Education Not Indoctrination (2 Viewers)

[_dhj_]

Which brings me to my question of the day, a challenge to right-wingers and atheists: could it be the case that virtually all the volunteering, campaigning and community mindedness that goes on in our society comes from people who are either left-wing or religious?

nah, not really

Yeah I don't agree with that comment either.

Religion is different because the religious person acts in the self interest in volunteering and undertaking community work if they truly believe that to go to heaven they need to live a certain way. The other problem with it is that even if we put aside the question of whether god exists the very fact that the moral zeitgeist has shifted so significant, that religion is forced to no longer take its own moral framework "literally" proves that religion was never the origin of morality, merely an agent that perpetuated morals.

 

[youBROKEmyLIFE]

Which brings me to my question of the day, a challenge to right-wingers and atheists: could it be the case that virtually all the volunteering, campaigning and community mindedness that goes on in our society comes from people who are either left-wing or religious?

The problem with the question is that he's leaving us with right-wing atheists.... who areeee... what % of the population? They barely even have a voice and for the most part are probably a variety of competing ideologies that disagree with one another. I don't doubt that these people participate in around the same numbers, but you just won't ever find them represented on a huge scale or with their own large organisations because there simply isn't that many of them and what of them there are aren't a very cohesive group.

 

[Captain Gh3y]

I'll never forget this first year education lecture in our obligatory social justice subject, here's a few of the slides:

Social Class and SES
Social Class:
Karl Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”.
Patricians and slaves, Feudal lords & serfs, Bourgeois & Proletarians
Bourgeois - owners of means of production (of capital), ruling class
Proletarian - working class who sell their labour to the bourgeois class

<graphs showing how 0.1% of the population have 99.9% of the wealth>

Socioeconomic inequality
What’s wrong with unequal distribution?
Marxist & Socialist principle
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need / work
How is distribution determined?

(at this point i very nearly shouted out "not by the state ffs")

it wasn't subtle leftist bias

- I wanted to make a difference
- I believe a good education can be an escape out of poverty and so I wanted to work in tougher schools

I thought that too, but the first thing they tell you is schools just reproduce the existing social classes because of TEH CAPITALISM, followed by lots of worthless-in-practice ultra-progressive ideas for educational change by hippies that could change the world if anyone would just listen

Then in 2nd year they tell you forget all that and be a good mindless drone for the system

 

[Captain Gh3y]

yeah i do

...

According to Freakonomics, these 8 factors are highly correlated with success at school:
• The child has highly educated parents
• The child’s parents have high SES
• The child’s mother was 30+ at the time of the first child’s birth
• The child had a low birth weight (negative correlation)
• The child’s parents speak English at home
• The child is adopted (negative correlation)
• The child’s parents are involved in the PTA (parent teacher association)
• The child has many books in his home
And these 8 factors are not correlated with success at school:
• The child’s family is intact
• The child’s parents move into a better neighbourhood
• The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten
• The child attended Head Start
• The child’s parents regularly take him to museums
• The child is regularly spanked
• The child frequently watches television
• The child’s parents read to him nearly every day

which seems to suggest it's all pre-determined anyway

 

[townie]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

Young Libs campaign to out biased dons

Jill Rowbotham | March 12, 2008

NATALIE Karam, a second-year university law student, recently changed classes because she was so uncomfortable about the ideological stance of one of her lecturers.

Hers is the kind of story the federal branch of the Young Liberals wants to hear about as it launches a nationwide campaign to stamp out bias in education, under the slogan "Education, Not Indoctrination".

The organisation's federal president, Noel McCoy, is urging students to record lectures that may exhibit bias and report back.

According to Ms Karam, the lecturer asked the class to complete questionnaires, including their names and student numbers, as part of an attempt on his part to get to know them better.

One question asked was to what extent an apology to the Stolen Generations should play a part in the Australian legal system.

Earlier, the lecturer had told the class his political affiliation.

"He said: 'I'm going to out myself now, I have been a member of the Greens Party for 15 years," Ms Karam said.

"Not only did it make me feel uncomfortable, it made me feel marginalised as someone with mainstream views."

Ms Karam said she felt she would not prosper in his class.

"(When) a lot of students come to university for the first time (they) have very little political knowledge and can get a bit intimidated," she said.

Ms Karam, who is also a Young Liberals member, said she was not angry about the incident.

"But it makes you think twice: what if I had said something he doesn't like?" She said although the course would cover indigenous rights, the core subject matter was the development of Australian legal institutions.

