Education & universities

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

I’ve never had a fly or maggot infestation in any place that I’ve lived. I wonder if this is down to the more recent trend of no fly screens in new homes, because they come into conflict with trending style choices like…

The 'balance' people think needs to be made between disease control and their social life? We learned how to control disease to GIVE us social lives. It doubled our life expectancy. You don't control a disease by…

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an…

Because elections, which are the adult version of popularity cliques at school, are clearly the best way to select for competence.

SAT scores are used in the US mostly to select people for college admisison. They’ve been in free fall since the pandemic began (circled in red). I don’t know about your experience, but in workplaces I feel a real…

Record crowds go to everything now. An increasing shift in the culture towards trending, viral behaviour. The desire to 𝒃𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆. The loss of shared meanings and stabilised hierarchies through social media…

I’m serious that social media is entrenching Year 9 as our permanent adult culture. This group shows it, and is getting more granular and personal as time goes on, to the extent that some people seem incapable of doing…

You can see the boy racer mentality that dominates everyday road driving on display right now in F1. The new cars are more technical, 50% combustion, 50% electric, and require a lot smarter driving to create, conserve…

One of Europe’s leading AI experts, on teaching his machine learning (ML) course. AI isn’t just parroting humans or playing with words.

Hardly anybody I know found this odd, even though it’s obvious. Societies don’t run on knowledge, they run on social conformity, driven by the desire for status. The principle most use to guide them is: ‘what is…

The only public or even private buildings where this would be allowed. Also the breeding ground for most disease in the community. If schools had the same basic HVAC as all other major public and private buildings,…

Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he…

Trump released one of his ridiculous AI videos of himself as some sort of national superhero. Some in his own party released their own AI-generated response. The wider point here is that we, all the way to the top of…

We watched the latest series of Bridgerton on the weekend. Why do people love period dramas? I think for a reason that links to what I post about a lot. Period dramas are pretty much all about one thing. Social status,…

When collective life is pulverised into a mass of fighting social media teams, fighting for status, the only thing that brings us together collectively is mass trending euphorias. The mad rush to join what everybody…

In many parts of Asia various measures to ration fuel have already begun. That’s because Asia is mostly still run by grown-ups, also why they took Covid much more seriously. Nothing in the West yet because the kidults…

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same…

Everything we label a political problem is really a social/cultural problem. Specifically that adult problems can’t be solved by adults with the understanding and attitudes of permanent teenagers. That’s not just some…

I’d almost forgotten that I once taught at South Sydney High School, when training as a teacher. I had no idea Heartbreak High was filmed there, I might have realised if I’d ever watched it! It was a nice school. The…

Social media has consequences. The wilful destruction of medical research in the US, at a time when medicine is making huge advances against major diseases, is entirely due to the power of health ‘influencers’ on social…

Some deaths hit you hard, this is one of those, for me. David was remarkable, a unique mind who discovered the most astonishing things about how humans work, and shared what he discovered with thousands in his…

Medicare is a universal health care system in name only, since John Howard introduced public subsidy of private health insurance. And that was always the plan, to destroy Medicare, which the Liberals hate and have…

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re…

The over 2000 comments on this one show the sad and pathetic world of the average ‘motoring enthusiast’. Enraged that not only did somebody buy an EV, but a WOMAN did. Outrageous. The guys we all met at school who got…

The disruption to global energy supply is an existential threat, particularly to Western nations, who are energy pigs. And unsurprisingly, what's their level of concern or action? Virtually zero. The kidult 'just…

In a social media culture, somebody has to be to blame for everything, because that fires up the imitative rivalry. The fake debates, the outrage. Like right now, with fuel. The most common explanations you hear are…

Attention is a gift. Most people don’t know how to give it. BY TOMASZ KOPEC3 A good mother doesn’t just feed the baby, clothe the baby, keep the baby safe. She keeps the baby at the centre of her attention. The baby…

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e.…

There have been debates for years between people who believe in ‘socialism’ (i.e. government-led life), and those who believe in ‘capitalism’ (a life led by individuals in markets). And me? I don’t think either -ism…

The head of Australia’s largest super fund speaking the truth about housing that Australians never want to hear. ‘Supply’ won’t fix the housing crisis. Nobody is going to flood the market with cheap houses. It would…

I’m going to give concrete examples of kidult culture, rather than just mention it in general terms. A guy at work bought one of these, a BYD Shark hybrid ute. He’s a car guy, has owned over 20 cars. All combustion…

This guy traces the shift from institutions that build things, which we saw after WW2 in massive ‘nation-building’ efforts. To today, where nothing gets built. Where the main social activity is obstructing change,…

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company.…

Why do I post so much about Tesla? They don't talk about the enormity of what they've done. You don't need to be any sort of fan to appreciate it, it will change the world, all of the world (well beyond cars) and it's…

Is it that hard to see that we actually live inside social media now? It is our society. It’s not ‘about’ it. It’s where lives are lived, inside these ‘vertical’ communities. To the tiniest level of detail. And the…

We live in very idealistic times, where everything is processed through the head and through feelings. I went through school at the tail end of corporal punishment, and was caned several times. it didn’t damage me in…

School uniforms were a way to try to reduce status competition between people, by mandating everybody wear the same outfit. But status won’t be suppressed. Students and parents quickly develop micro-status…

How to see kidult culture. Culture is like water to fish, mostly invisible to those living it. In the 19th century, Jules Verne created magical stories. About travelling to the moon, and amazing submarines exploring the…

The empirical data-based historian Peter Turchin says one of the most dangerous things a society can do is educate most of its young to a high level. (A difficult truth for any educator to hear.) All revolutions in…

Modern conservatives for decades have sold the idea that government is a barrier to prosperity and aspiration. The dreaded ‘red tape’ of government bureaucrats, with their taxes and regulations. They claim to ‘free’ us…

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v…

Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. As a culture, and like most other nations on Earth, we’re dying out. Our birth rates are at terminally low levels. Cost is often given as a reason for this.…

If the polling is on track, One Nation - 53 seats. The National Party ceases to exist. The Liberals become a minor nothing party. Remembering that One Nation is nothing more than the Australian arm of Trumpism. Do you…

It's really something else that there are people out there arguing that this is a bad thing. That we should be polluting more, not less. Because that's what their 'team' demands. Puppets to status games. Nobody ever…

Since the 1990s we’ve lived the disruption of social media to our lives. It’s been so destructive, we’re stripping away centuries of human progress in the space of a few decades. I encourage you to view the current…

The current hysteria over resource usage of AI data centres. Driven by social media, because trending hysterias is its bread and butter. It drives revenue. Humanity has always devoted enormous resources to cognition.…

Something a school kid says. Friends are adolescent currency. Welcome to kidult culture.

I see so many references to the idea that the best thing a person can do for their health is to make sure they have a rich social life. That to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of both life, and how humans work. Of…

And one more viral outrage. To be specific here (outrages never do specifics). This isn’t a breach of copyright, which is only about copies and performances. AI is only learning from existing music so it can produce its…

Kidult culture is right there, if you choose to look. 80% of ticket sales to the new Toy Story movie are to adults. Mostly 34 and below (Millennials), but even couples in their late-50s and early 60s spotted at…

I think the single most dangerous belief humans have is that their desire to form groups and crowds is benign. That it's a warm and cuddly desire to connect and be together. Let's talk about Love Parade 2010. In reality…

One of the reasons discussions about transgender are so fraught is that they mix up two fundamentally different movements. The various sex and gender movements of the 20th century (and before), and the transgender…

Globally birth rates fell off a cliff at the exact moment of the introduction of the smartphone. At the same time the amount people socialise also fell off a cliff. But in reality they were shifting to socialising…

Kidult culture sees knowledge and enjoyment as opposites. Not surprising because kidults equate knowledge with school, and fun with not being at school. All thinking is ’overthinking’, for a kidult. ‘Just Do It’, ‘live…

The purpose of life is not to accumulate experiences. Everything is an experience, it’s an empty concept. It’s to learn to see. To understand, any experience. Experience is not a teacher.

It's like I'm back in high school.

The deliberate conflation of learning with copyright in this debate. Training is not stealing. Copyright is to take somebody else’s work and to use or sell it as your own. But to train is to learn. We have never taxed…

Roads are public infrastructure. They shouldn’t be user-pays. Imagine saying people should pay at the front door of the hospital, or to get into school every day. Fuel excise doesn’t pay for roads. How many times does…

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won…

So often you will see the claim that AI is ‘stealing’ the work of artists, like writers and musicians. I think that’s deeply and self-servingly dishonest. Just as AI doesn’t store words, books or publications and then…

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those…

"Quincy, Washington, is now home to more than two dozen data centers, which pay more than half the city's property taxes. That windfall has bought Quincy a new high school, sports complex, hospital, library, police…

Gen X is realising that the boomer model, where retirement is a permanent travelling gap year, flush with cash and free of most responsibilities, is not going to be afforded to anybody else. The countercultural…

The community is getting more angry, and more violent. Coles workers should try working for a council. The more social humans get, the more violent they become. Unlike the warm hugs idea that being social = people…

Everywhere is getting more angry and violent. Schools are horrendous. See the enormous jump in incidents since Covid 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns are often blamed for this, but it's what people did during lockdowns that's the…

We’re not self-aware, as a culture. Still trapped in the counterculture adolescent protest culture of the 1960s. That’s our culture, just as China is still a post-revolutionary culture, or Russia. It’s just that our…

Modern mobile phones have NPUs (neural processing units) to carry out artificial intelligence/machine learning operations, on the phones. iPhones and Android phones have had these AI chips for nearly 10 years. The…

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them.…

A not spoken about revolution of AI? It’s the only thing in our history to be ‘well read’. That has read most human knowledge, from all sources, including images and sounds. No human has been able to do that since the…

Everything is in the framing. If we see AI as some magical black box that contains 'intelligence', or just statistical tricks, everything we think and say about it will be framed by that assumption. Every time it gets…

I think many teachers would say the real issue is the parents of these children, who (as kidults) still seem to see themselves as being at school, and think and behave in the same way the kids do.…

Those worried AI will make us all forget how to think were never school teachers. Nobody was doing much thinking for years before AI arrived. (Sadly, including many school teachers.) Lots of people copying each other's…

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often…

“To be honest, IQ levels are higher in China than they are in Australia. Most people in China understand the merits and values of an EV, whereas most people in Australia are afraid of electric cars. It’s true, they’re…

Much of what I post comes from the mostly unknown world of governance. What it is that makes it possible for people to live together. It’s not even art, let alone science. It’s a bloodsport with some core insights…

Harvard University’s warning to all of us about brain damage from Covid.

Most have swallowed the PR that there’s nothing that could be done about Covid, that we just have to ‘live with’ it, ‘like the flu’. (We don’t live with the flu, we spend billions controlling it.) Because of such…

Putnam is one of the main people who identifed how societies are now structured like high schools. His work is also a bit famous for showing that smoking and being a social outcast are about equally as damaging to…

My name is now 'Dee' for the same reason teachers aren't allowed to post under their real names. Public (and other) employees are often forbidden from making public comment on public issues. Often by the same…

I think it should seem strange to us, that at the same time the ‘world has never been more connected’, through social media, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That seems like a paradox, but it isn’t when…

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes.…

This again is gig culture. Teen culture. There’s a disaster, and our only thought to what could be done is to hold a concert. There is literally not one other suggestion on the table. The old Woodstock model, still…

For most of history, children were not thought of as a separate group. They entered the adult world from a very young age. When universal schooling arrived, we flipped the world in the complete opposite direction. As…

Humans never agree on anything. They always battle for status, and status is identity. They do it in groups, or teams as I call it, at every level of society, from school through to government and social media. All that…

I get exhausted even watching the curated lives helicopter parenting creates for kids. Trying to create ‘enriching experiences’ for the kids etc. The kids nearly always overly anxious and precious about everything,…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any…

Humanity’s greatest ever achievement was doubling its life expectancy in the 20th century, through public health measures. Trump is going to war on that achievement. The impact will be catastrophic. People defend him…

Trump and others hate what they call the ‘Deep State’. Sounds scary! All it means is the professional civil servants that actually run countries, who annoy popularly-elected dickheads who can barely tie their own…

Privatised public services not only cost a lot more (they’re much less efficient), they don’t even provide the service. This was the reason humans invented government in the first place, to create economies of scale.…

What a window into the mess of our ideas about relationships. I love that many are realising that being alone is not a bad thing. But their reasons here are all about personal development, incredibly self-centred. Being…

The massive shift to private schooling in Australia in the past 20 years was a deliberate policy decision of the Howard government. And what made that shift successful was that it targeted status. That’s what…

Australia might go one better. It might elect a halfwit who wants to spend $600 billion (of your money) on foreign nuclear technology that nobody needs. Imagine the roads, schools, trains, hospitals and affordable…

There have been many criticisms of 'boomer' culture. Nearly always misunderstood as being about them as supposedly horrible human beings. But it's a *cultural* criticism, about a mindset and attitude. About the…

A whole street, yesterday afternoon, people sitting in their stationary petrol and diesel clunkers with the windows up, engines and air con running. That’s the stupid of old energy thinking in one 4-second clip. Lovely…

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For…

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

Let’s say people decided that those who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are supporting the authoritarian Saudi regime and causing dangerous climate change, so others should key their cars, set them alight and abuse the…

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes…

Listen to the almost nervous, long justification he gives for buying the car, and you’ll hear how the choices we make on cars (and everything) are entirely about fitting in to this or that social group. We never leave…

Reading the real life (joyful) experiences of people who bought a Shark reinforces even more strongly how changing a car culture is like deprogramming somebody who's been in a cult. Unbelievably strong forces of peer…

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism.…

No builder wants to build cheap homes because they’ll send them broke. No gas company wants cheap gas for the same reason. This is primary school maths. The LNP has also stopped talking about nuclear, because they know…

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would…

I think all elections are pointless hot air. Strip away all the parties and just look at the material needs of societies, and see who’s actually doing anything about those. I think The Greens have some really…

International students are in the top 3 of export income for Australia. Both major parties targeting them as scapegoats for a housing crisis that has nothing to do with them. Voting causes this, desperate attempts to…

Again, this isn't a fascist State, even one in progress. It's just a circus. Mock and humiliate Trump and his team, don't grant them the prestige of being a fascist anything. They couldn't organise a school fete.

Historically tradies dominantly voted Labor, but were skilfully brought over to the conservative side of politics by targeting young men mostly, with fake wars on women, EVs and utes, Greenies and whatever else could be…

Marshall McLuhan once said “we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” In the same way our own culture is mostly invisible to us, we assume it’s just the way things are. As people who read my…

There was once not long ago no separate culture or space for children. They were just little adults, working alongside adults, at work. It was an entirely adult world. Then we invented schools, and suddenly there were…

I missed this story at the time. Yikes, blows every other deal ever made out of the water. Queen were never the coolest band in the world in their heyday, but the greatest artists create the future, they’re rarely the…

You can see here in an article about Peter Dutton that conservatives deliberately target young working class men, tradies in utes, who historically voted for the ‘Left’ side of politics. Many of these young men have now…

The building industry serving the housing ‘market’ is falling off a cliff. It can be saved if it shifts to building affordable homes for government, to use as affordable housing for ordinary people. But it won’t like…

I'm over people saying 'cheap Chinese shit'. Apart from it being the gutter-level racism you'd have hoped Australia left behind in the 1950s, it's also factual bullshit. China is the world's factory. If something made…

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy aren’t ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist‘, or any of the other dumb -isms we believe in. They’re giant high schools, where permanent…

Covid didn’t end. We’re just ignoring it, as kidults we got bored with it disrupting our ‘fun’, so we decided to let it maim and kill millions instead. Nothing exists in social media society unless it trends. Not much…

Air purifiers are relatively cheap, off-the-shelf devices that should be in every hospital ward and school classroom. I've had one at my desk at work for over 4 years. It will protect you against all airborne disease,…

William Mulready's The Seven Ages of Man, depicting Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage', from As You Like it. The idea that humans go through seven life stages. It's this idea of stages that has now collapsed, into…

Australia subsidises utes and SUVs to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s a big reason lots of people drive them. It’s time Australians went back to driving sedans and station wagons. Both utes and SUVs have the…

One of my mini projects is to explore how all human behaviour is people copying other people, driven by the desire for status. You can explain pretty much everything using that framework, it’s the periodic table of…

Another aspect of kidult culture is the explosion of influencers and their idiot podcasts. I suggest Joe Rogan get tetanus, which will permanently shut him up. Look at the inked and ripped sage here, filling peoples’…

I thought this was the scariest story in the news today. Schools are the thin line between civilisation and collapse. Much of this is the same kidult culture I talk about, kids raised by adults with the maturity of…

The thing that is most popular on social media, sharing information about yourself and what you’re doing, is also the thing that is most damaging to you and others. Some of it is obvious humblebragging, like people who…

Had to do a quick trip to Sydney today, and it reminded me again of how human life is all about status. Driving that Tesla is a wonder of the world. Supercar levels of performance, totally silent gigantic torque on tap,…

I’m sure Australians will respond with the time-honoured public health strategies of more gigs, more flights overseas, and sending kids to school sick and coming to work sick to cough all over everybody else, because…

The marble-columned ruins of ancient Rome are instantly recognisable. They copied them entirely from the ancient Greeks, whom they idolised for their culture and learning, after invading them. It was Romans trying to be…

Know what would have been a LOT cheaper and easier? Opening a window in the classroom before the kids got sick. And sending kids home if there’s an outbreak. You know, disease control, the thing adults used to do.

I noticed yet another symptom of kidult culture this week. A preface, those with no exposure to the front line of classroom teaching decided it was a good idea to give parents a much bigger role in schools. Now ask any…

The prosecution rests. Adulting 101 classes. It’s not about skills. The adult world itself ceased to exist, to use the skills in. Replaced now by social media transacting the personal, social, professional and…

These lists of notable deaths every year another window into the culture that’s invisible to us. Almost entirely celebrities - rock, film and sports stars, mostly. Others from the entertainment industry. Some…

Robert Putnam tracked the shift in US culture from a focus on “I”, to a focus on “we” and then back again, over the past century. What creates a ‘we’ or a ‘public’ is existential threat, in this case WW1, Spanish Flu,…

‘Urging’ will never overpower the most powerful force in the universe. Peer pressure, the need to do what everybody else is doing, and not stand out. Especially when your adult culture is really just an extension of…

When kids learn to ride a bike, it just happens. They fumble around with training wheels for a while and then suddenly their body just knows how to balance and ride the bike. The curious thing about this is that we…

Last week 34 people died of Covid in aged care, in Australia. Tens of thousands now have, in the past 5 years. Nobody cares. If it had been a bus carrying the national soccer and cricket teams, or rock bands on tour,…

Can we take a step back from ‘supporting’ every person’s fantasy life as an actual real-world identity (I know a teacher who thinks he’s a Jedi), and actually unpack the ideas? To cut back on the ‘feels’ and actually…

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of…

One of the things the collapse of our education has created is the misunderstanding of thinking itself. Thinking is a job. Just like plumbing. It has a set of specific skills, that take a long time to learn. It’s what a…

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent.…

Know what social media kidult culture hates more than anything? Knowledge. It gets in the way of opinions and feelings. The revenge of the jocks is underway. Again not an analogy, social media replacing society means…

Lithgow is having one of its annual balls tomorrow night. Will be a fantastic onramp into the school holidays for some I suspect.

