School balls

When I was at high school there was one girl who was out, she was the year below me. When the school ball came a lot of girls went together (double tickets worked out cheaper than singles). But this one girl brought her girlfriend - turned out the girlfriend had been my babysitter. I found this terribly embarrassing; in that vague way I found anyone talking to me embarrassing when I was a teenager. I don't know now - because I didn't think at the time - how hard that had been from her - what reactions she had faced.

St Pats has forbidden a student from taking another boy to the school ball. I just think it's awesome that students are fighting these rules - but shit that they have to do it at such risk and cost.

There was a facebook event for people to support them, but it seems to have disappeared - I am worried that the personal cost on them for taking this stand has been high.

Which seems like a good time to remind people of the follow-up meeting for Queer the Night - we are stronger together than we are alone.

When: Thursday 16 June 7pm
Where: Trades Hall
What: Homophobia and Transphobia - how we respond.

Note: The people involved have received a lot of media attention. I've left their names out of this post deliberately any comments that name them will be deleted.

A note of I told you so...

Like many people on the left I cut my eye teeth on student politics. In particular, I first became involved with political organising in 1997, the year of the Green paper. This was a proposal to corporatise the education system. I, along with 74 other people, got arrested on parliament's forecourt protesting it. We defeated some of the proposals in the Green paper, such as the proposals that tertiary institutions should be charged on the basis of their assets. But others, most critically funding of Private Training Institutions, went through.

So it is with the ears of a policy wonk that I listened to today's announcements about tertiary education. It is a clear rejection of the 'market fixes all' school of thought that had predominated in the 1990s.

This shouldn't be seen as a victory. It was interesting to hear Phil O'Reilly on The Panel today - he was torn in a couple of different ways. He specifically said that private providers and competition were important, but he also criticised the number of courses that these private training institutions had developed. Rather than being a step towards anything, it's just a recognition by capitalism that providing workers with specific skills needs more managerialism than a free market system will allow.

But I want to take a moment to say that we were right.

As for the 'solutions' - I think they'll probably do damage. The idea "we want Tertiary institutions to do X, therefore we'll pay institutions that do X more" creates all sorts of perverse incentives." The Labour government introduced a Performance Based Research Fund, because they wanted to make sure universities do research, not just concentrate on bums on seats. But by attempting to quantify research, they've created huge inequities, and perverse incentives. On top of that they've made the university a much more high pressure, unpleasant place to work. None of which actually encourages academic staff to do good research. It discourages anything that might be difficult, and instead encourages meeting criteria.

What do we want?

It's hard not to feel a sense of achievement. I've marched demanding universal student allowances; I've got up at 6.30am to put leaflets in lectures to get other students to march for universal student allowances, I've sat in long meetings talking about protests we were going to organise demanding universal student allowance, I've occupied buildings demanding a universal student allowance.

Although I left university a long time ago, I haven't forgotten the issue. I organised in workplaces where there were heaps of student workers. I've seen the the power that the employers had, because students needed to work outside lecture times.

I know that a universal student allowance won't just make a difference to the children of the middle and upper classes. The current threshold is $46,000 - so no student who has two parents in full-time work (even if it only pays at the minimum wage) is eligible for the full allowance.* Tertiary education is a requirement not just for middle class jobs. There is a full-time year long course for machine sewing - a job that only just pays more than minimum wage at unionised workplaces.

I think this shows the value of being organised, even in the minimal way that students are organised.

But it continues a theme of the labour government, which is ignoring the beneficiaries and targeting those with work. This comes with explicit, and implicit, ideology that those who are in work are more worthy than those who are not. This is a dangerous ideology at any time, at a time of rising unemployment it's purpose is to continue to draw attention away from the structural reasons for unemployment.

Unlike Julie I don't see Labour as a force for good.** This doesn't change my vote, or my view of labour. But it makes me think about everyone who was part of the chain that struggled against privatisation of education, against fees, and for allowances, for almost 20 years. A chain that must be continued, no matter what happens after this election.

