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Australian Teachers' union backs call for comprehensive approach to education
This is another shot in the long war between those who want education to lead to jobs versus those who see education as a general cultural experience. It seems clear to me that if the taxpayer is paying for it, it should be useful in some way. I see only three options there: education for jobs, education for citizenship and English language education, where that includes instruction in reading and writing, which in turn includes spelling and grammar. Education for citizenship should cover primarily history and how the political system works.
I see no role for literary education or foreign language education. Literature and language can be left to adult education courses and other evening courses. There are already in the country people of many ethnic origins who grow up bilingual so foreign language education seems particularly useless
The Independent Education Union of Australia NSW/ACT Branch has welcomed comments from NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes calling for a balanced approach to education, with no extra emphasis on any one discipline.
Stokes said on Wednesday that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects must not be preferred over the arts, sports or social sciences.
IEUA NSW/ACT Secretary John Quessy said providing a comprehensive education was the best strategy to create adaptable and employable adults.
“All disciplines, whether it be languages, sport, arts or science can and do contribute to greatness in Australian society,” Quessy said.
“It is important that teachers from all disciplines are supported and provided with professional development that enhances the education they can provide to students.
“While we totally support and understand the need to encourage the study of STEM subjects, students should never be discouraged from studying other disciplines.
“Everyone needs to be allowed to find their niche and be given a chance to shine.”
Media release sue@ieu.asn.au
Iggy the Crusader Victimized by a Misguided Crusade
A liberal, the old joke attributed to Robert Frost goes, is someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.
Something similar is going on with Catholics. Just ask Iggy the Crusader, who for years served nobly as the mascot of the College of the Holy Cross.
Holy Cross is throwing Iggy under the bus.
This was a necessary step in the larger effort to purge the school of any association with the Crusades. “The visual depiction of a knight, in conjunction with the moniker Crusader, inevitably ties us directly to the reality of the religious wars and violence of the Crusades,” the Rev. Philip Boroughs, president of Holy Cross, explained in a statement.
This is all ludicrous.
Let’s start with poor Iggy. Knights are not synonymous with the Crusades. There are knights in “Game of Thrones.” Do you immediately think of the sacking of Jerusalem when you watch that show? How about when you play any of a gazillion video games, or even the old-school Dungeons and Dragons? How about when you watch King Arthur movies? Or when you listen to “Knights in White Satin,” Giorgio Moroder’s disco homage to the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin”?
Maybe you do. But if that’s the case — if you see a knight in shining armor and immediately think of “the reality of the religious wars and violence of the Crusades” — well, that’s on you.
Let’s be honest: If you’re the sort of person who can’t let go of Christianity’s role in the Crusades nearly 1,000 years ago, excommunicating Iggy won’t solve the problem.
And yet, Holy Cross is just the latest of many institutions to abandon any association with the Crusades. Campus Crusade for Christ shortened its name to Cru a few years ago because the C-word had become too radioactive.
“It’s become a flash word for a lot of people,” Cru’s vice president, Steve Sellers, told Christianity Today in 2011. “It harkens back to other periods of time and has a negative connotation for lots of people across the world, especially in the Middle East. In the ‘50s, 'crusade’ was the evangelistic term in the United States. Over time, different words take on different meanings to different groups.”
That’s all true. The word “crusade” does have different meanings to different people.
And that’s the irony. For most of last millennium, if you talked about the Crusades, you’d offend Christians. Why? Because the Christian West lost the Crusades, for the most part. Meanwhile, Muslims rarely talked about the Crusades, and if they did it was a matter of pride.
In the last century or two, the story of the Crusades was rewritten to fit an anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist narrative. The European invasion of the Middle East was the first chapter in the evil empire that was Western civilization.
This is all nonsense. Christianity — which is older than Islam — was in the Middle East far earlier (and Judaism has squatters rights going back millennia). Christianity originates as a Middle Eastern faith (you can look it up). The forces of Muhammad took the Holy Lands from the Christians, but this was not some indigenous anti-colonial uprising. It was a relatively minor conflict in a backwater region of the Muslim world. The real action was to the west in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
Bernard Lewis, arguably the greatest living English-language historian of the Muslim world, writes: “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”
Or, as historian Thomas Madden has written: “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The Crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”
It is absolutely true that horrible things were done on both sides of the conflicts. And as a guy named Goldberg I don’t have much skin in this fight.