An Australian family pays 2% of its annual income to fund Medicare. Right now the same average family is also forking out 4-6% of its annual income, in private health insurance. Do we not see how insane this is? They…

All humans are highly suggestible, particularly kids. If you tell them always their mental health is under threat, they will become people whose mental health is under threat. If instead you fill their lives with…

The level of illiteracy in the Trump administration. Also a window into how populism is really a social movement of people who did badly at school (which is always most people), a revenge of the playground against the…

I often bizarrely get asked if I’m a ‘germaphobe’ because I still mask against Covid. It baffles people, everybody else has stopped wearing masks! Which shows, again, kidult society, where what adults do is just ‘what…

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid is everywhere online at the moment. Live Aid, where the Western world looked at the catastrophe of human starvation, and did what? It put on a gig. That’s what gig culture does to try to…

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the…

A national disgrace. Wipe all of the debt. Boomers taxing education is one reason the young despise them.

Bathurst Our Town doesn’t celebrate the lives of great engineers or teachers or nurses or tradies who die. But musicians, yes. Because they’re like our gods. Kidult culture. What Bathurst Our Town does most is give…

Sudden death of an ex-student this week, early-40s, with lung cancer, barely a week after diagnosis apparently. No symptoms. Appeared otherwise fully healthy. Covid is a potent trigger of cancer of the lung. These are…

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

I think it’s important to close the loop on social media hysterias, because in the middle of them no thought is going on at all. And then afterwards nobody takes stock of what a delusional and hysterical situation it…

Watching the netball, and it was another example of how partisan crowds now are. An entire stadium fell silent because the home team lost. I’m sorry, even when I was growing up that would have been called appalling…

I’ve had a day with multiple reminders of the kidult bullshit those at the front-line of actual provision of basic public services have to deal with. I know it annoys some to speak of kidult culture - well folks, come…

A retired couple who own a $2 million home and with other assets of nearly half a million dollars would still qualify for an annual aged pension of over $41,000 per year. And look at the growth rates along the bottom…

The sooner we learn this, the sooner life gets better. Step off the status treadmill. Leave high school, once and for all. Learn to see status in every facet of life, where it’s often cleverly hidden.

Watch sport now and you’ll have a beautiful window into the culture I post about a lot. The ‘team sports’ culture, really kidult culture, of competing teams battling for status. Not just in sport, in every single area…

Betsey was a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and formerly Chief Economist at the Deparment of Labor. Here she’s noticing the destruction of adult, institutional culture by kidult culture. The enemy is…

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters…

I like sharing this stuff, not because I’m some middle-aged hobbyist but because it shows the brilliant things that are available for us to use today, if we can escape lives enslaved to social conformity. High school…

Here Jessica talks about how doing the right thing is entirely dependent (like everything else) on what’s the most popular thing to do right now. Social status. And that when the tide turns, people will ‘morally…

Thanks to David for this. I’ve highlighted the critical sentence. This isn’t just a cheap shot, this is exactly the cultural shift we’re living. Because societies are social, and use social models, the fact ours is…

Why do I continue to talk about high school/adolescent culture? Again because it’s our culture. Those who don’t believe it, consider this. Humans in the West from the age when they can just walk and talk attend school…

It’s not a change in their personality, they’re just opting out of caring about working themselves to death to support an aged society that denies them basics like housing and education.

Transgender and its politics is really just one more subset of what we call identity politics. And identity politics in turn is the kidult society I talk about, where instead of focusing collectively on collective…

Germaine Greer has more or less retired now from public life it seems, living out her years with her brother’s family in Melbourne. She will always be one of the greatest minds of our time, for me. Always resolutely…

“I’m not the shortest in the family!” has a birthday today. She’ll spend most of it raising other peoples’ children, as teachers do. We love her to infinity and beyond.

What began as a mechanism for ordinary kids to ‘make it big’ in the adult world became just the adult world. Gig culture is over, it just hasn’t realised it yet. It also doesn’t recognise how unusual it is to make music…

If you think kidult culture isn't real, have a look at the total collapse of Australia's world-leading gun control. Much of that is local shooters connected to the rabid gun loons in the US, through social media. Social…

“It's like watching two sides debate the dangers of tobacco while everyone smokes cigarettes.” People should be being vaccinated for Covid twice per year. Instead the vast majority of Australians had 2 vaccinations…

Just had one of these in front of me on the road. Had three bumper stickers, the first said ‘Pornhub casting car’. The second ‘real women don’t have dicks’, and the third ‘real men fish, fuck and drive Fords’. Our…

Paul McCartney recently mocked this song’s meaning as childish and naive. But it’s also a vital piece of evidence for the time that the kidult culture I talk about was taking over the world. Decades of compulsory…

Is our taste in music ‘purely subjective’? Researchers tested this in the early 2000s. They set up a music market of unknown songs and got about 15,000 students to rate them in one of two ways. The first got to rate…

A solar panel that weighs only as much as a primary school-aged child will produce as much energy as 8 tonnes of coal, or 40 barrels of oil.

If we keep mistaking democracy for elections, then the most popular idiots in our societies will keep winning them and leading millions of other idiots to their own destruction, like lemmings over a cliff. There’s not…

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then…

The world is going nowhere in the fight against climate change. This is like an enormous asteroid heading for Earth, as in the movie Armageddon, while we all choose to ignore it and go on holidays. Millions who failed…

Social media isn’t where we go to get information about society and the world. It IS our society now. We live inside it. And it’s structured like a high school. Likes and followers. The transformation of adult life into…

If you’re sceptical status runs all human life, the road should be a great teacher. For example, why is it so overwhelmingly popular to overtake other vehicles, even those doing the speed limit? And why do people being…

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the…

It’s been a lot of years since I first shared this science. I remember the outright hostility I got from some about it. People didn’t want sugar to be bad, like Daylight Saving they ‘like it’, so it must be fine. Humans…

What different parts of the world charge for university education. The Anglo world (the US, UK, Australia, Canada - in pink), really just big nursing homes now in the demographics, unsurprisingly more focused on…

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the U.S. “Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”…

I like Kate. But Kate grew up in a boarding school. All of her own children will spend most of their childhood in boarding schools. How’s that for disconnection. The same parents and families going to war with devices…

What’s happening with Covid right now in the UK is so important to help people understand the mess we’re in. That 10 months of relatively low Covid low levels wasn’t interrupted by a new Covid variant. There is no new…

A measure of just how stupid public life now is, is that we now see the great tragedy of Covid as the ‘lockdowns’ that stopped us going to gigs, restaurants and pubs, on OS trips and children going to school. Over 20…

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making…

The US democratic fallacy winds up again. Create a big crowd and delude yourself this means 'democracy' at work. Everything 'public' looks like a gig. Societies are never, ever run by the people. 'People power' is a…

Throughout history the old had the role of guiding a society, with their life experience. The kidult culture doubters take note. In our culture the old do what many teenagers do when they finish school. They go on a…

When you were at school, the morons who used to occupy most of the back rows in science class, not understanding anything? They now run the world. There they are at the red arrow. Social media gave them kidult power…

Another genius from the back row of your science class at school. These people now rule the world, social media gave them power. You’ll find hundreds of them commenting on every thread on key public issues.

The same demographic trend but now looked at via the birth rates. You can see from the 1970s, fertility rates went into free fall. The 1970s was the decisive shift away from adult-centred life, the countercultural…

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new…

“One of the great divisions of existence is that between people who absorb the learning that lies in books, and those who take nothing on trust, and have to find out the hard way through life’s lessons for themselves.”…

The great swindle here is to make unthinking Australians believe their power price rises are due to renewables. Even a Year 7 science student could find the data in about 5 minutes. The surge in power prices is due to…

It’s belief in ‘the people’ as an actual thing that destroys all democracies, all republics. All populist utopias. Every attempt to lead a society somewhere is seen as a tyranny, against which an insurrection is then…

Nathan’s Tesla has done 404,000 km. The only maintenance he’s needed is some work on the air conditioner, and on the suspension at 345,000 km. He’s paid not one cent for fuel, or on regular servicing. Fuel savings alone…

Still one of the prime kidult things, an entire street full of cars with parents picking up children from school, all with the windows wound up on a beautiful day, with their engines running for the air-conditioning…

This is very common, deliberate behaviour. Men with tiny weenies whose entire identities is tied up in their Tonka trucks, like toddlers in a sandpit. The shift to EVs makes them feel what they are - nobodies. The…

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within,…

Left and Right politics is just adults playing football while pretending to run nations. Institutions run nations. The true story of our time is the gutting of those institutions, led by status-driven revolt against…

Sigh. The wankpanzer effect has hit batteries too. Humans run on status, the home battery program dominated by people putting truly ridiculously huge batteries on their homes, in a pissing contest. I want to leave high…

Could you live in a world without others? By which I mean, not live without other people in your life, but live without the need to conform to the social frameworks they think, act and feel inside? It is tempting to…

From next week social media platforms are expected to take effective measures to ensure people under the age of 16 can’t have accounts. A great idea, it should be extended to all age groups to rescue our societies from…

Car brands are a fascinating study if you want to see how human societies are really just status games. Only five global companies own most of the brands of vehicle that people buy. It’s like laundry detergent, where…

I think many school teachers today would say that their biggest challenge isn’t the kids. It’s the parents. Because the parents never left school, they’re kidults, and they then pass on those mindsets and behaviours to…

Whole nations with damaged immune systems. Norovirus also up 35% in the UK right now. Hospital chiefs say hospitals ‘engulfed’ by winter viruses. Here in Australia flu season (a 'winter virus’) was still going in…

Veteran music producer Tony Visconti, who lived through Beatlemania, describing the EXACT shift the counterculture of that time was. And it had nothing whatever to do with music. Like he says here, until The Beatles,…

I want to talk about the ‘hollowing-out’ of towns, to give more context to my deep dislike of modern travel culture. This is Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds, one of the most photographed towns in the UK. It has…

Work Christmas party today. Hundreds packed into an inside space. I’ll be the only one there in a mask, which many will find weird. Because we now live in a culture where what you think and how you act is shaped…

We’re not connecting with others not because of some epidemic of ‘loneliness’, but because as a culture we’re not engaged in any collective projects. We’re not building a common world, we’re all ‘living our best…

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless…

Robots are going to change the world. For a long time the challenge was making them physically capable of doing complex tasks. But they’ve been able to get them to do even backflips already for years, the challenge…

It's so hard to talk about anything today without people defaulting to their team in whatever fake 'debate' has been set up around it. Like discussing Tesla things, it fires up the anti-Elons and the anti-EVs and…

Australian governments are heading down this same UK path. Huge absences due to infectious illness caused by mass Covid infection being described as an attendance problem instead, as wagging. With ads like these…

When you look at adult life, socially little changes from your days at school. Take the fake debates over EVs, as an example. Grease put to music that cars have always been a key rallying point for particular social…

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are…

“All of this is why governments must invest in long-term strategies for managing COVID into the future, experts say — particularly by introducing standards for indoor air quality. But until then, they say, Australians…

The ‘live with the virus’ slogan has driven a huge escalation in anti-vax beliefs and behaviour. We’re told that vaccinations will protect us from Covid, but nobody is getting them. And they’re also stopping their…

New York has declared social media a public health hazard. Which it is. It’s also a hazard to every other part of society, generating continuous tidal waves of bullshit to obstruct the most basic essential services. It…

I believe Gen X is the last generation for some time who will have the experience of an adult life that is qualitatively different from high school life. And only at the beginning of their careers, now past, social…

A school over 1,100 km from the coast, in the desert, has had to close because of mould, due to sustained humidity this summer. And where did that humidity come from? From oceans that are cooking. I think many really…

The federal government collects more from HECS than it does from the fossil fuel industry. In Norway they tax the fossil fuel industry and give free education to students. We subsidise fossil fuels, and charge people…

Having spent a lot of my working life in universities, one criticism I’d have of O-weeks is that they tend to assume a type of person arriving that doesn’t match a lot of the students who actually do. Much of it is…

This is Widcombe Junior School, in the UK. They raised funds to put air purifiers in every classroom in the school. It cost them 20 pounds per student. Compare this to the national average cost of hiring casuals when…

Lots of sick Covid people today. Start of school has taken what was already a large outbreak and pushed it even further through the community. I'm genuinely curious when people think this nonsense will end, catching a…

Scabies alerts now in schools (thanks Dan). Let's add to the smorgasbord of infectious joys. Big jump in scabies, likely because the neutrophils that your body needs to stop spread are damaged by Covid.

Private health, education, housing, electricity and roads are all catastrophic failures, kept afloat only by huge injections of taxpayer dollars. Let them all live by their beloved market rules, take the taxpayer…

Researchers track climate denialism. It’s shifted now, from denying climate change itself, which has failed, to now denying the technologies which create the solutions, like solar and wind and EVs. Funded by the fossil…

I encourage everybody to pressure leadership of their local schools to do this course. https://www.covidsafetyforschools.org/

Want to see how our clown car approach to Covid has now fucked over all public health? Florida is having a measles outbreak. It's allowing parents to decide whether to send kids to school with measles. If that doesn't…

Hilarious. German farmers want the exact opposite thing to what Australian farmers say they want. In both cases because it means opposing government plans for renewables. It shows that it's all really just about…

The joys that come your way when you fuck your immune system by letting Covid play in it are legion. A new disaster every single day.…

To give an indication of just how corrupt fossil fuel politics is, it's worth remembering that university students pay more of Australia's bills through their HECS payments than all of the coal, oil and gas companies…

I know people won‘t change what they’re doing, because their measure of what to do is ‘what everybody else is doing’. Peer pressure, nobody really leaves high school. I guess they can all go and see the cardiologist…

"Scientists generally advocate for permanent ST, or “natural time,” as Gentry calls it because it better aligns people’s schedules with the sun year-round. “People who study the issue are all in agreement,” he said.…

“It’s not like we’re breaking records by a little bit now and then,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said. “It’s like the whole climate just fast-forwarded by fifty or a hundred years.”…

Here’s how to end Covid. Ventilate schools. Schools are the breeding ground for community spread, because the entire community is mixed there, in its kids, who then take it home. You can see it in the prevalence data…

If I said to you all of the Covid that still circulates in the community has its origins in one place, where would you guess that might be? A hint in the graph. We could fix Covid quickly, cheaply and with minimal…

Most large public and private buildings have full HVAC systems. Not just for heating and cooling, but to also supply continuous fresh air. The one glaring exception? Schools. This is our kids, how is this justifiable?…

A very obvious point not often made. The best way to make everything more affordable for young people is to return the provision of essential services like housing, education, childcare, health and super/pensions to…

I don’t waste a lot of time arguing basic science and engineeering with people, because I know that really most are actually arguing from a political position. Team sports. It’s their lens for everything. If their team…

A friend's daughter, in Year 11, had a catastrophic stroke 2 weeks ago. 3 brain bleeds. Is not expected to walk or talk again. How many Year 11 kids had strokes when you were at school? I'm guessing zero? She's had…

Transgender is the first theory in human history where the test of its reality is entirely social media. It went very quickly from being a fringe (whacky) academic theory in marginal gender studies departments in…

Humans like to form teams, and then to compete with other teams. The underlying principle of all of society, if you look, we learn it at school but our adult lives are this too, whether it's the cars we drive, the…

Every autumn and winter is a gardening challenge, because massive trees over the road in a schoolyard deposit literally cubic metres of leaves up our driveway. Every year I use a leaf blower to deposit them back in the…

"Taxation is not a deposit account that we can draw on to 'buy' whatever service we choose." In this case, talking about the private school argument that says they save everybody money. But also applicable to private…

This is a trend gaining real speed. Child-free spaces, on holidays, in restaurants etc. In societies that already have plummeting birth rates. The focus is recreational lifestyles, free of the ‘interference’ of…

My family are about the only people we know now who still mask regularly. But we’re also free of colds and flu too, never been healthier. And in terms of relative numbers of people masking, 60% of the world lives in…

How social media is distorting and destroying society. 28 women have died from intimate partner violence this year. We got this ‘crisis’ action this week, nearly a billion dollars. I shared earlier in the week that this…

I’ve criticised the use of social media as a personal space over many years. It’s not a personal space, though that’s overwhelmingly how it gets used. Peoples’ social lives are now transacted on these platforms. They’re…

Good. But much simpler to just cancel all HECS debts. If a person earns more because they have a degree (something quite rare now), they already pay more tax. Ridiculous to tax them twice, it’s a tax on education.…

The latest front in the transgender wars in the UK is gender-neutral (i.e. unisex) toilets. Transgender activists want school toilets to be unisex. Many women and girls understandably don’t. And are now called…

Pre-1950, fresh air in schools was prioritised in many places, to prevent disease. Look at those windows. Now the air in schools is filthy. Unflued gas heaters, windows closed year-round, a Covid and flu and RSV soup.…

The brutal reality of adult life is that it’s just high school life, hidden behind fancy words. Take any major issue facing societies, and history shows that no change occurred without disaster or catastrophe. Nothing…

When even the Financial Review is calling BS. This is Dutton’s new attempt at ‘Stop the Boats’. But the majority of voters now aren’t oldies terrified of migrant invasion. They’re younger. Without migration there are no…

Our education is now hopelessly fragmented. You find very few who study both the sciences and the humanities, for example. Or even study either of them. For most of my lifetime Einstein has been suggested as a type of…

SO many people are sick right now. I’ve heard from so many schools in particular who are struggling to even function. The things is, there’s a pretty simple way to make this a lot better. Put 2 or 3 purifiers in each…

The Unsatisfactory Husbands Club. Thought this was very powerful, I’ve posted a lot about love and how little I think we understand it, thinking of it as a feeling. The stories of these couples shows what happens when…

Have a look from 9:30, when the NZ Education Minister is asked about teachers getting continuously sick now from Covid, and their very high risk of Long Covid. The government’s solution? More sick leave for teachers,…

Every generation learns painful lessons, that the passage of time then makes later generations forget. Again, we once knew that the way to fight infectious disease in societies was to ventilate schools. In fact kids…

Here's a new word for a Western world operating at peak stupidity. 'Un-retiring'. I can't imagine massive demand from retired teachers to enter the shitshow of Covid-infested schools, particularly as they're in…

These are the 3 self-proclaimed ‘Great Leaders’ in the world today. What do they all have in common? Their power came from popular revolutions. Populism. People forget both the Russian and Chinese leaders today came…

This is such important research, with implications that go well beyond day care. @[100062898426616:2048:Ben] and @[1748499329:2048:Jane] are right here on Facebook, if it's of interest. Humans are social creatures, it…

Open the windows in schools (and give them proper HVAC too). Schools are the engine rooms of sickness in the community. How is this difficult to understand? This is an entire generation under threat. Fuck what a society.

