I've been very impressed with how Australians discuss issues when I see or hear them on video or audio internet streams from their mass media organizations. And it seems to me that I can trace this spark of intelligence back to the schooling system. I haven't ever observed Australian schools first-hand, but I have learned, that up until now there hasn't been an intense curriculum which teachers are expected to follow. Instead, we see a Montessori ethic of teaching - where students receive a generalist's education. I don't have enough information to offer a proper critique, today... but this new "national curriculum" which is being rolled out worries me. When teachers are given a strict curriculum to follow, they stop working for the student, and start working for the state. All of a sudden, they see the extent of their job as being this: imparting content to students and assessing that content. They will often neglect the things that their department can't really measure as easily - things like nurturing students and mentoring students.

You people in Australia see how folks in the USA talk to eachother on the internet. It's not pretty, is it? People in my country of the USA don't know how to think critically. People are really silly. They don't like to read. They discuss national issues using hyperbolic exaggerations - because they think that they can prevail in a debate, if they are more emphatic about their position.

I chalk up all these effects to the fact we educate our children a certain way. I was observing a sixth grade science class the other day... and I noticed one kid in the class was lolligagging. He didn't work earnestly on the assignments in class. And the teacher's aide was very annoyed that he wasn't following suit with the rest of the class. When watching him more closely though, I saw what he was doing on one assignment where the teacher had them sketch a bicycle which was set on a table at the front of the room. The kids were to label the "simple machines" that were put together to create this bicycle. This boy was a perfectionist... He was doing a work of art on that paper of his. He had the bicycle drawn in 3 dimensions, complete with shadow, and highlight and specular. That boy should have been the jewel in the crown of that teacher. He should have been lauded, and encouraged in his desire to do his best work every time. Instead, he was seen by the adults teaching the class as the problem child.

So this, Australia, is what can happen when you start making your teachers little marionettes who have to present material in a particular fashion. You end up with schools that teach students poor work habits. Kids are taught to do shoddy work, in order to get it in on time, so that they can keep up with the class curriculum. Those who go the extra mile are discouraged. Anyone who has particular talents or gifts is told to set those things aside; those things are treated as "diversions" rather than "real work."

Teachers who are working for the state, rather than for the student, tend to become more distant emotionally from the children. They become less reasonable. They think that their job is done when they have presented the material and have assessed it. If the students didn't do well for whatever reason on the assessments... these teachers are scornful toward those students... as they see the failure as being the student's fault, rather than their own fault. The teachers who are following a mandated curriculum feel far less personal responsibility for the success or failure of their students because they have crossed every t and dotted every i when it comes to following the standard curriculum.

I'm enrolled in the teacher education program at my local university this year... and I am frankly dismayed at how the professors treat their studets - even at this tertiary institution. In my opinion, these professors need to be nurturing and mentoring their students. These people are on the road to being teachers, themselves. The professors need to be looking at the "whole student" - in much the same way that they themselves exhort us that we need to look "at the whole child" when we become teachers out in the schools. They need to be assessing the students in tens of different areas when it comes to how well they work with children in the classroom.

Instead, these professors see their job as being done when they present material and assess how well the students absorbed that material. Frankly, I can learn material on my own by going to the internet, and reading a few books. I don't need a professor to present material to me. I don't want to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for someone to do something for me that I could do just as easily on my own. What I need, is to have real hands-on experiences with children... and I need to have professors who are masters of their trade - who can teach me the tricks of their trade, and show me the pathway which they themselves walked, and which I will be soon walking on.

So... Australia... I can see that you might have a very big diversity in the quality of education in various schools across your continent. And I can see how people would want to fix that, and bring the quality up to par across the board. But please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. A Montessori style of curriculum which addresses the students' passions and interests - and which gives kids a generalist education where all the subject areas are intertwined with eachother is a better system than that which we have in the USA - where you teach material and then assess material - and where the student's passions, and interests and ideas become sidelined.