* one of my pet issues as a union organiser was that entitlements to means tested programmes were generally indexed to inflation, if they were indexed at all, not to the minimum wage. This has meant that the entitlement of workers to things such as the community service card has declined dramatically, till anyone on full time work is no longer eligible. This is true of other programmes such as income related rents, the disability allowance, and so on. The government was giving with one hand and taking with the other.

** Although I do think that universal student allowances is a feminist policy, as is any policy that attacks student debt. Because of the wage gap women tend to take much longer to pay off student loans than men, and the amount of money they end up having to pay back is a much higher proportion of their lifetime income. Eliminating the need to borrow to live reduces, but does not eliminate this inequality.

Jesus Fucking Christ

I have many things I want to write about. I haven't talked about who I'm voting for DHB, or why Tasers are not the answer.* Plus I read Louise Nicholas's book last night - and I have a few things to say.

But since I also post on Alas an American blog, I had to take a moment to write about this:

School security guards in Palmdale, CA have been caught on camera assaulting a 16-year-old girl and breaking her arm after she spilled some cake during lunch and left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning it up.

The incident occurred last week at Knight High School in Palmdale and was caught on a cell phone camera by another pupil who was then also assaulted by the security guards.

The girl was black (in case anyone didn't know that already).

The students are organising (possibly have organised, I'm a little confused about dates and times) a walk-out. Check out Oh No a WoC PhD for more information about what you can do.

I think what's really important about this incident, is that while it is a horrific example it is also the inevitable result of a culture of security in schools . Yes be outraged that a girl's wrist was broken for not being able to clean up the cake she dropped, but it would have been just as outrageous if she'd responded to the request to clean up the cake by saying 'fuck you' and walking off and the same thing had happened. It's not enough just to object to the extremes of a system that attempts to controls students for every minute they're at school, we have to object to the whole system. As brownfemipower said:

Grace Lee Boggs argues that youths of color are “opting out” rather than “dropping out” of school–that is, rather than mindlessly dropping out of school to engage in a life of debauchery and sin–they are making a conscious choice to leave a violent and prison like atmosphere that labels them as “problems” from the moment they enter into the system.

Why would anybody want to go to school in a place like this? And who the hell are *we* to honestly believe that the “war” taking place in our schools today (schools are war zones, after all), is not a war between administration/security gaurds and the students?

I read about this at brownfemipower, feministing and Lenin's Tomb (and my reaction was very similar to Lenin's).

* Unless the question is "what do we not want the police to carry?"

Won't somebody please think of the children

In my effort to catch up on issues I missed while life was kicking my ass, can I just say I hate the government. From Scoop:

Coca Cola Amatil (NZ) Limited (CCANZ) and Frucor Beverages Group Limited (Frucor), the New Zealand distributor of Pepsi beverages, have signed the world’s first agreement to stop directly selling all full sugar soft drinks and full sugar energy drinks to New Zealand schools.

The voluntary agreement was signed between the beverage industry and government this afternoon.

CCANZ and Frucor have agreed to stop directly selling full sugar carbonated soft drinks and full sugar energy drinks to any schools (primary, intermediate and secondary) in New Zealand. This will take affect progressively from today and will be completed by 2009.

Both companies will provide alternatives, including no or low sugar soft drinks, fruit juices and flavoured waters.

Coca-Cola Amatil (N.Z) Limited Managing Director, George Adams, says the industry was prepared to do its small part in the battle against rising obesity levels in New Zealand.

I'd be happy to see soft-drink companies kicked out of schools entirely. I think the food provided in schools should be put produced for it's taste and nutritional value, not for profit. But I think this change is worse than the status quo. Coke has some nutritional value, as energy is pretty essential to our bodies ongoing well-being. Diet Coke doesn't actually have any food in there, just a message that the person who drinks it should be smaller.

Alternatives

As I said in my last post, I have some experience with alternative primary schooling. Over the years I've thought about what was good about my school, and what I'd do differently, so I thought I'd write about it.

I'm not planning on starting up an alternative primary school anytime soon. So this post isn't going to address the political problems of alternative primary schools as private schools. This is more of a thought experiment, how I'd organise education in a different society, what I'd try and do if I was a teacher, or the sort of environment I'd work towards creating if I was on the board of trustees.

