THE state opposition has dumped its promise to remove ethics classes from NSW public schools if it is elected, as 57 schools prepare to start teaching the new course within weeks…
In November the opposition education spokesman, Adrian Piccoli, said a Coalition government would remove the classes being offered in schools as an alternative to special religious education, or scripture classes… ”We voted against the legislation, so once the legislation passed through the Parliament there was a recognition that ethics classes are going to be in place,” he said. ”The view was it has been legislated and we are going to allow them to continue. The battle over ethics classes is finished and we will be part of it.”
Note to commenters: Hoyden has had fairly long discussions of the ethics classes before, see related posts below. Many commenters here (of course, not all) would probably ultimately rather see SRE abolished entirely and religious education designed for adherents or potential converts conducted privately out of school hours, and ethics and non-adherent religious studies treated as a regular part of the curriculum (as they already are to some extent).
Lauredhel had some interest comments on my last thread:
If anyone reading knows a child attending the ethics classes starting this term, it would be interesting to hear their experiences. (Privacy concerns permitting of course.)
I’m hoping to blog a little about SCUBA diving here occasionally. I dived on Wed December 29 for the first time in a year and a half (diving is contraindicated in pregnancy and was practically difficult with a young baby to care for and a body rearranging itself too often for a wetsuit fitting).
How did I elect to return to diving? Shark diving!
This is much less adventurous than it sounds, although definitely stressful or impossible for people with a shark phobia. (I’ve also dived with sea snakes—which are, yes, very very venomous, and quite inquisitive and tame so you get very near them, but they’re not aggressive at all—just don’t ever make me touch a slug in the garden because that is my critter limit!)
I’ve been in the water with a lot of sharks: leopard sharks, wobbegongs, Port Jackson sharks, grey and white tipped reef sharks and grey nurse sharks. This isn’t done in cages as you see with great whites, we’re in the ocean together. The trick is the size of the mouth: if a human limb doesn’t fit in there, there’s not much of a problem. Most species of shark are after much smaller prey than humans, the main exceptions are species that hunt seals. It’s also good to know that sharks generally sleep during the day (Port Jackson sharks look like very large cuddly toys, sleeping on the seafloor), and that they find the loud noise of SCUBA rather intimidating, although I have also dived at night when the reef sharks were hunting, but again, their prey is small. (Diving at night, also not as difficult as it sounds, but extremely cool.) I’ve also dived with seals, there’s a fairly simple rule for that, which is that if you notice none of the seals are in the water, you probably ought to follow their example and get out too.
What’s a scary thing I’ve encountered diving? That dreaded apex predator homo sapiens. I was not pleased to find that I’d been diving in murky water below people spearfishing one time. I hope they could see me better than I could see them.
Homo sapiens is of course the big threat to today’s Endangered Sunday species, the grey nurse shark or carcharias taurus. These are big, scary looking sharks (adults are between 2 and 3 metres in length), and if I wanted to impress you with my shark braving skills, I could show you this:
Grey Nurse Shark, Dentition of a Grey Nurse Shark (Carcharias taurus). Magic Point, Maroubra, NSW, by Richard Ling, CC BY-NC-SA
Image description: a grey nurse shark is seen from in front and below, its head and fins lit from below, emphasising the teeth visible in its jaws.
Grey nurse sharks are quite timid, docile sharks. There’s a group living in a cave just off Magic Point at the south end of Maroubra at a depth easily accessible to recreational SCUBA divers. It is a very popular site with divers in Sydney. On the 29th there were five sharks in the cave. We didn’t join them: the cave is a protected habitat. It’s not quite up there with Michael McFadyen’s 2008 sighting of 26 sharks, but more than I’ve seen there on the six or so times I’ve dived the site.
The grey nurse shark is listed as critically endangered on the east coast of Australia, with the population estimated at somewhere around 1000 individuals. In 2009 it was reported (the original article is Ahonen et al. (2009)) that there is also low genetic variability on the east coast and that it likely does not interbreed with the west coast sharks .