I am enrolled in a teacher education program at my local university. I see a big contrast with this program I'm in today, as compared with the early childhood education program I was in fifteen years ago at an Oregon community college. Yesterday for the first time, we got an opportunity to go into the campus early childhood center. I was very disturbed with how the child development center was set up, there. The rooms with the kids are on the perimeter, and in the middle there is a large common area, with big observation vestibules which have one way glass and listening equipment. The feeling this gives us students, is that we are being asked to put on rubber gloves before we get our hands into the business of working with children. And, in this preschool, one thing I noted I saw was that there was very poor eye contact between the children and the adult teachers in the rooms. The children looked like they were being herded from activity to activity, rather than being personally and passionately engaged by the teacher.

It's also fascinating to see how centrally important it is to our university department that we get finger prints, and get background checks done, and fill out papers about any criminal convictions we've had. It's very off-putting. It's fine to have these sort of things woven into the process - I understand the concerns about liability - but these things shouldn't be focused on with such incredibly intensity, because you need to make those who wish to work with children feel as if their energy and passion for working with children is wanted.

To contrast this experience with another I had here, in town:

I really liked the kind of warm welcome I got a couple years ago when I walked into one particularly nice elementary school in my town, and offered to volunteer. I immediately was given a chance to talk with the principal (who was on playground duty, that day), and he placed me with a teacher who he knew I would fit in well, with. She is extremely warm and encouraging. My positive experience at that school is actually the reason I'm going back to finish my bachelor's and become a teacher myself. The policy in that school is that anyone from the public can come and volunteer. And as long as they are working in the room with a teacher, they don't need to have a background check. When the teacher wants them to start working alone with small groups of kids, (which is highly encouraged), they need to go get a letter from the police station and bring it in to the administration building. After this, they get a little photo ID on a lanyard which looks exactly like the ones the teachers use. This means that parents really respect you, and look up to you, and ask you questions when they come to pick up their kids. The way this is set up makes for a very nice atmosphere. One of the reasons this school is such a pleasant one, is that they really engage with parents - parents are welcome to come teach little extra-curricular activities, and to come meet and talk with the teachers several times a year at little festive events. Schools should be these sorts of community hubs, in my opinion. It's really a lot more practical for teachers if they have volunteers coming in a lot to help with the classes and to do extra things with the kids.

The last time I was there at this, my favorite school - on my way out, I passed a little class of six or seven kids being taught violin in the hallway... and I stopped and chatted for a couple minutes with them, and the parent volunteer who was leading the class. I had an extra comment I wanted to tell the kids about how best to practice. It's so nice to have a cordial atmosphere.

I'm reading a Noam Chomsky essay today for a lingustics class. It's called "On language and the mind." Apparently Chomsky is seen, at least by academics in the Usa, as one of the most respected thinkers these days when it comes to issues of language, and neuroscience.

I can see why he's popular - he prods you to think in all manner of interesting ways about the elements of thinking and of the brain that you wouldn't have thought to muse about, without his prompting. He's very philosophical in his tone. Everything in this essay reflects speculation. He says, "Since we know x, shouldn't we consider y, and doesn't it follow that z?" It's good for the soul to think deeply about the things that writers like that suggest to you. However, it is not what I would call a "scientific pursuit."

One problem which I'm seeing with many academics, is that they want to approach a subject as an outsider, and try to figure it out in that manner. I would compare that to a person in the 1850s, who had never been to Japan, but who wanted to muse about what life must be like there. The person, with no first hand knowledge will invariably be wrong. The fact that he gets his audience to think about all the possibilities, and all the interesting nuances of things doesn't make him any more right.

If people want to understand how babies and toddlers develop language skills, there is only one way to find out. They have to remember clearly the day to day experiences and thoughts that they themselves experienced in those years of their own lives.

The other classic failing I see in Chomsky's musings is the one which happens when scientists desperately seek out whatever body of data is available and erroneously assume that will offer a direct way to assess the thing that they want to study. Scientists know that they cannot do science without data. So they will hastily seize upon any data set they can get their hands on, without thinking clearly about whether or not this data can actually be used to assess the things that they want to look at. In Chomsky's case, the data set he is fond of is the structure of grammar. And because that is what he is so focused on examining, he jumps to the conclusion that the mind computes grammar as it hears or reads or thinks or speaks words.