Mr McCoy said flyers about the campaign were being handed out at campuses across the country this week.

He wanted a Senate inquiry.

"Lecturers and tutors are brazenly forcing students to agree with their political or ideological views and we want to catch them doing it," Mr McCoy said.

"I think the public would be very concerned if they knew what was going on, so we're trying to raise awareness and get our politicians to take action."

The National Tertiary Education Union rejected the notion of any widespread systemic bias in Australian universities and said the Young Liberals' campaign had been borrowed from a similar movement in the US, led byconservative intellectual David Horowitz.

"The Australian university system is very diverse," NTEU president Carolyn Allport said.

"It is not one that had been characterised in my view by politicisation. We are very familiar with this campaign: it has come from the US.

"Generally speaking, it has been aired and dealt with."

Dr Allport said she was not sure what a Senate inquiry would achieve, "given we have such a strong environment of freedom of inquiry".



Can be accessed through: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/highereducation/

what a fucking joke, she left a class basically because she thought she might be marked down even though there is no evidence that she would have been and the teacher admitted his political bias. fucking douchebag

 

[boris]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

i love you, townie.

 

[Truthbynumbers]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

what a fucking joke, she left a class basically because she thought she might be marked down even though there is no evidence that she would have been and the teacher admitted his political bias. fucking douchebag

Lol yeah... what an idiot. Everyone knows that Lefties really hide their political persuasion for as long as possible so they can lure in innocent Righties and mark them down for their incorrect perceptions of society. Careful... they could be anywhere or anyone...

Honestly, if she felt she was genuinely going to be marked down then she should have done all the assessment, taken the low mark, appealed it, had it rechecked by another professor, and had the biased lecturer sacked (as I would hope would happen to any biased lecturer, regardless of political affiliation).

Is there any reason why she couldn’t just right an essay from political centre? "Some argue that social inequality is a practical impossibility regardless of a countries capitalist/communist persuasion" or "While Workchoices was seen as unacceptably socially detrimental to the Australian society, there were undeniable economic advantages...".

Maybe the answer is a system of political apartheid? Give righties and lefties segregated lecturers, tutors, and libraries because obviously uni lecturers are so biased that they refuse to countenance any political interpretation that differs from their own.

 

[townie]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

Oi Malfoy....was that you Miranda Devine was talking about today?

 

[AsyLum]

I know I'll be reporting all the terrible bias in my software engineering lectures right to Noel, and you should too!

EDIT: I think it's been blown a bit out of proportion, but if I was doing an ECON or WORK or whatever subject and was told explicitly or implicitly that if I didn't approach it in the way the tutor wanted I would fail, I'd be pretty pissed off.

Lol, we had someone apparently report a lecturer for teaching subversive attitudes in a Cultural Studies elective unit called Queer Theory.

How could they?!

 

[Thought Shark]

My maths classes will go as follows:-

(a) If you have 3 capitalist scum bags, and 4 more capitalist scumbags come along and join the party, how many capitalist scumbags do you have?

(b) If there are 77 heroic communists facing off against the capitalists, what is the ratio of capitalist to communists?

Reported in case you're ever a professor.

 

[Gay Captain]

awesome

 

[incentivation]

I'm not advocating empiricist-styled "absolute truth and objectivity," neutrality, von Ranke style! I'm just advocating pluralism and open discussion, and by that I mean real pluralism and open discussion, not "say anything you like so long as you agree with the accepted viewpoint!"

Despite your disagreement on whether lecturers are biased, I'm sure you could agree with me that some semblance of balance and intellectual debate is a good thing.

Couldn't agree more.

It's almost as though there is censorship of subversive views, or arguments which diverge from the lecturer/tutor's agenda.

In one particular tutorial I had a heated verbal debate with the tutor (an expressly open marxist) who was attempting to undermine my argument against the legalisation of drugs. My viewpoints were treated with continued disdain irrespective of any evidence or substantiation used.

I fully support argument and debate in the learning process. However, it is counterproductive to critical analysis skill development when your rationalisations and arguments are assessed not on their relative strength, but on their divergence away from the 'dominant' view.

A regurgitation of the dominant view and the arguments which support that view, is a deeply backward approach to learning and is not what university is about.

 

[Gay Captain]

The funniest thing about the radical theories in education for me has been that in the course (at this uni anyway) where they talk to you about practical experience, the message can be summarised as dress, act and speak ultra-conservatively. lolhypocrisy