Grey nurse sharks are ovoviviparous: they give birth to live young (-viviparous), which have grown inside eggs (ovo-) and hatched inside the mother. The two shark pups a female births are the result of adelphophagy: pre-birth cannibalism. Each of the surviving shark pups has consumed its siblings until it was the sole surviving pup in its uterus (of which the mother has two). This process takes up to a year and results in a reproductive rate that means the return from critically endangered levels is going be slow if it happens at all. There is some research into an artificial environment for the sharks to mature to birth size in. These environments have been successfully tested on dwarf wobbegongs.
Here are two more pictures of grey nurse sharks taken at Magic Point. Doug Anderson took these lovely shots of, I think, the sharks in the cave (the angle isn’t quite wide enough to tell on these two):
carcharias taurus, Maroubra, Sydney by Doug Anderson, CC BY-NC
Image description: a large and a small grey nurse shark, close to the bottom of the ocean, side on to the camera. A school of fish is in the foreground.
carcharias taurus, Maroubra, Sydney, by Doug Anderson, CC BY-NC
Image description: four grey nurse sharks are clearly seen side-on between one and three metres above the ocean floor. The outlines of two more sharks are in the background, in dim light, presumably in the cave.
So there you have it, big, scary looking but not dangerous: a perfect diver’s day out. May their numbers continue to increase and the number of hooks and wounds seen in their jaws fall.
Ahonen et al. (2009) Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA reveals isolation of imperilled grey nurse shark populations (Carcharias taurus) in Molecular Ecology Volume 18, Issue 21, pages 4409–4421, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04377.x)
Ethics classes in special religious education time (SRE) are almost certainly going ahead in NSW, in 2011 at least.
Background: Special Religious Education (SRE) is a period of time, up to an average of one hour per week, during which students at public (government) schools receive instruction in religion from volunteer representatives of that religion. The parents of the child nominate which religion of those offered locally (in some but not all schools, this will be limited to Christian denominations, here’s the full list of approved providers). They can also opt to withdraw their child from SRE entirely, but if they do so the school can provide supervision but not alternative lessons:
3. Schools are to support SRE by ensuring that no formal lessons or scheduled school activities occur during time set aside for SRE. Such activities may create conflict of choice for some parents and for some students attending SRE.
…
10. In times set aside for SRE, students not attending are to be separated from SRE classes.
11. Schools are to provide appropriate care and supervision at school for students not attending SRE. This may involve students in other activities such as completing homework, reading and private study. These activities should neither compete with SRE nor be alternative lessons in the subjects within the curriculum or other areas, such as, ethics, values, civics or general religious education. When insufficient teachers or accommodation are available, the school’s policy on minimal supervision will operate.
…
14. The principal retains an overall supervision responsibility for the conduct of SRE. Class teachers are not required to attend SRE classes, but may, with the agreement of the SRE teacher, assist or remain in the classroom.
The report (PDF, 0.8MB) into the trial classes is available, and here’s some material from its introduction:
The findings of the evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the course in relation to improving students’ understanding and skills in ethical decision making, and the overall appropriateness of the course content, activities and resources and of the associated training. The evaluation also points to the success of the organisational model employed by the St James Ethics Centre, and considers the viability of this model for wider implementation of the course in NSW government schools…
The call for a secular ethics-based complement to SRE in NSW schools is not without precedent, and there is evidence here that secular ethics and SRE can exist respectfully side by side. In this evaluation an attempt has been made to assess the extent to which the ten week ethics pilot provides an appropriate model for an ethics-based complement to scripture, and to do so on the basis of rational argument and empirical evidence. Further decisions rest with the Minister.
There’s been some back and forth since:
The NSW ALP government announced that rollout to schools would commence from 2011, starting with classes offered to Years 5 and 6;
The Liberal opposition, which will almost certainly be elected to government in March 2011, announced that they would reverse this and withdraw classes if elected.
The government announced that the ethics offering would be put in legislation, which will be difficult for the post-March government to reverse without support of minor parties in the state upper house.
