Education Not Indoctrination (1 Viewer)

[jb_nc]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

free market

 

[A High Way Man]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

she could have 8 hours of uni and 14 hours of breaks under ur definition
prove she has 22 hours of classes.

 

[jb_nc]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

Young Liberals are dumb as fuck hopfully this stupid campaign marginalises them more than a white person at UNSW

 

[scarybunny]

Re: Education, Not Indoctrination: continued

People have opinions (OMYGOD SOMEONE NOTIFY THE AUTHORITIES!) and they may differ from your own.

At uni you're not going to be penalised for challenging a lecturer's opinions in an assessment, as long as you've got the stuff to back it up. They don't expect you to parrot their opinions back at them. Independent critical thinking, yo.

 

[youBROKEmyLIFE]

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/

huh? so what's the solution? He CAN'T have those views? Or he can have them but he has to keep them quiet? How does this help ANYONE?

 

[youBROKEmyLIFE]

BTW tbh I'd probably mark down students with extremely conservative social values if they harped on about them in any essay, cause I can't imagine them actually providing a strong argument.

 

[scarybunny]

Seriously, cracking down on BIAS? Everyone is biased. Departments have bias as a collective. Courses will be biased. Things are included and excluded, given greater teaching time, supported and criticised based on the slant of the course coordinators.

It's a fact of life, a fact of TEACHING in general (even kindergarten classes are biased) so learn to think critically (which any halfway decent uni student does) and get over it. No department discourages critical thinking.

 

[Trampoline Man]

Obviously you're feeling that her calibre of work is reduced due to her political leanings. ... Doing exactly what the teachers were doing.

I believe the point was that a rant of any political persuasion will get marked down due to the poor quality of writing, rather than what one's political leanings are.

 

[Trampoline Man]

Then you obviously haven't realised the ability to create a decent polemic .

I'm sure it's possible, I just have no illusions about uni students being capable of it.

 

[boris]

Wow, you're a fucking idiot.

I *know* it was because of politics, because I had it confirmed by the lecturers - as in, I've talked to them after an exam and said I answered a question one way because that was what I believed (this was in a question, mind you, where you were asked your personal opinion) and he told me I'd be marked down because it wasn't the "right" way to think, and so I was. It's happened more than once actually. To be fair I've also had some great markers who are happy to see different viewpoints - one gave me a 93 after I threw out the entire reference list (it was one-sided) and did my own research, and I've also had some great teachers/lecturers who aren't biased and just teach their material in a really inspiring way. If you look at my overall spread of school and uni marks, you'd see they're generally of a very high standard so it's not as though I'm suggesting badly done work should get good marks!

It's not that all teachers are this way, because I'd say large numbers do good work. It's that I don't believe that teachers should preach certain values in the classroom - and like I said, I'm not a social conservative! Hopefully it's only a minority (not in my experience, but in others' it is). I just find education too important to waste on teaching political ideologies when it should be up to the individual to decide how they think or feel on an issue, and this applies to very right-wing lecturers too in honesty.

Also, I can also state with certainty that I've never marked down an essay for preaching a different political viewpoint than my own. I do a lot of tutoring and marking, and the only things I mark down are incorrect structure, syntax problems, non or poor use of sources/evidence/quotes/techniques, lack of logical argument and lack of relevance to the question. I'm a massive believer in people being able to develop their own perspectives on things (which is why I hate teachers that try and decide your perspective for you!) and I try to reflect that principle in the work that I do -- so long as it's supported and done using the correct structure and style it'll get good marks from me.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable here, and I hardly think I'm your archetypal right-wing zealot, either. Ask some of the more conservative Liberals what they think of me! I met someone today and the first comment out of her mouth was, "But you don't look like a Young Liberal!"

Also, go Nat! I know you're not on here but I'm going to state that you're fucking incredible nevertheless.

EDIT: Also, Nolan, thanks for backing me up on this. I really appreciate your kind words

Did you cut sick and have your work reviewed by somebody else?

I would have.

 

[boris]

But to be honest guys, the person in question here has made the case in point look a bit retarded.

For starters if he had blatantly marked her down for being a dirty right wing conservative I could understand the hype. He merely stated his political leaning, and sure it may have been uncomfortable but I think it was premature going to the media because of a perceived discrimination in the future.

Serious question. If the lecturer came out and said 'hay guys, I've been a member of the Liberal party for 27 years!' would she have been as uncomfortable?