I think that this is obviously untrue. I was an exchange student in West Berlin Germany back in highschool, and one lesson about language was hammered in while I was there. Each word has its own qualities and those qualities are known, individually. Nouns, in German are each associated with masculinity, feminity, or the idea of a neutral identity. There is no rhyme or reason as to why nouns are assigned the gender which they are. It's simply a quality that is associated with that noun in the mind of everyone who is raised with the German language. The spelling of words in english is a similar kind of thing. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. You simply associate the spelling with the individual word. It would seem to me then, that the mind has an infinite capacity for words. When you think of a word, the idea of how it is spelled presents itself to you.

Three examples that Chomsky uses in his essay are these simple sentences:

• I told John to leave.

• I expected John to leave.

• I persuaded John to leave.

And then Noam takes the reader into a jungle gym of grammar analysis... where he shows how different each sentence is, although all three appear almost identical. I would say that understanding the grammar is a nice intellectual pursuit, but it is entirely unnecessary for the thinker or speaker. As my linguistics professor pointed out on the first day of class - using language is like driving a car: you don't need to know how the engine works, in order to use it as a tool every day of your life.

The fact is, that words are used to accomplish goals - and there are two sorts of goals - to communicate or to think (Thank you, Vygotsky for pointing this very important distinction out to me the other day in another essay which I read!). Those three sentences above are the type of things you would put together in order to communicate with someone something important. First you simply start with "I" - which is yourself. Then, you use a verb and an object which communicates the specific event that you want to talk about. The predicate "to leave" is like a modular part that can be placed onto any number of different types of sentences. It's handy that our language has such modular phrases like that.

Does a fish know that the water around it is polluted? When there's a medium in which people live daily, it can be hard to see the forces which are affecting your life. This January I have just enrolled in my local university's education program... and one thing I'm seeing straight away is the very profound sexism which the women (even professors) in the program have towards men. When you talk with them or when they're lecturing, it's like you're looking through a glass wall; they're nice people - but they have a very strong stereotype about men in mind which governs their attitudes around them. I think this sexism directed at men is a problem generally in the Usa, but there isn't this rift between the genders in places like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, or Britain.

This sexism expresses itself as an aimless fear of males... for example, you can see that the woman will have a hard time looking at you in the eye, but will warmly address other women. And it also can be seen as an attitude where men are held to impossible standards. Basically these types of unreasonable people will move the goal posts, and so it doesn't matter how kindhearted or civil you are... they will always see you through the eyes of their stereotype.

Of course, the teaching profession in the Usa is primarily dominated by women. Women will teach what they know. No matter how much feminists will try to shout down those who are "talking about stereotypes" - what I see around me is that by and large women are seeking the life of an aesthete. They want to find a husband to share a house with, so that they can have a lot of time for themselves. The women then, as adults, have time to read, and to appreciate art, and to do all those things. They believe in selflessness and caring and sharing. And these are the values that they try to instill in kids in school. Unfortunately, this kind of thing does not prepare boys very well for their future lives as adults at all. Boys, by and large, are going to need to go out into the world when they grow up and be a part of the quid pro quo system of the economy. They are going to need to have the stamina to work 40 hour workweeks their entire life. There are, these days, very few older women who want to date younger men to be their sugar momma. We men don't have the luxury of being aesthetes.

As a boy, I was a devout student (and I use the religious reference on purpose). I believed in all the values that my teachers were trying to instill in us. I remember that middle school was a wonderful time for me, because all of a sudden, we were finally getting on with the task of being real students - something that our teachers had us only play at doing for the previous six years. As I return to the university, and immerse myself in this education program, and as I go out to do my field study at local schools, I reflect on that time of my childhood. I remember how I discovered, as a young adult, that the real world was a very different place. And I was ill equipped to deal with it.

What we need, is for more men to go into the teaching profession. I think that we need to have some effort on the part of community groups to get this happening. Young women have lots of support in this area - mothers and aunts and grandmothers encourage their young girls to consider this career. The only men who seem to enter early childhood or elementary school programs though, are folks who stumble in, after realising on their own that they have this ability to bond with kids.

In the middle school classroom the other day, I saw this same social effect I saw in my peers when I was that age. I saw that the boys were like ships embarking on a trip across the ocean without a keel or a rudder. They were all set to embark on their journey into manhood using the stereotypes of what masculinity is as a guide.

