Curios of the week #83

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Near Rainbow Beach in Queensland, there is the Carlo Sand Blow. This is an area of what was originally bushland over which sand has literally been blown from the beach below it over a period of thousands of years. It is a dynamic system that slowly migrates. When we recently stayed in Gympie, we visited the sand blow. It is a surreal experience. It is a little like I imagine a sandy desert like the Sahara, only surreally bordering on the bush.

This week, we returned to work for Term 3, first as a senior staff and then as a whole team completing professional learning. We had whole school presentations on the history of education, tracing the path from the enlightenment to now, the curriculum and student development. We also spent considerable time working in teams. The approach to professional learning is one of the aspects of Clarendon I enjoy the most.

This week’s Curios include an admission, a retraction, some supposedly real-life skills and much more.

Indoctrination of the week

Writing on the saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud blog of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), Ryan Al-Natour, Joel Windle and Sarah McDonald make the agenda of at least some teacher trainers crystal clear:

“We commonly engage initial teacher education students with theories of critical pedagogies. For example, Paulo Friere (sic) argued in his landmark book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed that ‘all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act’. Similar words were echoed by bell hooks, who wrote in Teaching to Transgress that ‘no education is politically neutral’. More recently, a pioneer of critical pedagogy Henry Giroux wrote: ‘Those arguing that education should be neutral are really arguing for a version of education in which no one is accountable.’”

I have read Pedagogy of the Oppressed and my short summary is that it’s a load of abstract nonsense of very little value to teachers. When I have mentioned it in the past, someone has usually popped up on social media to gaslight me by claiming it is not central to teacher training courses. Well, these particular teacher trainers certainly think it’s important.

Freire and others have apparently convinced Al-Natour et al. that all teaching is political, a suitably asinine claim given the source material. It therefore follows that teachers should not be expected to be unbiased or neutral.

If we follow their lead, we will end up asserting opinions as facts. For example, three times, they refer to the current ‘genocide’ in Gaza. You may think this is an accurate description. Personally, I think it is inaccurate, offensive and probably antisemitic because it makes use of the trope that Israel is repeating the horrors committed against Jews in the holocaust. In a free and democratic society, both views are tolerated but not, it seems, in the classrooms the article’s authors would like to see.

Of course teachers can be neutral. This does not mean ignoring the war in the Middle East. It means presenting the different arguments to students so they can make up their own minds. It is malpractice to present a contentious view as true and I am deeply concerned that, once again, we have an example of teacher trainers advocating for the opposite of what teachers should be doing*.

Transferable concept of the week

It is always interesting when you read about something from outside the world of education that has parallels with what we do and perhaps points to a way forward.