Nap time, New York school. 1911. Notice how rugged up the kids are, likely winter. Keeping them healthy was considered more important. Back when grown ups ran the world.

People will die rather than go against what everybody else is doing. We never leave high school.

This is a catastrophe that parents, schools and societies as a whole need to act on now. And fast. This is an entire generation. If you line up behind deliberately infecting kids, over and over, which cornflakes box did…

What’s caused the ‘cost of living crisis’? What’s not well understood is that our lifestyles have ALWAYS been expensive. Western lifestyles are the most expensive lifestyles in human history, they’re ruinously expensive…

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at…

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch…

Satoshi is a friend. An emergency doctor working in Sydney hospitals. He’s a great example of how increasingly it’s those who take Covid seriously (including by masking) who are carrying the burden of those who don’t.…

One of the arguments for privatisation is that it saves the taxpayer money by shifting responsibility to private organisations. But the taxpayer ends up paying even more, in user charges. Driving is now much more…

The number 1 place most people catch Covid (or any respiratory disease) is at home. And they catch it there mostly from their kids, who pick it up at school. I had to consider the best way to protect the family in…

An American friend works in the biotech industry. His son just got a ‘mild’ Covid infection. He now has parosmia. Parosmia is a condition where your brain distorts what you smell, in this case his son smells an…

Political strategy 101. Remember at school if somebody yelled 'fight!', how people would come running from all directions? The social group Trump represents doesn't have to fight for anything, they're rich and already…

UK teachers have been in the Covid firing line longer than Australian teachers. But Australian teachers will catch up. It's disgusting how we treat teachers and kids.…

When I was a kid, nobody talked about energy. When Wang opened in 1957, nobody did either. We just left it to engineers to sort out, the best possible power grid for Australia. And got on with our lives. That’s what’s…

The smoke-filled room experiment I think is one all people should know. Because this is the principle that runs all of our lives. Have a watch, it’s short. We think that the peer pressure of school is left behind in…

Parents doing this. Kids as products to be sold. I’m well aware that pretty much everything I post to social media isn’t the sort of thing people log on to see. Imagine turning your own life into a product. Even those…

Nick Cave is not a genius. It’s funny that he thought he was. He’s a very common popular music type, he’s ‘cool’. Just high school life imported into music. The cool at school are nearly always morons and bullies with…

It’s disingenuous to say to young people today that their parents also had high house repayments. The relative price of houses between then and now is literally chalk and cheese. The fabled ‘we paid 17% interest rates’…

When I say people never leave high school, I mean that the social models we learn there are what shape all adult life as well. At least now. And that model is the constant battle for status. Which is really the battle…

Adult life has the same structure (now) as teenage school life. We’re all looking for status, in a group of some kind. To be recognised, accepted, and admired. Tell somebody their favourite band sucks and watch how much…

The most common health advice for people is to exercise, eat well, don’t smoke or drink. But check this. Research shows that people at the lowest rungs of an organisation, with the lowest status, are 4 times more likely…

Public health often uses the same idea of ‘the public’ as shorthand for ‘everybody’. But societies don’t work like that. They run on social status. A tiny handful of people drive behaviours. Take alcohol as an example.…

The cloister is a beautiful architectural invention, seen mostly in old monasteries and also universities, and some schools. (Hogwarts had a cloister.) It’s like an internal verandah, a space between inside and outside,…

This is the UK. The same thing is now happening here. The same people who forced kids to be infected repeatedly in schools with a lethal virus that trashes their immune systems, are now getting punitive when those kids…

Elections are a disaster for democracy. Many confuse democracy *with* elections, but they're not the same thing. Democracy is over 2000 years old, elections are only 100. An election is a popularity contest, used as a…

The crazy thing is, beating Covid is actually quite simple. Covid isn't everywhere, all the time. It spreads from small hubs, where it breeds. Mostly schools. You can see it in the data. Infections take off every time…

In the absence of catastrophes, like natural disasters or wars, human societies just battle each other for status, in status hierarchies. Like we do at school. Only catastrophes force societies to stop doing that, and…

Presbyterian Ladies College, Burwood, is getting a new sporting facility. It will cost $85 million. In a given year the school receives over $10 million in public money. "The sports centre will be the size of three…

A few times this week I sat and watched the traffic. And was amazed again at the sheer number of wankpanzers (big utes) rolling by. A perfect example of how we never leave high school. People own these vehicles for only…

I know Colin, and the course he's created for school leaders is superb. I also know Hayley Gleeson, the journalist, one of the few who sees the complete insanity of what's happening with Covid in our communities. I…

I know the senior doctor who trained Nick Coatsworth. They were once friends. I can’t repeat what he now thinks of him. Just one who found celebrity (Coatsworth now has a TV gig) through a natural disaster, peddling…

Social media makes us think we’re just here sharing lovely pictures and stories about what we’re all doing every day. That’s a trick. Nobody ever enjoyed looking at other peoples’ lives. They only do when it allows them…

The fact people are now doing this into their 60s and 70s, not just when they’re 14, is what I mean about us never leaving high school.

Walking in a large shopping mall in a school holiday is a brilliant people-watching experience. What I increasingly notice is how the mobile phone has allowed us to essentially live inside our social networks now, more…

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled...more and more scientists have begun to research the…

A few notice the transformation of all adult life into high school life. In my 50s I decided to say enough. I now break all the rules of that adult life, probably alienating many I know. I refuse to play those status…

I see reports that Tony Shadie died, my old physics teacher. (Hans Stroeve just confirmed.) Many of my friends would have been taught by him too. Nigel were you in the physics class? I know David was, Lisa I think you…

This is a stock image, the sort of thing billions of people share. How happy everybody looks! Because they’re socialising. ‘Living their best lives’, as we now call it. There’s an uncomfortable truth about socialising…

My RDO today and I’m on school pick up, sitting watching a whole line of wankpanzers with windows up and engines running, to run AC. On a glorious Spring day. Says a lot about the whole culture of those vehicles.

From the UK. Note not one single concern for the health of the teachers. This farce continues unabated, everywhere that prioritises travel and gigs over human life.

To every teacher raising somebody else’s kids today, because the kid’s parents never grew up, I see you. Thank you.

Peer pressure runs societies. We never leave high school. Here's a story that shows it. This is Dan and Fran Keller, from Texas, in 1992. Standing trial for child abuse at a childcare facility they ran. Children from…

Why do monarchies and churches exist? The answer has been forgotten, but is still there. They were human inventions to prevent violence. Left to themselves humans will *always* fight each other for status, in groups.…

We will probably buy a Tesla next year. Because I finished school almost 40 years ago, I don’t play the “we don’t like Elon so you should all avoid him” games. This video is a great set of reasons (there are others) why…

Who would have predicted this? Outstanding. When I was at school, quite a lot of people did subjects like physics. Even people who weren’t really all that ‘academic’. The baseline of expected knowledge seemed much…

One of the most damning indictments of the idea of 'toxic masculinity' is the actual statistics. So much violence against women is domestic violence. Domesticity is the causal factor, specific strains on specific…

I think status is what drives all our lives. Starting at school, with kids negotiating their status there in different groups - peer pressure - and then right through adulthood. The overwhelming thing that drives humans…

I found this story powerfully symptomatic of the times we’re now living in. The total collapse of a ‘public’ anything. People stripping power cables from streets, to sell the copper. Just outrageous, like living in…

Murders his own mother for a life insurance payout he organised himself, to feed a social media-driven status lifestyle. Has a history also of crypto, another get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme, used out of desperation to try…

Social media is so addictive because it’s a poker machine for status. Poker machines are addictive not because you can win, but because you’re not sure if you’re going to win, with each spin. That’s what makes you keep…

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb,…

I'm going to post about this curve a lot. It explains why experts call renewables not just a replacement energy source for the grid, but a 'superpower' source. Students of economics will recognise it as a marginal cost…

New Zealand’s new government came to power with a tired old cliche about freeing everybody from dreadful government. They cut the guts out of public spending. Now their economy is a train wreck. There is no such thing…

This is the cultural shift that’s almost impossible to talk about without people of that age taking great offence. (People identify themselves individually with demographic groups, but these are cultural rather than…

Social media floods the world with shit. ‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But that’s only a symptom. Its real destructive power is to destroy trust. To encourage everybody to think they’re an expert on everything,…

Me learning the guitar, aged about 15 or 16.

The most important fact about human behaviour is that humans imitate one another. Social conformity is the basis of all society. It starts from birth, continues through school, and into adult life. This is an obvious…

Life in permanent high school, Part 347. Rock star dies: “Vale rock star, such a tragic loss.” 77 people die in a week from Covid: “Here’s a pic of us all at the beach!”

One of my hobbies is making ice cream. I use dextrose (which is just glucose) instead of ordinary table sugar, to avoid the fructose which is really bad for you. You can buy dextrose in supermarkets or brewing shops,…

I hadn’t heard of materials science and engineering before I started university. But it’s what I studied. It’s one of the most astonishing areas of research in the world, and the forefront of all engineering and…

I turn 55 this year. About a decade ago I remember a flurry of colleagues retiring at 55, with gold-plated super schemes. The schemes where you retired at 55 at your final salary, for life. Those schemes were quickly…

When I started in the workforce, I was a bit in awe of people in their 50s. They were the ones who knew how stuff worked, who had an authority about them because of their long experience. They were often the calm ones…

Excess mortality is the number of deaths above the usual average in a given year. For the first two years of the pandemic, ours actually went negative i.e. we were healthier than we’d ever been. Now it’s 15% higher than…

Monbiot has had Covid 3 times. Every time, he caught it from a school, via one of his children. Schools are back next week, and guess what government has done to make them safer for Covid? The same thing it did last…

Don't you love how oil companies keep fuel prices high through the school holidays and on public holidays? And look at diesel, often people buy those to use less fuel, but the savings are easily wiped out by higher…

Social media is destroying societies. It sounds a big claim, but only a handful of years ago Trump used it to mobilise an insurrection on the Capitol, in the world’s most famous democracy. But social media’s damage goes…

It’s a show, with a limited scope for what it can do, I know. But the trend it represents, of all of society becoming a giant high school, isn’t slowing. People well into middle-age still passionate about getting drunk,…

I feel for teachers today. First day of term, and very wet. Wet isn’t good, in teaching.

Teachers can probably relate to this. How you help, and then you just need to keep helping.

If you're buying your Year 7 kid a Macbook Pro, you're not only wasting thousands of dollars, you're perpetuating the ridiculous status games you went through at school yourself. The Macbook Air is far and away enough…

A very important discussion to have with your school. A lot of this is simple and also cheap, but isn't being done.

My suggestion is we infect the few teachers remaining multiple times every year with Covid, that should help.

Another corporate ‘team building’ exercise. The people who run and order these are on 6-figure salaries. Indistinguishable from a preschool classroom.

The disaster that people won’t speak about. Look at the collapse in student attendance in schools, driven by mass infection and illness from Covid. Only 42% of Australian kids were at school for more than 90% of the…

Life is a high school (not an analogy). If you think back to where each person (including yourself) sat in the social hierarchy of school, track just how often people retain this same status throughout the rest of their…

This is the first time in my memory that schools have closed in anticipation of a possible fire emergency. Must be a doozy of a weather event coming today.

Regional areas are expected to need another 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are also expected to leave teaching in the next TWO years. Try finding a tradie to do anything without waiting months. This day…

I was 1 when humans landed on the moon. The thing that interests me much more about it now is how society has changed, since then. Look at the pictures of that day in 1969, people gathered around the handful of TV sets…

With the colder months approaching, indoor air quality often collapses to pretty dire levels. It’s one of the main reasons we get more colds and flus in winter, and it’s very dangerous for Covid. A not very well known…

Interesting, so banning from the entire school, or just the classroom? This will actually be a pretty seismic change.

Young people have $74 billion of HECS debt. At a time when housing is completely unaffordable, wages have been going backwards for decades, and the country is desperately short of skilled workers. You could not devise…

Nobody can get staff, it’s a genuine crisis. The thing is, we knew this was coming. It’s demographics. Our population was ageing, and is now old. There are nowhere near enough workers to support that older population,…

I was thinking about how bad the situation is now with maths in schools, seeing Bunnings selling firewood for $20,000 per tonne. Nobody seemed to care.

It’s always surprised me that Lithgow has a reputation for being an unpleasant place to live. The valley is beautiful. It’s also known as a ‘hole’, probably by people who failed geography in high school. It’s a valley.…

Nurses don’t think the pandemic is over. They take the brunt of the lives we choose to live, ignoring Covid. Like teachers, leaving in droves, with nobody to replace them. I saw a great rallying cry at one of the UK…

The older I get, the less driven I am by social life, 'living my best life', all the stuff that gets equated with having a good life. The things that drive me, that I'm passionate about, are understanding things, and…

One of the high schools in Orange is now remote learning for all students years 7-10, apparently. There are no staff available.

Gee you know I’m sure Covid was over. I remember schools closing all the time because of infectious disease as a kid and as a teacher. Pig’s arse. Only 20 years ago there would have been calls to jail people responsible…

Michael is a professor at the University of Oxford. I was very glad he shared this, and not stories about his social life, about which let's face it, who gives a fuck.

Meanwhile in the US (my friends there can give more details), some States are on a book-banning purge. Thousands of books being removed from local and school libraries, with threat of jail for librarians if forbidden…

That word - 'collapse'. It's not just health that's collapsing. It also disgusts me that the main reason medical students don't go into general practice is that they can make more money as a specialist. Don't ever tell…

Any of the passengers in this car could have said ‘whoa, slow down’. They didn’t because they didn’t want to look like killjoys. And so now they’re dead. This is exactly the psychology that is preventing people doing…

A quick Covid guide. 'Mild, like a cold or flu' - moron. 'We have to live with it' - moron. 'Getting it will build your immunity' - moron. 'We'll reach herd immunity' - moron. 'Your immune system gets stronger with…

I’d encourage everybody to take precautions against SIM porting and SIM swapping. Porting: hackers port your phone number to a different Telco, so they can then set up a mobile phone in your name and take your number.…

I haven’t been to a conference in years, and don’t remember learning anything at any of them. Apparently this mass dancing thing is now common. Like being in pre school again. The icing on the cake with this one? It’s a…

We never learn, despite this now being objectively proved, people will cling to Gladys, because they 'like' her. The same way people cling to Trump, no matter what he does. Why I say we're a giant high school,…

Banning mobile phones in schools is a great idea. Though the real problem is the social media apps on the phones, not the phones. And to take it a step further, the disruption those apps cause to education (huge) is…

Fucking politicians. Measles advice out of the UK, for the current outbreak there. Nearly all absolutely useless to prevent the spread of measles, it’s just about the most contagious disease we have. They don’t want to…

Not sure how well known it is that these firms structure themselves as partnerships, like a law practice, to avoid key requirements of the Corporations Act, such as annual financial statements, and audit. (Yep, they…

A tutor at a uni openly admitted yesterday that he had Covid, while sitting in a tutorial room full of students. Wearing a mask, but removing it regularly. I think it’s worth pointing out to people that if you have…

Got that mate who tells you the climate stuff is crap? How confident are you? Were they somebody who even did science at school, let alone did it well? Worth asking.

“Unprecedented is a word that gets bandied around a lot, but it doesn’t really get to just how shocking this is,” says Hobbs, a sea ice scientist at the University of Tasmania.

In some ways I have real affection for schools. I worked in them, and was a student in them. But I now realise they’re probably the most stupid thing humans have ever invented, and may yet destroy us all. I’m not…

People who study the way high school shapes our whole culture made an interesting finding. In most cases, your status in high school matches how your adult life turns out as well. With one interesting exception. The…

And while on high schools. Not an analogy.

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see…

That some NRL players wear headgear interests me. Not sure if they think it protects them from the brain damage many players are now experiencing (it doesn’t), but even if so it shows real grit to go against the crowd…

I’m pretty critical of gigs. To explain why. As a teenager and young adult, I was passionate about them, found them thrilling. Now they mostly bore me. Partly because they haven’t evolved a lot, they’re still using a…

Many living in climate denial have put their faith in hydrogen, to avoid the bog obvious answer right in front of them, of solar and wind. (Actually what motivates them is that they just don’t want to agree with the…

Hands up whose school is doing any of this.

As a kid growing up playing sport, would any coach have tolerated you crying after a game if you lost? Or tolerated over-excited celebration at winning? Remember the days of losers and winners calmly shaking hands after…

Very proud of Molly, who’s about to finish uni with a near HD-average. A wise teacher said to me when I was at school that you can’t judge a kid’s true ability, until they leave school. School is about 90% social status…

This is Ludwig Leichhardt. Famous explorer of Australia. Disappeared on his last expedition in 1848, nobody knows what happened to him. I remember learning about the explorers at school. What's most interesting for me…

Gen X finished school 40 years after WW2. It’s now 40 years since they finished school.

Why regional people are hugely disadvantaged when it comes to kids going to uni. Unless they have a uni close to home with a course their child wants to do, uni is going to cost them a fortune compared to metropolitan…

For my CSU friends, who know it’s not when health care workers train outside cities that they stay there. It’s when the students grow up in the regions, and train there. Very powerful interests in medicine refuse to…

The new Health Minister defends this by saying 'we've got to learn to live with Covid and return to normal.' You hear that a lot, it's a slogan, completely free of any actual information. In reality what's 'normal' for…

Dangerous, stupid times we live in. I skipped all of year 9 at school and barely noticed. This is about control.

If ‘just like the flu’ pressed your buttons, for Covid, here’s the rules for flu and schools, in NSW. None of this is being done for Covid, a much more dangerous disease. I know this likely bores and annoys people who…

The worst possible, most brainless thing to be happening here. The roads will become a killing field. One of these flew past me yesterday on my way home, doing about 20-30 over the speed limit. 3 tonnes of metal, the…

Father’s Day this weekend. There is no harder or more important job than parenting. We idolise celebrities and explorers and rock and sports stars and rich business people. None of that comes close to being as important…

I was taught this too at school, that the earliest paintings of Australia were fantasies, painters trying to make the bush look like England. But the story is much more interesting than that. This IS how Australia…

The average Australian household spends 5 times as much on alcohol, cigarettes, take away food, dining out, holidays and recreation than it does on local roads, water, sewer, waste, libraries, parks and museums. That's…

'Should they still be playing at 80?' is the wrong question. They can do whatever they like. The right question is 'should people have the same passions at 80 as they had at 18?' You can say yes to that of course. But…

An example of what the new AI can already do. The Wharton business school is one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. It pitted 200 of its graduates against ChatGPT (AI software) in a competition to…

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

Teachers are thought of as people who put knowledge in peoples’ heads, like you put fuel in a car. That’s not their actual job. Their job is what holds all of society together. They take a classroom full of people who…

Why social media is dangerous. 1) It creates fake social lives that people then consciously and unconsciously compare to their own. This creates enormous stress and anxiety, as the relentlessly happy and fun posts clash…

And here’s the oil companies screwing everybody again, as they do every holidays. Know what doesn’t change price in the school holidays? Electricity. I like this picture, giving the middle finger to fossil fuel…

Ask for a 10% discount in cash-only shops. They’re mostly doing it to avoid paying GST, they’re pocketing that 10% themselves. GST pays for roads, schools, hospitals etc.

