Curios of the week #50

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week has been one for settling back into the rhythms of term time, albeit with a couple of slight variations. We had some warm weather at the start of the week and a few nearby areas came under risk from bushfires. And my wife was away on camp with her school which, given she was travelling to a heavily forested area, worried me a little until the temperature dropped.

I have been wheeling out my midweek standard repertoire of meals, including a braised chicken and leek dish that I am pretty close to mastering after working on it for about 30 years. And I have also grabbed some time to update my weird fiction project, Orthogonalis. I always have such plans for it yet like the youngest child of seven, it rarely gets the attention it deserves.

This week’s Curios include a campaign, a target, some times tables and much more.

Campaign of the week

The 2023 report of Australia’s Disability Royal Commission was split on the issue of specialist schools, with some commissioners siding with disability campaigners in calling for the phasing out of specialist schools. It would be easy to assume all parents of children with disabilities side with campaigners, but that would be wrong. In some places, parents a actively campaigning for more access to specialist schools.

One such parent is Mya Do in Australia’s Norther Territory. Do’s primary-aged son, Memphis, is non-verbal and autistic yet the specialist secondary schools in the Greater Darwin area are at capacity. Do has therefore launched a campaign to develop a new specialist secondary school that Memphis could attend in the future.

Why is she not convinced about sending him to a mainstream school? According to NT News:

“(Memphis is) high on the spectrum of autism,” [Do] said.

“I honestly don’t know how they’re going to phase out schools that cater for this and then flood it into mainstream (schools) when they can’t even control bullying.

“I just want to know that my child is going to be safe at school.”

It is easy to empathise with Do. In many cases, it is hard to picture how a child with a profound needs will benefit from a regular classroom. It is also interesting to note Do’s comments about bullying. If the disability campaigners calling for the closure of specialist schools were also advocating for robust behaviour policies that would stamp out bullying, then that would at least have internal logic. However, it is usually these same campaigners who are deeply sceptical about such policies.

If we did what they wanted, we would send disabled kids into chaotic schools where they could expect to experience bullying.

Report of the week

Another week, another sensible education report from the Centre of Independent Studies, this time by Trisha Jha who is well known in this parish.

Jha’s remarkably comprehensive account suggests that vague statements about following the evidence are not enough. She surveys the state of the Science of Learning and asks what it would take for a more robust approach to take hold — one that draws on these principles.

Much of Jha’s summary of the science of learning is likely to be familiar to readers of this newsletter. However, she also does a decent job of explaining how we got to where we are by surveying the impact and legacy of progressive education.

Jha will be speaking about her paper at researchED Ballarat on 23 March.

Inconvenient facts of the week

Sometimes the narrative is just so compelling that commentators don’t stop to check their facts. When this happens, we can often rely upon a small group of factcheckers who perform the thankless task of highlighting errors.