin, Anthony Ashbolt, Tony Kevin
Anthony Ashbolt
Tony Kevin is the author of the award-winning A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of the SIEV X, published in 2004. He retired from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1998, after a thirty-year public service career involving posts in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Prime Minister’s Department. He was previously Australia’s ambassador to Poland (1991-94) and Cambodia (1994- 97). Tony Kevin has been an honorary Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies since 1998. Since 2001 he has given guest classes on United Nations …
When The Boat Comes In - An Interview With Bob Fox, Anthony Ashbolt
When The Boat Comes In - An Interview With Bob Fox, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Bob Fox has been performing as a folk musician since the early 1970s, when he first started playing in the folk clubs of northeast England. He then came to national and international notice as a result of a collaboration with Stu Luckley. Labelled “the progressive dynamic duo” by Melody Maker, the two parted company in 1982 and since then Fox has worked as both a solo artist and as a member of bands. During the 1990s, along with his great friend Benny Graham, he developed a songs/slide show that remembers the coal mining communities of Durham and Northumberland. This led …
Love And Hate In European Eyes: Emma Goldman And Alexander Berkman On America, Anthony Ashbolt
Love And Hate In European Eyes: Emma Goldman And Alexander Berkman On America, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In the wake of September 11, a classic European disdain for American sentiment became apparent. Even American intellectuals, like Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal, issued pronouncements that reflected a profoundly European sensibility, one embedded in notions of tradition and memory. Yet within the contemporary European critiques of America there frequently lurks a distinct affection. Note the ambivalence of many commentators (not, to be sure, just Europeans) in Granta 77: What We Think of America. This paradoxical embrace and withdrawal is hardly new and, in a sense, arises from the essential unknowability of America remarked upon by both John Gray and …
Private Schooling As A Way Of Life, Anthony Ashbolt
Private Schooling As A Way Of Life, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Warning become self-fulfilling prophecies in the hands of a mass media trained in the art of disguising publicity as news. For many years, news about public or private schools or both, has often signalled doom, on the one hand, and infinite variety and riches, on the other. The story is familiar, so familiar as to be tiresome. Lazy journalists, ever at the ready for a slightly new angle, beef up the latest statistics and, quelle surprise, another front page news item emerges. Thus the Sydney Morning Herald educational writers tell us once again of the drift towards private schools.
Remembering The Warilla Strike: An Interview With Jim Bradley, Anthony Ashbolt, Jim Bradley
Remembering The Warilla Strike: An Interview With Jim Bradley, Anthony Ashbolt, Jim Bradley
Anthony Ashbolt
Jim Bradley, the local New South Wales Teachers Federation spokesman at the time of the Warilla teachers strike in 1976 is now an active campaigner on behalf of the disabled. His impressive work with the South Coast Disabled Surfers Association has received national recognition.
Rescue Public Schools Not Corporate Profiteers, Anthony Ashbolt
Rescue Public Schools Not Corporate Profiteers, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Kevin Rudd's vigorous attack upon “extreme capitalism” revealed he does not understand the nature of the current crisis. This is not a meltdown caused purely and simply by rogue traders, bizarre mortgage lending, gross corporate salaries and payouts and, in general, the politics of greed. All those are symptoms of a much more systemic disease. That disease is the ideology of privatisation and deregulation, an ideology Rudd has shown no inclination to buck. This Government's persistent embrace of neoliberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy in general.
Hegemony And The Sixties: Observations, Polemics, Meanderings, Anthony Ashbolt
Hegemony And The Sixties: Observations, Polemics, Meanderings, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The concept of cultural hegemony and the 1960s are interconnected in important ways. First, it was in the 1960s that a keen interest in the concept developed. Second, the battle for cultural hegemony today takes place in the shadow of the sixties. The neoconservative agenda has been developed with reference to Vietnam and the liberation movements of the 1960s. The neoconservatives certainly saw sixties radicalism as a challenge to power and privilege. Ironically, some on the Left now beg to disagree and see the radical sixties, in particular the counterculture, as paving the way for a new phase of consumer …
'Go Ask Alice': Remembering The Summer Of Love Forty Years On, Anthony Ashbolt
'Go Ask Alice': Remembering The Summer Of Love Forty Years On, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In 1960s historiography today, the expression ‘Summer of Love’ is used in three senses. It refers generally to the explosion of psychedelic sounds, images and lifestyles in that decade. It is also code for the overall phenomenon of Haight-Ashbury between 1965 and 1968. Specifically, and more accurately, it applies to the summer of 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. While the multiple meanings all carry weight, too often that first general sense of the Summer of Love shields a dialectic of hope and despair behind a banner of optimism and dreams. To put it more bluntly, the hippie …
Long Tan: The Politics Of Forgetting, Anthony Ashbolt
Long Tan: The Politics Of Forgetting, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The 40th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Long Tan have been both excessive and tendentious. The rehabilitation of Vietnam veterans now serves to reinforce amnesia about Vietnam itself. Such amnesia serves the interests of policy makers in Canberra. Far from the immoral imperialist venture that it was, the American war in Vietnam now functions as a salutary reminder of Australian heroism. The noble warrior is recreated before our eyes: spurned and trashed by the anti-war movement and the Government, labelled a baby-killer by people in the street or the pub, thrown in the gutter to fester and die of …
Review - Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Anthony Ashbolt
Review - Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