Populism is the political system we now live under. It’s not Labor, Liberal, National or Green. It’s not Left or Right. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a politics that says what is most popular, is right. It replaces…

What’s less known about populism (believing that only what is popular is right and real) is that fascism is just a form of populism. Fascism is what you get if you let populism run. Hitler and Mussolini for example…

At school speech days there are often speeches about leadership. To me there’s only one test of leadership. Are you doing something that’s unpopular? Popular things will do themselves, and need no leadership. Popular…

Society is a giant high school. Not an analogy.

None of this happened before social media. Laurence Fox here, famous Brit actor whose wife Billie Piper dumped him for being an unhinged loon. Social media got to him, as it gets to millions of others. I have close…

When you let pretty private school boys achieve senior positions in Health.

From a story today about schools being closed if they’re in a bushfire risk situation. I want somebody to explain what this parent means by ‘but at what cost?’ That if it means keeping them home for the day, let them…

From the UK. Have a gander at 'illnesses which do not require absences from school'. The Tories have probably terminally damaged the UK, on every measure.

How did we think linking together all of the world's most stupid people into a political force, through social media, was going to end well? The danger is that it has power, Trump's mob for example organised through…

Here's a story of the pandemic that is never told. How we jumped straight from government action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving business completely off the hook. We've had WHS laws for a century that they should…

My politics? Get rid of all elections, all referendums. All political team sports (parties). There are very simple, clear things that need doing to fix our worst problems, none of which need a popularity-based mechanism…

One for science teachers.

Nurses and teachers are being screwed so we get to continue meaningless recreational lifestyles, while somebody minds the kids, and looks after us when we get Covid for the 15th time.

Peter struggling to understand here. We do this because 99% of human behaviour is imitative rivalry. Status games. Keeping up with the Joneses, as it used to be called. I saw it in Lithgow, the rivalry even got locals…

Michael was a film from 1996 that doesn’t rate a lot of mentions, but which I really enjoyed. Travolta plays an angel on a mission. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was his passion for ‘battle!’. That’s what…

Huge decision here. A mother suffering from Type 1 diabetes was told by her local school principal that she wasn't allowed to have her child learn from home to prevent her catching COVID from the school. The Department…

My enjoyment of this reminded Kell that infants and primary teachers have a tough job, trying to make boys grow up.

I’m a Spinozan. Life has only one joy. Understanding. All of our other happinesses and joys are really this one thing, understanding. Love, pleasure, food, travel, music…whatever. All are derivative from this one and…

Molly had her last uni class ever last week. Absolutely smashed uni, blitzed every subject, a river of distinctions and HDs. Never got many awards at school. A typical pattern for the genuinely smart kids, finally freed…

A concerning explosion in ‘mystery’ pneumonia in China, targeting teachers and students most for now. Not fully responsive to usual treatments. As always, I think the mystery is an easy one to solve, immune system…

There’s an oppressive social framework hidden in our passion for music. The economy of ‘cool’. Musical acts are central to the way people shape their social hierarchies. You can see it here in Luka Bloom’s fun take on…

Had another person say this week ‘why are you still wearing a mask?’ They asked in the way I know very well, what they mean is ‘nobody else is wearing a mask, why are you?’ Their measure of what to do is what other…

It’s so accepted now that friendship is a vitally important thing that nobody really questions it. And it is a vitally important part of life, but it has its time and place. It’s also the most powerful way to stunt a…

In this last week leading up to Christmas, where people will want to be socialising heavily, a quick story about the current Covid variant. One of Sydney’s elite schools, which has invested in clean air technology and…

One of my kids gave me a stern look and warned me not to share pictures of them on social media this Christmas. I almost never do that anyway, so it was never going to happen. We’ve raised them well! Transacting…

What do the experts say? Delay sending kids back to school a few weeks until they’re vaccinated. What do the politicians say? I’m sure you can guess.

The ‘Economy’ is the worst it’s been for the entire pandemic. Lockdowns would be less damaging. (There is no Economy, just more proof.) Here’s the thing. ‘Living with the virus’ isn’t the opposite of ‘eliminating the…

Kerry Chant explained the ban on dancing yesterday. When you dance, you mix with people from multiple social networks at once, rather than only with the friends and family you see every day. So it allows the virus to…

School has been back in the UK for about 2 weeks. 315,000 children already in isolation for Covid. Wake up Australia.

If you want a flavour of just what low-life bastards the NSW Government are, this is one of many, many stories I’ve heard about parents trying to buy air purifiers for their kids’ schools, to protect them from Covid.…

Parents to supervise classrooms with mass staff infections. (Let’s see how many volunteer to do that.) Kids to be swabbed twice a week. Come on people, let’s be grown ups. Just as you wouldn’t send kids to school in a…

Kerry Chant: - we don't know when the peak might be - schools will drive case numbers - current vaccines won't make the pandemic end, and - NSW should expect a year of continuing epidemic waves.

Anybody with connections to schools knows how almost impossible it’s been in recent years to find even casual staff to replace sick teachers. Imagine what will happen when Omicron is allowed to let rip, in the schools.

Remember when politicians pretended schools had to be open in a pandemic, because of childrens’ education and mental health? They don’t even pretend that’s the reason now. The PM, yesterday. In the meantime,…

Like all service professions, teaching is treated like dirt. Nobody, not ONCE, has asked teachers about Covid in schools. Just as they don’t ask nurses about Covid in hospitals. Instead we have opinionated…

Over 40 people at my workplace have Covid. Meantime I have some friends who have been allowed to work from home for the past 2 years, or who are retired, telling me the whole thing is not as bad as is made out. I’m sure…

The great public health story of the 20th century was the huge reduction in child mortality. The great 21st century public health story is ‘let’s send kids back to school not even fully vaccinated, in the middle of a…

This will follow the same pattern we've seen in every country overseas. Mass infection, of staff and students. Astronomical levels of infection, if the overseas experience is anything to go by. All because we couldn't…

https://www.gofundme.com/f/fighting-for-covid-safe-schools?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet

In the UK, 400,000 kids are off school, infected with Covid. Some are being infected multiple times. What do we think will happen here next week?

How’s everybody’s kids loving swabbing their noses twice a week and waiting to see if they’ve been infected, and have brought it home too? Fixed the ‘mental health’ issues of them doing a bit of online learning? Get…

“But we’re living – and dying – with COVID, because … well, because the only alternative is more home schooling, lockdowns and closed borders, isn’t it? No, it’s not.”

Week 1 of school, 400 staff out because of Covid, South Australia. Leaders have encouraged us to think this is just a hard period that we need to get through, and then it’ll be behind us. But catching Covid doesn’t stop…

Omicron is the most infectious disease in history. The ‘measures’ the NSW government has introduced for schools are pathetic to prevent it, and are being applied in barely half-arsed ways anyway. As in the US and UK, a…

It should strike us as strange that the only thing children are apparently resilient to in this pandemic, is infection itself. Everything else, like missing school and public health measures to prevent infection, will…

"And perhaps that's what our leaders and academic economists lost sight of. It wasn't the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus."

The NSW Premier has said today he doesn't think they'll bother with school RATs after the first 4 weeks of school. This was their plan all along. Do some symbolic testing when kids went back, to give the appearance of…

P.S. on tests. I'm not sure the people of NSW have realised yet that when the government ends free school Covid testing, NOBODY NOT ON A COMMONWEALTH CONCESSION CARD IN NSW WILL QUALIFY FOR A FREE COVID TEST. In the…

The UK is about to lift all Covid measures, even not requiring people with Covid to isolate. They can go to school, work, shops, restaurants etc. Hooray, you may say. The death rate in the UK for Covid is a steady 200…

Are people still being notified by their school when there's a positive Covid case in their child's class?

“I regret going out when Omicron was running rampant”. I wish that was a more common view. On schools and Covid, the NSW Government published infection numbers at the end of week 1 of term. Since then - nothing. This is…

Victoria had 10,000 Covid cases in schools in the past week. NSW refuses to publish the data.

Yesterday details finally leaked out about Covid infections in (public) schools in NSW. (We don’t have private school numbers.) It isn’t pretty. Over 20,000 students tested positive in the first 2 weeks of term. Over…

So the NSW Government ensures there's no official data on Covid in schools. But social media usually knows. Claims of more than 100 infected kids at Bathurst High School right now. Plus staff.

From social media. The last source of Covid information in NSW. "I’m in Bathurst my daughter goes to Scots All Saints and the boarding house is riddled (with Covid). Same as the boy’s Catholic boarding school Stannies.…

What the graphs mean is simple. Infection with Omicron doesn’t give you immunity. A lot of people say ‘we’ll all get it eventually, let’s just get it over with’. But it won’t work, because you can re-catch it again…

The Premier has announced testing is to end in schools, with research showing transmission has been ‘extremely low’. The research he used ended at the red arrow on the graph below, before Christmas. Do what you like.…

For those keen to protect themselves and the ones they love from Covid. This is a risk guide produced by the University of California, which I think is excellent, to help people assess risk for themselves. Specifically,…

This is how dangerous the NSW and federal governments are. There was no train strike in NSW today, it was an old-school employer lockout. The NSW Government shut down the trains. Why? There’s only one reason that…

I plan to retire at 60. Not to stop working, I’ll probably work more after retirement than before. But work that I choose myself. I’m not happy with the world my kids are growing up with, it seems increasingly…

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the…

Where might all of those 0-19 year olds be catching Covid? It can't be at school, the politicians say it's not spreading there. Must be a helluva lot of kids wagging. Better get the masks off all of them, nothing to see…

For the rich, ‘living with the virus’ is hiding from it on your superyacht, with classrooms for your kids. For you and me, it’s going back to school and work to get infected. We’re dumb because we fall for it.

I should apologise to my friends in advance that I won’t be taking part in ‘normal’ social life until Covid is at some sort of manageable level in the community. I’m not being part of the political attempt to wish Covid…

NSW was averaging 10,000 cases a day, before the masks came off. Already ludicrously high. Now on the rise again. 10,000+ people being infected a day means a community is very sick, and there are in reality many more,…

I won't only talk about Covid, but it's kinda the issue threatening us all. 20-30,000 cases per day projected for NSW within weeks. The NSW Government response? Nothing. They say it's our fault, the community, we've…

2989 teachers in Victoria have contracted Covid in Term 1, so far. School casual budgets are exhausted, and teachers are running out of sick leave. More than 3 terms still to go in 2022. In other news, now you won’t…

Because we follow the UK in our Covid response, have a look at what comes next for schools here. Anything to force schools to stay open, to keep the ‘live with the virus’ rubbish alive.

You’ll hear people say that kids aren’t getting Covid at school, they’re getting it in the community. Have a look at the actual science. On the left, infections in schools (blue line) with no masks. On the right,…

50% or more of parents are not vaccinating their kids against Covid. The same parents who are happy for them to be infected at school. The same parents who ARE vaccinated, themselves. So they’re not anti-vaxers. What’s…

The people who argued here last year and the year before that Covid wouldn't be a problem in schools are now deafening in their silence. Cowards, immoral bastards. What's the government's plan here? You can guess, the…

Queanbeyan High School, which had adopted some remote learning again because of mass infections amongst staff and students, has apparently now been given a directive from the NSW Government to resume normal operations.…

Check out the chuckle near the start when he talks about how QR codes became just a con job, to dupe people into going out again. And how sending kids to school had nothing to do with education or children at all, it…

I wish the election would hurry up and get here. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/education-minister-blames-dud-teachers-for-declining-education-results-20220317-p5a5k6.html

‘We can’t live like this forever’ was one of the lines used to justify opening up NSW to mass infection. But economically we’re still behind 2021, so no forward progress at all. And huge numbers needlessly infected with…

An important thing to look out for when you’re doing RATs. As our immunity grows through vaccination and infection, we’re starting to get Covid symptoms much earlier than we did before. Previously people often had Covid…

How are peoples’ schools and workplaces going with Covid infections? Social media should be telling this story every day. It’s not being reported elsewhere.

Have posted before about how society is a high school, and how all adult life is being consumed by adolescence as a cultural model. (This is something researchers actually study.) A perfect illustration of this is the…

Imagine a school assembly, where a boy storms the stage to punch out another boy who he says has disrespected his girlfriend. Reckon the teachers would give him a standing ovation?

I still don't think many, even most, people realise just how much we're destroying our own society, right now. They act as if we can constantly run our hospitals, schools and everything else in emergency mode. Terrible,…

I put this in the category of stuff you REALLY need to know. Something that isn't said in public discussion, that I've seen, is that for a long list of workers (below), if you catch Covid-19 it is PRESUMED in law that…

The UK, always our future. Send the kids to school with Covid. In the past you wouldn't get this advice even for a cold.

Do you reckon before you award wealthy Australians tax cuts worth $184 billion, you should first check if every school, hospital, road, river, sewer, NBN connection, women’s shelter, legal aid program etc. has all the…

I strongly encourage anybody who has contracted Covid in some way via a school, including your kids being infected, to register your interest with this class action. Won't cost you a cent, the litigation firm does all…

Good on Michael for peeling away the happy clappy Covid is over bullshit. Wait until young kids start needing liver transplants here, or die from Covid-hepatitis, as is happening overseas now. Will we still put…

Yesterday the PM called basic checks and balances on political power 'public autocracy'. He's been running the (Trump) line that once somebody is elected, they have a 'mandate' to do anything they like. This is what…

Worldwide children are experiencing a surge in hepatitis cases, some needing liver transplants, and some dying. It’s extraordinary watching the frantic attempt by Covid minimisers to deny Covid is responsible. The…

Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, his look at the ‘far Right’, is compulsive viewing. To me it shows how boys have been left behind in our thinking. Young men have been weaponised by politics, because they lack role…

Maybe we shouldn't be letting kids catch Covid, hey. What do we hear from Australian leaders and most Australians? Nothing. Sending them all to school to get infected. Photos of what you did on holiday or the weekend…

The problem with democracy as we do it is, that it pays no attention to basic competence. If you go for a job interview or have a performance appraisal at work, how good you actually are at the job is critical. If you…

A large chickenpox outbreak in the Netherlands seems almost certainly to have actually been monkeypox. I’m sure our Premier will keep the schools open anyway, so coffee shops and gyms don’t go broke. Because that’s what…

Just in case you thought it had all magically gone away. Another 30 dead today, significantly more than those shot dead in a school yesterday in the US. In total 90 already dead this week in NSW alone.

Working from home and learning from home are now (apparently) bad. But DIY healthcare from home, with a potentially fatal disease, is good. This is Australia, 2022. Where public health is run by the business community.

I’ve run out of words for the disgust I feel about what’s happening in schools.

I have never known the Australian community to be as sick as it is right now. The amount of infection and other health issues out there is staggering. You can’t do even the most basic, social, work or school thing…

Millions of COVID-19 patients may have an undiagnosed, potentially fatal acute kidney disease, according to a new study. University of Queensland researchers say one in five virus patients admitted to hospital and two…

What’s going on in schools and hospitals is a national emergency. It’s hard to know how this all ends, we’re not the country we once were. This is the result of decades of gutting public services and institutions in…

An ED department in an Australian hospital right now. A major metropolitan hospital. Schools are even worse, some have 35 classes without teachers on a given day. Society is falling apart.

I think maybe teachers look at stuff like this and feel the break down of societies faster than others. They see the problems coming, earlier.

Life is (literally) a big high school. The pandemic proves it. Many prefer illness and dying, to being unpopular.

Again a shame that those here from the past 2 years advocating getting kids back to school no matter the Covid risk have now gone quiet. People forgot that we didn’t allow kids at school for much less serious diseases.…

This shows how many people are being reinfected with Covid, in the UK. So they've had Covid before, this is their 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. infection. Huge skewing to children, because we're sending them to school with almost…

Remember the people who said kids needed to get back in school during a pandemic for their 'mental health'? Reckon they ever went to school?

When politicians ‘opened up’ to Covid, vaccinations stopped. Stone dead. And less than half of us went to get a free flu shot since then. And now stories like this. People are not seeing the bigger picture here I don’t…

Only 33 dead listed yesterday, in NSW, about a big classroom full of kids. ‘Tis but a scratch.

James Lovelock died on Tuesday, on his 103rd birthday. People may have heard of Gaia, the idea he developed together with Lynn Margulis. Often misunderstood as saying the Earth is alive, a superorganism. What they were…

Kids don’t catch Covid at school, how often did we hear that.

Grease is a script high school teachers see all the time. Where smart girls decide the best way to keep the ‘bad boys’ they can’t resist on the leash is to mirror them. Some do it for an entire lifetime, consoling…

The whole world is short of teachers. Supply and demand means they'll pay them more to attract more people to the profession, right? Pig's arse.

Did you know that, well before the pandemic (2015), about 1 in 7 Australian girls aged 12-17 had contemplated suicide, and about 1 in 20 had actually tried to kill themselves? What did the people now making lots of…

In the US, parents of pre-schoolers having a working bee to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to protect their kids from Covid. Corsi, an engineer and Rosenthal, a producer of air conditioning filters, designed these as a very…

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see…

Many boomers get very upset at the idea of intergenerational injustice. They seem incapable of understanding privilege, and how you can still be a nice person, but privileged. I think I’m a nice person, but I know I…

The greatest epidemic of all time is likely the heart disease epidemic of the 20th century. Took off early in the century, peaked about the 1960s, and in decline ever since. The usual explanation for this is we ate bad…

I think heat pumps are incredibly sexy. They can deliver up to 15 times as much energy as they consume. Which makes them actual producers of renewable energy. A country can cut its entire energy bill literally in half…

In the pandemic Australia has sacked over 40,000 of the smart people who do this sort of work. Meantime TAFE will again be free, to fund the desperate shortage of tradies, a shortage that’s mostly an already bloated…

I’ve never been comfortable with children driving cars, children having children, or children drinking alcohol. Makes me sound old-fashioned, but actually it’s just that I was a teacher too, and saw firsthand how…

I’m a fan of the monarchy. What I think is so important about it is two things mostly, one being that it’s a form of government that puts custom and tradition at the heart of what we do. Institutions. The second being…

Public schools often don't understand public messaging. Take Bathurst High, which proudly displays signs saying 'Safe, Respectful, Learners'. I'd bet most people when reading that will think 'hmm, they've had problems…

If there is a meaning to life, it’s pretty simple I think. Raise the next generation. If you don’t have kids, do everything you can to help society raise them. No civilisation that makes raising the next generation a…

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me.…

Finally free of Tony Abbott’s string and tin can internet. Fibre to the home is glorious. Thanks to cable guru Russell Commins! I made no comments about Daylight Saving this year, because Covid came along and showed DST…

The real reason most people won’t wear masks or take Covid precautions is that the majority of people are followers, they follow others in deciding what to do. If mask wearing becomes optional (as it is now), they won’t…

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel…

Alex Jones is like the Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or Paul Murray of the US. This legal case was parents of the Sandy Hook school massacre suing him for running repeated conspiracy stories that the massacre was a hoax.…

One of the followers of this truckload of human smegma dug up the grave of one of the Sandy Hook shooting victims (school children), to try to prove it was empty.

