Your quote is not from the ABS, it from a Fairfax Media page (Brisbane Times).
I've got no reason to think they didn't get it from the ABS. Your assertion that it is inaccurate puts the burden of proof on you. Show that it is inaccurate or that your statement has more credibility than the Brisbane Times. Since the immigration figures given by you could account for a lot of it anyway, I find it is unlikely to be significantly inaccurate but, as I've already acknowledged, perhaps not as relevant to educational standards as might first appear.
No business I know of would employ them without a secondary to tertiary education certificate.
This statement shows more about your lack of knowledge of homeschooling in Australia than it does about my children's opportunities. If you're interesting in finding out about it, I refer you to the Home Schooling Review on the QLD education departments website as a reasonable place to start. http://education.qld.gov.au/publication/production/reports/
From the report: "They in turn submit folios of their work, often complete the STAT test (administered by the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC)) and are admitted on the basis of QTAC schedule rank to TAFE institutes and all Queensland universities.
It isn't an impediment to university entrance and I have no evidence other than your assertion that it will be an impediment to finding work. The department of education is quite helpful and I'm sure they'd mention it if there was a problem.
Even with a university lecturer in the family your children will still miss out on a lot, like the subjects that your grandmother does not know, how to assimilate information from multiple sources and detect bias, Science experiments that require equipment, the social experiences when working in a large group.
Yet strangely, even though none of my siblings or I are marine biologists like our grandmother, we all acknowledge her part in our education. Maybe it had something to do with her encouragement to find information from multiple sources (even on subjects she didn't know), detect bias (such as your bias against home school) and the inspiration of her lifelong love of learning. The cost of school science equipment is not prohibitive and some coincides with my hobbies anyway. As for the social experiences they do sport and I also quote the Home Schooling Review "In summary, researchers have found home schooled children are as well socialised as students educated in traditional State and non-State schools. Boyer (1993)4 researched the social stratification of children in schools by the lock-step age and grade approach to schooling. He concluded that by the time children are teenagers, they have little idea how to socialise with anyone outside of their peer group because of this approach to education." So school has disadvantages as far as socialisation goes. The review calls the idea that homeschoolers aren't well socialised a myth.
All home schooling accomplishes in the end is passing on your own bad habits to your children and not permitting them the opportunity to develop on their own.
Parents can only pass on bad habits? Placing children in a government school is them developing on their own? Government is a more beneficial influence on children than parents is the meaning of your statement. If that's what you really think, it's a sad reflection on you. Combined with the (incorrect) idea that children need school to be socialised, which amounts to saying that our children can't make friends without government intervention, and it paints a really ugly picture of your view of individuals. Can't learn to think or make friends without government intervention. That's certainly not the type of thinking that built this country. How sad it is that those ideas you have are widely accepted without peop
Yes. With a proper education you can work out if you can afford a loan. With a proper education you can work out that buying non-productive items that depreciate in value with credit subject to compound interest is a path to financial destruction. With a proper education you can work out that house prices can not rise indefinitely in proportion to wages. With a proper education you can work out that if most people in the economy are taking out loans they can't afford to buy things of no value that you're headed for a crash.
That's why I, with only a high school education in economics and mathematics, was telling people that our system was headed for disaster 10 years ago. You only had to do the maths and not very complex maths at that. Having for a brief period sold mobile phones, one of the most disturbing things was coming to understand that most people could not do the maths well enough to understand the impact of a 2 year contract on their personal finances. At the time in my country, mobile phone plans were the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy.
No amount of regulation of the financial industry will stop this from happening again so long as a significant portion of the population make consistently stupid financial decisions.
Isn't part of student engagement part of the student's responsibility?
Why is it it's the school's job to make sure the student is pursuing the education?
You're asking for wholehearted voluntary engagement in a compulsory system? You make some good points but this is one of the contradictions that make public schooling very difficult to implement. Clearly we can't have an uneducated populace, yet compulsion is rather limited in ability to deal with the problem.
