Month: July 2017

If Australia’s Education was One School

~ Corinne Campbell ~ Leave a comment
Imagine a school that organises itself in the following way:
The children from wealthy families are put in separate classrooms to those from poor families.
The parents of the  wealthy children donate money to improve their children’s classrooms. The principal agrees with this, so the children in the wealthy classrooms have nice furnishing, great technology, climate control, maybe even some additional teaching support.

The children in the poorer classes have basic furnishings and outdated technology.
But that’s not the only decision the school makes. To further meet individual needs, they divide the classes by religion.  So the  Jews, the Muslims, the Christians, the Atheists all learn in separate classes.

And then, to raise student achievement and cater for individual needs, they divide the school even further. The ‘gifted’ kids are separated from the others. Those with disabilities are also taught separately.

Some of the parents still aren’t happy, so the school goes further, this time dividing along the lines of race. Whites are kept separate from PoC.
Would we accept this from any individual school? Would we not be outraged by the school’s divisive and discriminatory policies?

Yet what we find (I hope) absolutely unacceptable for a school is the way we Australians run our education system. We need to THINK about this.  Really really think.

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Not Such a Safe Space After All

~ Corinne Campbell ~ 5 Comments

After a few years of fairly prolific blogging about education, I quite suddenly fell silent. I had, I think, been naïve to assume that putting my thoughts out into the public sphere was a safe activity. But, just over a year ago, someone took and twisted the words of my blog and used them in a particularly nasty attempt to sabotage my career. It was their first, but not their last attempt to do so.

It’s taken over a year to come to terms with the knowledge that there are people who act with such cowardice and malice, and that what we put into the public sphere can make us vulnerable. But I miss being part of the conversation about education. I miss blogging, I miss being a part of the public dialogue, and I don’t like being silenced. That act of cruelty hurt, but I think  I’ve enough courage to return to the public space. So this term break, I plan to start writing a few posts again, but perhaps with a little more caution… Stay tuned.