In which Sam Wallman expresses a strong opinion about the educational value and social role of private schools.

It is abhorrent and morally indefensible for any government to suggest transphobia is an acceptable practice if you’re rich enough to subject your kids to an educational environment that actively incites prejudice against trans and non-binary people.

If the industrial action is successful, this moment in time will be the beginning of a revitalisation of the teaching profession and public education in NSW. Failure will accelerate the exodus of new and old teachers alike and the coming months will be remembered as the last resistance of unionised educators to a program of austerity that has dismantled public education in NSW over the last twenty years.

The NSW government set the conditions for the slowly spreading recruitment poverty in its own public education system back in 2011, when it became the first state or territory to impose an austerity measure in the form of a wages cap of 2.5 per cent on all public sector employees (including teachers and nurses). This remarkable act of economic vandalism has overseen a year-on-year decline in teacher wages in relation to inflation and the cost of living.

In the long term, schools need to be fundamentally restructured to align with the needs of the communities they serve. The humanistic and economic arguments that inform the way we think about learning are fundamentally misaligned with the social realities many students are faced with.

Far from covering issues such as Aboriginal deaths in custody, disproportionate sentencing and police powers, Australian law schools acclimatise students to accept law's authority without question. Students learn to apply the law to facts, without questioning the law or the facts.

The new curriculum may perhaps disturb the historical amnesia that is a condition for the possibility of settler colonialism, but it doesn't go far enough to truly unsettle it. Achieving that is a different task altogether: it requires prying history from the realm of the discursive and putting it back firmly in the realm of the material.

Radical Hope arrives at an urgent moment in Australian higher education. As the world around us offers countless reasons to be terrified for the long-term wellbeing of universities, Gannon’s transformative vision is a welcome reminder of how radical and consequential education can be.

The costs of what once would have been on-the-job training has been socialised and offloaded to tertiary education institutions, while the benefits of having a ‘job ready’ workforce are privatised. Employers benefit from the training that the taxpayer and the student fund. And they’re still unhappy.

A just education system must serve the joint purposes of providing the skills needed for a radically different economy, and the knowledges needed to make possible, and to build, another world for us all.

Gabbie Stroud’s memoir Teacher is almost militantly unhappy with NAPLAN, and gives it considerably more than a walk-on role. Rather, it is a main player: a powerful, insidious antagonist which emerges, along with other forces of educational standardisation, to drive Stroud in despair from the profession that she loves.

Part of what underlies this debate is that the Yes campaign for marriage equality in 2017, in its most formal organised form (under the banner The Equality Campaign), emphasised LGBTIQ equality in private family life, rather than broader public life. The campaign quite explicitly decided not to defend Safe Schools, gender diversity, or to confront the homophobia and transphobia stirred up by the No campaign.

‘It all starts with learning how to read, to write, to count and to think in the national language. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an important role for culture in remote schools but nevertheless people need a decent education in the national language.’

I am originally from a small provincial town in northern Italy, and one my generation’s last native speakers of a fast-disappearing language, Bresciano, a non-standard variety of Italo-Romance.

We all know that universities produce research like banks produce money. They hoard knowledge, turn it into the ignorance of the rest of society that they might better arbitrate from above. Organise it into disciplined shapes that do not touch for fear that the meeting of different types of knowledge might produce something new, uncategorisable, unassimilable to the corporate plot (‘A thought would be ignited.’).

Public schools rely on the unpaid overtime labour and emotional blackmail of teachers. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve challenged why we are expected to complete an arbitrary task in our own time only to be told ‘we don’t get into teaching for the money’ and ‘we go that step further because it’s what is best for the children’.