Looking back, I'm glad I was made to do school even though I didn't want to and didn't necessarily see how learning history would help me (and why can't I just play computer games?).
I'm pretty sure I got almost no benefit from history lessons in school. Twenty years later I read about history probably more than anything else. YMMV.
I am fairly certain that there comes a point at which kids simply have to be made to do their work, even if they don't want to or even don't see why they should.
Agreed. The fact that my homeschooled children are compelled by their mother rather than a school doesn't change the essential correctness of your point. However we require much less compulsion than is exerted at school because (a) we read and learn and the children want to copy us and (b) the younger children see the elder doing their lessons and don't want to miss out. Our "classroom" is a converted bedroom which the children frequent even when not being compelled to do lessons. Self directed learning is great but pretty much impossible if no-one has taught you to read.
"I want it, so I'm going to get it" pervades society a lot more than "This is better for me in 5 years, so I should do that instead of do what I feel like doing." When the "we should do what the child wants" gets into education, we've got major problems.
I'm not sure self-discipline is possible to learn other than by practice, I don't see how self-discipline can be practised under compulsion. Surely if you are being compelled you are by definition NOT learning self-discipline.
It's from the ABS. Do you have any evidence for your assertion of bias or error?
Not all of these migrants were educated in this nation.
Well that 7 million immigrants, if a high proportion were not educated here, could account for most of the illiteracy statistics. Considering it is workplace related, they could potentially be literate in their own language but functionally illiterate here which doesn't reflect on our school system.
Because the alternative is much worse, no education what so ever.
Except my children are homeschooled without government help. Obviously if nearly half the population is illiterate in English (for whatever reason) this is not a viable alternative for society as a whole, but it works for us (middle class income, university educated, teacher trained wife). Public education, IMO, is a good thing for people incapable of educating their own children (either personally or by paying for it) but not very desirable as a universal solution.
The only parents that actually take an interest in education these days are the parents that want to ensure their child is protected from subversive or offensive information
Or those that had a university lecturer for a grandmother and have the resources to do better than public education. That said, if our children want to go to a school in their high school years that will be OK. We will have trained them to love learning by then which school will be unlikely to be able to take from them. It's only the last few years that I've realised how much impact my grandmother had on my ability to learn. Availability of school is a comparatively minor influence to someone who had such an (admittedly unfair) advantage.
Not enough of the right parents were involved and too many of the wrong people get to write policy.
In a nutshell explaining why I won't be handing my children over.
There's a difference between not wanting an education and not thinking that increasing the time children are subject to government compulsion will achieve that education.
Single-issue parties, though on occasion successful, rarely get more than the people that feel really passionate about their issue to vote for them.
When that issue is don't get sued for downloading you might be surprised how many would vote for it. Australians in general aren't very politically aware. I doubt that 10% could give you any sort of reasonable explanation of what a free market is, or what socialism is. Downloading without risk is potentially something that many, particularly under 30's, would consider a more compelling reason to vote than something obscure (to them) like policy on deficits, privatisation etc.
I know a man who was the regional president of one of our political parties, he could not give you an accurate description of our countries political development or where the concepts in our constitution come from though he could tell you a great deal about who is in power now. The ideology behind the differing political movements is lost on most people, even those involved in them.
That's your "point". All I've been doing is indicating how wrong you are, with your straw men, etc. I am refuting a point.
You haven't shown me a straw man. To refute a point you have to, you know, refute it. Even in your last post you agree your words could convey that meaning, therefore it's not a case of me building a straw man but you communicating poorly.
I can insult you as much as I like, and it affects nothing else.
Yes, it affects your credibility, since those with a valid argument don't need to resort to such tactics.
Oh, I made a spelling mistake. Woe is me! Have mercy, ChameleonDave, have mercy.
I explain how you (a) put two words together and (b) gave them a certain interpretation; you then defend yourself by arguing that it is reasonable to put the two words together. Can you see what is missing?
