Education – Page 4 – Kiwipolitico

March 4, 2009March 4, 2009

Identity politics behind school stabbing?

An article in the Herald gives a clue in favour of what I suspected: that there might be more to the assault by an Avondale College student on teacher David Warren than meets the eye. A few bullet-points below:

Warren was a Japanese-language teacher with a brusque and sometimes offensive manner, who allegedly joked about the Republic of Korea. His attacker ~~was new to NZ and likely unfamiliar with our ways~~ had apparently been here for two years and at Avondale College all of 2008.
Korean students (and I’ve taught hundreds) are quite strongly inculcated to respect and admire teachers. It’s part of their Confucian socialisation. I simply can’t imagine one attacking a teacher, or even speaking rudely to a teacher they don’t know very well indeed, much less while in a foreign country.
Probably the only thing stronger than this is the Korean sense of national pride. If the two things came into conflict, it would have to be a grave insult indeed to result in this sort of response.
Koreans have an abiding hatred of the Japanese, founded (among other things) on the crushing occupation they suffered through the first half of the 20th Century and not helped by a) pervasive anti-Japanese propaganda at home and b) continual denial by the Japanese of any imperial wrongdoing (not unlike their attitude to China and elsewhere).
If a joke was made in the context of the Japanese language, which Koreans were forced to adopt, learn, and use, even to the point of taking Japanese names (not unlike how MÄori was here, though more brutal) about Korea, then I can certainly see it being grave enough.
Students are speaking anonymously about the case for fear of expulsion – WTF? Why does the school get to impose this sort of constraint?
Avondale College Principal Brent Lewis claims to know nothing of the sort, contradicted by his own staff and pupils. I detect arse-covering.
I can’t find any reference to the incident on Korean English-language news sources, but if there emerges a sniff that this may be a matter of national identity, it could turn into a Big Freaking Deal. Especially with Lee Myung-bak here to gladhand and the chance of a Free Trade Agreement being floated. Talk about bad timing. Update: exexpat notes below that Korean-language media have picked it up, with the nationalism line intact.

None of this is to excuse the student’s attack, of course. But it doesn’t look like a random bit o’ violence to me.

Update: The attacker has been named, and a bunch of the details seem to be disputed, see here. I’ve amended the post to remove details which seem to be incorrect.

Disclaimer: Can I be completely explicit for people who are too suspicious to believe or too stupid to read the statement above (which I almost didnâ€™t put in because I thought it was bleeding obvious): I am not trying to blame Warren or defend Chung – I am trying to consider the dynamic in play here. If you attempt to call this into question or engage in any such behaviour yourself, expect to be soundly ridiculed. You might note I’ve tagged this post hate crimes.

February 19, 2009February 19, 2009

Four-day week – analysis?

Since I spend my workday up to my eyeballs in the media, it’s very rare that I watch ONE News Tonight, and even rarer that I come across something I don’t already know.

(Red Planet Cartoons)

Today, I managed to elude the fact that the government is considering support for a four-day week for businesses which might otherwise consider layoffs, paying (part of?) the fifth day’s income, while staff undertake training or community work. Until Tonight, that is. This seems to me an excellent idea, if it can be well-implemented. It accounts for the necessary scaling-back in production which some industries will experience, while subsidising future productivity increases to come from improving the skill base of NZ workers, which means that once the recession passes, the country will be better-positioned to hit the ground running, as it were, and enable the government to pay back the debt which will necessarily accrue from the scheme.

(As a sidebar: that a National government is even considering such a thing represents a huge change in political culture.)

There are certainly pro- and contra- arguments to this sort of scheme which I’ve not considered; as you can tell by the cartoon, I’m not unaware of the general uselessness of make-work-for-the-sake-of-making-work schemes. Friedman’s quote, on the linked site, is especially well-taken:

â€œIf all we want are jobs, we can create any number â€” for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. […] Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobsâ€

The question is one of implementation: what would be necessary for a make-work scheme which results in productivity improvements down the line to be better than redundancy – the consequent productivity increase that brings as they try to better themselves, less the productivity drain they represent, being out of money and therefore not consuming, or on welfare?

This is a complex question, and I invite you to argue your corner. But please, I’m not interested in ideology-bound doggerel of the `OMG statist corrupt meddling communism’ sort, or its inverse – I’m not an economist, but I expect a high standard of analysis, the more formal the better.

February 13, 2009February 14, 2009

Because she’s Indian

Now, I don’t have a Facebook account. I’ll rant to you another time about why I consider social networking to be a form of mass surveillance; just let it be said than before hiring anyone, and I’ve hired a lot of people in the past few years, I check out their social networking pages. But damn, it’s wild what some people will put up there in public.

Anyhow, my wife has a Facebook account, and she just found that someone she knows has a child whose ethnicity is listed on some official form as `Indian/NZ European/Pakeha’, who got automatically enrolled in an ESOL course upon enrolment at some school. Yes; apparently you can get yourself automatically enrolled in a course in school because of your ethnicity. (Think of the possibilities! I’d start with enrolling everyone of `NZ European/Pakeha’ in the full suite of Te Reo MÄori courses).

Apparently she found it pretty easy and reckoned she was the best in the class; she’d been speaking English and nothing else ever since she was born.

Now, there was a fair bit of the old `moribund bureaucratic state schools’, and rightly so. But what I think was grand about the ensuing discussion was that people universally found it absurd that someone would be prejudged on their stated ethnicity. Best quote: “Maybe they could teach her Indian as a second language?”

Good stuff.