Public Address - Hard News (Home)

The cane and the strap | Jul 31, 2007 11:43

In The Fern and the Tiki, his frequently withering examination of 1950s New Zealand, the American academic David P. Ausubel devoted many pages to what he regarded as the cruel and authoritarian approach to discipline in New Zealand schools. It seemed to him that punishment was regarded as a greater end than education itself.

Some headmasters and teachers know and believe in no other form of discipline. They state frankly that classroom control can only be maintained through liberal use of the strap and the fear which this engenders. Hence they start off the school year with entering third-formers by laying a cane on the desk and asserting that they know how to use it. And to show the class forthwith that they mean business, they deliberately make an early example of the first hapless lad unlucky enough to commit a trivial offence.

Teachers such as these not only use the strap routinely for minor infractions of the rules but also for smudgy homework papers and for spelling errors. In some circumstances they openly incite biys to misbehaviour or disobedience so as to have an acceptable excuse for thrashing them …

"Under these conditions," wrote Ausubel, "very little emphasis is placed on self-diiscipline and as a result very little develops," and "once external controls are removed, the entire tenuous structure of imposed attitudes towards work, knowledge and authority tends to collapse."

Thus, he thought, were constructed some of the less appealing aspects of our national character. In Fretful Sleepers, Bill Pearson lamented much the same traits from the inside.

Ausubel copped quite a backlash when he volunteered such views on being asked, inevitably, what he thought of New Zealand - he was a know-it-all American. Ironically, it's a franchise of an American organisation that is now receiving unquestioning coverage on the same issue.

Really, is Family First the new Maxim? The religious lobby group treated as if it has science on its side? And why does it get its logo on the Herald's story conveying its claim that the withdrawal of corporal punishment in schools is the reason for an increase in violence in recent years?

What the story doesn't tell you - and what newspaper stories never tell you -- is that at least some of the increase in the raw number of violent incidents in schools is a consequence of an increase in school rosters; a flow-on from the mini baby-boom of the early 1990s. It's clear enough that there is cause for concern - if violence in schools isn't new, assaults on teachers are intolerable. But the claim that it is a consequence of the cessation of corporal punishment isn't supported by any evidence of which I'm aware.

Corporal punishment in all New Zealand schools was banned in 1990 (we were rather late to the party - every industrialised country in the world has done away with corporal punishment in schools - with the exception of about half the US states, one state in Australia and Canada). If an increase in school violence had been solely due to the withdrawal of the strap and the cane, we shouldn't have had to wait 10 to 15 years for a change in behaviour, should we?

There's a sad memoir of school punishment here.

But what I always think of when this issue arises is a conversation I had with John Godfrey, my old deputy principal at Burnside High. Burnside, now one of the most desirable schools in the country, had been ahead of the curve in abolishing corporal punishment, and he believed it had been the making of the school. When the structured violence of corporal punishment was removed, the overall level of violence at the school fell away dramatically. It became, he was certain, a better place for everyone.

And I think that in general, schools are much safer places than they were when I went. In particular, the pastoral culture of our local secondary school means it is a safer place for my son than some of the more traditional schools he could have attended, where bullying remains a problem. His younger brother has not been an easy pupil for any school to handle, but at no point has that meant he has suffered an assault for who he is. That might not have been the case 20 years ago, and I'm grateful for the change.

Anyway, the Sunday Star Times story on me, David Cohen, our kids and autism is online if you didn't catch it in the paper.

We're launching A Perfect World, David's moving and informative book about life with his autistic son Eliot, next Monday at the San Francisco Bathouse, 171 Cuba Street, Wellington. There'll be an auction to raise money for the Autism Intervention Trust, the Bonnie Scarlets are playing and I'll be the MC.

You can buy your $10 tickets at Working Style Wellington, 8 Woodward Street, ph 04 472 2194 and Millwood Gallery, 291b Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington ph 04 473 5178. Or email rsvp@peadpr.co.nz to reserve tickets at the door. See you there.

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Copyright Amendment Bill latest | Jul 27, 2007 12:14

The select committee report on the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill has landed. It's a mixed bag.

The copyright lobby has been largely disappointed in its bid to hamper the use of digital copies by libraries and archives.

Technical protection measures retain their exalted position under the proposed law, and the committee appears to have had little time for arguments to the contrary. The main change proposed is that you won't have to contact the copyright holder before you can take your DRM'd CD to one of those "qualified persons" who will help you exercise your permitted act.

And, further:

We also recommend inserting new section 226E(4) to ensure that such persons cannot charge unreasonably high fees for such assistance. We recommend the addition of a new regulation-making power in new section 226D(3)(d) that allows the Governor-General to specify persons as qualified persons by Order in Council.

Which sounds mildly farcical.

The format-shifting exception for music will be slightly extended so that you can use a copy made by a person in your household, rather than, as had been the case in the original text, obliging everyone in the house to rip their own CDs. You'll have to delete your digital copy if you part company with the original CD. The sunset clause is gone. And the committee wants the bill amended "to make it clearer that copyright owners always have the option of contracting out of all of the permitted acts."

