Edition 75
Learning Curves
- Published 27th January, 2022
- ISBN: 978-1-92221-65-8
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Education never ends, as Sherlock Holmes once told Watson – but where does it begin? And how many different paths can we take on the journey to knowledge?
From preschool to postgrad, from private to public, and from sandstone to the school of life, what do the parameters of our educational experiences add up to? Australia is one of the most educated countries in the world, but not every Australian has access to a world-class education. What does a good education look like in a country with an increasingly segregated school system, public funding for private institutions, and a tertiary sector that’s facing an uncertain financial and philosophical future? How does education change in a country where political regard for its most basic principle – that education matters – seems to have so profoundly changed?
Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves explores what we can learn about learning.
AUDIO AND VIDEO
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Prismatic perspectives’.
Listen to Winnie Dunn read her short story ‘Real fobs’.
Listen to journalist Nance Haxton‘s report ‘Disabilities in Education’.
Listen to Lisa Fuller read her memoir ‘Following the song’.
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay on Books, Books, Books podcast.
Watch a recording of the launch of Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves with Editor Ashley Hay and contributors Bri Lee and Catherine Keenan.
In this Edition
Remaking universities
CAN WE GRIEVE not for a person but for an institution? Should we be angry over possibilities destroyed, young talents denied a chance to flourish? Is there any point in lamenting greed, short-sightedness, the brutality of power? As I write this, in September 2021, Australian...
Simulated learning
IN GILLES DELEUZE’S ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, the philosopher compares a discipline society in which one is always ‘starting again’ to a control society in which ‘one is never finished with anything’. In a control society, graduation is always deferred. We have...
Schooled
TOWARDS THE END of Educated, her harrowing memoir of an Idaho childhood with Mormon survivalist parents, Tara Westover concludes: ‘Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths...
By design
I WAS TREMBLING. Not because I was about to do something risky or scary – quite the opposite. This was a situation I had been in many times before, but I was nervous about what was going to happen next. I was on the Concert...
Compulsory wellbeing
SUCH GREAT PAY and all those holidays. Plus you only work from nine ’til three…is often the response a teacher receives when they say what they do for a living. It hurts, but we generally don’t defend ourselves. That’s partly because we’re aware of...
The colonial storytelling of good intent
There was once a time when all spoke the same language, no matter the skin, and so there was a great peace over the lands. To help keep this peace, great meetings were held when the three sisters in the sky stood in line,...
Follow the leader
AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES ARE unsettled. There is no doubt they are facing significant and real challenges. Many of their buildings have been shuttered on and off in the last year. They have fewer staff and students than they did before the pandemic. By some estimates, 20,000...
Climbing the opportunity ladder
IN THE LATE summer of 1912–13 a new public high school was established in Parramatta, on the western outskirts of Sydney. The local newspaper, The Cumberland Argus, followed its early growth with excitement. One report described it as ‘the people’s school’, contrasting it with...
All things to all people
ON 16 JULY 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the launch of the $2 billion JobTrainer Fund. The media release declared that JobTrainer will ensure more Australians have the chance to reskill or upskill to fill the jobs on the other side of this crisis....
Tech future, human rights
IT SEEMS AS if we’re experiencing unending crises, rolling over us at such pace that we can’t catch our breath before the next one hits. Bushfires so large they create their own storm systems; pandemics of global proportions; the climate emergency, which threatens consequences...
Following the song
Click here to listen to Lisa Fuller read ‘Following the song’. Western knowledge is increasingly problematic because of its dominance over other people’s world knowledge and learning systems, its innate belief in its superior- ity over all forms of ‘knowing’, and its claims to universality when it...
‘I will not be doing it again’
I’VE BEEN TEACHING at Australian universities for twenty-five years now. I began when I was twenty-seven – I’m now fifty-two. This means I’ve been next to university students since 1996, and if you’re curious about these things, you see patterns begin to emerge. Every parent,...
Sacraments of guilt
IT’S THE LAST Tuesday of May and the coldest day of the year so far. The temperature has fallen 10 degrees in the past forty-eight hours and as God (or, by proxy, the parish priest of West Wollongong) would have it, I’m stuck in...
Top of the class
IT WAS A strange moment, becoming aware that a school I had attended was classified as ‘disadvantaged’. I was standing on the edge of the waterlogged deck of a shack down on Bruny Island and although I was protected from the breeze, I could...
The reading revolution
WHEN BOB FITZGERALD, Chief Inspector of Blacktown Police Area Command, was in Year 4, he stole a book from a library in South Australia. It was Babar the Elephant and he couldn’t understand a word of it. He’d been to thirteen schools by then,...
Holding the baby
Where I live, what I earn and my level of education: these will all influence not only my decision to have a baby but the experiences that baby will then have. These four factors – education, geography, wealth and birth rate – loop around one another in infinite iterations. People in regional and remote Australia have more children younger; they also have lower levels of educational attainment.
Performance enhancement
IT’S A STINKING hot Saturday morning in December and I’m dressed as an elf at a rundown shopping mall in Sydney’s western suburbs. Four of my fellow graduates from QUT’s acting class of 2003 are also clapped out in cheap Christmas drag to bring...
Double
ALL THE ROADS in this part of town are bitumen, so Odette’s piece-of-shit Toyota does fine, even in the storm. She parks at the mouth of the cul-de-sac. It’s the only street in Elm Heads that’s on a hill, and the water is thick...
Real fobs
Listen to Winnie Dunn read her short story ‘Real fobs’. ONLY BOGANS AND dumb ethnics go to Western Sydney University. Real fobs won’t even bother. But I am something different and better because I am half-white. At least that’s what I told myself back then. Dr Kindling, one...
University material
JEFFREY AND MY mother were together for three years. I lived with them for their final year, when I was sixteen. Before that I lived with my father and stepmother, but my stepmother didn’t like me so I had to get out of there....
Vestigial
THE BOY RAN past the house just as Sherwin held the clothes pegs up to the line. The sheet sprayed soapsuds on the sunken floorboards, but Sherwin didn’t see them. The boy wore his trackies high on his back, shuffling up the hill with...
Dramatics
ANNIE DOESN’T RECOGNISE the old teacher at first glance, not consciously. She only registers a vague sense of disorientation that seems carried in by the light in this new room – bright and sharp, streaming through high-panelled windows. A momentary dislocation, time slipping sideways. There...
what did you want to be when you grew up?
dad, did you ever want to live in a treehouse with a monkey butler? wear a helmet made of an ice-cream container? hoon across a sun-bleached bonnet like a slip and slide? rob a bank with an exploding umbrella? be as small as a...
Footpath rage during lockdown #6
The bicycles have me huddling Mum into the garden to avoid their maskless legitimacy. Keep the rules the man shouts. Mum with her walker on the pavement. Both of us wearing surgical masks correctly. Four children and a man riding on the footpath fast...
High resolve
So I taught myself to run again (again). It’s all about the playlist. Plus the way the cold forgives us, given time. I say good morning like I mean it. All the zen one would expect. I’m new. I’m good. Wise men are worried for my knees. I have...
Featured Contributors
Winnie Dunn
Winnie Dunn is a writer of Tongan descent from Mount Druitt, Western Sydney. She is the general manager of...
Pasi Sahlberg
Pasi Sahlberg is professor of education policy at UNSW. He is the author of Finnish Lessons: What the World Can...
Bri Lee
Bri Lee is an award-winning writer, academic and activist and the author of Who Gets to be Smart, Beauty...
Gabbie Stroud
Gabbie Stroud is a freelance writer and novelist. Her book about her experiences in the education system, Teacher (Allen &...