My interest in this is long term: I have one child, and he’s a baby. But I am an atheist, and likely under the current system I would opt him out of SRE unless he specifically asked otherwise, and under the new system I would place him in the ethics classes unless he specifically asked otherwise.
I would, in fact, like him to be familiar with the history and teachings of the major religions in Australia. My own schooling was quite indifferent on that front. I attended Catholic primary and high schools, which do not have the SRE system: all students participate in scheduled classroom lessons on Roman Catholic beliefs. (In my experiences, not very robustly taught itself: the doctrinal positions opposing use of contraception came as a considerable surprise to my fifteen year old peers. “Bullshit, Miss.”) The secular state curriculum also seemed to lack much insight into religion or religious influences on culture and politics (and vice versa). The major exception was the Studies of Religion unit in Stage 6 (Years 11 and 12, the final two years); at my school we were offered a choice between a school developed religion course which would not count for university entrance, or the Studies of Religion course, which did. (Stage 6 has been considerably revised since, but this course is still available and you can see the present syllabus.) I attended Catholic schools for thirteen years without hearing about the split of the Democratic Labor Party from the ALP in 1955, for example. The ethics classes aren’t a cure-all for that hole in the curriculum, but they are not intended to be, nor should they be: that kind of material should be offered in the standard curriculum.
What do you think? If you have a child will you or would you have them attend the ethics option in SRE time? Will you or would you volunteer to be an instructor? (The website that is being built at primaryethics.org.au has contact details for would-be volunteers.) I am considering volunteering in 2012 assuming that the classes remain in place and that work and parenting commitments don’t make it impossible (as they likely will.)
Why, I enjoyed those posts (1, 2, 3) in which Lauredhel tried to answer search queries as questions too! So much so that I show up in this site’s logs looking for them. So today, I too become Auntie Hoyden.
Frankly, it appears to me that most people stop here on their way to I Can Haz Cheezburger (funny cat pictures, captioned cat pictures, supernatural macros funny, funny pics), but they also appear looking for soylent green simpsons, any medicine for truth speak and, in considerable numbers, anal sex diagram. (Which is a bit odd, Google finds plenty of considerably more helpful sites for me on that term.)
But let’s see what I can do for you all today, although my specialities are more in the computer line than the sexual health and breastfeeding line that is traditional for this.
pluralising names
Lauredhel observed in 2008 that there’s a construction in Australian English (among others) that allows you to use things like “the Marys of the world” to mean “people like one particular Mary” rather than necessary literally multiple people named Mary.
But if you’re simply interested in how to add a suffix to a proper noun in order to indicate multiple things with that name, here’s a style guide’s answer.
I like openclipart.org for this sort of thing: it’s public domain clipart, take it, use it and modify it without credit. (Not that I don’t also love various Creative Commons licences that do require credit, but dropping that requirement makes using many pieces a lot easier. I’ve seen people who use CC images from Flickr need to put a credits roll at the end of slide presentations.)
Plus! openclipart.org provides SVG as well as PNG. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a free image format which allows pictures to be scaled up in size without loss of quality, as well as down in size. This is accomplished by describing an image in terms of lines or curves (hence, vectors) rather than in terms of individual coloured dots. It’s not very useful for photos, but it’s great for clipart (and fonts, which are generally described in vectors and thus can be scaled up).
openclipart.org has hundreds of drawings of dogs. I’m not sure if this person was looking for a silhouette of a dog, which I couldn’t find on a very brief look, or simply a line drawing of a dog, of which there are many. Here’s a cute one.
snuggle otter
Don’t. We love ’em but that doesn’t make them domesticated pets.
Does she ever. I breastfeed a ten month old baby. When he was little I had a supply suitable for twins, or perhaps sextuplets, and milk was everywhere. Then things balanced out and we had a nice interlude of not spraying. Then he got a bit more distractible, which resulted on the weekend in him getting a letdown, pulling off and slipping so that he headbutted me in the breast and milk shot out for the best part of a metre.