Yes, the part where you acknowledge that you agreed to that interpretation twice already. I could link to and quote your posts, but you don't like that. If you really had any valid point to make you would have explained by now how "it's not for you to say so" means anything substantially different to "shut up". It doesn't and you can't.
You've called my comments snarky, a straw man, inaccurate, non sequiturs, called me a wikipedia admin, a liar, a lying idiot, claimed I would throw a tantrum and made an outrageous comment about how I would respond if you accused me of shooting a baby in the head. If you had a point to explain you've had ample opportunity to do so, yet you haven't. There's no reason for me to take you seriously. You disqualified yourself from that when you started the ad hominum arguments.
I argued that it was inappropriate for a certain person to say a certain thing.
In other words, for him to shut up.
You will have no choice but to throw some sort of tantrum
Which would presumably be something similar to your latest post.
I already knew that you had decided to grab the "not" and the "say" and splice them together as "shut up"
Ah, I see. Telling someone to not say something (which you now confirm as we all can see by the first quote in this post) is so completely different to telling them to shut up.</sarcasm>
I already interpreted "it's not for you to say so" as "shut up". That's as specific as necessary and you haven't offered a thing to counter that interpretation. In fact, when I asked (snarkily!) if that was correct, your response was Essentially, yeah. Have I misunderstood what you mean by the word "yeah"?
It's not that I've given up, you've just got nothing. It's impossible to counter your point since you haven't made one.
If you want to persist in this, give a clear and concise explanation of what you think I meant by "say so", and I will then point out how inaccurate it is.
Welcome to slashdot President Clinton! What did they mean by "is", I never found out?
Your ability to come up with a convoluted explanation of why your words don't convey their actual meaning and why that indicates a fault on my part rather than yours is not of interest to me.
The central banking system we have in the so called capitalist countries is a feature of communism[1] designed to transform the country to communism. You haven't seen the failure of capitalism, what you are seeing is the success of a communist strategy to destroy capitalism.
[1] same applies to free government schooling and progressive income tax. Reference: "The Communist Manifesto"
You do realize we have the power, right? You don't need to spill anyone's blood in the process. If 'the people' you are referring to have enough power to win a violent revolution, they have enough power to take it by voting. Unless your 'people' is some minority group trying to impose their will on the majority. Not a good idea.
Glad to see someone else saying this. I don't know why it's so hard for some people to understand.
The current government would fight to the death of the last man in order to retain power; I have no difficulty believing that.
Remember though that the "current government" is not the borg. They will turn on each other for the slightest advantage. Divide and conquer is the way it works, they use that against you but are equally susceptible to it. How hard is it to convince a state legislator the the Feds are taking territory that really belongs to the state?
I'm in favour of the right to bear arms for the purpose of resisting tyranny, but seriously, try a video camera first. Why blow the machine up when you can just throw some sand in the gears and bring it to a standstill? Even if you can win a revolution it is very destructive.
Agreed. The idea that you can be convicted as a sex offender for having a cartoon... I don't think that most people are aware of how badly the legal protections here in Australia are being abused and destroyed. There was no victim here except the accused.
What should happen if violence is initiated by the police? Or if there appear to be agents provocateurs involved?
My last sentence applies equally to them. You don't lose your right of self defence just because you're being attacked by a policeman. Difficult or impossible in a lot of circumstances to sort out who did what first to the satisfaction of a court or the general public. Unless you can get that evidence, as a protester you're on the losing side unless public sentiment over continued abuse becomes strong enough to swing support to you.
No, it's not actually. This is the New South Wales government, whereas the "child abuse" case (I don't believe he was actually accused of distributing child porn) was the Queensland government.
Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.
Snarky, well ok. Straw man, no way. For my comment to be a straw man would require that you hadn't said "but it's not for you to say so". "I have no idea why you were protesting" is a perfectly acceptable response for Phroggy to make since protesters are presumably trying to raise awareness of something. Telling him it's not for him to say is nonsensical.