Back on the university campus later that day, I reflected on the fact that young adulthood is that time when reality comes to call, and these men realise that they can't act out in that way that they used to as teens - it just doesn't work in the real world. These men have a rebirth so to speak, as they embark on the lonely job of making a life for themselves.

This past week, in one class we've seen a couple of films on the history of schools in the Usa. The thing that strikes me as the best model of those we have seen in the films is the system pioneered by William Wirt in Gary, Indiana. Kids there learned by doing - and they were engaged in all manner of activities from swimming, to cooking, to doing the school newspaper, to mechanics, and all these other practical skills. Former students of that school system there who were interviewed had nothing but great things to say about the school. It became a model for educators from all over the world. Unfortunately, as is all too common in the Usa, there was an unreasoning pushback from conspiracy theorists who believed that the school was trying to "prepare cheap labour for factories" - there was a riot and that style of schooling was abandoned. Parents wanted their students to focus on book learning, instead. They all wanted their kids to go on to be doctors and lawyers, and such. These parents had absolutely no understanding of how our economy works. Consumers choose which things they will support with their income - intellectual elites don't make that call. There is no way to make a decent income as an artist, or a writer, or a musician. Consumers don't pay for those things. They go to the library to get books, and they download music for free off the internet. Consumers pay for household goods, and heating oil, and car repairs - so that's where the job opportunities are going to be.

This is an interesting npr article about how educated parents are much more likely to have autistic children than uneducated parents:

• Listen to the article at npr.org

The folks talking about the topic come to a conclusion which is a fairly standard misconception: "Other kids must have the illness and are just slipping through the cracks."

I remember at the university, the field that offended me the most was the field of psychology - and especially developmental psychology. There are some really serious flaws in the way that these people reason about how the mind works. The best way I can approach talking about this is to say that the mind is not static - it's dynamic. The mind is not a thing that can be studied like a rock. It can't be broken apart and it's nature understood by looking at its component parts. People are dynamic - they have wills, they have perspectives and worldviews. And they act within that world which they see around them.

The absolutely worst thing you can do to anybody - a child, a spouse, or even yourself - is to believe that the person "has a problem." A hindrance can exist, ineptitude can exist, a puzzle can exist - but to say you have "a problem" is to adopt the belief that you have a quality about your person that makes you unable to excel, or to succeed in your endeavors. And this is simply not true.

The worst kind of problem you can believe that you have - is a problem thinking - a problem with your mind. If you believe you can't think or reason well - that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, so to speak. You need to have faith in your fundamental ability to think, in order to do it halfway decently, and to learn how to do it better. That's how the mind works. Think about this one: if a person were swimming across a lake, and were to suddenly doubt his or her ability to swim - what would happen? That person might drown. If you have no faith in your ability, you cannot pursue the task - and this kind of task is a very important undertaking - and in that case, one's immediate well being depends on keeping your head above water, and reaching the other shore. And so, I reason that placing a label on a child is one of the most abusive things adults can do to that child. Parents need to believe in their children. They need to see them as those who are changing and growing and coming into their own. Now, certainly there are special circumstances where a child has a serious developmental problem - cerebral palsy, for example... but those are very rare situations.

I found this to be a very good mouse, overall. The size is good for my hand. The weight is perfect. The housing is coated, for the most part, with a rubber that feels very good between the fingers. The battery is inserted in a very elegant manner - angled off to the left. My wrist feels very good using it. The catch for the battery/receiver compartment is solid and well designed. The mousewheel is soft rubbery and indexed, and it rolls well under the finger. The range is a little bit weak, I suppose, but you wouldn't notice if you have the receiver close to the mouse; I guess that's what you get with a mouse which is powered with one aaa battery. And I wouldn't want the extra weight and size which would be imposed if it took two aaa batteries.

The mouse has an on/off switch on the bottom - which is very pleasant if you want to make sure to save the batteries when not in use. There is also a button which controls the speed of the mouse cursor - 800, 1200, or 1600 dpi. I'm not sure why mouse manufacturers have felt compelled to add this feature. You can usually easily control mouse cursor speed from the operating system mouse control panel.