If anyone else wants to grace the Internet with a milk spray story, feel free.
australia’s prime minister 2010 smiling
On the 25th June 2010, one day after becoming leader of the government and being sworn in as Prime Minister, Julia Gillard smiled in the presence of the US ambassor to Australia, Jeff Bleich. This is important, because it was photographed by embassy staff, and as a work of the US Federal Government, it is thus in the public domain and you can get it from Wikimedia Commons.
tigtog asked if someone could do a Friday Hoyden piece on Ursula K. Le Guin for her 80th birthday… last year. Le Guin’s 81st birthday was yesterday on the 21st October 2010: this is going up in time for it to still be her birthday in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Photo of Ursula Le Guin, 2004 (Wikipedia user Hajor, Creative Commons BY-SA)
A little capsule summary for people who haven’t read her work: Le Guin is a novelist, poet and essayist. She is best known for science fiction and fantasy, particularly the six Earthsea books (five novels and a collection of stories) set in an archipelago world with advanced magic and pre-industrial tech; and various books set in her Hainish universe, which is a future series in which Earth, among other planets among relatively nearby stars, turn out to have all have hominid species on them, established some millions of years ago by a still existing ancestral species the Hainish, in a series of biological/sociological experiments. This has allowed her to write, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness, Winter’s King and Coming of Age in Karhide, set in a world of primates with a sort of oestrous cycle in which their bodies can become either male or female, and who have otherwise no gender or sexuality; and The Matter of Seggri, about a world on which there are about sixteen women born for every man, and men are kept apart with their role in society being purely exhibition of strength, sex, and providing sperm.
Le Guin is something of a goto name for someone who wants to make sure their list of Great Science Fiction includes something, anything, by a woman: she’s white, she has by now become a big name and is award-winning and Taken Seriously (see Guest Post by Alisa Krasnostein: The Invisibility of Women in Science Fiction from June). I… do think she’s worth reading anyway! But don’t stop there, I doubt she’d want you to.
I’ve enjoyed Le Guin’s writing for years, but here is her crowning Hoyden moment for me, in a 2001 interview by Nick Gevers, a science fiction editor and critic:
[Gevers asks] Who, for you, are the finest SF authors now writing — both your fellow feminist writers and more generally?
[Le Guin answers] First I am to list fellow feminists and then… non-fellow anti-feminists? Come on, Nick, let’s get out of the pigeonholes. If feminism is the idea that differences between the genders, beyond the strictly physiological, are an interesting subject of study, but have not been determined, and so are not a sound basis for society to use in prescribing or proscribing any proclivity or activity — which is what I think it is — then I probably don’t read any non-feminist SF writers, these days. Do you?
Here’s a few selected pieces of Le Guin’s writing:
If I had to recommend a single piece of writing of hers, I would say that its the short story The Day Before the Revolution (probably easiest to find in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters), which probably benefits a lot if you read The Dispossessed for context first (The Dispossessed is a fine novel, so not just for context). The Day Before the Revolution was published when Le Guin was 45 years old. She wasn’t old at the time, and I am not old yet, but it is the closest I come to understanding how it might be.
Tegan Leach and her partner Sergie Brennan have been acquitted:
A Cairns District Court jury took less than an hour to find Tegan Simone Leach, 21, and her partner Sergie Brennan not guilty of charges of procuring an abortion and supplying drugs to procure an abortion following a three-day trial.
… in his final directions to the jury, Judge Bill Everson said they had to be satisfied the drugs were noxious to Ms Leach’s health, rather than the foetus.
Of course, this does not in any way lessen the need for legal reform in Queensland and NSW, to protect pregnant people and providers of abortion when a pregnancy termination is wanted or needed.
Last year, it was revealed that the residents of St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, who had formed a “Define Statutory” Facebook page that described itself as “pro-rape, anti-consent”. There was a lot of heat around it, and initially a lot of words and not a lot of action. Lauredhel and I wrote about it here last year (University colleges: nurturing a rape culture, More on St Paul’s College “Define Statutory” facebook page).
I’ve been meaning to find out what happened next for ages. Here’s what seems to have happened.
