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A big stir over trivia
Yearbooks are meant to preserve. To flash-freeze memories from yesteryear, providing a snapshot in time, decades down the line.
For better or worse.
In recent weeks, several area high schools have pulled or reprinted the coveted keepsakes due to controversial photos and quotes within their pages, forcing schools to foot the bill and tread carefully into new territory.
Among the major concerns: The “OK” hand gesture. The once-harmless symbol took on new meaning after a 2017 social media hoax by a right-wing group who spread word that it symbolized white supremacy. Alternatively, kids and teens use an upside-down version of the gesture in a made-you-look type game.
Despite sending letters to parents that made clear the OK gesture is used by students from a variety of racial backgrounds and religions, Oak Park River Forest High School in Oak Park and Walter Payton College Prep in Chicago both announced they would reprint their 2018-19 yearbooks after finding photos of the symbol — moves which cost $50,000 and $22,000, respectively.
While some people have criticized the action, defending the hand symbol as ambiguous or a silly game, school yearbook advisers are making moves to thwart any potential misconception.
As a yearbook adviser at Lindblom Math and Science Academy in Chicago, Sam Dudek is proactive against potentially offensive content by choosing who he believes is the most honest and hardworking student as the yearbook’s editor — that student alerts Dudek if anything looks questionable. Dudek then personally proofreads each of the yearbook’s 300 pages before it goes to the printer, including all images, captions and senior quotes.
“It makes for a long, painful week, but it’s my name in the back of the book, too, and my reputation on the line,” said the English and journalism teacher who’s been at the school since 2008. “And it’s important that I represent our school in the most positive way possible.” Dudek said last year his student editor spotted someone flashing what they believed was a gang sign in a group picture.
“Usually we delete a picture like that, but it was an important senior class group photo, so we used some creative Photoshopping to remove the offensive gesture,” she said.
And it’s not just hand symbols that cause alarm. Highland Park High School in Highland Park halted distribution of its yearbook last month over two senior quotes that were deemed inappropriate. One of them, attributed by the student as “anonymous,” is commonly linked to Nazi propaganda.
Sheila Quirke, a West Ridge mom of two boys, serves as her elementary school’s yearbook parent adviser and photographer. Monitoring a staff of 13 students across sixth, seventh and eighth grades, she started the school year with a conversation about the significance of yearbooks as historical documents.
Quirke said that when she’s taking photos, if kids start flashing the OK sign, she refuses to take the shots.
“I kind of put my foot down and did bring it to the attention of the principal,” she said. “As we got on through the year, there were three instances where I was taking photos of seventh- or eighth-graders who were flashing that gesture, and every time I saw it, I said, ‘No, I’m not going to photograph you while you’re making that gesture.’ I had a sense from the older boys at the school that it wasn’t just a harmless game — something felt off to me.”
The former social worker took to social media to discuss the change in meaning of the OK sign but got pushback from other parents who defended it as a game.
“There seems to be an unwillingness to sort of acknowledge that this gesture’s significance has evolved,” Quirke said. “It started out as an intentional hoax, then it kind of morphed into a kind of trolling tactic. But when somebody has slaughtered 50 Muslims in their place of worship makes that gesture, I’m sorry, that is a gesture that has been fully co-opted and it has no place in the world of children anymore.” (She referred to the New Zealand mosque shooter, a self-described racist who killed 51 worshippers in March.)
Quirke believes people cannot ignore things and move through the world so blithely.
“It is our responsibility to start to pay attention,” she said. “None of us exist in a vacuum, and we need to dig in further and be more conscious, more vocal, more aware and teach our children as well.”
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Esther McVey is right about the Birmingham schools row
It is not the role of schools to teach children about relationships
Five-year-olds are on the frontline of the culture war in Birmingham. At school, they are taught about lesbian, gay and bisexual relationships and about gender and transgender issues. Meanwhile, mainly Muslim protesters argue that these lessons are inappropriate for such young children and run counter to the religious beliefs of their parents. They have taken to demonstrating outside local schools. ‘You say we are homophobic, we say you are Islamophobic’, said one, neatly summing up the state of identity politics today. There is now a High Court injunction banning protests in nearby streets.
No child should have to run a gauntlet of placard-waving just to get to school or have lessons curtailed because of demonstrations. But it is not parents or even protesters from outside of the school community who have politicised education: it is activist teachers backed by successive governments. Sex education has been taught in schools for decades, but lessons in relationships, soon to be compulsory for all children, are a much more recent and far more political project. One of the Birmingham protesters criticised the ‘No Outsiders’ programme, the books and lessons used across several schools to teach about relationships: ‘It is changing our children’s moral position on family values and on sexuality and we are a traditional community.’ Parents are right to be wary of this state overreach into what should be the domain of the family.
Schools have always done more than just teach facts: alongside how to read and write, children are taught to sit still and be quiet. Sometimes the values underpinning education are made explicit. Catholicism determined everything that happened in my primary school, from the prayers we copied for handwriting practice to the hymns we sang in assembly. However, in most schools today, it is politics and not religion that shapes the values at the heart of the curriculum. Promoting Fairtrade, recycling, respectful relationships, healthy eating, gender equality and awareness of Britain’s colonial past now make up the content of lessons. As we see in Birmingham, the problem with putting every social problem on the curriculum is that it allows activists to bypass difficult arguments with adults and go straight to the easier task of convincing children. This is social engineering, not socialisation.