(Perhaps they should be required to post a prominent warning on the front of the CD -- YOU MAY NOT COPY THIS MUSIC TO YOUR IPOD -- and see how that strikes the consumer.)

Any other comments?

Anyway, got stuff to do, but you may wish to take in The Simpsons on Drugs: The 6 Trippiest Scenes. If, of course, you can bear to embrace such a flagrant breach of copyright.

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TV is social. Already | Jul 26, 2007 10:51

This week's new Pew Survey on online video use is striking, if unsurprising: three quarters of people with broadband connections watch video on the internet. And more than half of those viewers share links with their friends:

Young adults are the most "contagious carriers" in the viral spread of online video. Two-in-three (67%) video viewers ages 18-29 send others links to videos they find online, compared with just half of video viewers ages 30 and older.

Video viewers who actively exploit the participatory features of online video -- such as rating content, posting feedback or uploading video -- make up the motivated minority of the online video audience. Again, young adults are the most active participants in this realm.

So TV, as it manifests on the internet, is social media. Already.

The most popular content? News and comedy, with younger viewers most preferring comedy and older viewers choosing news.

In a closely related vein, this is your last chance to participate in my little online survey about public broadcasting in the internet age. I've had 500+ responses, the results (which I'll make public after the paper is done) are fascinating and the comments are often thoughtful.

And that will do. I have to make a radio show, and then venture out to the only store I've been able to find with a 24" iMac and buy the thing before the drive in my present machine (which has been absolutely hammered at work and play for three years) actually dies. I'd promised the kids we'd get the custom option with the 256MB Nvidia graphics card, but that's looking like a five week wait from anywhere at the moment. And a man in my position just doesn't have that kind of time …

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Phew, what a scorcher? | Jul 25, 2007 11:21

The British frequently seem unprepared for the weather. When I lived there, it seemed that every time it snowed, it was as if it hadn't happened since the Romans were in charge. I slept through the "Great Storm" of October 1987: although the south coast copped the strongest winds in 300 years, it didn't get above 65-80km/h in London, but the upshot was chaos in the city. But it does seem like they've got a real situation on their hands this time.

The current flooding may not be the worst the nation has ever known (property damage was greater in the 1947 flood, which followed a sudden thaw after heavy snowfalls), but the fact that 140,000 households in Gloucestershire alone will be without water services for the next two weeks suggests that it's extremely serious.

Two interesting points stand out from the suffering and damage. The lesser is that the British government has hampered its own ability to respond by breaking up the system. Multiple organisations, including privatised water companies, have co-operated and communicated poorly and, in some respects laid the seeds of the disaster with their own investment decisions. Ministers were warned about this three years ago. With our own extreme weather issues lately, it's a lesson we might want to take on board too.

The greater point is the fact that virtually everyone -- from Gordon Brown on down -- is willing to ascribe this extreme weather to global climate change. I would have thought this was possible but unproven, but a new study -- published with exquisite timing in the latest issue of Nature -- in the words of the Guardian "adds weight to the growing belief that the UK is experiencing a fundamental shift in weather pattern with bursts of extremely hot conditions and almost tropical downpours."

When you have made decades' worth of planning decisions on quite different assumptions (and, say, permitted extensive building on natural flood plains), that's going to cause you some problems.

Meanwhile, as many as 500 people have died in Hungary as a result of the heatwave that is gripping southern Europe. Bosnia and Macedonia have declared a state of emergency. The heatwave, bringing the highest temperatures in more than a century, is the second this summer.

The Indian Express dubbed it "Freaky Europe".

Now might be a good time for Denis Dutton and his chums to emerge to explain again how if global warming is happening (and of course it isn't, you know) it's all good anyway.

PS: Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre goes absolutely postal on The Observer over its mealy-mouthed defence of its bogus autism story. Good read.

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Brimful on the 45 | Jul 23, 2007 09:48

This morning 20 years ago, I left my squat in the Elephant and Castle for an unremarkable train journey of great importance. I was travelling to Reading to uplift my first computer: an Amstrad 512k SD.

A small discount on the purchase was a perk of a job I'd left six weeks before, to tag along with the Chills in Europe and, I told myself and others, write a novel.

A delay in the process had worked out nicely. The day the computer was ready was my 25th birthday. I recall a feeling of satisfaction at having bought myself a tool. I felt older and a little more in control of my destiny.

The novel, which was really more like tracts of impressionistic non-fiction, never got finished, but the attempt was character-forming. Nearly every morning I got up early and wrote on that computer, with its single floppy drive. It was a useful habit.

And now it's 20 years later and I'm 45 today. I have work. It's interesting, fulfilling work and it pays, but there's no goofing off for the birthday boy. My blogging will be light this week. Rest assured that, come the end of the week, I aim to misbehave.

In the meantime, perhaps you'd be kind enough to complete this survey on your role in the future of television, which is connected with some of the work I'm doing.

Then you can watch a clip of some New Zealanders in London finding new and captivating ways to open bottles of beer. I find it oddly heartwarming.

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