This analysis of American politics today is done through the lens and style of Raymond Chandler. And it is brilliant. Frank dissects the murky world of right wing politics with precision and a sharp wit. It is a better book than his much praised What’s the Matter With Kansas?, ,partly because he paints on a bigger canvas and partly because this book does read like a thriller. It is a thriller about the corporate capture of Government in the United States of America. What’s new about that, you might well think? Hasn’t the ruling class always controlled Government? The point, …
The American New Left And Community Unions, Anthony Ashbolt
The American New Left And Community Unions, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In the Spring and Summer, 1964, issues of the American new left journal Studies on the Left, political economist James O’Connor grappled with the concept of community unions.1 He argued that increasingly the social basis of working class organizations was in the community. Debate about the nature and efficacy of what could be called community unionism was a feature of the new left’s mid-life in the 1960s. The overall intellectual context in which this debate occurred was one of disillusionment with traditional leftist dogmas and pieties. The political context was one reminiscent of the Russian Narodnik movement of the nineteenth …
Public Education In The Universe Of Closed Discourse, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education In The Universe Of Closed Discourse, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
IN HIS CLASSIC ANALYSIS of consumer capitalist society, One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse pinpointed the crucial role of language in fashioning conformist thinking. A one-dimensional framework of thought prevailed and alternative ways of thinking were cast out, characterised as propaganda or absorbed into the dominant discourse and thus suitably domesticated: "The unification of opposites which characterises the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal . . . In exhibiting its contradictions as the token of its truth, this universe of discourse closes …
The Warilla High School Strike: A Veritable Class Struggle, Anthony Ashbolt
The Warilla High School Strike: A Veritable Class Struggle, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
On 10 February 1976 the Illawarra Mercury reported that 18,000 steelworkers would strike from midnight for 24 hours due to BHP’s refusal to ratify a steel award which lifted the all purpose bonus from $12 to $30. The following day, the major industrial news (front page) involved the ACTU warning of massive industrial unrest if the 6.4% was not granted. It was not until page 8 that there was an item about Warilla High School teachers going on strike the previous day. From then on, it was much bigger news. The Warilla High School strike persisted for 28 days and …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2008-9, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2008-9, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the financial system internationally shudders and shakes and disappears, only to reappear as something else, we are entitled to ask if this finally is the death throes of capitalism. Or is it merely the end run of what Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called “extreme capitalism”? Rudd’s diagnosis, of course, is problematic, precisely because he fails to see the systemic fault-lines. Instead, he points to personal greed and unfettered finance as the causes, when both are merely symptoms of a more deadly neo-liberal disease. And the current Labor Government, rather than tackling this disease directly, pushes empty rhetoric …
Private Desires, Public Pleasures: Community And Identity In A Postmodern World, Anthony Ashbolt
Private Desires, Public Pleasures: Community And Identity In A Postmodern World, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As George Orwell, Herbert Marcuse and, more recently John Ralston Saul have argued, language can be a key mechanism whereby social reality is blurred, camouflaged or distorted (Orwell 1957: 143-57; MarcuseI972: 78-103; Saul 1997: 41-75). Slogans, buzzwords and words blatantly misused permeate contemporary discourse. Just as the advertising industry can take a word like 'freedom' and render it a commodity, so too politicians and journalists can take a word like 'reform; and strip it of meaning. We are told, for example, of the reforms of the Kennett government in Victoria. Closing hospitals and schools and wrecking the industrial relations system …
Remembrance Of Things That Last, Anthony Ashbolt
Remembrance Of Things That Last, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
For some years now, the 1960s have been contested terrain. Many commentators have rushed to specious judgements about the radical politics of the era, while others have struggled valiantly to keep memories alive. Much of the politics of the contemporary epoch is being played out through the lens of the Sixties. This seems like a grand and foolish claim but it needs to be understood that the so-called neo-liberal and/or neoconservative agenda (and I will include hawkish foreign policy in this) is substantially directed at burying the Sixties. The gains of the various social movements, in particular the anti-war and …
Quality Education For All: State Aid Is Still The Issue, Anthony Ashbolt
Quality Education For All: State Aid Is Still The Issue, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The fundamental measure of education in all spheres is its contribution to a democratic society. To ensure that the Australian education system creates what Benjamin Barber calls ‘an aristocracy of everyone', we need grand spending plans. We also need to embark on a mission to rescue the public education system, which has been sidelined during our years of transferring funds to private schools. The public realm and the importance of education within it was a critical foundation stone of the fledgling Australian state. The same is also true of the USA, where even someone with residual monarchist tendencies like John …
Education And Social Justice: The Absent Kevin Rudd, Anthony Ashbolt
Education And Social Justice: The Absent Kevin Rudd, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In October and November last year, Kevin Rudd outlined his Christian social democratic principles. His essays for The Monthly were in many ways refreshing. They revealed a commitment to issues of social justice that hitherto had been buried by his passion for the minutiae of foreign policy. “Social-democratic values are a check on rampant individualism”, Rudd declared boldly. Yet if we look at Rudd’s political agenda pointed to in the first essay, a clear missing dimension becomes apparent. The environment, global poverty and asylum seekers receive pride of place and when the list grows we get “rising interest rates, declining …