"This Bias"

The following is a response to Dr. Mark Lopez's "This Bias: The left wing domination of Year 12 English" which appeared in December's Insistute of Public Affairs Review. IPA's review is a quarterly review of politics and public policy - a good read. The article can be found here.

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Hats off to Mark Lopez in his determination to balance out Year 12 texts. The more of us encouraged to ask questions of what and how young Australians are taught, the better. Year 12 students are tired not only of spoonfed texts, but of school in general. The least we can reward their efforts is with a fresh and balanced choice for their final year or two. But unfortunately, the choices are always made by their teacher. I fear that trimming the list of texts and dividing them equally between Left and non-Left (as Dr. Lopez suggests) will only bring about teachers more readily selecting texts which reflect their own personal political persuasions. The fact that we should feel encouraged to pigeon-hole English literature into their place on the two dimensional political spectrum (which most kids struggle to understand) is worrying. That Dr. Lopez promotes this idea in the name of a pluralist society is weird.

An important question he asks: "Is it democratically fair to those many students and their tax paying and/or school fee paying families to have different views from the politically correct left?". Just as important a question: "Is it democratically fair to have the opinions of young adults decided by compulsory texts and teachers in compliance with current community standards and expectations?". More option not less will bring about balance in the English curriculum. Young adults responsible for their own ideals.

Amongst Dr. Lopez's comments on Hannie Rayson's Inheritance, where he calls upon his obvious analytical ability as evident in his entire article, he identifies a lack of clarity in a mother's character in the play. What he knows "is clear" immediately follows with his astonishment that her son can be a main positive politically correct character in the play and also habitually smoke marijuana. The gate is then opened for Dr. Lopez to interestingly finish his article pointing out examples of drug use in some of the Year 12 texts, and he doesn't disappoint.

To imply that because of these immoralities, the texts do not reflect community standards and expectations (therefore not meeting text selection criteria) is a cop-out. I find it quite refreshing that these days at school kids can learn about drugs in society through other means than those provided by Life Education and Personal Development "teachers".

What kids really want is more texts and their own choice of which ones to pursue. Of course, it would require vastly different teaching methods to accomodate such individualistic study. Perhaps it would see teachers supervising (rather than instructing) their students' critical skills; guiding their students through the techniques required to make ones one opinion validated - despite their choice of text. I think that the result would be a more balanced pattern of study, which Dr. Lopez along with myself, craves. A bonus of this system would be responsibly opinionated students with unique skills.

That sounds pretty good.