As education has become more political, the distance between some parents and schools has grown. The parents of my classmates were happy for us to make weekly school trips to the cathedral next door: it is why they had chosen to send us to Catholic school. But what is happening in Birmingham shows us that adults are not in agreement about the values schools should inculcate. Yet despite this, schools encroach ever further into the terrain of parents. Whether it is checking the content of lunchboxes to remove crisps or chocolate biscuits, getting children to keep food diaries or monitor household recycling, or even suggesting bedtimes, the boundaries between the role of parents and teachers have become blurred.
Too many who work in education, at all levels, are ready to suspect the worst of parents. Some seem to think that classes in relationships are necessary because, without them, children are bound to grow up to be abusive towards one another. This is a tragic lesson to teach children of any age. This view of parents means the current dispute in Birmingham is about far more than picture books featuring penguins with two dads. It is a battle between parents and the state in determining not just which values should be imparted to children but, far more importantly, who gets to decide. Tory leadership hopeful Esther McVey recognises this. ‘Parents know what’s best for their children’, she told Sky News.
In the past, saying parents know what is best for their children would have been unremarkable. Today, it is just about as controversial as you can get. Labour MP Jess Phillips led the charge against McVey on Twitter. First, she ridiculed those who would support the wife-beating dad from preventing his child from learning about domestic violence. The idea that lessons in domestic violence are all that is standing in the way of the UK descending into a nation of victims and abusers speaks volumes about Phillips’ view of ordinary people. Not content, she poked fun at the idea that parents might also decide to pull their kids out of lessons on phonics or oxbow lakes. But there is a huge difference between knowledge about oxbow lakes and knowledge about relationships.
There are right and wrong answers when it comes to geography. Academics can study rivers for years and come up with verifiable explanations for how oxbow lakes are formed. In other subjects, like literature, knowledge and understanding emerges from interpretation. But there still tends to be a consensus among scholars about methods and the parameters of interpretation. The ongoing dispute between trans activists and gender-critical feminists show that any such consensus in thinking about gender is a very long way off. There are no right and wrong answers when it comes to relationships. They are more complicated than rivers; more complicated, even, than a Shakespearean tragedy. Each relationship has its own dynamic, determined exclusively by the participants involved. The idea that teachers can be experts in relationships in the same way they can be experts in maths or science is ridiculous.
Loath though many are to admit it, parents have a bond with their child that is forged within the love, intimacy and history of their own family. Even the most dedicated and sensitive teacher cannot hope to replicate this for the 30 children they come into contact with for a few hours each week. Parents know far more about their child’s emotional maturity, their life experiences and the context of their relationships with others than a teacher ever can.
The Birmingham parents are right to be angry that the state, via schools and teachers, should try to dictate how people should behave in the most intimate sphere of their lives. Demonstrating outside primary schools is ugly and shows children the divisions between the adults in their lives. But the last thing Birmingham families need right now is High Court interference. They need schools to stop teaching children about relationships once and for all.
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No, school choice does not cause ‘segregation’ -- in Australia
Australia has very extensive school choice. 40% of teenagers go to non-government schools
The mental gymnastics displayed by some people in order to blame school choice for Australia’s education woes never cease to amaze.
A recent OECD report on school choice and equity indicated Australia has one of the most ‘segregated’ school systems in the OECD. This just means schools tend to have less diversity of student socioeconomic background — not that they are practising apartheid.
And if we look at education equity in terms of what actually matters — the effect student socioeconomic background has on achievement — then Australia’s equity is actually slightly better than the OECD average. So finger-wagging at selective and non-government schools for harming disadvantaged students is baseless.
Besides, even if all selective and independent and Catholic schools closed down, it would just mean more high income families would move to areas with the best government schools (raising local house prices) — so social stratification between schools probably wouldn’t reduce, unless we’re going to build a wall between school catchment areas to stop anyone from ever moving anywhere.
School choice can potentially reduce community residualisation because parents don’t have to leave neighbourhoods if they aren’t satisfied with the local government school.
It’s also a furphy that the non-government sector takes funding away from the government system.
According to the Productivity Commission, between 2007-08 and 2016-17, government schools received an 11% real per-student funding increase.
It’s been argued this was only a minor increase, because if teacher wages growth is taken into account then schools on average don’t actually have much more discretionary spending. But this notion — that extra school funding spent on higher teacher salaries doesn’t count as extra school funding — fails the common sense test.
The reality is funding has increased for the government system. While some state governments have chosen to spend the additional money on higher teacher salaries, the fact remains much more is being spent on government schools.
In any case, the government funding received by non-government schools means they can keep their fees affordable for many middle and low income families, so taxpayers don’t have to fund the full cost of education. For example, new financial modelling by Ernst & Young estimates Catholic schools in NSW save taxpayers $480 million per year in recurrent funding.
No one is helped by pitting government against non-government schools
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