This seems inconsistent with your earlier message:
but it's not for you to say so
I just picked on the bit I disagreed with. I found this to oppose the general thrust of your message and be contradictory to the interests of the protesters. If people become aware of them without getting any idea of their message they ought to know. There are a lot of different groups competing to get their message out, nobody has time to investigate them all. Saying to someone that it's not for them to bring it up is counterproductive.
The practice of letting private banks inflate the currency supply through fractional reserve lending resulting in a consistently inflationary financial system is evil.
Deflation is a result of lending "money" that doesn't exist. Real money does not disappear if someone doesn't repay a loan. The borrower goes bankrupt, the lender suffers loss but it won't destroy the economy as a whole. Even a fiat currency could act like that provided it was released by the government as value rather than by banks as debt.
Slashdot Mirror
aside from that I'm afraid that's outside the purview of the Federal government.
Has that ever stopped them?
Got any tips for a non-programmer who is willing to learn enough to set his children on that path?
Your quote is not from the ABS, it from a Fairfax Media page (Brisbane Times).
I've got no reason to think they didn't get it from the ABS. Your assertion that it is inaccurate puts the burden of proof on you. Show that it is inaccurate or that your statement has more credibility than the Brisbane Times. Since the immigration figures given by you could account for a lot of it anyway, I find it is unlikely to be significantly inaccurate but, as I've already acknowledged, perhaps not as relevant to educational standards as might first appear.
No business I know of would employ them without a secondary to tertiary education certificate.
This statement shows more about your lack of knowledge of homeschooling in Australia than it does about my children's opportunities. If you're interesting in finding out about it, I refer you to the Home Schooling Review on the QLD education departments website as a reasonable place to start. http://education.qld.gov.au/publication/production/reports/
From the report: "They in turn submit folios of their work, often complete the STAT test (administered by the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC)) and are admitted on the basis of QTAC schedule rank to TAFE institutes and all Queensland universities.
It isn't an impediment to university entrance and I have no evidence other than your assertion that it will be an impediment to finding work. The department of education is quite helpful and I'm sure they'd mention it if there was a problem.
Even with a university lecturer in the family your children will still miss out on a lot, like the subjects that your grandmother does not know, how to assimilate information from multiple sources and detect bias, Science experiments that require equipment, the social experiences when working in a large group.
Yet strangely, even though none of my siblings or I are marine biologists like our grandmother, we all acknowledge her part in our education. Maybe it had something to do with her encouragement to find information from multiple sources (even on subjects she didn't know), detect bias (such as your bias against home school) and the inspiration of her lifelong love of learning. The cost of school science equipment is not prohibitive and some coincides with my hobbies anyway. As for the social experiences they do sport and I also quote the Home Schooling Review "In summary, researchers have found home schooled children are as well socialised as students educated in traditional State and non-State schools. Boyer (1993)4 researched the social stratification of children in schools by the lock-step age and grade approach to schooling. He concluded that by the time children are teenagers, they have little idea how to socialise with anyone outside of their peer group because of this approach to education." So school has disadvantages as far as socialisation goes. The review calls the idea that homeschoolers aren't well socialised a myth.
All home schooling accomplishes in the end is passing on your own bad habits to your children and not permitting them the opportunity to develop on their own.
Parents can only pass on bad habits? Placing children in a government school is them developing on their own? Government is a more beneficial influence on children than parents is the meaning of your statement. If that's what you really think, it's a sad reflection on you. Combined with the (incorrect) idea that children need school to be socialised, which amounts to saying that our children can't make friends without government intervention, and it paints a really ugly picture of your view of individuals. Can't learn to think or make friends without government intervention. That's certainly not the type of thinking that built this country. How sad it is that those ideas you have are widely accepted without peop
I wonder if that's still true.
Yes. With a proper education you can work out if you can afford a loan. With a proper education you can work out that buying non-productive items that depreciate in value with credit subject to compound interest is a path to financial destruction. With a proper education you can work out that house prices can not rise indefinitely in proportion to wages. With a proper education you can work out that if most people in the economy are taking out loans they can't afford to buy things of no value that you're headed for a crash.
