Labor's answer to everything is not to reform the union dominated industry, but to throw more money at it.

Thus perhaps you could motivate the kids by paying them for results?

My random thoughts…

I don’t believe discipline is a problem, I believe the teachers’ taking the time or learning the skills to promote it is. We know kids can be little undisciplined spoilt horrors in their homes but act completely and instantly different when placed in another environment. And nah discipline does not require any kind of violence.

Moving children forward in school based on age instead of accomplishment is bizarre to me.

The schools for difficult children in my area cater to boys only.

Why do my latest group of kids know about washing their hands and healthy food choices via schooling but can’t tell me the letters of the alphabet?

I think parents would often prefer the school does not try to parent. I also think teachers would rather teach than parent outside of the kindy classes.

“Most children grow up in couple families — in 2006-07, 73% of young adults reported they had lived with both their birth parents until age 18.”

How can we encourage children to achieve better academic results?

Send them to another country....the academics and bureaucrats here have not got a clue....they do have ideology....but ideology does not build bridges or machinery, it builds dead ends.

Dear Hasbeen,

Misbehaviour and punishment aren't opposites that cancel each other;
on the contrary, they breed and reinforce each other. Punishment
doesn't deter misconduct. It merely makes the offender more
cautious, more adroit in concealing their traces, more skillful in
escaping detection. When a child is punished they resolve to be
more careful, not more honest and responsible.

I remember a friend telling me, "Our teacher gave a long
sermon on integrity. I listened and laughed inside. The teacher
teaches dishonesty and doesn't know it. I was late to school once
because I overslept. The teacher said, "That's not a good
excuse," and he punished me. I got the message. The next time I was
late, I made up a convincing story."

Punishment is pointless. It fails to achieve its goal. No child
says to himself, while being punished, "I am going to improve.
I am going to be a better person - more responsible, generous,
and eager to learn."

How the blind belief in punishment is passed from generation to
generation is dramatically illustrated in Willard Motley's book,
"Knock on Any Door." Upon hearing that his son Nick was
sentenced to death for murder, his father said, "I can't
understand it ... I always whipped him when he did wrong."

Hasbeen, you may well ask, "Don't children have to be taught
responsibility and respect, if not by persuasion, then by
punishment?"

Ethical concepts such as responsibility,
respect, loyalty, honesty, charity, mercy,
can't be taught directly. They are learned in
concrete life situations from people one respects.
One grows into
virtue; one can't be forced by punishment.

Methods of punishment not only fail to correct; they provide
the troubled child with justification
for past misbehaviour and with an excuse for future offense. A teacher's authority comes from
competent exercise of personal prestige and persuasion because
in the last analysis the true disciplinarian is the teacher
who can move children from terror to trust - and inspire them
to want to achieve.

Garbage Lexi, I'm sorry to say.

Punishment worked when I was a kid. I was a bit of a goody goody, & only got the stick once, but it was in the back of my mind when in doubt about misbehaving.

Tough kids, who boasted the stick didn't hurt still became better behaved to avoid getting it.

We have tried all this "nice" persuasive rubbish, & tried it for far too long. Comes a time when those who advocate it must bite the bullet, & admit they were W R O N G wrong. It is a totally failed concept, & the time to abandon it is now, before yet another generation suffers from this foolishness.

A wise man said, only an idiot keeps doing the same thing, expecting a different result from the last time. How much longer are we to be idiots?

We know what worked, it did for decades, time to step back to a proven formula.

Dear Hasbeen,

I can see that we're not going to agree on this issue.
But that's allright. Each of us is entitled to our
own opinion, each speaks from our own experiences
of what we believe works.

To me the essence of discipline is finding effective
alternatives to punishment. Unlike ships, human relations
founder on pebbles, not reefs. A teacher can be most
destructive or most instructive in dealing with everyday
disciplinary problems. Good discipline is a series of
little victories in which a teacher, through small decencies,
reaches a child's heart. A teacher never abdicates his
moral authority. A teacher does not enter mud-throwing
contests with children. Discipline is never bizarre or
sadistic. A good teacher lives by the law of compassion,
even when challenged by children to defy it.

See you on another thread.