Open mike 17/02/2010

15 comments on “Open mike 17/02/2010 ”

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1. Dan 1

   17 February 2010 at 6:57 am

   As I listen to Heather Roy justify her inane proposals for private providers of education popping up to cherry pick the brightest, and top and bottom students commuting around to different schools for different subjects, I get a little unhappy. The so called education crisis is a convenient creation by the right to push their discredited ideologies.
   It would be so much easier if we tried to make all our schools excellent schools, instead of constantly bagging teachers and results. A classic last night was the breathless reporter indicating Roy’s proposals sought to create more duxes! Sorry lady, there is only one dux per school.
   John Minto quoting Ivan Snook does a great job in outlining the NACT party’s dishonesty in education in the following article. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1002/S00098.htm
2. Adrian 2

   17 February 2010 at 7:50 am

   Off her Trolley would be delighted to meet more duxes ( duxi?) at each school to make up for only meeting vice-chancellors at varsities. Exactly who is going to move the “bottom 20%” around all these schools, of course how silly of me, their parents, with their tax cuts of 35c a week.
   • Scott 2.1

     17 February 2010 at 8:47 am

     The plan is to eventually turn schools into businesses. So making more duxes makes sense. It’s just an extension of the modern work practice of calling everyone a manager.
3. lprent 3

   17 February 2010 at 9:03 am

   Bugger. Rebooted this morning. For some reason the mobile version is not displaying. Makes reading on the bus difficult. I will fix when I get to work

   Update: fixed. Mount points were in place, but appeared not to be active. ‘mount -a’ (from my iphone) fixed it. Issue for tonight is to try that again and see what happened.
4. Pascal's bookie 4

   17 February 2010 at 9:05 am

   Everyone’s a winner, baby, that’s the truth.

   Though I thought that was PC gone madism, and to be avoided.
5. prism 5

   17 February 2010 at 11:41 am

   Makes me think some how of Garrison Keeler’s sly little phrase as he bids goodbye “From Lake Woebegone, where all men are handsome, all women are strong and the children are all above average'”
6. felix 6

   17 February 2010 at 1:12 pm

   That weird little sharp intake of breath Key does after answering certain questions. WTF?
7. randal 7

   17 February 2010 at 1:48 pm

   yep Roy has flipped allright.
   its a nutter proposal giving people freedom to choose and drive round all day looking for a teacher that meets their needs precisely.
   can they use their voucher to buy a car and pay for the gas too.
   Roys job is to make the system go.
   not carve off slices for consumers delectation.
   this proposal is verging on the refractory wishes of a recalcitrant child.
   i.e. poop.
8. Robert Winter 8

   17 February 2010 at 1:56 pm

   The nation confers on Ms Clark today the ONZ, as the University of Auckland confers the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Two well-deserved honours to a great New Zealander.
9. BLiP 9

   17 February 2010 at 2:25 pm

   John Key’s word of the day:

   illumative
10. Bill 10

    17 February 2010 at 7:16 pm

    Maybe I blinked…or I’ve had a stroke…or something. But I spent 45 minutes flicking between ch1 and ch3 this evening and received no fucking news whatsoever. None.

    And so a few thoughts kind of sprung up and wandered across my mind.

    Firstly, it’s been a few months since I subjected myself to TV and maybe it was just as bad before..or maybe it got even worse than it was.

    I decided that the latter was the case and that led to the ‘secondly’. Which is the scary bit…or at the very least, the disconcerting bit…which precedes the merely observational bit which you’ll get to if you read through all of this comment.

    So secondly, you know those Latin American juntas of ‘yesteryear’ ( or the image you had/have of them) where what was happening and what was impacting on people were the only things not reported on in the domestic media? And you know how ‘everything’ became a message of aspirational successful white elitism? And you know how the guy who might have been running the various alleged disappearances and death squads was a nice guy with a nice smile who gushed over the TV screens on such important and pressingly widespread matters such as a national teams sportspeople sporting in a particular foreign country….

    This is happening right now in NZ ( not the death squads and shit..just making that clear before some wing nut onslaught..) And the wheels of the ‘no brain no news good news’ is being oiled to an extent by the fact that information is available for those who want it in places like this.

    Rather than pushing the envelope on mainstream sources of news and pressing them to be more informative, ‘the standard’ and other such outlets, allow for the ghettoisation and marginalisation of substantive news by a mainstream focusing on bringing the comfortable and friendly ‘colgate smile’ of 21-st C corporatism into every home…
11. prism 11

    17 February 2010 at 9:16 pm

    With every ‘innovation’ by NZ government we need to look for the country, state, supercity where it originated. While it is wise to see what others are doing there seems to be little native wit going into our policy.

    This education voucher stuff has been tried in the USA. Apparently if it is limited and targeted it can be ground-breaking for some. I think they were given to bright kids and I think black ones particularly, so that they could attend a school offering courses at their level. It was a good way of getting the kids out of what is often a negative environment. (I haven’t heard a mention of this which apparently affects low income children. They do not accept the bright hard-working kids in their midst, who would be extending themselves beyond the parents aspirations as well. Outcome, easy to guess.)

    Unfortunately when children are taken from their own familiar environment to another school which is completely different, they may be treated as strangers alien from the norm and soon don’t fit in their neighbourhood either. If parents do not support, or do not know how to support then they are really isolated. They may gain an education and better future and lose their home and family connections.
12. ak 12

    17 February 2010 at 9:39 pm

    Ah but how lovely eh, Bill, to see young Hels again; popping up among the food news and nude cyclists like a long-lost motherlode of class and sanity ‘mid the ennui and dross of this drifting, shiftless political asylum of grinning, rudderless impotency: right glowing she was, ‘n all, and why wouldn’t she be? – up there treading the global boards in the sterling role of tireless, intelligent dedication that she made her own right here in our own little rep-rooms – before the high priests stirred the rooting mob to spit on her pearls for an oleaginous lounge-invertebrate and flip-flopping money-trader whose slithering superciliousness to date has touched hardly a whisker of her sturdy corpus of achievement and the proud, inalienable legacy she has enshrined and gifted to this fair, fortunate populace whose only fatal foible is an almost pathological political naivety which leaves it hopelessly gullible to the manipulative whims and vagaries of the media forces you so perceptively allude to – a sight for sore eyes; long may she employ her towering talents in succour of the needy billions – and may we be granted the fortune of her occasional, inspirational presence.
13. Jan 13

    17 February 2010 at 9:44 pm

    New Zealand’s main source of publicly funded news and broadcasting is under a grave threat.
    Friends of Radio New Zealand anyone?
    http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/rnz-govt-in-showdown-over-funding-3369371
    • Armchair Critic 13.1

      17 February 2010 at 11:11 pm

      Not a good sign. With RNZ muzzled or gone it will only be student radio that is worth listening to.

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