This is Covid, there's no way half the school has seasonal flu at the same time. It's not even winter there. All of the lies and stupidity are exhausting.

It seems we have a choice between curated happy online personas living their best (Instagram-filtered) lives, and righteous vandalism. Social media means we now never leave high school.

Australian researchers study soap bubbles to design the most efficient way to dig an open-cut mine. Our lives would be almost infinitely more amazing if we ran societies on smart, and not on the social conformity of the…

I do realise most people won’t change their behaviour, because they think nobody else will either, so it’s like school, peer pressure will win. Without change being led, nothing will change. Yaneer is an international…

SARS-Cov2 (Covid) is only allowed to be studied in a Class 3 Biosafety facility. It's a Class 3 Biohazard, like bubonic plague, and anthrax. Kids are allowed to breathe it in all day at school, unprotected. And you too…

I don’t know if many even read the Covid stuff I post, but I do it anyway in the hope it saves even one life. I’ve never seen stronger proof that we never leave high school than this pandemic. Hardly anybody does or…

More recent workshops I saw online. This is what passes for work in far too many organisations now. When you don’t have leadership with a clue what to do, you end up in endless workshops with post-it notes, butcher’s…

Some bars in the NT still have wet t-shirt competitions. Some of the young women I heard interviewed there in the audience said they found the competitions 'empowering', and allowed women to 'celebrate their bodies'. I…

In the US and Europe they’ve been infecting kids with Covid longer than us. You can see what it does to immune systems, leaving people wide-open to other infections. This is what AIDS does - Acquired Immune Deficiency…

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much…

Went out for dinner for Alice’s 12th birthday yesterday. I had to sneak this snap, they hate photos. Was lovely. They asked if we wanted to sit inside, which everybody else in the restaurant had chosen to do. In the…

Today is world toilet day. My first training in engineering included learning how to make toilets. They get a lot of jokes, but toilets are very complex objects, and have saved more lives than pretty much anything else.

As Dr Tyler Black always says, a specialist in child psychology and trauma, easily the best way to protect a child's mental health in this pandemic is to stop people getting Covid. All the other bullshit about them…

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me why if you want to be an architect or nurse or teacher or engineer in Australia, or any job that needs university training, you have to pay for your own training. But if you're…

So true, nobody cares. But they’re being led to not care. 95% of people just do what everybody else does. We see that at school, and it continues into adult life. If the 5% don’t lead us to fight climate change and…

Living with the virus. I’m waiting for year 11 and 12 students to be asked to teach classes.

"Schools and daycares are sending letters home to parents talking about this "immunity debt.” They’re saying that healthy children are getting sicker, even dying, because they weren't exposed to enough germs over the…

National Cabinet said 2022 would be the year Covid ends. Instead teachers are 'crawling to the finish line', infected repeatedly. Kids too, though they're likely at school sneezing and coughing over everybody else.

We apparently can’t mandate masks in schools. But we can pump the kids full of antibiotics, like feedlot animals. The UK, cutting edge insanity. Where they go, we always follow.

Many think peer pressure somehow ends when we leave school. That’s not true, in fact it’s the main way all of life works, even more so with adults. The primary driver of what people do, is what everybody else does. The…

“When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with...you all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.” Kurt Vonnegut I write about…

I’ve felt this more every day of my life. At last count I’ve been in high school for about 42 years. Workplaces behave just like high schools, middle-aged adults have ‘besties’, grown adults are more interested in their…

At an average school Christmas concert or presentation, each person in the room breathes in about 33 litres of used air per hour, breathed out by other people in the room. Imagine somebody giving you mouth-to-mouth and…

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own…

Zoë is an international expert on Covid in schools. Remember ‘schools are safe’? Only where there’s no community transmission of the virus. If there is, they act as superspreading sites. In the UK the government is…

I think we need wide education in political language, the Greeks called it ‘rhetoric’, it was a cornerstone of their education. For example yesterday the acting Premier was asked about risks to regional NSW from Sydney…

The Land of the Free. If you allow freedom to be narrowly defined as just the right to say what you like, this is what you get. The cheapest, most insignificant form of freedom. Freedom is a decent wage, working…

If you’re curious why the UK is in such a bad way, remember that for the last decade or more it’s been run by these people. This is what they looked like as students.

George has just had a bad case of Covid himself, which his daughter brought home from primary school. George looks for a pandemic plan, but Economy governments never had one. Ask somebody to show you Australia’s…

Look at these hopeless testing numbers. It was a Sunday, but that should be taken into account. Last week of school holidays, people aren't going to faff around interrupting things by getting tested, it may prevent them…

Feeling your age. A new senior manager at work was being introduced to everybody. They got to me, ‘this is Nick’. Senior manager says, ‘o yes I know Nick, he taught me in high school’.

Those of my friends who went to KHS but haven’t seen the recent project to re-build the old school virtually, you can see the end product from about lunch time today, at the link below. There are 2 things to look at, a…

I think it’s fair to say that in Australia, university work is still considered some sort of waffle. Tradies are the heroes, they do ‘real work’. Ideas are the source of all wealth.

I'm close to just whacking people who go on about kids missing education in the pandemic. As if they actually give a shit about that, they never did before, when schools were looking after the kids and student results…

These are the guys who reconstructed my old school, which burned down in 2005. If you ever need virtual buildings created, couldn't recommend them highly enough. Staggering reality in the finished product.

Well said, Delma. A retired teacher. Smart people, teachers.

Listening to conservative politicians speak with 'great concern' about children losing education in the pandemic is vomit-inducing. Like they care about children's education, they never have, they spend non-pandemic…

I bet this proposal will be denied. I watch the UK news as much as the Oz news, and they tried a similar thing there. And failed. Modern conservative parties are business lobby groups in disguise. Their priority will…

Notice the blissful (relative) quiet from the US, with Trump gone? He's a shining example of how modern populists function by throwing petrol on fake arguments every single day. Every single day, a new battle is started…

Normal service has resumed in the UK. Boomers largely vaccinated and safe, virus running rampant in the kids and young. Get those young slackers back to school and work, they have boomers to support in their lifestyle…

The LNP position on quotas is consistent with their belief in free markets. They believe talent will naturally rise to the top. Their record suggests this means there are no talented female LNP pollies, because they're…

The 'free market' shows industry super funds are light years ahead of the others, as public health and public education also are. They're non-profit, none of your money gets creamed off to pay shareholders and manager…

Gladys rolling the dice again. Have a look at this set of instructions. Given many people struggle to even stay within 10 km/h of a known speed limit, what are the chances people returning from Queensland will go…

Australians spend $60 billion a year on overseas travel. That's 10 times what the country spends on infrastructure, and about equal to what it spends on education. And nearly every cent of that money ends up overseas.…

Cars give you the freedom to go pretty much anywhere in a country. But that freedom bites back much harder against you than for you. Once people can use vehicles to go anywhere, there's nothing any more that makes their…

What if 'real life' is actually school, and everything after we finish school is an imitation of life? What I mean is that all of life is, literally, made of ideas. There isn't a single thing you think, feel or do that…

This is the case for most schools. With peanuts, we don't add up the number of kids who have a reaction, divide that by the total number of kids and say that tiny number is each kid's risk. That would be nonsense, most…

Curious that something many attribute to a universal gender trait - toxic masculinity - at the same time as they argue gender is infinitely fluid - has such specific geographical outcomes? Similarly in NSW, DV up over…

Straya worships tradies. Tradies are in my family. But there's a reason you can mostly DIY your own plumbing, carpentry, painting etc., but that you can't DIY your own MRI, or commercial airliner, mobile phone or hip…

A scholar, courtesy of Rembrandt. Scholars are the tradies of ideas. Ideas are the literal building block of our lives and societies. Everything you do, think and feel is based on some idea. Unis now compete for…

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of…

A nasty budget last night. Token amounts to aged care and women, neither of which will fix the problems there. Tax offsets for low and middle income earners to get through one more election, after which their taxes go…

Some talk today that pensioners may be forced to use the cashless welfare card - the indue card. Surely political suicide. Unpack the ideas, it's always in the ideas. The poor need to have how their money is spent…

The joke here is that school is irrelevant. The reality is that most jobs are a stupid waste of time where you have to turn your brain off to stay sane.

This is a drawing, using just a blue pen like you'd use at school or work. Nothing else. Oscar Okonu. The soul of this man is now living in ink as well as flesh, art extracted it and gave birth to it in a new material.

Loving maths being compulsory in years 11 and 12. Not as thrilled that education is still seen as preparation for life. It is that, but it's supposed to change life too. Not just churn out well-trained employees.

Last year I argued with people here about Covid and school safety. I feel vindicated that the year since has proved Covid spreads in schools as easily if not more easily than everywhere else, that children are infected…

The rolling contempt for children and teachers. In no country that I'm aware of have teachers been considered 'front-line workers', for vaccinations. It's inexcusable.…

Rich countries are like cars who refuse to slow down for roadwork. Movement is their pathological obsession. For the whole of the pandemic they've tried to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Now they're doing it…

Hmm, it seems people are soon going to have to choose between the mental health destruction of children not going to school (seriously, I can barely type that without laughing), or them getting Covid.

I'm seeing the same Economy-driven nonsense in other natural events now, not just the pandemic. For example yesterday, this was the travel advisory for the highway. I was on that road yesterday morning, there's no way…

A question. Would you willingly allow children to become infected with Covid? The UK is doing it. On one day alone over 136,000 students were absent, due to Covid infections in themselves or in people they mix with.…

Serious question. Should violent criminals be allowed to work in schools? I'm sure we'd all say no. And yet we're fine with Covid circulating in schools. Please help me understand the difference.

The government public messaging seems to have missed this, so for information. If you've been in Greater Sydney (includes the Blue Mountains), or the Central Coast, Shellharbour or Wollongong since 10 June, you MUST…

Kings School claimed $7 million in JobKeeper payments. A school for the haves, and the have-mores.

Choose your sides people. I watch the UK news every day, today’s bulletin is a story about how 250,000 school children have had to isolate at home because ‘only 9000’ of them were actually infected with Covid. Only! In…

Schools are by far the greatest drivers of social mixing. Look at the mobility plummet when schools are closed. Remember how many demand schools be open in a pandemic, when virus is in circulation. I call those people…

"We now know that the idea circulating early in the pandemic that kids are extremely unlikely to transmit the virus was more wishful thinking than good science." Some of us knew that last year. And it's not just…

The oldest trick in the modern conservative's playbook is to knee-cap taxation (on the wealthy), and then claim the resulting budget deficit is due to too much spending. The spending doesn't change much at all, it's…

I study political strategy. It used to be part of every child's education, in Ancient Greece. I think we're suffering from the loss of that. Right now, for example, you'll see daily pile-ons at people not following…

This one flew under the radar this week. A proposed traffic light system for NSW schools and Covid. Follow the logic of this one and it's clear again the government plans to allow children to be infected. The amber…

Here's a way I think to understand what our future will look like, after we're vaccinated. If a child or an adult turns up to school or work with whooping cough, do we say "come in, we're all vaccinated here!". Nope.…

Really interesting article about how the development of universal schooling led to the emergence of a separate culture for children, that then went on to change adult culture. The growing adolescence of adult life.…

Articles like this see this as an amusing analogy. But it isn’t, life is high school. The social world we all live on our way to adulthood is school, it gives us the framework we use in adult life. It explains…

The LNP are masters of spin. Take ‘taxing and spending’. They’re already dusting off the ‘Labor love to tax and spend’ lines for the next election. Any primary school kid could understand from the graph what a load of…

John Thaw, as Inspector Morse, stating the often unspoken truth of our great housing market democracies. Roads and cars enslave us, and houses even more so. We’ve ‘economised’ all the basics of life, turned them into…

Just prepare for disappointment. The 70-80% target from National Cabinet won’t remove ‘lockdowns’. Nor will vaccination end the pandemic. The pandemic will be over when Covid is eliminated from circulation. There is no…

Covid is flatlining in the UK, and nobody is really sure why. It’s not vaccines, though they’re likely a major contributor. Not enough people are vaccinated there to explain the dramatic drop in cases. It could be…

Memories of 2020, when some people here on FB were insisting that schools were magically Covid-free zones. My experience is people just go quiet when their stupid assertions turn out to be stupid. Or they block you.…

Parents usually send their kids to uni to ‘get a good job’. It often does a lot more than that. Ideas and beliefs are the raw material of society, and therefore education can fracture relationships between generations,…

If you were one of those last year bizarrely saying schools would be safe from a respiratory virus, what drugs were you on?

DH Lawrence, himself a teacher, was scathing about the idea of universal education. His reasoning was that only a handful of people are suited for what we call more ‘academic’ type work, and forcing all kids to sit…

This is Mkayla Robinson from Mississippi. Her first day of year 8, and her brother's first day of Kindergarten. She died 8 days later of Covid. Never, ever believe politicians who say it's safe for kids to go to school…

Yes. But watch, we can find $150 billion for tax cuts for the wealthy, but there won't be $50 million to give classrooms clean and safe air.…

Parents are about to face some very difficult decisions in NSW. There is no way schools in NSW will be able to re-open safely until about March 2022, on current virus case numbers. It's early August 2021. The government…

As an indication of the idiocy in NSW, I see so many ‘stay home’ messages on social media. People can’t stay home, they have to go to work. Why do they have to go to work? Because the NSW Government won’t close…

4000 children now have Covid in NSW. 1500 of them are under 9. Expect those numbers to explode, when the NSW Government re-opens schools without vaccinating children first.

Worth remembering if/when Gladys opens the schools before kids are vaccinated.

I suspect tomorrow National Cabinet will be forced to include children in its vaccination targets. (That they weren’t there already - I mean, what can you say?) Tomorrow the NSW Premier announces her plans to get kids…

With schools re-opening, the NSW Government has mentioned a measure they’ll use to determine when a school is open or shut. It’s quite technical, which will no doubt stop many people paying attention to it. If the LGA…

I worked with academics for many years. Like many others, they have a hatred of administration, or bureaucracy. But administration doesn’t exist, in fact the law refuses to define it, for that very reason.…

The federal government funds private schools so that there’s equity for all children.

Spend one minute watching this Florida school board meeting, and I think it’ll become clear why democracy isn’t, and never was, government by the people. For the people, yes. But not by the people.

This story today, announced at the daily Gladys at 11am. Analysis commissioned by the NSW Government, to determine safety of sending kids back to school. They did a similar analysis last year after national lockdown.…

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate,…

Schools are safe. Pigs arse. What sort of leaders send unvaccinated kids back to school in a pandemic?

We need to get the kids back in school, so that all of our pointless ‘hobby farm’ small businesses, 75% of which were going to fail in 5 years anyway without the pandemic, can get back to work.

The latest thing is to say that it doesn’t matter if lots of people get infected, provided they’re all vaccinated and don’t end up in hospital. Let’s test that against normal life. Say there was an epidemic of head…

Why aren’t we as a society insisting upon vaccinating kids against Covid before sending them back to school? Here’s a historical comparison. Whooping cough, pertussis. Before vaccines, about 50-120 deaths per year. I’ve…

You can only go for so long telling every kid at school that they're as smart as every other kid, before the shit hits the fan.

Know when kids in science at school say 'how am I going to use this in later life'? We have a new answer. You may not have a later life, if you don't shut up and learn.…

Construction re-opens next week in NSW, even if construction workers aren’t vaccinated. And 5000 at a horse race in mid-October. But vaccinating kids for school isn’t in the roadmap at all. NSW is owned and run by…

I think Australia is sleepwalking into something it just isn't seeing. Right now it thinks the opening up plans of 70 and 80-% are great, because they think it'll be just more of what they have right now, with extra…

100,000 children infected in just one week in England. The government there not even bothering to isolate infected people in schools, it all got too hard. If you don't think NSW could end up like this, you're not paying…

The UN’s hip new educational TikTok. I watched it about 20 times and can’t remember a single word, my brain couldn’t process just how bad it all was.

An aspect of the months between now and Christmas many aren’t aware of, is that the National Covid plan, modelled by Doherty and driven by the PM, involves the mass infection of children. This is quite deliberate, as it…

We have a PM rushing to an election by destroying 2 years of hard Covid work. And a NSW Premier who gets wide applause for leading a government with such entrenched corruption that ICAC wouldn’t have know where to…

Here’s the former NSW Auditor-General speaking about Gladys’ resignation. (Don’t forget either that this NSW Government also rorted the bushfire relief funding.) I plead with people to not embrace populism, where…

Society is just conversation. All of it, even the Economy. Great article about what this means for journalism. If you look at something like FB, notice that in libertarian societies like ours, a ‘public’ act is thought…

Two things I think will explain most of the apparent craziness of the world right now. One is seeing it as a giant high school - have posted about that, and it’s literally true. The other is understanding that we all…

The UK, a few weeks ahead of us in opening up schools to widespread infection. I’m not understanding why Australian parents are just meekly allowing this. Instead they’re applauding the woman who approved the same…

OzSAGE, a collection of some of Australia’s top experts across a range of fields, has released a guide for sending kids back to school, during Covid. A great read for all. I think this is a line in the sand issue for…

I think my frustration with social media is exactly this, it's called the 'Spiral of Silence'. See excerpt below, but the link is only a page of reading too. People simply refuse to engage in discussion most of the…

Fat, rich, whiney countries are opening up their countries to infect millions of people, many of them children. To save businesses, 75% of which were going to fail inside 3 years anyway, without the pandemic. India,…

Australia lies with its vaccine data, only reporting over-16s. This is the real NSW data. 0+ is the whole State, not just those aged 16 and over. At our re-opening day next Monday, only just over half of the State will…

As one prominent journalist said, the NSW Government is run for business, by business. Shredders going flat-out in the Reverend Dom’s office, with all the NSW Health advice. The Deputy Premier, our own novelty cheque…

Underneath grand narratives you’ll usually find some simple, practical thing that explains things. The US has a much more libertarian, individual freedom focus than Australia. That comes down to underlying beliefs. But…

Well now, the zoomed-out version shows 5 lots of fines for Revenue NSW, score. It is good to see normal service returning in NSW, where the blokes are at the pub, the ladies homeschooling, the alcohol and gambling and…

The NSW Government spent a fortune upgrading its air conditioning system so that its air is changed every 7.5 minutes. Its 'effort' on schools returning? 'Open a window'. And also 'masks are ludicrous' (our new Deputy…

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than they are by Covid, have endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Nearly all of the diseases in that scheme…

As a younger person, I was terrified of standing in front of a crowd. It stopped me ever going into music as a career, or doing public speaking, debating, dancing, even going to parties. About a decade of teaching beat…

Isn't this great, even where parents try to carry the cost of clean air in schools, because the NSW government won't do anything, they're not allowed. No masks, 'open a window'. Just disgusting, corrupt, and probably…

Of course it didn't. We're a society of adolescents, interested in drinking and holidays. The world is a high school.