That's why I, with only a high school education in economics and mathematics, was telling people that our system was headed for disaster 10 years ago. You only had to do the maths and not very complex maths at that. Having for a brief period sold mobile phones, one of the most disturbing things was coming to understand that most people could not do the maths well enough to understand the impact of a 2 year contract on their personal finances. At the time in my country, mobile phone plans were the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy.
No amount of regulation of the financial industry will stop this from happening again so long as a significant portion of the population make consistently stupid financial decisions.
Isn't part of student engagement part of the student's responsibility?
Why is it it's the school's job to make sure the student is pursuing the education?
You're asking for wholehearted voluntary engagement in a compulsory system? You make some good points but this is one of the contradictions that make public schooling very difficult to implement. Clearly we can't have an uneducated populace, yet compulsion is rather limited in ability to deal with the problem.
Looking back, I'm glad I was made to do school even though I didn't want to and didn't necessarily see how learning history would help me (and why can't I just play computer games?).
I'm pretty sure I got almost no benefit from history lessons in school. Twenty years later I read about history probably more than anything else. YMMV.
I am fairly certain that there comes a point at which kids simply have to be made to do their work, even if they don't want to or even don't see why they should.
Agreed. The fact that my homeschooled children are compelled by their mother rather than a school doesn't change the essential correctness of your point. However we require much less compulsion than is exerted at school because (a) we read and learn and the children want to copy us and (b) the younger children see the elder doing their lessons and don't want to miss out. Our "classroom" is a converted bedroom which the children frequent even when not being compelled to do lessons. Self directed learning is great but pretty much impossible if no-one has taught you to read.
"I want it, so I'm going to get it" pervades society a lot more than "This is better for me in 5 years, so I should do that instead of do what I feel like doing." When the "we should do what the child wants" gets into education, we've got major problems.
I'm not sure self-discipline is possible to learn other than by practice, I don't see how self-discipline can be practised under compulsion. Surely if you are being compelled you are by definition NOT learning self-discipline.
Statistic is biased or just plain wrong.
It's from the ABS. Do you have any evidence for your assertion of bias or error?
Not all of these migrants were educated in this nation.
Well that 7 million immigrants, if a high proportion were not educated here, could account for most of the illiteracy statistics. Considering it is workplace related, they could potentially be literate in their own language but functionally illiterate here which doesn't reflect on our school system.
Because the alternative is much worse, no education what so ever.
Except my children are homeschooled without government help. Obviously if nearly half the population is illiterate in English (for whatever reason) this is not a viable alternative for society as a whole, but it works for us (middle class income, university educated, teacher trained wife). Public education, IMO, is a good thing for people incapable of educating their own children (either personally or by paying for it) but not very desirable as a universal solution.
The only parents that actually take an interest in education these days are the parents that want to ensure their child is protected from subversive or offensive information
Or those that had a university lecturer for a grandmother and have the resources to do better than public education. That said, if our children want to go to a school in their high school years that will be OK. We will have trained them to love learning by then which school will be unlikely to be able to take from them. It's only the last few years that I've realised how much impact my grandmother had on my ability to learn. Availability of school is a comparatively minor influence to someone who had such an (admittedly unfair) advantage.
Not enough of the right parents were involved and too many of the wrong people get to write policy.
In a nutshell explaining why I won't be handing my children over.
There's a difference between not wanting an education and not thinking that increasing the time children are subject to government compulsion will achieve that education.
Public education has existed in my country for about 130 years. Bureau of Statistics data shows that almost half of all working Australians have less than the minimum literacy and numeracy levels required to meet the demands of everyday work. If after 130 years they can't get better results than that, what evidence is there that I should be willing to let the government get involved in my children's education in any capacity?
Single-issue parties, though on occasion successful, rarely get more than the people that feel really passionate about their issue to vote for them.
