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Give academic excellence a sporting chance : Comments
By Kevin Donnelly, published 7/4/2005Kevin Donnelly asks why the Victorian State Government backs elite sports but not elite studies.
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Posted by enaj, Thursday, 7 April 2005 2:37:30 PM
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Kevin might like to read the posts at
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=3285 before getting to excited about charter schools et al Posted by rossco, Thursday, 7 April 2005 11:07:49 PM
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Enjay's comments have to be answered.
In the studies that you quote what proportion of students were from private or comprehensive schools? In our more "esteemed universities" most of the student places are filled by students from private schools. I'm not talking about Dookie ceramics or Deakin enviroment studies, I'm talking about medicine, law, science etc. This means that your chance of getting into University is much greater through a private school rather than a public school. As a student from an essentially "comprehensive" school all the odds were stacked against me. Teachers who constantly pushed low, poor school discipline, poor selection of subjects and generally low academic expectations. My private school collegues were "spoon fed"(their own words) to get into university. They were pushed into uni. I had to work basically on my own initiative and sometimes even against the advice of my teachers in order to succeed. In a perverse way there is sort of a Darwinian selection process. Those who make it into unis from comprehensive schools have had to crawl and struggle to get out of the bucket while our private school friends are pushed out. Its no suprise that once an equal playing field is established, the comprehensive school kids tend to outperform. I think the fact that comprhensive school kids perform better at university is more a reflection of the student rather than the school system they come from. Posted by slumlord, Friday, 8 April 2005 9:24:38 AM
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Dear Slumlord,
I am sorry you had such a rotten time at your comprehensive public school, there are bad schools of all kinds, public and private, in every system. And congratulations to you for overcoming such obstacles. But, and it is a big but, not all comprehensive public schools are bad, or disadvantage their students. And thank God for that, after all they are the only schools that shoulder the responsibility for compulsory education, surely an important part of our democracy. I send my own kids to a comprehensive, co-ed public school, a school which routinely gets higher HSC marks than its private and selective neighbours. Even better, of course, the kids then go on to do even better at Uni. This school still struggles for enrollments, however, because parents have been persuaded to believe that education is a commodity and the more you pay, the more you get. As to more kids from private and selectives getting into uni; study after study has shown that it isn't private or public that makes the difference, it is social class. Private schools and selectives will always get more kids in because, unlike comprehensive public schools, they can choose who they will and who they will not educate. Obviously, they tend to choose the brightest and the richest. What we need to ask, is with so much good material to work with, how come their results don't stand the test of time? Posted by enaj, Monday, 11 April 2005 11:42:05 AM
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Kevin Donnelly's article is about double standards: why does the VIC government accept competition in sport but not in education? He states his point clearly and supports it with the undeniable fact of the new sport school. The replies posted so far have not attempted to speak directly to Mr Donnelly's main point, so just let me say this: socialism by some weird jump of logic postulates equal outcomes for all, but we are not all created equal in our capacity for different skills and roles. In education, this socialist philosophy of "one size fits all" only leads to mediocrity. The teacher's unions in a peverse display of paternalism, want to protect their students from the stigma of low marks, but only succeed in creating a more potent stigma, that of inability to read, write, spell and manipulate numbers.
Posted by mykah, Monday, 11 April 2005 11:28:16 PM
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I think the real problem Kevin is not socialism but Australian(particularly Anglo Saxon) culture. Coming from a Continental European background it is obvious to most of my cultural peers that Traditional "Aussies" would rather talk sport than ideas. So its no suprise that the Gov of the masses plows money into sports education and now selective sports schools. I mean how many Australians could tell you what Florey did? Or william Bragg? Look at Andy Thomas's recent attempt to get a job in Australia. Yes it is a double standard in this country but one that has its basis in the ruling parties culture.
Posted by slumlord, Tuesday, 12 April 2005 8:02:50 AM
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Interesting that the"one-size-fits-all" schools actually seem to give bright students more of an advantage in the long run.
Such studies appear to show that while herding school kids into ghettos of like with like (catholics with Catholics, girls with girls, the better-off with the better-off, and the academically gifted with the academically gifted, and so on) is great for reassuring parents and passing exams, it has the opposite effect when it comes to actually getting an education and living in the real, diverse world.