Curios of the week #22

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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One of the more interesting places to visit in Ballarat is the old cemetery. There is a monument to the Eureka uprising and the headstones of people who stretch back as far as Ballarat’s gold rush, with many of the surnames recognisable from local families today.

Graveyards are about nothing if not love. They are a futile attempt to keep something physical and eternal as a token of a passed father, mother, son, daughter or other cherished soul and the inscriptions are poignant. It is therefore also worth considering those graves that have lost their markings and collapsed inwards. They memorialise someone special too.

This week’s curios include a visitor to Ballarat, a victory for the science of reading, the return of a bad idea and much more.

Reversal of the week

Just under a year ago, Dr Jenna Price, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, took aim at Tom Bennett, the UK government’s school behaviour adviser, in a crude personal attack. The context was that New South Wales intended to appoint a similar advisor. In the end they hired an academic who has not been seen or heard from since, so Price’s panic was perhaps a little premature. Nevertheless, she took the opportunity to nail her ideological colours to the mast:

“…hardcore discipline leads to students spending a lot of time on suspension. As if students, already wildly disrupted by COVID, need to spend any more time away from peers, teachers and learning.”

Price used phrases like ‘hardcore discipline’ and ‘zero tolerance’ to characterise Bennett’s approach in a way I do not recognise. Instead, Bennett is all about building warm and accepting school cultures where boundaries and clear and positive behaviours are explicitly taught. However, setting that and other inaccuracies aside, Price now appears to have had a change of heart,. This week, she penned an article with the headline, “Why are teachers struggling? Because your children are awful.”

It seems that Price has been pestered by parents of university students who, ‘argue the toss about every single grade,’ and this has prompted wider reflection. Price is now concerned about increasing levels of narcissism among the young and the impact on their behaviour. Price believes that, ‘you must have some rules and some boundaries about what’s acceptable behaviour and what’s not,’ and she notes:

“It’s not just rudeness or a lack of cooperation or even respect. It extends all the way to violence. We have record levels of assaults at schools and violence both within and outside school – and believe me, it is not only the behaviour of students with significant trauma in their lives for whom we must make both excuses and support mechanisms.”

I think Bennett would agree. Perhaps we can all link arms and skip off into the distance.