When that issue is don't get sued for downloading you might be surprised how many would vote for it. Australians in general aren't very politically aware. I doubt that 10% could give you any sort of reasonable explanation of what a free market is, or what socialism is. Downloading without risk is potentially something that many, particularly under 30's, would consider a more compelling reason to vote than something obscure (to them) like policy on deficits, privatisation etc.
I know a man who was the regional president of one of our political parties, he could not give you an accurate description of our countries political development or where the concepts in our constitution come from though he could tell you a great deal about who is in power now. The ideology behind the differing political movements is lost on most people, even those involved in them.
Yes, the part where you acknowledge that you agreed to that interpretation twice already.
That simply never happened except in your head.
Except here Essentially, yeah. Except the shutting-up part is optional. (the "optional" part is a qualification, not a denial), here I argued that it was inappropriate for a certain person to say a certain thing (which, in context, is saying shut up since the "certain thing" was the entire content of Phroggy's post) and here It is possible that they could convey the same message which is an acknowledgement that your post conveyed the message "shut up" even though you now claim you didn't say that. If you were claiming that you didn't mean it that way I could accept it, but to claim you didn't say it, well, your posts are there for everyone to see. I don't know why you continue to embarrass yourself with your denials.
I don't have a "point" as such.
Glad we can agree on something.
That's your "point". All I've been doing is indicating how wrong you are, with your straw men, etc. I am refuting a point.
You haven't shown me a straw man. To refute a point you have to, you know, refute it. Even in your last post you agree your words could convey that meaning, therefore it's not a case of me building a straw man but you communicating poorly.
I can insult you as much as I like, and it affects nothing else.
Yes, it affects your credibility, since those with a valid argument don't need to resort to such tactics.
Oh, I made a spelling mistake. Woe is me! Have mercy, ChameleonDave, have mercy.
I explain how you (a) put two words together and (b) gave them a certain interpretation; you then defend yourself by arguing that it is reasonable to put the two words together. Can you see what is missing?
Yes, the part where you acknowledge that you agreed to that interpretation twice already. I could link to and quote your posts, but you don't like that. If you really had any valid point to make you would have explained by now how "it's not for you to say so" means anything substantially different to "shut up". It doesn't and you can't.
You've called my comments snarky, a straw man, inaccurate, non sequiturs, called me a wikipedia admin, a liar, a lying idiot, claimed I would throw a tantrum and made an outrageous comment about how I would respond if you accused me of shooting a baby in the head. If you had a point to explain you've had ample opportunity to do so, yet you haven't. There's no reason for me to take you seriously. You disqualified yourself from that when you started the ad hominum arguments.
I argued that it was inappropriate for a certain person to say a certain thing.
In other words, for him to shut up.
You will have no choice but to throw some sort of tantrum
Which would presumably be something similar to your latest post.
I already knew that you had decided to grab the "not" and the "say" and splice them together as "shut up"
Ah, I see. Telling someone to not say something (which you now confirm as we all can see by the first quote in this post) is so completely different to telling them to shut up.</sarcasm>
Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.
I already interpreted "it's not for you to say so" as "shut up". That's as specific as necessary and you haven't offered a thing to counter that interpretation. In fact, when I asked (snarkily!) if that was correct, your response was Essentially, yeah. Have I misunderstood what you mean by the word "yeah"?
It's not that I've given up, you've just got nothing. It's impossible to counter your point since you haven't made one.
If you want to persist in this, give a clear and concise explanation of what you think I meant by "say so", and I will then point out how inaccurate it is.
Welcome to slashdot President Clinton! What did they mean by "is", I never found out?
Your ability to come up with a convoluted explanation of why your words don't convey their actual meaning and why that indicates a fault on my part rather than yours is not of interest to me.
The central banking system we have in the so called capitalist countries is a feature of communism[1] designed to transform the country to communism. You haven't seen the failure of capitalism, what you are seeing is the success of a communist strategy to destroy capitalism.