Our alternative primary school was small, there were usually less than thirty kids. The main division was between 'little kids' and 'big kids'. I don't really know how things were set up for the 'little kids', because I don't really remember (I didn't start at the alternative school till I was 7). But the big kids had a routine, of a sort. We'd start with either writing or maths, and do that till morning tea and then we'd do the one we hadn't done earlier. Writing was whatever we wanted to write about, sometimes we'd do creative writing, sometimes we'd do project work, once we designed and wrote about our dream houses (I seem to remember these mostly featuring zoom tubes, and drinking fountains of fizzy drinks). We did maths at our own pace working through text books and asking for help if we needed it. Somewhere in there there'd be silent reading, and we'd also get read to (the teacher cried so much when reading Good Night Mr Tom - which is totally understandable).

In the afternoons we'd do different things. On wednesday we went to the library and on thursday we went to the swimming pool. Apart from that parents had different interests so they'd lead us in group activities: singing, plays, art, history (we'd pretend to live in all these different times and learned how they did stuff), making ginger beer, making a magazine, sports, zoo school (the zoo people let us do things that they wouldn't let other schools do, and my brother got scratched by a tiger), two kids started a shop, sewing, dance, electronics, Maori, making stuff, astronomy (we stayed over at school one night to see Halley's comet), playing the recorder, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. I don't know how it was decided who got to do what when, but I think we got a reasonable amount of choice.

There was a lot of good things about the way we worked. Most importantly working at our own pace when it came to skills development, particularly maths, was really useful. It meant that people were neither bored or confused. I think in the ideal world you'd have a mix of group and individual work, so kids could join in the groups if they wanted. Being able to write about whatever we wanted was also really cool - it helped kids follow their interests, and I think it'd make writing easier.*

But if I was going to structure a school day I'd do it a little differently, or rather I'd add two things.

One would be a structured session every day where each kid could follow their own passion or interest. This could be anything they wanted: finding out how something worked, creating something, learning to do something. Some kids would spend the time each day kicking goals, others learning to knit, other playing the piano. Either at a set time, or at the natural finishing time of the child's last project the teachers and kid would get together and figure out what resources the kid would need to do what they watned to do.

I think this is important partly because I think it's really good for kids to have the opportunity and resouces to concentrate on things that they're good at and interested in. But more importantly it's because I think it's really important that every kids skills and interests are valued. By doing this the school is saying "this is something that you're good at, this is something we think is worth developing." A lot of kids don't necessarily get that reiforcement from adults, and I think it's really important.

But the other thing that I think is really important is a time set aside each day for each child to work on something that is hard for them. For me it would always have been some sort of co-ordination thing, writing legibly, riding a bike, catching a ball. For other kids it could be reading, or drawing or whatever. The important caveat is that teachers were really careful that the children were trying things that they could see some improvment with practice (ie there were no developmental, or disability barriers to the kid getting better at this activity). It would need to be treated really matter of factly, and non-judgementally, the point being to make the kid feel better about themselves because they're mastering this skill, not bad because they don't already know it.

The reason that I think this is so important was that I, like most kids, came out of primary school knowing there were things that I was good at, and things that I wasn't good at. Luckily for me the things that I was good at were the things that were valued at secondary school, and the things that I was bad at (still everything involving co-ordination) it was OK to be bad at, because I was smart. But nothing in my time at school taught me that I'd ever get better at those things that I was bad at: that I could learn to play knucklebones**, catch a ball, . So if things didn't come naturally, I wouldn't do it (to a ridiculous degree, for years I maintained I didn't understand faxes, despite finding computers really easy). I don't think this is a particularly rare way to approach the world. It wasn't till I learned to drive that I actually worked on a skill that was difficult. I'm not a great driver, but in a way I'm more proud of becoming a vaguely competent driver than of anything else I've done, because I kept on working at it.

I think kids should be given a safe and structured place to work on things they find hard. Not because every kid needs to be able catch a ball, or write legibly, or understand pythagorus, but because every kid needs to know that they can learn stuff, that they're not the person they are now forever, and that things that they can't do now, they will be able to do with practice.