Third straight day of increases in NSW. This is a jump of about 100 in a day. And schools only reopened this week. Next week will be interesting.

From the UK. A present for Paul 'masks are ludicrous for school children' Toole, Deputy Premier. Also for the 'kids don't transmit Covid' folks from last year, here on FB.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. Alexander Pope

More life as a high school. Melbourne re-opens. It’s curious that the narrative around lockdowns has been that people are healthiest and happiest when they can mix socially. That without it, they become lonely and…

Assumption School in Bathurst already closed because of Covid. Only years 1 and 2 there. It took only 4 days. If the idiot NSW Government follows its idiot overlords in the UK, the next stage will be to just keep…

The 'living with the virus' slogan. Anybody uttering it needs to explain exactly what they mean. Here's an example - whooping cough. Pertussis. We 'live with' it. There's a vaccine. Between 2008 and 2012 we had a…

67 schools have been closed since the beginning of Term 4 in NSW, because of Covid. Most kids not back yet.

Covid school closures, Victoria, Term 4. Most kids not back at school yet.

Hooray. Now the TGA and ATAGI here can do their assessment, and we can vaccinate kids before they all go back to school. (Wait: I’ve just been informed we already sent all of the kids back to school.) I’m sure people…

Eglinton now. Schools only really opening again today, and here we are already. Put masks on the kids if we’re so desperate to open schools to get back in restaurants, pubs and planes. Only 7 weeks of school left, what…

The Deputy Premier referred to use of masks in schools as 'ludicrous'. This is the official CDC advice, in the US, just so you get a sense of the calibre of the NSW Government: "Due to the circulating and highly…

Politicians have now forced children back into schools, mid-pandemic, with little or no protection, because of apparent concern for their education. The same politicians who presided over this educational performance…

Those who doubt school re-openings are nothing about education - this is a federal minister, speaking on Sunday. Disgusts me that there isn’t public outcry about the deliberate infection of children with Covid. Not a…

CDC, Centre for Disease Control in the US, their main regulatory body. Compare and contrast with our 'masks are ludicrous in schools' Deputy Premier. Yesterday most Covid cases in NSW were in the regions. When asked…

58% of Americans opposed going to the moon, when Kennedy announced it. ‘Moonshot’ became a term to mean pushing for a massive collective achievement. Kennedy succeeded. Compare and contrast this with the pandemic, where…

The NSW Government still refuses to even mandate masks for children. Only 6-7 weeks of school left, what possible reason could there be for not talking that basic precaution?

Remember the ridiculous hoo-ha about the $14 billion school hall building program in the GFC? We got school halls out of that scheme.

Not just allowing children to become infected with Covid. Now legislatively mandating it. Choose your side people, history will be a harsh judge. If you think infecting children with a novel multi-system virus is a good…

Covid cases are beginning to climb again in NSW. You can see here where it's mostly happening - in kids, in schools. On the 'herd immunity' front, people need to know that infection with Covid confers relatively little…

You can look at this two ways. Regulators being cautious, as they're supposed to be. Or key members of these expert groups being culture warring, political operatives who have spent weeks attacking any sort of…

This morning's discussion, with an emeritus professor of epidemiology, who opines that kids shouldn't wear masks in schools because it will harm their 'social and psychological development'. I mean really, is there a…

"More than 270 NSW schools and 300 childcare centres have closed due to COVID-19 cases in the past month...". The same people who say kids wearing masks will damage them psychologically and socially, are now saying the…

I know pandemic stuff bores some people. There's a fair amount of hopium around, that hoping it's over will make it over. But there are critical ideas that aren't making it into the public conversations. Take 'endemic'.…

NSW Covid projections through to June 2022. ct = contact tracing. You can see it’s critical this remains high (NSW is scaling it back rapidly), and that under-12s get vaccinated before the 2022 school year.

Not all Liberals are vacuous slogan machines. Well done sir. Can't see Mr Economy in NSW doing the same. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/tas-school-year-start-could-be-delayed-covid-vaccination/100642918

Pictures tell stories. What the pandemic showed so clearly was who the really essential workers are in our socieities. Nurses, teachers, supermarket staff, sewer and water workers etc. Leading politicians are…

Omicron in schools. No links to travel. Community transmission is underway. Watch and learn as they come up with new excuses every day to do nothing, as they did with Delta.

So sick of the bullshit. Parliament in Canberra shuts down because of one Covid case. Primary schools in Sydney get Omicron cases, and they only send a few classes home.

Society is a high school. Not by analogy - literally. It's where we learn our social models. Great piece here on the US that shows it in a way that can't be missed.

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle.…

So...kids do better, the longer they're NOT at school. It's actually very important we understand why that is (I co-wrote a book and a few research papers on that). And also that we continue to ignore the Henny Pennys…

Your ideology runs really, really deep when you won't make a mask mandatory. We already do for tradies in workplaces. Covid is much more dangerous than dust. Kids have to wear hats for the sun at school.…

Nearly 3 weeks to the day. At the time I posted this, NSW was in the euphoria of 'freedom' and Christmas. The data and common sense (something the PM has none of) said way back then already what a disaster that would…

Remember ‘hospitalisations are what matter’? Predictably, now they’re trending up, suddenly that spin has gone a bit quiet. Also predictably, social media is still pretending we’re all living in 2018. As Covid inches…

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by…

My first training outside school was as a materials scientist. Nobody I knew had heard of it; I’d still recommend it to anybody not sure what to study, it’s the most amazing field. Much of what we call ‘modern…

It still angers me that people who go to university pay an extra tax, HECS. The rationale for it was always that they earn more because of their degrees. Some do, some don’t. I know more rich tradies than rich…

We’ve spent 50 years flirting with one catastrophic idea: that society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of separate individuals. It explains our massive and ongoing accumulation of debt, the increase in family…

Finally an Aussie PM admits the true function of schools. Childcare for working parents.

Good on you, Norman Swan. "I have a personal view on this: there is no time to waste. Each day that goes by we're going to lose control of this. We have been too late in banning large gatherings. We have got to stop,…

Again tonight leaders saying when virus case numbers get to a certain number, then you act more strongly. Why is that? They’re not even pretending they’re isolating all the cases, so all waiting does is exponentially…

This is the paper that some say made the colour drain from both Trump and Johnson’s faces, and made them do a super-fast U-turn on their virus strategy. If you want a deeper connection to the ideas in play here, it’s an…

It's up to each person, but my children won't be going to school after today. I understand that for some parents that's not doable with their work arrangements, and that's understandable. But it incenses me to hear that…

I'm waiting to see senior staff of major organisations announce they will be taking significant pay cuts to help keep staff in jobs. Many of these senior managers, including at my previous employer, could easily afford…

I wonder if these months of children doing their learning online might change education. I was watching and helping my kids yesterday, and it was a fundamentally different experience to what school is. More personalised…

The 'retreat to relationship', only one week in! O dear. One of the reasons I left education was its idea it's all about the personal relationship between teachers and kids.…

Women of Australia, what did you think? Last night ScoMo was asked if his kids are still at school. He said no, his wife had finally won. Let that sink in. He’s saying schools are fine and kids should go there, unless…

I’ve been playing guitar for about 40 years now. One piece of advice I’d give to anybody learning an instrument, that you don’t usually hear much in music teaching. Learn songs. All this stuff about scales and chords…

It looks almost certain HSC exams will be cancelled this year, and kids given a mark based on in-school assessment instead. The Class of 2020 will be unique.

One thing i'm enjoying right now is how the people who are the real brains and muscle of society are coming into the limelight, while the celebrities, sports stars and shock jocks disappear into their country estates.…

The conversation around schools and childcare coming from ScoMo is overwhelmingly about child-minding. Pandemics have this way of flushing out what people really think and feel.

Schools are not childcare centres. There's no doubt keeping as many kids out of them as possible will quicken elimination of Covid-19. Even the best models suggest that they contribute significantly to spreading a virus…

An experiment, psychological immunisation. Our pandemic is horrible, but read about what the people who lived during the Black Death endured. The greatest catastrophe in human history. It lasted 3 years, killed about…

My biggest frustration with conservative governments in this crisis has been the continuing insistence on 'balancing' the 'economy' and peoples' health. As if those were two separate things. Like this obsession…

I keep coming back to one insight from Camus. Humans are not free, because there are pestilences. The thing that annoys me most is the choice we're being asked to make between 'normal life' and lockdowns. Normal life is…

Daniel Andrews was on telly this morning, speaking how a leader should. Saying schools generate significant human traffic, within them and outside them (drop offs etc.) Makes the bone obvious point that if you open…

On the one hand, you had an economist saying that the cost of lockdowns exceeds the benefits, and causes more human suffering than it relieves through loss of social life, livelihood, health etc. Valid argument. On the…

Sigh, another half-pregnant scheme. This will be like the laundry list of lockdown rules, imagine the poor schools trying to administer this farce, and teachers now being forced to teach the students in classrooms and…

The reason I left the university sector after nearly 20 years there was this. Supposed to be the custodian of society's ideas, but instead a gravy train milked by senior staff for exorbitant salaries, and utter contempt…

If you missed the details of NSW's back to school arrangements, this is a good visual summary.

New Delhi is an example of why we're maybe not learning from our current experience. Look at the difference in air quality, then and now. That means more surely than just a temporary interruption to business as usual.…

This is the report that will be used from today to 'prove' to people that 'schools are safe'. It's embarrassingly bad, all 4 pages of it, with 2 vague references. The data size? 18 infections in schools before the…

The schools debate, should kids go back? Never mind that people say 'the science is in' (it absolutely isn't, that's a lie). Look at it this way. If your teens hung out like in the pic here, in a public park, they could…

John Hattie is probably the world's leading expert on evidence-based education. Like 'economies', student results actually tend to improve after a crisis like this, even if they miss months of school with no online…

Covid-19 school closures around the world as of today, from UNESCO. Blue means open. 186 countries have closed all schools. About 74% of all school children in the world currently not at school.

I like the honesty right at the end here: "Reopening schools is considered key to getting the economy moving again. Without a safe place for kids, many parents would have difficulty returning to work." This is nothing…

Right now we're hearing a lot about how kids' education is being damaged by them not being in school. One of society's greatest secrets though is that, no matter which way you look at the data, schools make no…

Schools are safe. But parliament is closed for 5 months, for safety. Join the dots. If you want to introduce a vaccine, you test it for a year or more. But apparently a few weeks' of data is enough to say that schools…

Funny this, from Gladys today. They said schools are 'safe'. Funny too that they have to close entire schools if they get an infection and bring in professional cleaners for 'deep cleans', even though schools are…

Curious whether when parents hear 'schools are safe'; they hear 'my child won't get infected at school'. Or whether they hear 'my child might get infected at school, but they probably won't get really sick', which is…

The UK Health Minister live on UK TV right now, asked about when UK schools will reopen. Quote: "although children don't suffer from the consequences of coronavirus nearly as much as adults - there have been a small…

I sometimes almost apologise for posting every day about Covid-19. I do it because - it's the greatest issue of the past 100 years, changing every day, why wouldn't we talk about it? Kids and schools, obviously a focus…

Now we have our 3-stage strategy to all go and get infected to save the economy, anybody notice parliament is still closed, and isn't in the 3 stages? Presumably it's unsafe. Schools are safe though and in Stage 1,…

Touching to see that kids being 'left behind' at school is a concern right now. When the economy is impacted. When it's not, they can sit in under-funded schools, breathing in nitrous oxides from unflued gas heaters,…

Debates now about merits of working 'from home'. If you work virtually, your work is not actually at home. Nor is your work 'at work'. Some people say you're working 'online', just as they say kids are doing 'online…

I was a teacher. This rubric for the country alarms me, because I know it'd be a struggle to get a room of 20 to follow it. I don't buy this bullshit about 'restrictions' and 'lockdown' - the language is designed to…

I was amazed they decided to push on with exams, just seems another example of how schools and kids are cannon fodder in this pandemic. I say don't be fooled by the appearance of care for education in Australia -…

Pre-pandemic article. Took only 5 weeks to discover that busyness was never the problem? ‘Get the kids back in school.’

Think I'm exaggerating when I say people don't give a shit about schools and kids? Gladys' daily press conference, talking about getting people off public transport and back into cars, or onto bikes, or walking. Great…

Scientists have invented a piece of software that can write any number of Beatles songs you want. I think if you believe in and understand education, then this shouldn’t actually be threatening or wrong in any way.

Remember the idea was, we'll relax some restrictions, then wait 2 weeks to see if there's any impact on infection rates? All kids back at school next Monday, announced just over a week since some kids started going…

Magic schools, magic school buses, magic public transport, now magic planes! Magic pliable doctors for hire! Masks optional, for 'peace of mind'. They forgot 'positivity', and 'being nice to each other'.

Home schooling hump day with Mrs Berejiklian. Today we're protecting lives, 'and' livelihoods. Now class, can you have a livelihood, without a life? Anyone?

Many said this was the strategic role of the phrase ‘the science’ from the beginning of the pandemic. And here it is, exactly as predicted. Scientists as human shields for politicians. This will be exactly the line used…

Finally Aussie kids can go back to what they were doing before this bloody pandemic. Failing at school.

1 day in to the big re-opening, 2 schools down. I call it Covid-19 pin bowling - strike! These students need to be disciplined, for ignoring the science.

We tend to think freedom is the opposite of slavery. If you actually look at what happened though, in history, that bondage of one person to another didn't lift to give us freedom. We enormously expanded and diversified…

That 'period of euphoria' is palpable here in Oz right now. Why Israel thinks it lost control? Schools. Yesterday ScoMo said: "Eradication? Elimination? These are not the goals that we have". We love pandemics so much…

Well now. 122 cases linked to one school. (And people wore masks in this school.) Now 6 more schools with infections. I'm happy for history to show me as not on the side of people who say 'this respiratory infection…

The age of crowds. Even microbes - a pandemic is a crowd of microbes. Research on crowds suggests individuals hate to touch except in relationships. Why people walking along a busy footpath do a sophisticated ‘step and…

Public debates and protests are battles of ideas, using humans as troops. Ideas are beings, they’re alive. They enslave us. Education is supposed to free us from that slavery (it rarely does today). I don’t think ideas…

School often seems like preparation for 'real life'. I think we need to flip that - society (real life) is just a collection of ideas. Working through a set of problems at school is not practice for real life - it is…

Regular sufferers of my posts will know I've been advocating these for years. Could put them on every bus, in every classroom and hospital, for bugger-all money. I carry one with me all through winter, for work or…

The federal government has almost no role in management of a pandemic at all. The States do pretty much everything and have most of the authority, under constitutional law. The reason ScoMo wanted a National Cabinet was…

Was listening to talkback radio yesterday, and the question was - what’s something you learned at school that you actually used in later life? And it made me think about how education has failed, that this is such a…

It's always what people do, not what they say. What they say? "We're all in this together". What they do? $150 billion in tax cuts skewed heavily to the rich and foreign corporations. Can't find a measly $84 million to…

Democracy is winning. What if that's why the world seems batshit crazy right now? I don't have my ceremonial jackboots on, there is a serious line of thought that says democracy is what you get when people lose a shared…

This is a paper that may change the pandemic. A few hundred international experts pleading to change social distancing rules, because they're sure the virus is mostly transmitted through the air. (Astonishing that we…

Less reported. The second-largest source of Victoria's infections, after the meat-processing plant? A school. 90 cases, and climbing.

Who would you rather guide us out of this crisis? A failed advertising hack (ScoMo), and a career politician who went straight from university into politics (Gladys), both desperate to protect their party donors in…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

If they don't want people moving about, close the places down they go to. Don't ask people not to move about and then leave the places open. The economy Nazis thought letting Australians travel all over the country in…

A plan that turns a pandemic into a set of rules to follow and a daily blame-game is no plan. It's the absence of basic public health planning. If you're a parent or teacher and you're reduced to writing a list of rules…

Did you do maths at school? NSW Cabinet didn’t. There are close to 10 transmission chains of Covid in NSW right now that can’t be traced. Even one of those is enough to start an explosion of cases. Exponential growth,…

Even the research group who said schools were safe, on a sample size of 18 students, now think NSW is in trouble.

Just sayin'. https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/covid-19-children-and-schools-overlooked-and-risk

More than 25% of Americans believe Bill Gates is using vaccines for mind control. When will we start taking seriously the destruction of our institutions (education, government, journalism etc.), creating this lunatic…

"A danger greater than war faces the State of NSW...". From 1918-19. People came out of 4 years of horrific war into 3 years of horrific pandemic. The pandemic killed far more than the war. They weren't strategic…

Got an entire continent now trialling the 'learning to live with the virus' strategy. It's not going well. I'm waiting for the learning to live with cancer, heart disease, malaria, TB, paedophilia and poverty strategies…

Back to this brilliant research published in the BMJ. I've marked with an X now where schools, public transport, many workplaces, pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops would sit. All extremely high risk in NSW right now.…

One of the debating tricks people who oppose strong public health action against the virus use is to say 'more people are being harmed by the restrictions than by the virus'. That's like saying 'we can't build new…

Imagine how different the world would be if, instead of making education into training for work, we made work into a project for our education.

Ken seemed a lovely guy. To me as an educator and researcher, he was one end of a destructive see-saw. On one end sits the 3Rs people, on the other the 'creativity' people, like Ken. Both leading education astray for…

Goodhart's Law says if you use a measure as a target, it stops working. Organisations do this all the time. We're seeing it in the pandemic too. In Iowa, 'exposure' to the virus is taken to be at least 15 minutes within…

The best managers I've worked with are like the best teachers and best parents. They build routines. Habits. The hardest thing in the world to do. The worst managers now dominate workplaces, constantly changing…

A qualification for leading a university today is rank stupidity. Exhibit A. https://www.smh.com.au/national/melbourne-uni-chief-says-victoria-must-address-difficult-ethical-questions-20200919-p55x82.html

One of my side projects at the moment is working as part of a small team to reconstruct my old high school, virtually. It burned to the ground a few years ago, a tragedy, it was one of Australia's most stunning schools…

When you sit or stand anywhere for long periods, stop trying to hold or fix yourself in any way - up, forward, back - whatever. Feel everything that happens in your body as it learning to effortlessly balance without…

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid…

If you saw a parent or teacher pleading with kids to ‘follow the rules’, you’d (rightly) assume they have no idea what they’re doing. Think about that the next time a politician says we all need to follow the Covid…

The role of education isn't to prepare you for life or a job. It's to prepare you to change lives and jobs.

