Curios of the week #14

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Last weekend was the Ballarat Regional Athletics Centre Lap of the Lake. My eldest was running in that and it was perfect conditions for cross-country. Lake Wendouree has a perimeter of around 6 kilometres and is just West of the centre of Ballarat. As a result, it is a popular place for rowing, dog walking and running.

Then, this week, the conditions turned. The heaven’s opened, we had puddles everywhere and I could not find my umbrella — I later discovered a member of my household had taken it to her friend’s house and accidentally left it there. Despite my protestations and exhortations, at the time of writing, I am sad to report that it remains there.

This week’s curios include a new growthy thingy a bit like growth mindset, some exciting surveying from England, a slide show from Pasi Sahlberg, some shade thrown on restorative practices, a success for the simple view of reading and much more.

United Nations report of the week

What is the United Nations (UN) for? Having never been a student of international law, I used to imagine it was about mediating in disputes between different nations and organising treaties. However, once I started writing about education, I became aware that some educationalists have a habit of invoking the UN at unwarranted and redundant moments. They appear to think such invocations end any further discussion whereas, in reality, they are non sequiturs. We are justifiably left asking, “So what?”

This habit relates to the function’s of the UN’s numerous bureaucracies.

This week, I was made aware of a report by the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child that was published on 2 June. This report told the democratically elected UK government to, “Monitor the use of exclusions and ensure that they are prohibited in primary schools and used in secondary schools only as a measure of last resort,” and, “Remove ‘colonising’ and discriminatory language from textbooks and curricula.”

I have to ask: Who elected these people? What is their mandate?