My childhood was influenced in some measure by two great icons that no longer exist. The first was Kodak – I adored my Box Brownie and I still have the wonderful grainy black and white pics. The second great icon was larger than Kodak: it was a stack of books known as Encyclopaedia Britannica. The […]
Category Archives: Education
The furore following the announcement that Jenny Craig CEO Amy Smith would address a gathering of hundreds of girls’ school teachers has once again brought the uncomfortable issue of corporate presence in schools to light. The public response – that school groups should not be seen to endorse the dieting industry – is certainly warranted. But such […]
When I was very young, the father of the neighbors family a young academic – suddenly disappeared. The young academic was working, I was later told, on original research upon which he had pinned the hopes for his career. Nearing the completion of his work, however, a professor he had been working with published […]
The current debate in Timor-Leste about whether to use a mother tongue or home language for the first years of education or whether to focus on building Tetum as a national language has raised a number of important points. These include whether local languages are, in the long term, viable and whether they could promote […]
The caps are coming off and university administrations are nervous. Just what a demand driven system means for university recruitment, no-one really knows for sure. What I know for sure is that as well as ensuring recruitment targets are met, we need to be ready to ensure the success of the students we recruit, especially […]
Edited extract of address to the Business Leader’s Luncheon in Warrnambool on Monday 26 September. My topic today is, “Does a University town bring real benefits or is it all just spin?” Many towns do not have a university. Those that do are often fiercely proud of what they have. All towns put up a […]
This post was published in ACEL’s weekly online newsletter (22/08/20110 The National Curriculum could be cited as one of the greatest political false starts of all time. Recently, as cited across a number of major media outlets (for example, Justine Ferrari, ‘Australian’, 9/8/11) and through the Minister for Education Peter Garrett’s own tweets (@PGarrettMP, 9/8/11, 4.03 […]
Working with regions is a step in the right direction The Grattan Institute report on Investing in regions is timely as both Federal and Victorian governments grapple with challenges of a ‘two speed’ or ‘patchwork’ economy and metropolitan transport and planning problems arising from rapid population growth. The report takes an unapologetic economic stance, and […]
Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. Proposing to cut $400 million from Australia’s aid budget to Indonesia’s schools program looks pretty desperate. So one can only assume that having alienated damp Queensland voters and not just a few Victorians, Tony Abbott is trying to find a way out of opposing the one-off tax […]
In a recent newspaper article (Long way to top 10, The Age (Melbourne, Australia) – 23/10/ 2010), I was reminded of the Federal Minister for Education’s previous incarnation as the leader of the Australian band Midnight Oil. This memory of Peter Garrett in this capacity initiated a small glimmer of hope within my increasingly critical […]