3 cases per day. We had that many in NSW today alone. The Swiss are highly organised people. They also all wear masks. Did you know we're following an 'aggressive suppression' strategy here? Except we aren't, it's more…

Larry is a Republican Governor. The Republican Party is learning the very hard way that populism is a false God. You win for a while, and then it destroys you. Ditch the Left and Right people, populism is consuming all…

Universities are also a type of federal system. Schools and Faculties are like the States, and a central administration is like the federal government. Nearly every senior manager of a university doesn’t understand this…

Birds in lockdown. No doubt other birds somewhere nearby getting soaked, saying ‘get out from under that leaf’, ‘build your natural water resistance’, ‘think of all the education your chicks are missing while you hide…

Education isn’t about subjects, it’s about learning to pay attention. And keeping at it past the point where others get bored (Einstein’s advice). Without training your attention, everything in the world will just be a…

If you observe groups like this (very similar to sporting change rooms and a lot of male ‘bonding’) you don’t see strength. You see fear, and weakness. The desperate weak personalities using the group to shed their own…

It usually takes a decade or so to develop a new vaccine. With funding it’s now been done inside a year. You could make a list of things we’ve been told society can’t afford - free childcare, free dentistry, affordable…

I worked with an academic who studied hyperhidrosis. It’s real. I see people out exercising with their water bottles, and I think - why? The hydration message is like the fat message in our diet - deeply habituated and…

How many years have most workplaces had air con now? Not schools. None of the people wailing about lost education during the pandemic actually give a shit about schools, they just wanted them open as childcare so…

Same spin, different country. Fast-spreading, horseshit. Incompetence in conservative government. At the same time this same government is threatening to take schools to court if they close to control the virus. We’re…

Many people argued schools were immune to Covid earlier in the pandemic. They are when you have no virus, they’re superspreaders when you do. What’s particularly disgusting about this is the reason they argued it. They…

In the UK, millions of children will potentially contract Covid in the next week, take it home to extended families over Christmas and kill some of those family members. In both Germany and the Netherlands, they’re…

If you wanted electrical work done, you’d ask an electrician. But experts in areas like science, governance, and public administration are told their views are just ‘opinions’ like anybody else’s. This contempt for…

Every time we tell people that their study at school doesn’t really matter in the longer term, we undermine education just that little bit more. Nothing really matters in the longer term, taken in isolation. In the…

This teacher observed that his teams of girls nearly always win this challenge, over teams of boys. The conclusion was that girls cooperate better. But another teacher came back with an interesting observation. They…

It’s strange that if you want to learn how to play tennis, or to type, or an instrument, or to knit, your body will just figure it out for you, given enough time. But to sit or stand, so many of us are a train wreck.…

This is a vortex tube. A miraculous thing hidden in industrial sheds. Compressed air enters the chamber (the bit with EXAIR written on it), and forms a vortex; like a mini-tornado. That vortex separates the air into two…

The Pledge is a UK debating show on SKY. Here in Oz the ABC is doing something a bit similar, though not as good, with The Drum. This is one area where ultra-conservatives have been so clever. What engages people is…

These are the sorts of prices I remember from primary school. I was in Year 1 in 1974.

I had a teacher in primary school who put a picture like this above the blackboard. We saw it all day, every day. Like most people we came to think of posture as a position of some sort - sitting up versus slouching. It…

Never come between a boomer and a bucket of money. Here's the angry face of old fart entitlement. Oldies currently getting 'refunded' for tax they never paid, to the tune of nearly 8 billion dollars a year (almost…

Here’s another way to look at a society without tradition and meaningful institutions. Williams describes the end point of doing that, the young, and the old and frail get thrown on the scrap heap, with only the healthy…

Do you get anxious about whether you have enough super? Super is I think one of the great shams of the finance industry, who naturally want you to invest as much money with them as you can. The idea of ‘lifestyle’…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re caught. That’s how I see living in a rich and privileged country too, we often don’t see that privilege, we assume that’s just how the world is. For example, the idea of…

Sometimes a book can help change a life. Latour’s Science in Action was one of those, for me. Always hated the title, it sounds so boring, but it’s one of the most revolutionary books of our time, it can change how you…

I have a daughter now old enough to drive. It's a tension for me, because: 1. I don't think kids should be driving cars. 2. I think society already has way too many cars and drivers. 3. The greatest killer of…

At school they teach you Pi is defined as the circumference of a circle, divided by its diameter. And that’s true, but what they don’t explain is - why do two perfectly simple finite lines, with clear beginning and end,…

In this book I co-wrote with Alan Bain, we looked at why education usually fails. Kids learn, but the schools and universities they go to contribute very little to that learning. It’s hard to raise that without…

I still think we often have society upside down, in our thinking. Take kids, and school. We often assume society is made and driven by adults. I think it’s the opposite. Not only does our own social circle of adult…

You can’t feel your own weight. Learning that changed my life. ‘Taking the weight off your feet’ (title of this pic) is impossible, because there’s never any weight *on* your feet.

Kids have to learn to balance. Adults think they don’t. But all human activities need balance, and as we do more complex things as we get older, we should be learning new balancing as we do. But we often don’t, we…

If you don’t make education interesting...

My annual trawl through NAPLAN. These are two schools said to have made ‘remarkable’ gains, by strategies such as employing a writer in residence, and having regular meetings to track student progress. Both ‘gains’ are…

I do this every day, it’s my workout. It’s not well understood that you can’t feel your body. You are your body, you can’t step outside it to feel it. That feeling in your back, or knees, or neck, or wherever, is the…

I'm sure that there are profound things about our society that are unspoken. My strong guess is that the idea of touch would reveal a lot of those profound things. There's a real anxiety I sense around the idea of…

Achievement is one of the strongest motivations. I’d bet the reason millions of students in schools worldwide find school meaningless is that they’re not actually being taught. Schools aren’t set up to teach, they’re…

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say…

The usual pathway through life is seen as, person is born an individual, and then has to learn to socialise. But...what if it’s the other way around? We’re born fundamentally social, and growing and maturing is about…

I defend institutions. It seems a boring and unintelligible cause to some, for me it’s the last defence against total social chaos. Read this, what’s going on out there, in this in case schools. All of our institutions…

If you’re one of those outraged by the Borce Ristevski verdict, here’s the full judgment. They should begin publicising full judgments for every controversial case, it would be an education for the public. Incredibly…

Geometry means ‘measurement of the Earth, or land’. Geo-metry. We learn it (badly) as ‘maths’. The original meaning gets lost. Ancient inventors of geometry would measure a piece of land to have a way to say ‘this piece…

At school you learn about compound interest. It's the basis of nearly all investment. It's an exponential function, which you can see in this graph. Which means it's a time bomb right at the core of our societies,…

Now social issues are getting too big for pollies to solve, and they’re struggling, rather than the public getting off their lazy, entitled and complacent arses and doing a bit of learning, debating and compromising,…

The huge increase in early voting for elections, yeh nah. Election Day is a collective tradition or ritual, but pre-poll voting is making it an individualised thing. Vote when it’s most convenient it to you, customer…

Standing desks will be a fad that passes, mostly because the framework of ideas behind them - that sitting can kill you - is bonkers I think. 50 years ago the supposed dangers of standing were the reason so many…

It's not just wealth that's trickle-down. So are education, entertainment & news. Social media is smashing them all.

Idiots get leadership positions because, like how much money you earn, merit has nothing to do with it. It's always power. And idiots do power better than anybody. They start young, at school, where they're the ones who…

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old,…

I might email my local school and ask if they can give me a private performance of the end of year school concert, say in August, when it works better for me.

One of the beautiful, profound things I learned from Michel Serres was about legends. Because the true humanities are absent from most peoples' education today, a legend can only seem like a made-up story. But Serres…

From cradle to grave, I think humans' most fundamental act is to copy, or imitate. In politics, school, shopping, fashion - everywhere. Have mentioned before that to try to go against the current trend is to be even…

Here's more evidence that our society is run by (scared) old people. Do you know our two most trusted social institutions? Schools maybe? The legal system? Marriage? No. 1) Australian Federal Police. 2) State police…

Here's an idea for 'stimulating the economy'. How about diverting the vast rivers of taxpayer dollars flowing to Canberra, to State and local government, where the services people use actually are? At the moment…

Hard to describe some ideas in 10 words, but this one is a cracker, I think. Jacinda Ardern got a lot of press recently by saying economic growth would not be her government's sole measure of achievement. Some described…

The flip side to tax 'relief'. We're absolute dopes not to see this. The more they cut taxes, the more they shift the cost of basic public services back onto us. Anybody noticed the price of education, health,…

I think David Gillespie's forensic lawyer's mind was fantastic for exploding a lot of myths of dietary science, and also schooling. But on screens I'm not a fan. It's such an easy and lazy argument to say screen time is…

An example I think of how splitting knowledge up into 'subjects' destroys education. Trigonometry again, we all learn at school how to do it. Sometimes a teacher might even tell us the 'history', how the Greeks invented…

Descartes. Him what invented Cartesian coordinates, which we all learn at school. Maybe the most obvious example of us mistaking the measure of something for the thing itself. Ever since Descartes, I think we've made…

Commiserations to those low income earners who stupidly went to university to train for a career. Your tax cut has been eaten up by the lowering of the threshold for repayment of your HELP debt. We need to look after…

Hands up if you plan to use your tax cut to: - upgrade the NBN - pay childcare workers a living wage - reduce hospital waiting times - take unflued gas heaters out of schools - build more public transport - fix the…

On health, notice the sniggering you'll hear from some about 'Dr Google'. Turns out doctors regularly use Google as well. This is medicine's Trump moment. Patients have been ignored as ignorant for a long time, and…

One of the most embarrassing open secrets of science is that it has no idea what 85% of the universe is made of. The elements we learn at school make up an estimated 15% of the visible universe - the other 85%? Nobody…

The Bullingdon Club, Oxford University, 1987. You can see David Cameron (ex British PM) second from top left, and Boris Johnson, likely British PM from Wednesday, seated at the front. This club reportedly performed acts…

The word rhetoric has a pejorative meaning today, like persuasion is a sneaky thing. Better to just 'stick to the facts'. I think it's the key to reforming education. The ancient Greeks had it right in the middle of…

How do you determine what's right and wrong? What's good and what's bad, or less good? In any situation, including what music you like, whether to send your kids to this or that school, etc. This question really…

The ‘virtual’ world has nothing to do with IT. It sounds a bit abstract, but i think it actually changes everything we know, about life, death, space, time - the lot. We all still use Newton in everyday ideas, I think…

A very wise friend, talking about NAPLAN, but you could apply this to any measurement, in any field. "I am astounded that people think that measurement will make a difference in education when there is such a poor…

I'm sure their primary school teacher has none about getting rid of them.

Isn't this magnificent? The House of Lords has its problems, but one of them isn't its full name: "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in…

Saw an ad, "Not Ready to Retire? Become a part-time school bus driver." They should have added "and you'll be ready to retire in no time."

After trashing: - parliament through populism - the press by constant talk of 'fake news' - universities by constant attack on academics - civil service by constant attack on bureaucrats - unions by constant attacks,…

Learning to ride a bike is one of those early balance skills, like standing, walking and running. Somewhere in the transition between those early years and adolescence, humans do something weird. They stop balancing,…

Australian scientists have discovered that beneath the sea bed around the world, there may be up to half a million cubic KILOMETRES of fresh water. That’s about 100 times as much groundwater as we’ve extracted since…

I reckon teachers understand power better than anybody. You can’t just give people orders, it doesn’t work. Power is granted to you, by the people you lead. It’s a contract, a provisional agreement. Nobody ‘has’ power,…

I did some research with Professor Alan Bain about why ideas about education never improve education. The results can be applied to any part of life. Ideas will only change things if they ‘fit’ the actual reality in…

I’ve spent a lot of time working in universities. What’s the function of a University? Actually I think it has only one true function. To teach people to tame ideas. Ideas matter because everything we do is an idea.…

D.H. Lawrence believed forced mass education past a certain level was evil. The world of ideas he thought was a particular talent some people had, and many didn’t. Forcing everybody to take on higher levels of education…

Universities are often seen as disconnected from real life and practical things. But I bet you can’t find a single ‘practical’ thing in life that didn’t originate in a university, or in the ideas of a brilliant thinker.…

It’s easier to find the answer to any question, and fast, today than at any time in history. At the same time ‘facts’ have never been so ignored. Maybe this proves the maxim that we never desire what is easy for us to…

Given that the stats clearly show that no school makes a difference to student learning, it’s not surprising that recognition at school is mostly about social status and who likes who the most. Doesn’t mean some…

People sometimes say if you pay for private school or private health, you should still get government support, for fairness. I love David Gillespie’s response to this idea.

I see schools are now doing rain dances, does stupidity have no limit? Australia’s problem isn’t lack of rain - ‘drought’ - it’s stupidity. Australia builds its towns and cities on its best agricultural land, flood…

This site is excellent for tracking fires. The RFS site shows you in very general ways where the fire is, this one shows you exactly where the fire itself is, and how intense it is in each place. Applause for Landgate…

Australia’s favourite way to not address a serious problem? Let it get completely out of control, and then call the poor bastards who have to try to clean it up “heroes”. Like calling women juggling families and work…

Kelso High School was a unique school. The buildings were beautiful, light everywhere, central courtyards with gardens, everything carpeted, long ramps everywhere as well as stairs, it had its own cinema and…

There's a popular view that people get paid what they're worth. So doctors, teachers, nurses, bankers etc. are all apparently paid according to how much each of them is worth, to society. Thank you Real Housewives for…

It's not just schools that need to stop fundraising. This lady gets it, fundraising is an epidemic, often being used to fill gaps in services caused by government cuts. My parents always said it wasn't the parents who…

They could re-make Friends for the 21st Century, I'm sure it would do as well again. It's probably not a coincidence that at about the time Friends was originally popular, young people started to move away from more…

Good on young people, they don’t always get good press. (One possible explanation for why they’re drinking less and having less sex is that they’re too busy staring at their phones, but whatever works 😉 ) Interesting…

I have the pattern to make this little dragon, somewhere, if anybody is looking for a school holiday activity ;)

But, but...isn't it all just 'supply and demand'? Huge demand for nurses and emergency workers and teachers and other 'essential workers', in these areas, so surely the 'law of supply and demand' means there will now be…

The American novelist Richard Powers says that it’s our parents’ weaknesses that have the deepest, most lasting influence on us, above and beyond anything else they teach us. Many peoples’ lives are driven by the…

I prefer the old ways in education, where the focus was habit and not our minds and ideas. And we are, in the West, so lacking poise of mind and body. We’re hyper-sensitized slobs, or hyper-sensitized six packs. William…

Ever noticed that kids are very reluctant to head the ball, when they’re learning to play soccer? I think that’s a natural protective instinct. Have wondered about this for a while, all the attention is on rugby and…

This image is extraordinary. In India, there is huge pressure to pass high school exams. Cheating and corruption is widespread, and that’s what you can see in the photo. This is parents, relatives and friends climbing…

"Second, why should students be free of stress? Life is not free of stress. University study requires a great deal of effort and imposes deadlines for which the HSC, stress and all, will have been good…

Do you work somewhere where your performance is measured? If so you may love this book. Nurses, teachers, police, anybody who suffers in the world of performance measures and KPIs. I have nothing against measurement,…

At just before 10 minutes in this video, the big fuel tank strapped to the Challenger Shuttle explodes. I remember when this happened (January 1986), I’d just finished high school and was working at the local corn…

One of the worst detours I think we took as humans was to believe we think with our brains. Generations of kids have been physically confined to classrooms and desks because of the myth of the thinking brain.

Many people hate maths, or say they can’t do it. I think this is because maths is so badly taught, and that bad teaching comes from a misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Maths is the study of patterns. Where it got…

I still remember a packet of chips being 10 cents at the school canteen. And I often think, why does inflation exist? Why is a packet of chips now up around $1-$2? Wages have gone up at the same time, so why didn’t we…

One for @[1240225973:2048:Nell] 🙂 Frugality is an important thing for me, but it’s a difficult topic because how people spend their money is a powerful part of their psychology and personality. In boom times, the…

DH Lawrence, who was himself a school teacher, often said that education forced on all people was an evil. To be ‘uneducated’ is not the same thing as not being smart, it just means to not spend a lot of time in schools…

This is what has always struck me as the single most important thing people need from education. Not any individual subject or type of knowledge. The capacity for sustained attention on something.…

One of the things I do in my professional life is work with these guys to help explain why education doesn’t work for most students. I think they’re the only people who have really understood the problems in education,…

At school we had to sing the hymn, based on Kipling’s Recessional, from which ‘Lest We Forget’ comes. Do people still sing it in schools? It doesn’t have the meaning we give it today, as shown in the picture. It’s maybe…

“Besties” is the source of terrible suffering amongst kids of school age. Old-school teachers would actively discourage kids having ‘best friends’. It’s a difficult topic, but the bestie phenomenon is buried deep in all…

The knowledge pyramid is a famous way of representing how knowledge becomes wisdom. It’s superficially appealing, but is another example I think of how our tools shape how we think. IT people love it because it’s really…

I never win this debate, but it’s been a while. HECS. University students pay a contribution for their degree, once they enter the workforce. This is usually justified by saying they tend to get higher-paid jobs, so…

You know how everybody is never sure what to eat these days, what’s healthy and what isn’t? And we keep turning to ‘the science’ for the answers? Maybe we have the framework wrong. For millennia who were the experts on…

So...the proposed tax cuts seem popular. Because government is unpopular, and the silly myth that tax takes ‘our’ money off us. Around the world there’s been a rush to gut government, often through tax cuts which starve…

Young Liberals, including Peter Costello, Eric Abetz, Michael Yabsley and Michael Kroger, with Malcolm Fraser PM in 1978. It really does amaze me that more people who like the LNP don’t actually know the people who…

Have lived this firsthand. Steiner was an occultist, and occultism was very big in the 19th and earlier 20th century. The term occult and 'cult' are related - occult thinking tends to produce cults, a word that has…

I love villages, I think they're the healthiest and nicest form of human settlement. Everything at just the right human scale, not so small as to destroy privacy but not so large that people feel alone. And a balance of…

I think there’s truth in this, women have historically not done ‘leisure’? And not out of choice. Even shopping is rarely leisure. Maybe wine o’clock is a sort of pushback on this, although not sure it’s a positive one.…

Cartesian coordinates. Named after Descartes, although Fermat developed the idea separately too, and there were others before them. One of those things you learn in school and maybe wonder why. For me, this is how we…

Chinese whispers. All meaning is the meaning made by the person receiving a message. All messages are translations, even in the same language. An extension on the idea that you can’t ever really know another person -…

Another lens to view our world through (see link). This example comes from business, but applies to anything society does I think. Most of what’s seen as disruption in business is really that companies are dumber than…

If you look up images of ‘arguing’, nearly all of them will come back as people shouting at each other. Why are we so afraid of argument, and why do we think it means shouting at each other? In my experience most people…

Kidult, the child-adult. Hadn’t heard the word before, but adults with the mindset of adolescents, and adolescents aping what they see as adult behaviour seems very real. People well into middle age, often with no…