I think, at the moment, children get nearly enough affirmation about their brilliance, and the skills they do have, or understanding that they can gain new skills - they don't have to be 'bad at math' forever.

The one other thing I'd do differently is not make the poor kids do self-assessments. We had to do them every six months or so and we all hated them with a firey passion. I once wrote in one of mine: "SpellingI think I'm getting better at speeling (on second throts maybe not)."

* Start at about age 8 I wrote a series of plays that challenged gender roles called "the lady-knight plays". They started with me killing my brother's character and were great fun- I'll tell you more about them one time.

** I did though - when I was babysitting in my late teens and early twenties, my knuckleboning skills are on par with an 9 year old, but they improved a lot when I figured out you look at the knucklebone you've thrown up, not your hand.

A couple of memories

I was having a conversation about alternative schools, with one of the Frog's parents tonight. I generally refer to my primary school (for non New Zealanders primary school generally goes from ages 5-12) as 'my hippy school'. It was run as a parent co-operative, we all worked at our own pace, the entire school was thirty children, there were two teachers, and every family had to do one half-day parent help each week. It was a gillion times better for me than my other primary school in New Zealand where I'd been bored and miserable. Although I don't know how it would compare with the primary school I went to in London, where my Mum says I was really happy (my main memory from that school is not liking gravy, but being too shy to ask the school dinner people not to put any gravy on mine).

I was going to write a post about what my ideal primary school would be like (believe it or not I've thought about it a lot). But as I was thinking about writing that post, I remembered something I hadn't thought about in years. So I thought I'd write about that first. Otherwise I feel I'd have to go into it in great detail in a footnote in the other post, and that'd be a little bit distracting.

I don't know how old I was at the time, I think I was ten or eleven, I certainly wasn't older than that. I know because the main teacher of the school (and the one who taught us 'big kids') left before I turned 12. Anyway she decided that four of the girls around my age were getting fat, and therefore we had to go for walks (everyday? Once a week? I don't remember). We were to go out of the school down to the park up a hill and come back again.

We didn't always do it, of course (no adult came with us). Sometimes we'd go down to a creek bed instead. Sometimes we'd stop behind some bushes that was a fairy place (I was still young enough to like 'fairy places').

There were four girls my age who didn't have to go on these walks, two of whom were reasonably serious gymnasts. I wonder, looking back, how much of it was that the teacher had forgotten how girls' bodies change. We were the first older girls in the school for a number of years (the school always had more boys than girls), and we were all eldest daughters. Maybe puberty took them by surprise.

You see, it was only the girls they did this to. There had been fat boys about our age in earlier years, and no-one thought there was any need for intervention.

It makes me so angry, looking back. Not at the activity itself - it'd be sad if the great injustice of my life was having to go for a walk. If they'd decided that kids who weren't particularly physically active needed to do more walking, I think that would have been cool (and I would certainly have been one of them, but so would some of the thin girls). I am really angry that an alternative school, where there was at least some feminist analysis among the people who ran it, dedicated time and energy into making sure pre-teen girls knew they should try and control their weight.

So tomorrow you'll hear all about my plans for an alternative model for schools. But remember that individualised attention isn't always a good thing, it can allow all sorts of individualised way for teachers to passed on fucked-up ideas.

Of course there is plenty of scope for this at normal secondary schools. In forth form (fourteen) I was taught nutrition by a woman with anorexia. The thing I remember most about that was an exercise where we had to write down everything we ate over a certain period of time. We were told the number of calories we ate each day, and everyone I knew in that class (it was an all girls school) worked really hard to make sure we ate less than that number of calories. To the extent that I thought that was the point of the exercise, to make sure we weren't eating too much. Because the important thing to teach fourteen year old girls is to make sure that they eat less than the calories they need to live.