I think if you have clashing views but you're able to articulate them well then I don't see why any mature, unbias lecturer couldn't mark accordingly. I think a lot of them would be unbias, but occasionally you get assholes and that my friends is why you get your work reviewed

 

[scarybunny]

I understand that it's idealistic for me to suggest that lecturers reward critical thinking that disagrees with their beliefs, since this skill is supposed to be encouraged at uni. People with strong opinions are probably going to be harder on those students who have different ideas, especially if they're trying to get a particular viewpoint across in lectures. Perhaps in these cases it's best to disguises outright disagreement, make it look like a nice, strong critique?

I imagine this has something to do with your experience at Usyd, in the ed faculty? Which is a pity because I always feel like critical thinking is encouraged over blind acceptance of course opinion. That's easy for me to say, though, because I generally agree with them.

I can imagine this happening in a workplace, too. If you don't agree with the dominant ideology, you're going to have a hard time.

 

[scarybunny]

Education Faculty and also my high school... *shrug*

I also just kind of think it's hypocritical as well, because EdFac preaches diversity but doesn't accept it.

Yeah, I think it's more like "Do the research, analyse the literature and come to the same conclusion as us". Which is a shame, because I thought they, of all people, would be open to different ideas (provided they were supported, which of course you would do).

 

[youBROKEmyLIFE]

Well my experience is that I've been taught by some of the most crazily left-wing teachers (one so nuts that he got kicked out of the uni for causing raucus with the student union when they were introducing VSU -- He tried a citizens arrest on Ruddock, was a good mate of the chaser guys who helped them start up their newspaper, actually getting them to come out to UWS for a lecture and also basically as far left as u can get... and they've all respected my dissenting views. I guess UWS just has a higher caliber of teacher.

Despite his insanity he was a really clever guy, open to discussion and fond of argument. I emailed him a year after taking the subject to let him know he'd changed my perspective on things a fair bit and he told me it made his day to hear these sort of things from students.

A great loss.

A radical activist to the very end, January 23, 2008 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/01/22/1200764259941.html
PETER McGREGOR, activist, academic, and writer, was one of the Australian left’s most committed and energetic sons. He was involved with - and sometimes led - many of the most significant campaigns of the past 40 years; against apartheid and the Vietnam war, for the rights of Aboriginal Australians, asylum seekers and David Hicks, about climate change and censorship.

The campaigns were often unpopular when McGregor took them up. Yet history has come down on his side more often than not. Perhaps his biggest coup was the cancellation of a tour to Australia by a South African cricket team. McGregor and Meredith Burgmann, co-convenors of the Anti-Apartheid Movement with Denis Freney, wrote to Sir Donald Bradman, urging that Australians not play a team chosen on a racial basis. After lengthy correspondence, Bradman called the tour off. Bradman’s son, John, said later that the correspondence had convinced his father to act.

Peter James McGregor, who has died at 60, grew up in Roseville. His father left home when he was young, leaving Alice McGregor, her boys Ken and Peter, and her sister May with limited income in a comfortable suburb. Peter was dux of Roseville primary school, attended North Sydney Boys High School, graduated from Sydney University and taught maths at Manly High.

Alice and Peter were early supporters of the campaign to free Nelson Mandela from prison. At Sydney University from 1965, McGregor’s interest in apartheid grew. He met South African exiles in Sydney, including John and Margaret Brink; John had been jailed after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.
After falling out with school heads for attending a protest meeting, McGregor left teaching and devoted most of his time in the early 1970s to the Australian Anti-Apartheid Movement. The group fought against the South African rugby tour of Australia in 1971, protested over the appearance of a whites-only lifesaving team at Bondi, gathered assistance for South African political prisoners and played the key role against the cricket tour.

The nature and method of creating social change was instrumental to Peter’s thinking. The Vietnam war was a major cause for him and he visited the country several times, later publishing Cultural Battles: The Meaning Of The Vietnam-USA War (1998).

He became an anarchist in 1973 and, more recently, joined the Socialist Alliance. His libertarian and anarchistic leanings were formed by the counter-culture and unlike many contemporaries who found professional complacency, he maintained the rage. With little stomach for compromise or patience for the finesse of institutional politics, he worked tirelessly for radical causes. He was arrested (many times) and charged (several times).

