Written By: - Date published: 1:22 pm, August 22nd, 2008 - 58 comments
Categories: education -
Tags: craig foss, early childhood education
Craig Foss annoyed some students in Napier when he described early childhood teachers as “glorified babysitters”, according to a recent story in the Hawke’s Bay Today (sent in by a bemused reader). He admitted that he used the term “babysitting” yet also tried to argue he was taken out of context. Perhaps he realised his assumptions were not going down too well. Certainly National’s plans to boost the numbers of non-accredited early childhood staff lead me to think they do regard “child-minding” as more of a priority than education of toddlers.
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HS see my above post
too many big words mate…hey I am not your mate and do you or do you not own a dictionary. and it is it beyond your capacity to use it or do you prefer a kneejerk response to everything rather than calm consideration and rational deliberation?
ok randal I stand corrected. I do have a tendency towards the eschatological when it comes to the whittling away of our Rights. Many apologies. You are right. I don’t own a dictionary, I just tend to widen my vocabulary by a kind of osmosis, if you like. have a look at my latest post in ‘Monkeys with Typewriters’ I thought that that was relatively rational and calm take on the subject.
randal I though you were busy starting another party for morons so NZ First voters would have another option ?
higher standard all I have to say to you is a fool can ask more questions that a wise man can answer
looks like the tory provocateurs do not have the capacity to stick to the point
Well Done Randal, I guess they are trying to express the values and principles that underpin the broad labour movement , y’know, values such as human rights, which obviously the EPMU don’t share
check this blogs About:
It’d be fair to say that all of us share a commitment to the values and principles that underpin the broad labour movement and we hope that perspective will come through strongly as you read the blog.
Its starting to come through in the comments, if not the posts.
Why, so it is. But imagine this conversation:
Shaun Sorry Rodney, can’t come to the caucus meeting today as I have a high level meeting at the union to attend.
Rodney Oh?
Shaun Yeah, we’re going to discuss the unions opposition to the proposed bill we just announced and the pamphlets that we’ll be handing out.
Rodney Sounds interesting, let us know about it will you?
Shaun Yeah, sure. I’ll give all the details at the meeting tomorrow as well as copies of the pamphlet if I can get hold of some. Gota go, Cya.
Rodney Cya
It’s not a human rights issue but a conflict of interests issue.
well if that is the case dave start a thread about it…dont hijack someoneelses point of view and then complain because you are held up because you have nothing to say for yourself except writing a whole lot of rubbish about nothing
Randal I cant start a thread here as its not my blog you dork. Piss off if you have nothing worthwhile to say or get your own blog as others of us have. Draco, it is a human rights issue as his employer didnt want him to have a choice as to whether he can stay at work and be involved in Act in his own time. The conflict of interests issue hasn’t arisen yet and in any case conflicts of issue is not a prohibited ground of discrimination, whereas expressing political opinions is.
dave none of that made any sense whatsoever. SPAM 101.
to others it would, but not to you, as you appear to lack basic comprehension skills. And not for the first time either.
dave you are a troll. crawl back in your hole till you have somethng to say that does not involve an ad hominem argument or a mouthfull of nonsense put out to confuse people and waste their time..ciao
Dave, all that’s happened so far is that he broke a part of his employment contract put in there to, apparently, protect against such conflicts of interest as has now arisen with him becoming a high ranking member of ACT.
no member of act is high ranking…they are all low type people.
Wow, a hole day without one of the Standardistas putting up a post and I miss them already.
When I saw this thread had 50 comments I thought, great, people will have been talking about early childhood education as a profession, the stupid comments Foss made, the sexism underlying them, etc.
Sadly I see that is not the case. Guess Mr Foss is pretty undefensible then?
And barnsleybill I think the “vermin” with the tape recorder in this case are in fact the students that Mr Foss went to see and spoke directly to, no entrapment necessary (not that I think the recordings were entrapment anyway). I don’t think anyone has made any allegation that the students were politically motivated members of another party, but rather that they were surprised and annoyed to have their profession denigrated by an MP.
Hey HS, sorry I’ve just caught up with this thread. I’m friends with a lot of people who know Tan personally so I’d rather not comment on his employment issues, except to say I’m incredibly disappointed with his actions.
All I’m seeing on this thread is a lot of misinformed commentary from people on the right who don’t know the full facts of the situation. Here’s a hint: responsible employers don’t go running to the media about their employment disagreements, opportunisitic political aspirants do.
Are early childhood workers allowed to vote against the vile Miss Clark and her Absolute Power regime?
stand for parliament d4juice and see how many votes you get.
Hook yourself up to a lie detector randal and watch the lights go out across New Zealand you stupid nitwit cretin.
Lynn
Can you save all of Randal’s and D4J’s comments at the very least there’s a short novella there, it’s like watching an old rerun of the odd couple – brilliant stuff.
How did this thread entwine itself in two issues?
The remark of Mr Foss, if accurately reported, is insulting to early-childhood teachers and that’s all it is. Any suggestion that his view is representative of anyone else is fatuous. He’s a clown, FOSS is a four letter “F” word, see, you can learn things at kindergarten!
The other issue, (employer permission for standing in an election) is pivotted on the terms of Mr Tan’s employment. It is a legal issue, not a political or human rights issue. Let the court deal with it. Personal and political opinions have nothing to do with it.
LP I don’t know if this feature exists, but it would be great to have it in the comments section and would save a lot of moderation time, and d4j and randal prove its worth. If you could have a karma feature like on kiwiblog, and a setting to mute the comments that fall below a karma level, like they have on youtube, then we wouldn’t have to waste time reading mindless trash from the likes of randal and d4j that doesn’t add anything to the debate. Inflammatory comments from both sides would self-moderate, too–people would be less likely to write inflammatory comments if their karma drops so low that nobody reads what they say.
I don’t know if this kind of feature exists but if it does it would be great to integrate with this blog and knock out some of the childish behaviour.
[lprent: I've thought about it. It doesn't prevent outbreaks of stupid comments, it operates after the fact. The other factor is that it allows the formation of a self-perpetuating comment cabal. Effectively it rewards forming informal coalitions with others to drive people out. I could think of about 10 ways that I could use a system like that to do interesting things.
To comment on here is a privilege not a right and subject to a perception by the moderators of reasonable behavior. The enforcement of the standards of behavior is fairly lax - most of the time we warn first on the offending comment(s). But when they are enforced, they tend toward the draconian.
It is mildly arbitrary and not subject to appeal. That ensures that there is no lawyering introducing its own level of flames.
In Rob's case the real problem wasn't what he was saying was so far off. It was that he was consistently inaccurate and appeared to seldom read the responses to his previous comments, either by moderators, or by other commentators. So why was he commenting at all ?
Effectively he was writing a set of lines without interacting. To me that smacks of graffiti mindset. It was also taking too much of everyones times. My previous actions didn't cause a sufficient change in behaviour - for instance putting his remarks into moderation.
Eventually I got annoyed and banned him for a week for being a bloody nuisance to me. That is the least time I could do. But that is his last warning. ]