Dance then where ever you may be

Asher's written a really interesting post about religion in schools:

In the school assemblies, the whole school was to stand and recite the Lord’s prayer. This was lead by the head prefect - at the time I thought it was just a quirk, but now it seems that it may have been to get around the laws regarding prayer in schools. Additionally, we would sing one or two hymns, always of a Christian nature. In the year level assemblies neither of these occurred, but once every term or two we would be addressed by a “guest speaker” - a Christian who would discuss Jesus with us, and hand out free copies of the Christian Bible at the end of the assembly.

In the school assemblies, the pressure on all the students to recite the Lord’s prayer was intense. If you stood silent, the teachers would stare intensely at you, making sure you knew they disapproved. On a couple of occasions, I was actually confronted by teachers demanding to know why I wasn’t reciting the prayer with the rest of the school! In addition, the intense peer pressure that always exists at high school from the other students was ever present in this case.

I went to Wellington East, an all girls school just up the road from Wellington College. Unlike Wellington College it's not a rich school. But, like Wellington College, it had religious assemblies. We said the Lord's Prayer, and sang songs - which were hymns about half the time, sometimes there'd be a reading from the bible.

I think the pressure put on Asher is apalling, but that wasn't my experience at all. I never felt any pressure to say the prayer, or sing hymns, sometimes I did - sometimes I didn't. There were no dirty looks from teachers - lots of teachers didn't say the prayers either.

Sometime in my fourth form I did get a dirty look, but it was from another student. You see I was sick of the fact that all the hymns constantly referred to God as 'he' - so I'd taken to changing around the pro-nouns around. Unfortunately my theology wasn't quite as advanced as my feminist principles and most of the songs turned out to be about Jesus rather than about God, so I'd be singing "and I'll lead you all, wherever you may be, and I'll lead you all in the dance said she."

A Christian girl sitting near me wasn't partciularly happy with that.

I think what happened to Asher at school was indefensible (although I do think that Wellington College is a terrible, no good, very bad, school, and wouldn't expect any better). But I'm not convinced the problem was just the religion.

We didn't just sing hymns at assembly at my school - we also sang songs. Since I was at school on the suffrage centenary we learned to sing the excellent Bread and Roses. It probably shouldn't surprise people that I have no problem with singing a socialist, feminist song, but other people might have.* I'm sure if people hadn't wanted to sing Bread and Roses that would have been fine, but I think it would be as bad to pressure kids to sing Bread and Roses as it would be to pressure them to sing The Lords Prayer (which I can still do). To say that the only place in school that kids should have a right to opt out is around religious ideas, seems to me to be problematic, and priviledging religious belief over other kinds of principles.

* Probably very few, at my school - but it's the principle of the thing.

Their problem is that they're not white enough

The Dominion post has declared it annoying reporting on academic studies week:

Maori and Pacific Island children need to be taught to ask questions to improve their skills in maths, says Massey University lecturer and researcher Bobbie Hunter.

She said there was widespread concern about the lower level of numeracy in Maori and Pacific Island children compared to their Asian and European peers.

"It is recognised among teachers that this group of children does not ask questions or argue a point.

"We need to teach them to do what European children do automatically."

It's not that the teachers are doing anything wrong in schools. The reason Maori and Pacific Island kids aren't doing so well is their own faul - they're not enough like Pakeha kids.

I think there is an important point buried in there - all students should be taught to question and argue in primary school and secondary school. It's ridiculous to say questioning comes naturally to any ethnicity (particularly as she's a secondary school teacher - there's a lot of shaping of what kids do naturally by the time they get to high-school) and I think she ignores the role racism from teachers plays in shaping students behaviour. I went to an multi-cultural, reasonably low-income high school and I was the middle class white girl who asked a lot of questions (one of my maths teachers actually told me I took up too much of his time - but he was an asshole - and wasn't interested in developing anyone else questioning him in my place - just wanted us all to shut the hell up). I know I wasn't 'naturally' any more questioning or curious than the other girls in my class - it's just that I was more comfortable in an the class-room setting, and knew how to ask my questions in a way that would get rewarded by my teachers.

Shut up Sue Kedgley*

Ever since I've started this blog I've developed a secret suspision that journalists sometimes write articles specifically to piss me off. You may think that that's a ridiculous (and ridiculously arrogant) thing to say. But just look at what they had in the Dominion Post today:

Despite regular exposure to healthy messages at school, many children were getting mixed messages at home, a new study suggests.