He found that protesting alone did not necessarily bring social change. Anarchism came with personal cost and drove him to some compromises. He bought a house in Leichhardt with his partner, Johanna Trainor; after further study, at the University of NSW, he became a lecturer in media studies at Macquarie University and at the University of Western Sydney, from 1987 to 2004. He took his commitment to political movements more seriously than his career. His students found him inspiring.
The protesting continued. He campaigned to free Tim Anderson, Paul Alister and Ross Dunn over the Ananda Marga conspiracy case and Anderson over the Hilton bombing. Their convictions were finally overturned. He campaigned against the Labor council in Leichhardt, over Aboriginal deaths in custody and for East Timor.
Only last year he tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Philip Ruddock, then Attorney-General, for alleged war crimes.

He supported anyone who lampooned the big end of town. He attended the launch in 1999 of a new satirical newspaper, The Chaser, published by a group of students to whom he had lent support. The newspaper led to the TV series, The Chaser’s War on Everything.McGregor couldn’t win them all, of course. He taught film studies. Mumbling his displeasure over a film in a city cinema, he finally stood up and announced to the audience that this was a reactionary and distasteful spectacle and he proposed to walk out. He suggested they all do the same. Only one person, his sheepish companion, followed.

He was kind, warm, generous, self-deprecating, an eloquent raconteur and free of the brooding resentment towards political foes that often encumbers radical outsiders. He wrote recently of activism: “But there aren’t enough of us, and we aren’t getting there. While, as Alice Walker says ‘activism is my rent for living on this planet’, I’m getting more and more behind on that rent.”

Yet a week before he died he was selling copies of Green Left Weekly on street corners in Newcastle, where he lived. Three days before his death, he drove to Sydney to support a protest at the US consulate on the sixth anniversary of Guantanamo Bay jail.
Despite his busy mind and body, Peter McGregor had dementia; his future was bleak. He chose to take his own life.
It was a last act of activism. He is survived by Johanna Trainor, his companion of 28 years, brother Ken and cousins David and John.

Wow. He killed himself...
I can remember him dancing on a table one time while he played a film, trying to demonstrate how engorged people can become in a movie that they won't even notice that sort of thing. What a nutter.

 

[boris]

Yet a week before he died he was selling copies of Green Left Weekly on street corners in Newcastle

Moar like he woke up and was like, what the motherfuck am I doing.

Despite his busy mind and body, Peter McGregor had dementia; his future was bleak. He chose to take his own life.

Nah, thats entirely sad.

 

[boris]

Malfoy had some link to some shit she had written on here, it was epically long but I thought it was quite well structured and brilliant.

I've also heard first hand what cunts lecturers can be, especially if they take an immediate dislike to you or, if you happen to be on the otherside of the political spectrum. This is why arts and politics fails and science wins. I have no idea what my lecturers are and I don't care. They can't mark down an experiment I do because it looks too much like John Howards corpse.

It happens. It probably happens more often than not and people are usually too stooopid to realise. And I'm saying this for both sides (ahaha except a true Libertarian wouldn't be so petty), but for some reason the green left tend to be a little more petty and childish when it comes to stuff like this.

But seriously, I was embarrassed by this article. Embarrassed as a Liberal supporter. I thought it was baseless, he didn't mark her down, he merely stated his political leaning and I am quite sure if he said 'HAY GUYS, LIBERALS 4 LYFE' we wouldn't be hearing about it.
It just makes the cause look really dicky and petty.

 

[Iron]

Cool, then you obviously don't understand the calibre of her work. I do because I've seen it. You can make up bullshit straw men all you want to try and discount what she's saying but it really won't make any difference because they are just straw men.

"Well maybe you didn't say your prayers beforehand and God was punishing you with bad marks".

See how that's a complete load of shit, and why it's pathetic to judge someone on What If's if the other non-politically topical works are getting near 100%'s?

That was downright decent of you old man!
Good show!

 

[Republican]

Bachelor of Arts

 

[Truthbynumbers]

Another article... bias because it is an opinion piece, but I think it relates really well to what _dhj_ was saying before. Are lefties more likely to become teachers because it is "left" to want to take a crappy job with little respect in the hopes that it is shaping our future for the better (well, it surely isnt for the money)? Lol... crazy martyrs. Ill take my Law/Econ degree any day over that life...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/...r-lowpaid-ranks/2008/03/14/1205472079209.html

 

[Captain Gh3y]

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