The only drawback to this mouse, is that apparently there's some weird firmware which controls the way the mouse feeds coordinates to the computer. If you move the mouse quickly, there isn't a one for one relationship between how far you moved the mouse, and how far the cursor actually moved. It is slow for the first half a second, and then speeds up... The general effect, is that even with varied speed of the mouse on the pad, the mouse cursor motion stays even. It's very odd. My reason for buying a laser mouse was the increased precision I would get from it... and this mouse's motion feels kind of sloppy. Basically, I find that I have to move back to buttons after overshooting them. And one has to move very slowly if you want precision, which I find increases strain on my wrist.

My guess is that because there is some weakness to the mouse's wireless signal, this sloppy motion tends to hide any actual hesitations, which happen because the signal didn't get through immediately.

I've been really keen on Australia, recently. I've become disillusioned with the Usa, and so I've been studying Australia through its mass media offerings over the internet. Australia seems to me to be something of a left-wing paradise, when compared to the Usa. Watching an Australian television program, today: ABC Fora... it dawned on me that there is a very overt tension in Australia between moralists, and those who wish to have more freedom in their society. This was a discussion about the nature of art. And, if you like, you can watch it; I've attached the video to the bottom of this post.

Catherine Deveny is a person I've seen in another ABC Fora presentation recently (where she addressed the topic of abortion)... and listening to her talk about things is like listening to someone from the 1970s or 1980s in the Usa.

She sees herself as an activist for the left wing, for social progress, and for freedom. And her way of being an activist is to lobby for more vulgarity and more shock art.

It's ironic, because the social force which Devany is representing is the kind of thing which actually will move Australia in the direction of the Usa, culturally. I remember when Fox News started broadcasting in the 1990s. Here was an overtly republican and rich person's advocacy news station, which was embracing all of the free sexuality ideology that folks like Devany had been campaigning for since the 1960s in the Usa. Fox News decided to be racy. And this represented a final win for folks like Devany. All of the causes which she feels so passionate about have been won in the Usa. Rupert Murdoch, the Australian, has given that group of people the win they wanted, here in the Usa. But do you know what? The day that Fox News started broadcasting, the right wing in the Usa changed from something that was promoting social conservativism, and community values to something that promoted war, and rampant greed. We saw the dawn of what we now call "neo-conservatism." Rush Limbaugh got on the bandwagon in the early 1990s as well, to promote this new brand of republicanism.

So, in practice, in the Usa, we have seen that when people like Devany won their suit, we had social entropy and a very strong takeover of a form of right-wing ideology. These days, the Usa is the most right wing english speaking country out there (except for, perhaps, India). The Usa is a very selfish country. People here believe that the primary moral imperative is to look after one's own personal interests. People don't have rational discussions about social issues anymore here, in the States. Topics such as politics and religion are off-limits in most family conversations, because they devolve into absurd competitions with nothing but exaggerations tossed back and forth across the table. In fact, it's so bad that children who are very smart and "gifted" often develop social problems, because intellectualism just isn't appreciated in the Usa. Parents don't understand the life arc of these kind of children. People who reason about things are spit on, in the Usa. They're seen as cranks, if they don't go about validating one of the mainstream opinions about some social issue.

So, it's ironic, that people like Devany feel that they have to play this tug-of-war game with what they see as the stodgety Australians.

So I say to you Australians like Devany, who believe peddling vulgarity is the way to social progress. Stop playing politics. Start acting constructively, and building the society you want to create. If you would rather live in the Usa, move there. Here, I'll trade places with you. But don't try to turn Australia into the Usa. Australia's strength is that it is a country where people are intellectually disposed... where they care about eachother, where they have a strong sense of ethics and community standards. Those are GOOD things. And we in the Usa would see them as left-wing values.

If you want to see a way forward, I suggest you look southward at New Zealand. Build communities which are happy, and dedicated to social equality and a diversity of voices. Change your electoral system to allow for a multipolar system where there can be a strong green party, and a strong aboriginal party.

Throwing temper tantrums is not going to produce positive change. I'm sorry. I find myself very much more in agreement with John Carroll in this debate. I'm refreshed that he is dealing with the "elephant in the room" about modern art, which is something that you can't even discuss in the Usa. People never think to point out the things he's talking about, over here.

• Watch the panel discussion (177megabyte mp4)

• Listen to the panel discussion (33 megabyte mp3)

• This is a 24 hour internet stream of "Radio Australia" - from the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC)