Curios of the week #82

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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This week, I have mainly been in Queensland. After Noosa, we headed to Gympie to stay with some old friends on their gorgeous property. On the way there, we managed to take in Matilda the winking kangaroo — look it up — and travel down a section of the Old Bruce Highway that now looks like a vision from a post apocalyptic TV show with faded signs and abandoned businesses. I am fascinated by abandoned places.

One of the highlights of Gympie was a visit to a creek popular with bathers and walkers. As we dodged the March flies, we had the honour of meeting Gary the goanna. Seemingly used to humans, he strolled by nonchalantly and generally hung around as kids played and squealed in the water.

This week’s Curios include Martians, a toff tax, causal inference machine learning and much more.

Promotion of the week

Our domestic recruitment campaign continues and to aid with that, I was asked to speak to camera for a promotional clip. I find it hard to watch myself but it may be of interest if you want to know more about Clarendon.

Here is a link to the employment page.

Profound thank you for the week

Over our term break, a group of staff from Clarendon visited the UK. The idea was to visit schools pursuing similar ideas to our own and then see if we could learn anything from the subtle differences in implementation — an idea we have dubbed ‘comparative research.’

I cannot wait to hear what the group learned. However, I already know they had a fantastic welcome and are so grateful to all the schools that hosted them. Those schools were: Harris Academy Tottenham, Harris Academy Battersea, Angel Oak Academy, West London Free School and Grafton Primary School.

I would like to reiterate my thanks. If you are a UK teacher and you are not tempted by Australia, one of these schools could be your next great career move.

We are planning another trip around the end of June / start of July next year. Get in touch if you think your school should be on the list.

Classical education of the week

The idea of a classical education received a big write-up by Greg Sheridan in The Australian. It could apparently save our society.

Classical education is increasingly popular in the U.S. However, the constraints of Australia’s national and state curriculum requirements mean a pure model cannot be followed here. Instead, Australian schools following a classical model are built on compromise:

“All of these schools are classical, or liberal arts, schools up to a point. In Australia, every registered school, especially an independent school, needs to follow state and national curricula. But they can still organise much of their school’s effort around classical principles.

All these schools are explicitly Christian. In classical education, the idea of integrated understanding – as a Christian might say, all truth is God’s truth – is a central organising principle.”

The first paragraph sounds a lot like my school. I am not sure whether it is necessary to be explicitly Christian to follow a classical model but I accept this may be true of Australian schools that have chosen this path.

When I read about the tenets of a classical education, I am unsure exactly how this differs from schools who are pursuing a knowledge-rich curriculum without this label:

“Classical education offers the student an integrated understanding of life, culture, knowledge and the meaning of being a human being. It gives students direct exposure to what English poet Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been thought and said’, the greatest of the Great Books.

It promotes an intellectually sophisticated encounter with these writers through Socratic ­dialogues. It offers the thrill of chronological, deep history and the finest literature. As Crowther comments: ‘Contemporary education fails in giving students an understanding of how the (modern) world came about.’”

Perhaps I need to visit one to find out.

Martians of the week

In essence, education is about cultural conservation. We value our culture, steadily built as it has been over many generations, but what will it take for such a culture to survive long-term?