Education
Rubricitis
I really must protest very strongly at the uninformed and inane criticism of the Eduction Department’s intelligent and innovative Essential Learning curriculum.
Here we have a group of true professionals working with diligence and imagination in Tasmania’s interest and all they get is mindless abuse. Shame on you Tasmania, the media and the critics, for your negativism.
“What is a rubric?” is the question that many people are asking. Just a teeny weeny bit of homework in the State Library or on the World Wide Web would have quickly revealed that the word had its origins in the physical peculiarities of one Reuben O’Brickstaff, a backwoodsman in Vermont USA in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
Reuben, born of an Irish mother and an Afro-American father, suffered from a physical abnormality that caused a pronounced stoop and required him to wear a heavy leather truss. This rare disease is called Rubricitis and the few carriers of it have some Afro-American blood and are called Rubrics. It has absolutely nothing to do with education but I expect the Department of Education considered it a very good idea at the time. Leaks from inside Fortress Ed confirm that they will not retreat from the totally quality driven research that allowed the strategic fit resulting in the use of the word rubric.
And this is the nub of the present debate. We have all these dills sitting in their grubby little suburban kitchens pretending they know more about education than result-driven professionals with mindsets way above the kind of scale that would fit your average suburb. Why? Why then do they challenge the experts? Because they have pimply little grubs who go to the local school? Possibly. Because they can’t spell or pronounce many of the words in the new curriculum? Certainly. Because they have not undertaken the gap analysis to help them fast track their thinking to a synergistic win-win outcome? Indubitably.
Chopper Reid being a well-known example
We even have alleged experts joining the fray. David Owen and Don Watson, both of whom have written books, are cases in point. But a lot of people have written books – “Chopper” Reid being a well known example. Mr Owen has written a few books and he puts out a nice magazine and Mr. Watson has written about language. But have they written about education? Eh? There’s the rub. Have they leveraged their knowledge to think outside the box and come up with a best-practice strategic fit to touch base with a result-driven benchmark that is genuinely outside the loop? No. No they bloody haven’t – excuse my language but I am quite passionate about this – and that’s why the critics should button up on this one. They’re in the wrong ball park.
I have great respect for the Education Department. They have done some marvellous things over the years, one of the most notable of which was that they educated me. Notwithstanding that their teachers were thoroughly nasty to me during my “troubled years” I bear them no ill-will. My troubled years were between the ages of four and fifteen during which time I was abused, caned, criticised, maligned, temporarily expelled and otherwise victimised by lovely people who were only doing their job. My last couple of years were largely trouble-free due to exhaustion on both sides finally compelling an informal truce. The fact that I “studied” at six of their schools – Deloraine kindergarten, Deloraine Area School, Port Sorell Primary School, Wesley Vale Area School, Devonport High School and Hobart High School – is impeccable testimony to my commitment to Tasmania’s public education system.
Apart from teaching me how to nearly read, write and count – which is all you can reasonably expect of a system always under pressure – I also learned a lot of life skills at school. Skills like smoking, drinking, sex, independence of spirit (ie. truancy), deviousness, cheating, acting (eg. feigning illness), and gilding the verbal lily were among those skills that served me well until I gave them all up a few years ago. I should add that all those skills were invaluable in such diverse areas as the public service, business, taxi-driving, politics, diplomacy, apple picking, consulting and lecturing at the university.
And the Tasmanian public education system has been nothing if not consistent. All those skills are still available. The more recent additions include shooting up in the dunnies, having a joint behind the pine trees and engaging in sex with the female teachers.
So, I reiterate, the parents should step back from this one. Education is a matter for the Education Department. We don’t allow people who are a bit bonkers to do their own brain surgery, so we should not allow parents to determine how the exciting new education innovations should be presented. It would be an ill-considered revolutionary departure from a very satisfactory and ordered way of doing things.
Mr Watson draws a parallel with Stalinist Russia. I would remind Mr Watson that there were some very contented and successful people in Stalinist Russia. They are dead now. Both of them.