Education
Kirk Graham reviews 'How To Be An Academic: The thesis whisperer reveals all' by Inger Mewburn
The idea that academia is a meritocracy in which intelligence and hard work will inevitably result in a long and storied career sounds these days like the foundation myth of a dead religion. Inger Mewburn’s How to Be an Academic is a salve for people such as myself who were silly enough to pursue a research career anyway ...
... (read more)Paul Giles reviews 'No End of a Lesson: Australia’s unified national system of higher education' by Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, and Gwilym Croucher
Ever since Henry VIII plundered the monasteries, relations between those in seats of power and learning have tended to be fraught, since political administrators do not take kindly to scholars thinking they know best how to run their own affairs, and vice versa ...
... (read more)Ilana Snyder reviews 'Required Reading: Literature in Australian schools since 1945' edited by Tim Dolin, Joanne Jones, and Patricia Dowsett
At the heart of Required Reading is a database called ALIAS (Analysis of Literature in Australian Schools). It includes all the reading material prescribed for senior secondary English and Literature courses in most of the states from 1945 to 2005. Like all electronic databases, ALIAS comprises a structured collection of items ...
... (read more)Robert Phiddian reviews 'Speaking of Universities' by Stefan Collini
It stands to reason, apparently, that universities are inefficient creatures that need ever more market discipline and corporate responsiveness to fulfil their potential. After all, what is education but an industry, and British industry is plainly more successful than British universities. Or perhaps not. Stefan Collini points acerbically to the fact that British i ...
Colin Steele reviews 'A History of the Modern Australian University' by Hannah Forsyth
Hannah Forsyth, a lecturer in history at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, begins her first chapter with the words: ‘In 1857 all of the Arts students at the University of Sydney could fit into a single photograph.’ Some neo-liberal critics of universities would argue that it has been downhill ever since. By World War II, Forsyth estimates that there ...
I’ve never looked at a big independent school in an established suburb and thought ‘that’s not fair’ … I look at a big independent school in an established suburb and think ‘that’s a great example’.
Julia Gillard
If Julia Gillard were to drive past the main campus of the Methodist Ladies’ College (MLC), a big ...