Massey University PhD student Jacinta Hawkins[*] found that some parents needed to go back to school for school-based healthy eating programmes to work.

During studies of four low decile Auckland schools she found some teachers saw it as a challenge getting the healthy eating message across when children went home. Teachers felt educating parents was beyond the call of duty of schools.

"There are a lot of parents doing a really good job but there are others who the message isn't reaching," Ms Hawkins said.

"It is sad to think it's because they simply don't know any better."

My first issue with this sort of article is that it always acts as if the worst possible outcome from any diet is getting fat. It ignores the problems that are created by not getting enough of all the nutrients you need, and any increased risks associated with particular food products except getting larger.

But in this article I could barely get up any sort of anger about that, because the anti-poor people subtext was rapidly become text. You consistently see this argument in any discussion about food - that the only reason people living in poverty eat the way they do is because they're ignorant. It's not people in poverty's fault that nutritious food is often more expensive than food that is low in nutrients (it's the food manufacturers fault - and capitalism's).

So shut up with you 'messages' bullshit and provide free breakfast and lunch in schools.

* This is what Sue Kedgley had to say about the topic "It is true that many parents are simply unaware of the problems with what they are feeding their children." Well quite, if only they knew, like Sue Kedgley, where to get the best organic produce, and that sushi is so much healthier than fish and chips then all those low decide parents would be fine.

** The researcher in question isn't a scietist or an educator, but a marketing communications researcher - just the sort of people we want to run our education system, or possibly our social welfare program - it's not entirely clear what's being proposed.

Talking about my generation

I started university in 1996 - all ready to go on some protests. The first protest of the year was a protest against fees (university had been free in New Zealand until 1989), and it was tiny 60 people - so small it was embarassing to attempt to march with that few people. The next edition of the student paper had a headline saying 'You are Pathetic'.

18 months later 75 Victoria University students were arrested on the steps of parliament, protesting the privatisation of education - a week after that there was a march of nearly 2,000 people.

I tell this story as a response to the Sunday Star Times article about the lack of activism among 'Generation Y'. I loathe trend stories at the best of times - they're so meaningless - you get half a dozen people and let them tell their life stories and call it a trend. You can always find half a dozen people of any life group and you can make a trend. In Paris 1968 (or over the last twelve months) I'm sure you could have found half a dozen apathetic young people.

I believe there are often structural reasons behind the rise and fall of political movements, but to reduce this down to 'generations' is lazy, innaccurate and banal. But that wasn't what I found most annoying about the article (which was a reasonably good article of its type - and I think did a good job of presenting more complicated explanation, even if it used the ridiculous generation frame).

Throughout the article individual action - such as buying fairtrade coffee - was conflated with collective action - such as going on a protest. I was most shocked when these ideas came not just from the journalists but from people involved in protests - even Joe Carolan - who comes from the socialist workers (it's supposed to be anarchists who are attracted to that particular brand of lame pseudo-protest).

I think individual action is a useless form of protest, because it's only through collectivity that we have any power. But that's not the only problem - not buying clothes made in China, or buying fair trade whatever isn't just uselss - it also frames political action as something you do for other people. I actually ended up agreeing with one of the apathetic people they interviewed when he said - I might get involved if I thought there was something in it for me. If people believe that the only reason you paticipate in poltical protests is personal goodness then we're all screwed.

I've been involved in organising protests for 9 years now - and it's not something I do for other people. That's not just because it's incredibly fucking rewarding - working together with other people to change things is easily the most meaningful thing I have ever done. It has helped me found strength and skill I didn't know I have, an. It's also because I want to live in a better world. The sort of world I want to create would be better for people in New Zealand, as well as people in Africa. But most importantly I think the fate of everyone in this world without power is intertwined. Yesterday morning I went to a picket to suppot striking supermarket workers, and a vigil in solidarity with the people of Lebanon. I went on these pickets for a number of reasons, but because I believe all these struggles are related - so it matters to me in a practical way if other people win.