In February 2010, the University Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence announced that the sexual harassment and discrimination policy was being extended to all student residences. (The colleges’ residents are almost always enrolled students of the University, but the colleges are independent institutions.):
[Spence] said his handling of the website scandal… had been hampered by the old policy, which excluded the legally independent colleges, leaving them free to conduct their own investigations without guarantees of an independent inquiry.
”It is fair to say our old harassment policy gave us no teeth as far as the colleges were concerned,” Dr Spence said. ”However, under the new system we definitively would be able to discipline those concerned.”
The vice-chancellor’s office has called for the residential colleges to review their sexual harassment and assault policies as well as student initiations and unofficial activities.
In an email on Tuesday [February 23], Dr Spence told all students that they ”had the right to be treated with dignity and respect, irrespective of their background, beliefs or culture”.
Ruth Pollard, who wrote the Herald‘s original stories, wrote in February that she regarded St Paul’s response as continuing to be highly unsatisfactory, especially in light of the administrations of the other colleges being willing to criticise their own culture:
We received another email from Dr [Ivan] Head [warden of St Paul’s], describing St Paul’s as ”one of the most exciting and stimulating places to live, brilliantly in the heart of the university, fully engaged with every aspect of student life, punching above its weight, moderated by wise and astute scholars”.
Oh yes, and all forms of sexual assault are abhorrent.
Since then, Dr Head says there has been an investigation which included ”interviews with the [Facebook] site administrator who is a former college resident, and a small number of current college residents who had agreed to become members of the site”, but he refused to release the results of the inquiry.
I am not surprised to find though, that there are reports that St Paul’s residents have closed ranks around their college:
First, some history. In 1977, a group of St Paul’s College students at Sydney University held an awards ceremony in which a student who raped a woman was applauded for committing “the animal act of the year”. Then last year St Paul’s made headlines again after a Herald journalist, Ruth Pollard, exposed a “Pro Rape/Anti Consent” Facebook group run by students at the college…
While the scandal has made the students more media cautious, it does not seem to have affected their attitudes towards women. Earlier this year, a number of St Paul’s students planned a musical dance revue number titled Always look on the bright side of rape. The number was canned for fear that it might invite media coverage.
In the end, the villain of the revue was called “Ruth Pollard” and students hissed, booed and threw objects when the character appeared…
I can’t honestly think anything other than that it will be a long long time before college culture changes a lot. There will be a lot of social pressure on and additional harassment of students who attempt to go through the university’s procedures as outlined in their policy, just as there has been of students who have gone through the legal system in the past. College songs, folklore and culture will continue to very explicitly promote sexual harassment and assault. I will be interested to hear if the efforts of the administrations of some of the other colleges are serious, sustained and effective over the next few years.
Blogger Grog’s Gamut‘s legal name and position in the public service were today published by James Massola writing in The Australian. Media editor Geoff Elliott wrote:
IF you are a public servant and blogging and tweeting, sometimes airing a partisan political line, do you deserve anonymity? No.
… if you are influencing the public debate, particularly as a public servant, it is the public’s right to know who you are. It is the media’s duty to report it.
Note the get-out-of-free card in that: “if you are influencing the public debate, particularly as a public servant… it is the media’s duty to report it.” That is, I note, “particularly”, but not “only”, as a public servant. If you are “influencing the public debate”, an action not otherwise defined by Elliott, The Australian is apparently reserving the right to publish your legal name.
I am not entirely sure that Elliott meant my reading, which is that The Australian believes it is ethical and in the public interest not only to out pseudonymous public servants, but probably pseudonymous anybodies, but given the impact of outing, I think the more alarmist reading is sensible: that is, The Australian will out public servants who are writing about political matters (perhaps broadly interpreted) and will at least seriously consider it in other cases.
Institutional power accrues to people who are willing to open most, or increasingly all, facets of their lives to media and public scutiny: their words present and past, their name, their face, their body, their clothes, their family. Who can’t do that? Well, most of us. I doubt even many of the most powerful relish it, but the less powerful cannot withstand it.
