Edition 11
Getting Smart
- Published 7th March, 2006
- ISBN: 9780733316210
- Extent: 268 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
The battle over ideas in education is intense and seemingly never-ending.
A lot is at stake in getting education right – especially for the next generation. It touches us all.
Education has long been central to creating opportunity and social equity – but the evidence suggests it may not be working as well as it should.
The level of dissatisfaction is high and so are the stakes, but there are also remarkable success stories.
Getting Smart explores these issues and debates, proposes new ways of thinking about schools and universities and presents compelling personal tales of life-changing moments in and out of the classroom.
In this Edition
Girls talk
GIRLS TALK IS a classic Dave Edmunds song, penned by Elvis Costello, and it captures in a few verses and choruses the complexities of a girl culture that thrives in the corridors and toilets of schools around the world. Movies like Heathers and Mean Girls helped bring the...
Flying the flag for mainstream Australia
ON JUNE 2004, the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the former Federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, announced a new $31 billion federal education package in which funding would be tied to a National Values Framework.[i] The increased government support would be contingent on the...
The rising phoenix of competition: what future for Australia’s public universities?
IN MID-WINTER, NEW Brunswick is a long, cold train ride from Penn Station in Manhattan. The New Jersey transit runs out of the city and through suburbs until the scenery seems an endless process of small depressed towns strung together along the line. Few...
The academic underclass
IF YOU GET a casual job as an academic at an Australian university, you think you are very lucky – a job working in your own discipline, a beginning to an academic career. You may be given casual teaching while you are a postgraduate...
Hamlet in a classroom
IN MY TEENS I revered writers. I hung onto their words the way my classmates hung onto marijuana. I believed writers had the gift of clairvoyance, that they knew things about this world non-writers didn't. I thought people wrote and read books to decipher...
When literacy can mean life
"LET'S PLAY HANGMAN," says my eleven year-old daughter, Claire. Heavy rain is falling and so we settle at the kitchen table and with pencil and paper play the word game that has been around longer than anyone can remember.I look at this flaxen-haired child...
Moving private
IN 1991, I did something that once would have been beyond imagination. I enrolled my eldest child in an elite private school. Financially, the six years were to be a terrible burden. Emotionally, it was not easy. I was acting against my background and...
Armed for success
IN 1984, I was a seventeen year-old Aboriginal youth just finishing school. I had a Tertiary Entrance score that told me I was average and that I only had the capacity to do some type of agricultural course if I was serious about entertaining...
Beyond the numbers
IT IS SAD that after thirteen years of schooling, education is reduced to a series of acronyms and numbers. BOS, HSC, UMAT and UAC dominate discussion or inspire intermittent bursts of study and guilt while straining once solid friendships. It all culminates with the...
Reality beyond imagining
IN THE COURSE of the 35 years in which I taught in universities, a number of people had suggested that I write a campus novel: a novel about the university in the abstract and about the University of Sydney in particular. Ted Wheelwright, the...
Creative writing strikes back
I'M DRIVING BACK from a literary soiree somewhere in Sydney where yet again I've been hauled over the coals for teaching creative writing. I was standing in a circle of new acquaintances and a man of a certain age asked what I did. I...
Designing a lesson in science
IT IS SURELY a sign of our times that a public controversy in Australia has been triggered by the arrival of a DVD rather a person. The DVD in question is a documentary with an axe to grind, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, which has...
Amusing and stimulating small minds
EVERYONE KNEW HIS name was Michael, but no one whom he instructed in Latin would have dreamed of calling him anything other than Mr Keary. On the occasions we have met since my schooldays, in fact, the sensation of calling him "Michael" has seemed...
I hear with my eyes
I'M DEAF. MY being deaf seems to be significant to other people. "Why do you speak like that?" This question has recurred throughout my life: usually explosively from the mouths of small children unable to contain the excitement of their curiosity, but sometimes expressed...
Outside in a teaching life
WHEN BB TAUNTED me with continual cries of "You killed Jesus, you killed Jesus ... " I had no idea what he meant. But I sensed that the nuggety, pasty-faced English lad was not paying me a compliment. After all, BB had a well-earned...
Capricornia 1967 – a governess remembers
IN AN INTERVIEW with the vocational guidance officer sent out on the rural circuit during my final year of high school, I expressed a wish to become an archaeologist, only to be told in a dismissive manner that this would involve going to university....
Encounters with Mrs L BA(OXON)
About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters; how well, they understoodIts human position....– WH AudenABOUT GLAMOUR THEY were also never wrong, the Old Masters. Not that I'd seen an old master when I first set eyes on Mrs L, yet instinctively I knew...
Beyond the comfort zone
LAST WEEK I was on a train. In the same carriage was a collection of object studies for parental hope and anxiety. There were the private-school girls in their blazers, box pleats and boaters, their silky ponytails unravelling. There were the labourers falling asleep,...
Making a difference
AMROZI. JUST SAYING his name dissolves the thin laughter lines that usually radiate out from retired teacher Maggi Luke's eyes like a child's drawing of sunrays. His name instantly conjures that chilling 3am phone call she and husband Doug Luke received after the Sari...
Just the way it is
"BUT THAT'S JUST how it's always been done," the grey-haired, tweed-trimmed headmaster said, somewhat mystified, somewhat incredulous and very annoyed.So this is what it's been reduced to, I thought despairingly as I sat opposite him and his wife at their wooden kitchen table. I...
Featured Contributors
Gideon Haigh
Gideon Haigh has been writing about sport, business, both and neither for more than thirty years. He has contributed...
Isabelle Reinecke
Isabelle Reinecke is a Sydney-based lawyer and director of strategic initiatives for GetUp!.
Chris Sarra
Chris Sarra is a professor of education at the University of Canberra, a commissioner with the NRL and the...
Meera Atkinson
Meera Atkinson is a Sydney-based literary writer, academic, and the author of Traumata (UQP, 2018), The Poetics of Transgenerational...