But what I object to is this reflexive assumption, peddled by a diverse unintended coalition of Western social-justice warriors and Muslim radicals, that the West is the villain in every tale and that to demonstrate a progressive worldview, Christians — and Westerners generally — must shed their own cultural heritage to appease people looking to be offended by things they don’t understand.
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Train Teachers To Shoot Intruders
by TOM MCLAUGHLIN
Five years ago I wrote a column titled: "Time to Arm Teachers." That wasn't a popular notion in 2013 but perhaps its time has come after the Florida shootings last week.
The idea was pitched to me by men uniquely qualified to train those teachers willing to carry concealed weapons and confront armed intruders in schools. One was father to a former student who'd done several tours in the Middle East as a Green Beret. He was still doing three-month hitches in Afghanistan with his team of other highly-trained, contracted soldiers who would deploy for ninety days over there, then serve another ninety here in New England protecting courthouses, then back to Afghanistan, and so on.
When asked my opinion of their proposed enterprise I said it was a great concept, but public schools would never allow it, being almost completely staffed by anti-gun leftists who believe only stricter gun laws will prevent school shootings. Maybe school officials have since taken a lesson observing Chicago over the interim five years where even with the strictest gun laws, almost as many young people are shot every weekend as were shot last week in Florida.
Our schools have been "gun-free zones" for twenty-eight years now since Senator Joe Biden introduced the bill that became federal law in 1990, and how has that worked out? We could argue that "Gun-Free Zone" signs posted at schools attract whackos like Nikolas Cruz who can be assured that nobody in the school will be able to shoot back.
People like guns where I live in rural Maine because when seconds count, the police are minutes away - and my town doesn't have a police department. We rely on the Oxford County Sheriff's Department and the Maine State Police. They do as good a job as they can, but it's not enough. Armed criminals tried to break my neighbor's house across the street and were repelled after discovering the old man who lived there with his elderly wife had a gun of his own. Police arrested the men later based on my neighbors's descriptions.
"When you see something, say something" we're told by the FBI, but people have said something several times lately to no effect. The FBI was warned about the Tsarnaev brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon. They were warned about Omar Mateen before he shot over a hundred people in the Orlando night club massacre. And, they were also warned about Nikolas Cruz before he killed students and teachers last week.
When I started teaching here in rural Maine forty years ago, young men came to school with high-powered, semi-automatic rifles on racks across the back windows of their pickup trucks during hunting season. Those guns could have been used to shoot up the school but they weren't. Guns haven't changed since then but people have - and that's clearly the problem.
Mainstream media don't report stories like that, or incidents like my elderly neighbors scaring off intruders with their gun. They don't fit the progressive, Democrat, gun-control narrative. Media did print warnings about what would happen if Maine and New Hampshire allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons without permits, but those states went ahead anyway.
Concealed carry permits were never required in Vermont and sensible people knew it wouldn't be a problem in Maine or NH either. It'll be three years this summer here in Maine and there's been no increase in gun violence. It's been a year in New Hampshire. Vermont never had a problem.
There's a squad car parked outside Whole Foods in Portland every day. Inside stands an armed cop who I asked one day why he was always there. There's usually a cop in Portland supermarkets he said, often in plain clothes. We see them in airports and court houses. The student council at my last school had to pay a cop to guard school dances. During my last few years I could only use the main entrance because other doors were locked on the outside. Why not post an armed guard there and arm teachers in every wing of the school? That's what Israel does - a country in a constant state of war. They've had only two school shootings in over forty years.
Ever since Columbine twenty years ago, brave teachers have died shielding students with their bodies at nearly every school in which shootings have occurred. Imagine if those teachers had been armed. How many students could they have protected if they shot back at the intruder instead of just absorbing his bullets? Had they been armed, we would likely be seeing stories of how Nikolas Cruz was killed attempting to enter the school instead of the national keening we're undergoing now.
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