But, let’s take it from the top, shall we? As coffeeandink, who was the victim of repeated outing attempts (not by journalists), writes:
Reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet:
Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution
Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence
Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, acquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it
Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers
Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children
Because it’s the custom among their Internet cohort
Because it’s no one else’s business
Nobody’s business, unless The Australian thinks you are successfully influencing public debate that is. Can’t let the less powerful do that, can we?
As pointed out in Tim Dunlop’s comments, journalists are generally supportive of at least some right to identify pseudonymous writers.
Annabel Crabb of the ABC (from three tweets, here, here and here):
I don’t think anonymity should be a right. Disclosure of identity would be a rebuttable presumption in my ideal world… Rebuttable presumption – ie, you should ID yourself unless there is a good reason for not doing so… @TudorGrrrl I totally think there is an argument for anonymity in some cases. I just think anonymity should be reserved for extreme cases.”
Because of course explaining your “extreme case” somewhere where journalists can find it and in sufficient detail that they agree with it is never going to in and of itself identify you sufficiently to put you in danger.
Ben Packham of the Herald Sun (from two tweets here and here):
If you set yourself up as a critic whose opinions are worth listening to, you owe it to readers to say who you are. It’s about disclosure… Identity disclosure also disclosing who you are NOT. ie. not a member of the executive, senior official, someone with an axe to grind etc.
I think that something that is not often recognised in these discussions is the advantages that many people who are able to write using their real name have. Packham is partly right: identifying yourself as being or not being someone with an axe to grind, or party-affiliated, or an infamous scoundrel or a beloved Australian living treasure may well give your words more power or get your argument taken more seriously or at least read more widely. It is not unreasonable to be cautious about the stance of a pseudonymous writer, or any writer who conceals related facts about themselves, but in fact this disadvantages writers using pseudonyms, including those who are not intending to deceive their readers about their interests. The bias is applied already.
There are many ways that the less powerful are silenced, and conflating having something to hide or keep private with being not worth listening to is one of them, and insisting on identity disclosure is another. Not all pseudonymous writers are using pseudonyms to ethical ends, this is abundantly clear to anyone who has ever been on the Internet. But insisting that only those who name themselves and state their interest to everyone who lives in the country can speak is far worse.
There was an idea floated ages back, maybe by tigtog, that it would help people to submit to the Down Under Feminists Carnival if there was a bookmarklet that people could use when they are on an interesting page.
The idea of the bookmarklet is that instead of having to open up a new browser window and go to the submission URL, you simply click on your bookmarklet and it takes you to the submission form with the page you’re already looking at pre-filled.
I finally got around to coming up with one, and I’ve written a generator so that everyone can have their own bookmarklet with their name and email address pre-filled too. I can’t embed Javascript on Hoyden, so you will need to head over to my personal website to generate your bookmarklet.
If you’re having trouble with it or it’s buggy, feel free to post here, and I (and hopefully other experienced Firefox users) can try and help out.
The High Court have ruled that Howard-era laws which close the electoral rolls on e day that writs for an election are issue are invalid… Activist group GetUp! brought the constitutional challenge, arguing the laws effectively disenfranchised young people.
Great work by GetUp!: the closing of the rolls on the day the writs were issued have never been explained as anything other than simple disenfranchisement of young people: Australians cannot be on the roll before 17 and only tend to enrol for the first election they are eligible to vote in, so this has very effectively locked new voters out of at least their first election.
They may also seek a ruling to allow electronically signed enrolment forms: at present the AEC insists on having a physical signature made with a pen, or facsimile thereof (ie, as produced by a fax machine or a scanner).
Update: the AEC has a statement about the decision, and will now inform voters who submitted enrolment forms on or before July 26 that they are eligible. However they will have to make a declaration vote, because the printed books will not include their names:
… voters affected by today’s decision who attend a polling place on election day (or early voting centre) will have to cast a declaration vote and provide an accepted form of evidence of identity. The AEC therefore urges those electors to carry their driver’s licence or other accepted form of identity with them when voting to easily meet these requirements…
Other acceptable forms of ID are given in the statement.
Ethics classes in special religious education time (SRE) are almost certainly going ahead in NSW, in 2011 at least.
auntie hoyden
