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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Is A Us Marine Base In Darwin Really A Good Idea?, Anthony Ashbolt
Is A Us Marine Base In Darwin Really A Good Idea?, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The American alliance is simply too costly for Australia both in terms of human lives and international relations. While our political leaders prattle on about “getting the job done”, an Orwellian nightmare persists in Afghanistan and the police we train torture detainees and are deeply enmeshed in the drug trade, the troops we train turn into Taliban and the Government we prop up is no better, in moral or philosophical terms, than its enemy in the field. The American Century is well and truly over and it is time to forge new associations and to think not in terms of …
Falling Everywhere: Postmodern Politics And American Cultural Mythologies, Anthony Ashbolt
Falling Everywhere: Postmodern Politics And American Cultural Mythologies, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
History repeats itself, endlessly and sometimes tiresomely. Numerous writers and scholars have worried about the divisions - social, political and cultural - which began permeating American society in the 1960s. The unravelling of America, the coming apart of America, became familiar refrains. During the 'sixties itself, Daniel Boorstin's new left barbarians were at the gate threatening the very genius of American politics which Boorstin had postulated in the previous decade. This genius, itself a cousin of American exceptionalism, revolved around the erosion of ideological division, and the lack of vigorous difference within the American polity. Rather than this producing a …
Symbolic Politics And Cultural History, Anthony Ashbolt
Symbolic Politics And Cultural History, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Transcript of an interview with Professor Michael Paul Rogin, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, conducted in the Cafe Grace, Berkeley, November 1, 1995.
Public Education And The Public Good, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education And The Public Good, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
When Julia Gillard became Minister for Education and Everything Else That Moves, as well as de facto Prime Minister, she expressed a desire to have a conversation about school funding. This politics of inclusion (social inclusion is one of her many portfolios after all) was short-lived and it became clear that conversation was code for acceptance of the status quo. So Julia went off and had a conversation of her own with utopian dreamers whose vision of the good society revolves around testing regimes, job credentialism, disciplinary control of schools (particularly teachers), and whose heights of ecstasy are only achieved …
Save Public Schools, Not Corporate Fat Cats, Anthony Ashbolt
Save Public Schools, Not Corporate Fat Cats, 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 Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to challenge. This Government's persistent embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy in general.
Private Funding Has Been Taken To Extremes, Anthony Ashbolt
Private Funding Has Been Taken To Extremes, 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 Mr Rudd has shown no inclination to buck. This Government's embrace of neo-liberal ideology and practice is highlighted by its school funding policy and also its market-driven approach to schooling policy.
Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism And The New Left, Anthony Ashbolt
Review - Perry Anderson, Marxism And The New Left, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Perry Anderson is a towering figure in the annals of contemporary Marxism. As such, he deserves a special sort of intellectual history, one that engages and illuminates and challenges. Blackledge only succeeds in a partial and rather unsatisfactory way. In a sense this is a book in two parts, even though it is not divided as such. The first deals with the Anderson of the 1960s and 1970s, the second with Anderson’s later developments. The first part is very dry and somewhat confused intellectual history, the second has a few acute observations about the shifts in Anderson’s thinking. I suspect …
Book Review - George Irvin, Super Rich: The Rise Of Inequality In Britain And The United States, Anthony Ashbolt
Book Review - George Irvin, Super Rich: The Rise Of Inequality In Britain And The United States, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
In a splendid essay in The London Review of Books (11 September, 2008), Ross McKibbon took the hatchet to New Labour. He expressed particular distaste for the ‘democracy of manners’ that has made Britain resemble Australian and American society. This democracy of manners is, of course, all surface egalitarianism concealing profound inequality. He bemoaned ‘the moral exclusion of those who were once considered part of Labour’s constituency – the social underdogs’ (p. 22). The government, in particular, sidelined young working class men, portraying them as outside ‘the sphere of moral worth’. McKibbon acknowledged that Britain ‘is a very much more …
Review: A Time For Choosing: The Rise Of Modern American Conservatism, Anthony Ashbolt
Review: A Time For Choosing: The Rise Of Modern American Conservatism, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The steady rise of the radical Republican right as an electoral force since the mid 1960s is an intriguing, albeit chilling, feature of contemporary politics. What was once considered fringe and unacceptable, to the point where Goldwater was decimated by Johnson in 1964, has now become mainstream. We now have an administration that compels National Parks bookstores to stock a book which argues that the Grand Canyon is only 4500 years old, being the result of the global flood described in Genesis. This reflects both the persistence of fundamentalist beliefs in ordinary Americans and a dramatic transformation in American political …
Reviews: Suburban Warriors - The Origins Of The New American Right; The Book Of Jerry Falwell - Fundamentalist Language And Politics; Blinded By The Right - The Conscience Of An Ex-Conservative, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The triumph of a neoliberal economic doctrine in America has been accompanied by, indeed partly propelled by, a conservative social and moral agenda. The paradox is this - as neoliberalism cuts its swathe through tradition, remaking the social order out of the ruins of a New Deal consensus, it removes the material conditions that can sustain social and moral conservatism. Thus it is that the Supreme Court recently upheld the doctrine of privacy in Lawrence vs. Texas and effectively challenged state laws banning sodomy. In a dissenting decision, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the Court had taken the wrong side …
Public Education For Our Future, Anthony Ashbolt
Public Education For Our Future, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt examines the funding inequalities in education and problems with policies of social exclusion.
Labor’S Education Policy Buried By An Untrue Tale, Anthony Ashbolt
Labor’S Education Policy Buried By An Untrue Tale, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
There is a perplexing myth pervading journalistic commentary and even Labor party thinking. The persistence and predominance of this myth not only illustrates the power that the media wield and the ignorance they fuel but also shows how a certain mode of thought, including key terms and phrases, saturates public discussion.
Time For A Real Education Revolution, Anthony Ashbolt
Time For A Real Education Revolution, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
News that elite private school fess are becoming increasingly less affordable hardly comes as a surprise. What would be genuinely surprising is news that they had become increasingly accessible to poorer sections of the community. That, of course, is not going to happen. Elite private schools service the elite. Forget the occasional dramatic publicity about Aboriginal scholarship students. They are publicity tokens propping up the illusion that social justice informs these school's charters. Elite Catholic schools are particularly good at manufacturing images of social concern and commitment. The images disappear at the front door. Rigorous selection criteria, based now more …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …