Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Section: EDUCATION

  • EDUCATION

    The myth of the average teacher

    • Tim Hutton
    • 22 June 2018
    12 Comments

    I have the controversial opinion among my colleagues that teachers, on average, actually get paid pretty well. Averaging, however, is the crux of debate. Yes, if a teacher's job is averaged over the year, their pay is reasonable and their workload is manageable. Alas, teachers are mere mortals; they aren't Time Lords who can redistribute their work to a time of year when they are less busy.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Academics tangle with managerial oppressors

    • David James
    • 14 June 2018
    15 Comments

    The imposition of 'managerialism' or 'marketisation' on universities is disastrous. So why are academics so passive when their working lives are being immiserated by the imposition of ideas, mostly derived from business or economics, that are either patently false or poor?

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    How schools funding became such a problem

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 June 2018
    16 Comments

    Tony Taylor's study of the funding of Australian schools from the time when Menzies first aided Catholic schools until today explains how school funding has come to pose such an intractable problem for governments. It is also a lament for so many lost opportunities to build an educational framework that would open opportunity to all.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Voluntourism hinders community development

    • Beth Doherty
    • 01 June 2018
    13 Comments

    More and more, school leavers are being invited to participate in 'life-changing' experiences where they build houses in Cambodia, or volunteer for a week in a Vietnamese orphanage. When presented with such opportunities we should exercise caution and informed discernment.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    The joys of teaching adult refugees

    • Paulette Smythe
    • 25 May 2018
    15 Comments

    I often feel I have the best job on the planet. Teaching English to adult refugees should be a daunting task. Yet these classes are especially warm and congenial places to be. Human beings at their most vulnerable possess an extraordinary fund of light and laughter despite, or perhaps because of, the darkness they have left behind.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Students need teachers, not technicians

    • Fatima Measham
    • 10 May 2018
    8 Comments

    For the past several years, education has been treated as solely a technical problem. One of the pitfalls of this is that political will becomes a function of money, which in turn rests on political expedience between federal and state governments, further complicated by external lobbying. Education gets ground to a grain.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Teaching public issues in Catholic schools

    • James O'Brien
    • 09 March 2018
    65 Comments

    I was in a lecture with 50 pre-service teachers preparing to transition into the profession. One student spoke up saying he was afraid to teach in Catholic schools, fearing he'd be reprimanded if he said 'the wrong thing'. In fact, a church school comes alive when teachers and students breathe an air of freedom.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Best of 2017: Hanson's autism remark misses value of diversity

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 11 January 2018
    2 Comments

    The mood was subdued at the gates of our small Catholic primary school at 3:30pm on Wednesday. Ten per cent of our school's students have an autism diagnosis, and for their parents who had read Pauline Hanson's comments to the Senate that afternoon, those familiar feelings had been activated yet again.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    It's time to revisit free education

    • Osmond Chiu
    • 10 November 2017
    7 Comments

    Dissatisfaction and concern about falling living standards for future generations is leading to longstanding policy assumptions being rethought. Nothing symbolises this more than tertiary education. Across the world, a decades-long trend towards user-paysis now being reversed. It is time for Australia to follow suit.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Bringing the classics back to schools

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 31 October 2017
    9 Comments

    American-British writer Amanda Foreman is campaigning to return authors such as Austen, Dickens and Eliot to curricula in famous schools. But teachers have told her that a generation reared on smartphones and iPads finds such authors too ‘difficult'. So what? is my inward cry.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    The English teacher's drink of choice

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 06 July 2017
    2 Comments

    Paddy was a mediocre teacher, even if that is the unreliable opinion of a colleague who has great sympathy for what must go on in an English class. He had a weakness not uncommon among the literati and which may well have been a reaction to the rigid pieties of his Tory background. In his case, the consumption of alcohol caused him to become tiresomely scrupulous, seeming to lose the capacity for dissimulation and verbal artifice that are necessary qualities for life in the modern world.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Hanson's autism comments miss the value of diversity

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 22 June 2017
    19 Comments

    The mood was subdued at the gates of our small Catholic primary school at 3:30pm on Wednesday. Ten per cent of our school's students have an autism diagnosis, and for their parents who had read Pauline Hanson's comments to the Senate that afternoon, those familiar feelings - dismay at the ignorance and lack of empathy of some people, worry for the future, and defiant pride in their diverse children - had been activated yet again.

    READ MORE