[1] same applies to free government schooling and progressive income tax. Reference: "The Communist Manifesto"
You do realize we have the power, right? You don't need to spill anyone's blood in the process. If 'the people' you are referring to have enough power to win a violent revolution, they have enough power to take it by voting. Unless your 'people' is some minority group trying to impose their will on the majority. Not a good idea.
Glad to see someone else saying this. I don't know why it's so hard for some people to understand.
The current government would fight to the death of the last man in order to retain power; I have no difficulty believing that.
Remember though that the "current government" is not the borg. They will turn on each other for the slightest advantage. Divide and conquer is the way it works, they use that against you but are equally susceptible to it. How hard is it to convince a state legislator the the Feds are taking territory that really belongs to the state?
I'm in favour of the right to bear arms for the purpose of resisting tyranny, but seriously, try a video camera first. Why blow the machine up when you can just throw some sand in the gears and bring it to a standstill? Even if you can win a revolution it is very destructive.
At some point soon, this will have to be stopped.
Agreed. The idea that you can be convicted as a sex offender for having a cartoon ... I don't think that most people are aware of how badly the legal protections here in Australia are being abused and destroyed. There was no victim here except the accused.
What should happen if violence is initiated by the police? Or if there appear to be agents provocateurs involved?
My last sentence applies equally to them. You don't lose your right of self defence just because you're being attacked by a policeman. Difficult or impossible in a lot of circumstances to sort out who did what first to the satisfaction of a court or the general public. Unless you can get that evidence, as a protester you're on the losing side unless public sentiment over continued abuse becomes strong enough to swing support to you.
Keep those cameras recording.
... give the impression that Austalia's governors are stupid fucks.
Our country originated as a convict settlement, many of our cultural heroes were armed robbers. We don't like our governments too smart.
Just kidding, the real reason is we have nearly 50% illiteracy and compulsory voting.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/small-business/managing/poor-worker-literacy-hurting-business-20090831-f4fz.html
Some combination of those reasons anyway.
What education should be about is understanding
If our education system was intended to benefit the children it would not need to be compulsory.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/small-business/managing/poor-worker-literacy-hurting-business-20090831-f4fz.html
"Bureau of Statistics data shows that almost half of all working Australians have less than the minimum literacy and numeracy levels required to meet the demands of everyday work."
I think NSW introduced compulsory schooling around 1880. This experiment has gone on long enough.
No, it's not actually. This is the New South Wales government, whereas the "child abuse" case (I don't believe he was actually accused of distributing child porn) was the Queensland government.
Wrong case, he is referring to this one from NSW.
:)
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24771973-16947,00.html
The case you are probably thinking of was dropped. http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/technology-news/babyswinging-video-charges-dropped-20090909-fh33.html
From a helpful Queenslander.
Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.
Snarky, well ok. Straw man, no way. For my comment to be a straw man would require that you hadn't said "but it's not for you to say so". "I have no idea why you were protesting" is a perfectly acceptable response for Phroggy to make since protesters are presumably trying to raise awareness of something. Telling him it's not for him to say is nonsensical.
You see something wrong with listening? :)
Ha! No, I've got a bit of a problem taking people seriously who exercise their free speech by telling people to shut up though :p
Except the shutting-up part is optional.
This seems inconsistent with your earlier message:
but it's not for you to say so
I just picked on the bit I disagreed with. I found this to oppose the general thrust of your message and be contradictory to the interests of the protesters. If people become aware of them without getting any idea of their message they ought to know. There are a lot of different groups competing to get their message out, nobody has time to investigate them all. Saying to someone that it's not for them to bring it up is counterproductive.
Securitizing the mortgages alone is not evil.
The practice of letting private banks inflate the currency supply through fractional reserve lending resulting in a consistently inflationary financial system is evil.
Deflation is a result of lending "money" that doesn't exist. Real money does not disappear if someone doesn't repay a loan. The borrower goes bankrupt, the lender suffers loss but it won't destroy the economy as a whole. Even a fiat currency could act like that provided it was released by the government as value rather than by banks as debt.