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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 …
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 …
Wollongong The Brave, Anthony Ashbolt
Wollongong The Brave, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Two months ago, Illawarra ABC Radio presenter Peter Hand was stood down for alleged bias after a complaint from a Liberal Senator. Anthony Ashbolt examines this extraordinary case of ABC capitulation to Government pressure 'Farewell Aunty Jack' may have been a signal of things to come. That bitter-sweet conclusion to an ABC show that placed Wollongong on the television map in the 1970s, captured a sense that the certainties of the past were fading away and a brave new world was soon to commence. More than 30 years later, Wollongong the Brave has become a little known frontline in the …