As a kid it never made sense what adults saw in politics. But I see it now. Many hate politics, but it’s an amazingly rich teacher about life. Take the current fight between Turnbull and Abbott. We’re all so used to…

Watching Malcolm Turnbull on energy bills. How long will it be until we decide again that essential public services should never be privatised? Not energy, not education, not housing, not superannuation, not roads, not…

A gap in our education? If you play sport, it’s obvious that you start pretty badly at it, and then with practice you get better all the time. But with the basic physical things we do every day, like stand, walk, run,…

If you float in a pool, you’ll notice that most of the feelings you normally have in your body will disappear. That’s because what we feel in our body is created by the interaction between our bodies and what’s around…

Australia often lags other parts of the world in trends. In the US for example there’s a real backlash against school fundraising. Here it’s all still pretty gung-ho, you beaut. Children are so often used as the weak…

There’s a saying, “speak truth to power”. Meaning telling the ‘powerful’ what’s really happening, rather than stay silent because of their ‘power’. I scare quote ‘power’ because just about every photo you can find of…

More Dart. Poise, not posture or exercise, will shape your body in the most perfect, healthiest way, while ‘doing’ nothing. You can be poised during exercise too. But the forces on you are enormous even sitting doing…

Quotas for women in powerful positions is one of those test cases for different worldviews. Those who believe everything should be decided by 'merit' hate quotas. I think the merit stuff is complete rubbish. The people…

My first degree was in an area which is hardly even mentioned to young students, but is the cutting edge of nearly all science and engineering. Materials engineering. It’s new materials which have been the real driver…

For me, one of the most destructive oppositions people use is the one between thinking and doing. As if those were opposites. As the famous line says, 'nothing is as practical as a good theory'. You can't do, without…

Story on the telly last night about arranged marriages. The idea horrifies a lot of people, but it made me think about whether the idea we personally choose the relationships we have is accurate in the first place? How…

Made me laugh. It’s like a flashback to the beginning of the great boomer swindle. All you need is love. And free education, tax-free super and cheap housing. And put it all on the credit card for the kids to pay off.…

Here’s my vote for why people like Trump and climate change deniers win. It’s a classic example of how the people who want the world to be different see the people they need to convince as simply stupid. How far do you…

It says a lot that the same people who froth at the mouth about what a terrible restriction on individual freedom compulsory voting is, will at the same time quite happily support draconian laws on flags, welfare…

The history of chairs is actually very interesting. Originally chairs were more ceremonial things, reserved for royalty or people in high church office. If you look at some of the old paintings of kings at court for…

Learning to ride a bike is my favourite metaphor for life. When we learn to ride a bike, we don’t try to control things too much, we just get on and wobble away, until we get it. Suddenly we’re riding. I see the trend…

It's slaying them at the Box Office, number one film in every country it's opened. And it's worth reading this self-serving, delusional piece to see inside the mind of critics, who can't accept that the masses might be…

I took a not very common pathway through education in the modern world. I studied sciences, maths and engineering, as well as the humanities, music and art. I worked bloody hard in all of them (still do), and did well…

The memories that are the most special for me in life have often been of events that are everyday, ordinary things. For example, coming home from school every day and snacking on SAOs and Vegemite. I can still feel that…

Being ‘cool’ at school, or one of the in-crowd, is apparently a very good predictor of problems later in life. It’s the kids at school who are outsiders, who buck the trend and are their own people, who are more likely…

Our tools shape how we see and think, something I was taught but which isn’t common in many schools or universities. Apart from making us think there is a 3-dimensional thing called ‘space’ (there isn’t) and a 4th…

Lots of press this week about the stress of the HSC, and how it doesn’t matter how well you go, there are always pathways to what you want to do. All true, but aren’t we sending the wrong message about education? To me…

I think Shakespeare is like the Bradman of human thought, something remarkably above and beyond all others. At school you get thrown straight into the plays, which means many find it a torture. But Shakespeare did…

One of the things that fascinates me about singing is how great singers (and it can take enormous practice) are those who don’t sing with their voice. They sing with their whole body. Singing just with your voice will…

Cool image. I was taught about the balance of nature at school. It was only years later that I learned that this picture is a lie. There is no nature, and no balance. And that’s why climate change is so scary, no Mother…

Translation is usually thought of as something you do between different languages. But actually all meaning is translated, even within the same language. What we think we’re communicating to others is always translated…

Teenagers get bad press on most things. But to me they've always been the age-group that keeps society honest. "Researchers originally found a correlation between a teenager's being adopted and a variety of negative…

A senior teacher I worked with said one day, “we need to do more for the gifted kids”. I said, “how do you know which kids are gifted? Are you gifted? Would you recognise a gifted child?” It was a serious question.…

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

The anglepoise lamp is a classic of design. It seems to defy gravity because you can put it in just about any position, and it will seem to float there. Your body is designed to do a similar thing, but no gym or workout…

Heard that joke about how the private sector is so efficient? Health insurance has gone up 28 percent in the last 4 years, and at the same time the pay packets of its bosses have more than doubled in some cases. This…

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although…

It's how nonsense spreads. Somebody writes a post about some long-forgotten information, and how the past was even worse today, so why do we worry? That era IS studied carefully, and even further back and in much more…

And we wonder why men don't teach in primary schools. Most sexual abuse happens within families, not with strangers. It's this sort of extreme reaction that is also behind people sending their kids off to private…

This looks a bit dry, but is really huge. After decades of education see-sawing between more and more testing, and more and more hippie love for the whole child, finally the focus is on what actually, PRACTICALLY works.…

Trump's actual legislative agenda so far, summarised by an American friend. Not much in there for the ordinary downtrodden citizen, he's like Tony Abbott, talks the talk and then walks the jackboot big business and…

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now…

For every teacher who wanted a comeback to this question.

One more for the teachers, the thin line between civilisation and chaos.

Do more sport, they say, it's good for you. “It’s true. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. Yes, it is. Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind — what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school,…

I see a lot of students and even adults holding pens and pencils in sometimes horrendous ways. My own kids included! Maybe it's not as big an issue now, that typing is much more common. But the physical strain some…

"...news from our friends about their families’ triumphs and trials has become omnipresent, unrelenting—a never-ending vacation slide show from hell." 'Oversharers' often see FB as like an extension of their actual…

Beautiful. For the shy people out there. One gem: "The internet, far from cutting us off from each other, has simply provided more fodder for our own era’s fascination with emotional authenticity and therapeutic…

History is such a good teacher.

This could all change if we keep electing people determined to outsource government services to the private sector. Don't think it can happen? Just look at schools people, look at schools.

Germaine Greer was one of the only prominent boomers who saw through the emptiness of the 60s 'peace and love' movement. This looks a miserable quote, but it's not at all, and matches what Proust for example saw about…

"Sources who attended the meeting said some parents, concerned about massive fee rises, were in tears and said they would have to send their children to a public school if the changes passed." O the humanity.

Kids with autism should be mainstreamed. They probably should get a lot more support than they currently do IN that mainstream now though. Mainstreaming in the past has often been a cost-cutting measure too, removing…

Do you ever hear teachers tell kids they have to do 'real research', and not just Google answers? That's maybe bad advice, for a couple of reasons: 1) Google is how 'serious' researchers do a shedload of their own…

Here's a good essay topic. "Play School is moving from 9.30 am to 9 am. Explain why this is a really dumb idea."

We tend to think of kids as adults-to-be, as if we adults shape the world and then kids grow up and start shaping it too. But to me kids start shaping the world in all sorts of ways we hardly notice, while they're still…

Report on the state of Australian schools. Some highlights: - equity in schools is declining (family and personal background are becoming far too important in determining how well you do) - students/families who can…

Good resource for maths teachers, on exponents. I think Adele and other major acts have had the lesson already. How to screw the public, cubed. Sell pay TV subscription. Then charge $60 extra to watch a program. Then…

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages…

Both schools and universities have failed forever to understand that if you don't offer people a way to understand *and* quantify the quality of the work you do, they will do it TO you. Nature abhors a vacuum. Or as…

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days…

Bill Shorten has been playing the long game. Now he's made inequality the central plank of his platform, which is both brave and the only thing any politician should be doing right now, it doesn't matter if you don't…

Nick Hanauer, smartest billionaire in the world. "From 1950 through 1980, during the heyday of the Great American Middle Class, a combination of New Deal programs, a corporate culture of civic responsibility, and a…

Bun or bump? There are ethical debates about women and babies - some see a woman as a 'container' for a baby (bun), others see the baby as a part of the woman herself (bump). Echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, the idea that…

The big secret about schools (and universities). Students learn, but they're doing most of it themselves.

Professor John Buchanan, from the University of Sydney business school, says policies of both conservative and Labor governments over the past 30 years have resulted in depressed wages. "None of this stuff is an…

Isn't Brian doing well? More gouging of the public. The public will pay of course. If you asked them to cough up more for science education in schools they'd probably call you a socialist.

Just hypothetically, if your maths teacher had given you a problem about Mozart and Kochel numbers and hadn't explained anything about how to approach it, this is what I'd do. Just hypothetically. I'd go to this link,…

There's a look teenagers get heading to school in the morning which reminds me how life can be a bit shit, at that age. Exhibit A. Stock photo, don't have a clue who it is. But captures it well.

This statement is true whether it's private insurance, or private roads, water, schools, banks, electricity etc. "Private insurance, however, is an expensive way to fund health care. When we look at the relationship…

A P.S. on yesterday's post. Very few people seem to like politics, and maybe a majority of people think politicians should be 'nicer' to each other. Anybody who has been involved in a group of any kind, like at work or…

When they teach maths at school, they rarely give you the history behind the maths. It's the history which often brings the whole subject alive. Take calculus. Calculus firstly is some of the sexiest *looking* maths you…

It was angles that led the ancient Greeks to invent the idea of atoms. You know those questions you sometimes ask as a kid, about the infinitely big and infinitely small, like if the universe ends at this point, what's…

Not done with angles. Trig is a bit of a trick, the sin, cos and tan we learn at school are really just ratios of lengths, they can help you measure lengths and deviations, but they don't actually tell you anything…

Who got the cane at school? I did, multiple times, and it was a lot bigger than that.

"I would be very emphatic that our schools, our parishes exist to teach a Catholic view of marriage," he said. I would be very emphatic that they take some of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they're getting…

Our schools really do fail our boys, far too often. I sit through annual awards ceremonies watching lines of grinning girls and think about whether schools still really don't have a clue about boys.

I don't think this is just about smart and dumb. It's true smart people need to speak up more than they do, but what usually determines what happens in the world isn't thinking - it's power, and status. Most of life and…

This is what every cake except one, in one store, says in Woolworths. And even in that store the 'Special Persons Day' cake was one only, amidst a great pile of Happy Fathers Day and Dad cakes like the one in the…

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised…

Maybe time to put negative ion generators in classrooms, buses, trains, hospitals and other public spaces. Cheap, effective.

I never get sick of this photo. That’s where we live, in that thin blue line. We don’t live ‘on Earth’, we live in that tiny thin layer of life which churns the surface of the planet. At school we were often taught that…

The secret to everything is bacteria. Learning about them changed my life; they are the most complex living things, don't believe a word of the biology you learned that says humans and other animals are the most complex…

Story of the week. http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/school-life/highschooler-run-over-by-topless-girl-doesnt-want-to-press-charges/news-story/a34054de4f59207a273ef4a34357d1bc

What worries Australians, graphed over the last 7 years. Look at housing on the rise. Australia is in real trouble. Its economic success in the last 20 years is almost a complete fantasy. The country has been run like a…

What you were probably never taught about gravity, at school. Gravity is not 'weighing you down' in everything you do. So many hip and knee replacements, aches and pains, disease, exhaustion and effort could be avoided,…

Took the No campaign all of a day to turn really nasty in defeat. Abortion today. Bun or bump? Is a woman just a container for a baby? Or is that baby also part of her? For Cory and his friends a woman is like an…

This is a very common gripe doctors tend to have - administration. Academics are the same. And we’ve all been told to despise bureaucracy. It’s well known that the amount a charity spends on administration has almost no…

Polygons, those geometries many suffer through in school maths, are not as abstract as they seem. But we don’t learn that at school.

More fun evidence that societies are built out of imitation and status. Now that everybody is going private, a new way to differentiate yourself is to go public. If everybody follows this trend, people will then shift…

I’ve discussed this with a lot of friends. Flirting really is a lost art, as the article says, in an age of such appalling manners and almost zero etiquette even being polite can be misread as flirting. We confuse and…

So much of the behaviour the #metoo phenomenon is complaining about is explained by this picture. How do men and women end up as sexualised objects of desire first, people second? The simplest answer is, as one woman…

Every politician who offers you a tax cut should be told the same thing. I would rather have: - decent and affordable schools - decent and affordable health care - affordable and effective transport options - power that…

Everything Elizabeth says is (scandalously) true. And similar arguments apply to private hospitals and private health (who also use the same lying excuses, such as ‘it takes the strain off the public system’). I…

Here's a genuine question to puzzle-through. I think it's an important topic, and there are some interesting myths around. Many supporters of private education say it saves the public money, because the public subsidy…

Can we make 2018 the year when fundraising in schools gets some needed attention? I don’t think more than two weeks go by without a new fundraising initiative. It needs to stop.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/09/08/fans-arent-going-pay-music-anymore-thats-ok/ Steve Lukather (net worth about $40 million) was a good recent example of a muso without a clue, complaining about how real quality…

The saying is true - it's not what you say (or think), it's what you do that defines you. Huge implications across life and work and dealing with people everywhere. "We should be very careful when taking any notice of…

In Australia it's more often the other way around. Working with your hands is cool. Doing University-trained stuff is apparently a wank.

Don't actually expect people to buy this, academic publishers charge too much. But I enjoyed co-writing it - it's about why you can't tell if schools or universities are actually teaching you or your kids anything or…

This may move people. Its basic message, that teachers should treat children as human beings, and have high expectations of them, is impossible to fault. The problem is, that applies no matter what work you do. This is…

When you study trigonometry at school, you're actually studying deep history. Modern curricula separate maths and history though so you're never told that (hardly anybody even remembers the connection). Angles are the…

Brian May and Queen are a different type of hero for our times. Relentlessly smart and curious and inventive, and decent. And able to shamelessly access the power of magnificence and spectacle at a time when these were…

A plug. http://theconversation.com/data-collected-about-student-behaviour-doesnt-help-improve-teaching-or-learning-57793

That time of year again here when depression and anxiety really ramp up for some people. I give these guys a plug every year, they're fantastic. Their Depression Learning Path is a free download, if you just want to…

Commercial radio is like being on a school camp. Firstly you buddy up, because heaven forbid you had to say something on your own. Then you turn everything into some glorified competition version of Truth or Dare,…

This is a short video about an educational genius. I doubt many people have ever heard of him, or of the approach he invented, called Direct Instruction. It wipes the floor with every other educational approach it's…

THE CHECK UP We go to doctors and dentists for check ups. But this is a type of check up that's even more important, and not as common. To check up or check in on yourself. All it requires is a bit of time, where you…

Yes, cut teachers some slack, all true. But...teachers also need to get rid of the idea that teaching is all about interpersonal relationships. Teaching is about...teaching. If teachers don't want to constantly be held…

Watching the Brexit results. There are some simple things that go wrong in countries, and every generation forgets them. It took us to 2 world wars, and we still forget. 1. If things are unequally shared, people get…

Primary school teachers. They say it how it is.

A better question is why the pretty feeble academic challenge that is school today for most of our kids stresses them so much that they end up with anxiety and depression.…

How much of life is just school repeating itself over and over. No matter how old people get. The same cliques, the same desperation to outdo other people in terms of possessions, status - whether it's cars, houses,…

To see the origins of this sort of culture, it doesn't hurt to ride the bus each day with boys from all-boy schools. The 'old boys' networks attached to these schools are also instrumental in running a lot of the…

The school teacher in me wants to stop kids gripping pens with hands that look like they're in the final stages of arthritis. And to stop girls storing their mobile phones in front pockets of their skirts resting right…

Not an ongoing vendetta against Brian Cox (like he'd care anyway). He's a lovely bloke. But the arrogance of saying this is a book about 'how to think' for starters. As if only science thinks. And then to say: "The…

Love it. I studied at this School at UNSW, they do some amazing stuff. Materials science is the cutting edge of engineering, most new big innovations in engineering are about the materials used, not the way they're put…

“Public school students receive significantly more total government funding per student than what goes to private school students." Um, yes, that's why they're called government schools. Next he'll be telling us that…

Thought about this today when the Tele demonised a young girl as a dole bludger, when in fact she'd just finished school and was about to go to TAFE.

Big fan of the staycation. Sometimes holidays seem to be going the same way as after-school activities for kids. Family holidays in the past were so often to dodgy, cheap places not far away where you just got to lay in…

Can save maybe 5 years of school for people.

As an ex-teacher this rings alarm bells. Schools as cheap child care. But if they can do it without just expecting teachers to 'mind the kids', I also know the pressures on working parents. The bigger picture here is…

Ricky Gervais saw this with The Office. Millions of people spend much of their lives working in organisations that they think are fundamentally stupid. Understanding why they put up with it is great reading. "A recent…

A little bit risky to see history through the lens of human development, but is the Western world stuck in a rut of adolescence? Adolescence is a time of ruthless comparison, of defining yourself according to others and…

Add to this that the public schools also generally make no real difference to student performance, and it's not a pretty picture. The answer isn't public or private (although the privates don't need all that money, it's…

And this is why schools and universities look like they're doing an ok job of teaching. Students do learn, but very rarely is it because of the school.

I'm not sure people realise just what fanatical zealots are in charge here now. They won't stop until they've dismantled most of the public sector that Australia took a century to build. But all the way along they'll be…

Bewdiful. (We can give up with science education when even astronauts call this zero gravity.)

Putting the old school teacher hat on, a very different way to understand recent terrible events is to see that kids blow themselves up in some parts of the world for the same underlying reason kids binge drink here.…

There's lots of debate around diet now, and people are learning amazing new things about nutrition, and reaffirming some old wisdom about food at the same time etc. What isn't questioned to the same extent, but it's…

So if a nurse, builder, teacher or firefighter said to you "yes I can do the job, but I'll be charging you a couple of hundred extra above the standard rate", what would you say? And if you took out extra insurance to…

Doesn't matter who you vote for, these trends in Australia should bother us. 1. People who get paid millions of dollars to mouth 'opinions' every day, like shock jocks and newspaper opinion columnists, are allowed to…

Not sure how aware people are of how much money education brings into the country. Second biggest export after coal. Billions a year. The 'ivory tower' thing people say about unis, as if unis are out of touch with the…

Rich people, rich hospitals and rich public schools getting taxpayers' money is, um, a bit rich.

This is what happens when you let local boards run schools.

Kids in school often ask "so how will this this help me in later life?" I'm not one for twee quotes but this one from Steve Jobs isn't twee, and might be a good answer: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you…

Hmmmm, the best Play School window?

thinks biological warfare was invented in a pre school.

used to love school lunch orders in brown paper bags.