Tram Town
Thursday, January 29, 2004
| Category: Values Three cheers! Andrew Bolt is back after what appears to have been a six week break. In today's dump he concentrates on the left response to the Prime Minister's comments about teaching "values" in schools (whatever the hell "values" means). He "quotes" the government report, which the SSS summarised with the headline "Schools study contradicts PM's stance", thus... It says values were "a distinct part of the curriculum during the late 19th and early 20th centuries", but since then "values education has been largely neglected", and "teachers appear not to have received adequate preparation, to reflect critically, on their role as values educators".I certainly couldn't find any mention of this while taking the lazy option of looking at the executive summary. In fact the best I could get from it was that they asked a bunch of schools if they would like a grant in return for making some waffly statement about generally good valuesish kind of things. From what I could gather, most of the schools took the dough and asked for more. No surprises there. So I had to go for 861K, 259 page full report. It's there alright. And this as well... Other than these earlier attempts to incorporate the specific teaching of values, in Australia values education has been largely neglected, or seen to form a limited part of other subjects, notably social education (Johnson 2002).Not quite what you would you would expect to find given the SSS's headline. Regardless, the report was pretty empty, so was the PM's statement, so were the unions' responses. The word "values" was applied in this case because it was impossible to pin it down in any useful way. As The Professor says: "No doubt about it, Howard is genius. Once the mainstream left works itself into a froth in defence of the status quo, Latham's hopes of reclaiming the aspirational electorate will vanish." |
