At least at first glance, the draft English national curriculum released yesterday looks reasonably good. I was pleased to see specific reference to apostrophes, and encouraged by a story in this morning’s Age that Julia Gillard is also big on apostrophes:

As a solicitor at law firm Slater and Gordon in the 1980s and ’90s, Ms Gillard would get her staff to chant: ”One cat’s hat, two cats’ hats, where do the apostrophes go?”

She told her biographer, Jacqueline Kent: ”If I got a letter with it done wrong I would draw a cat with a hat at the bottom in the hope it would come back right the next time. They all thought I was kind of strange.”

That Gillard needed to use a primary school mnemonic to teach people working in law firms how to write letters shows how badly English teaching has failed over the last generation.

Though this English curriculum may be better than those currently in use by the states, I am still strongly opposed to the idea of a national monopoly curriculum. What we should have instead is competitive curricula. Each curriculum on offer could be adopted anywhere in Australia, but none would be mandated for every school.

Though there are educational reasons for avoiding monopoly – one size is unlikely to fit all, we need better pressures than politics for innovation and improvement, etc – other stories running in today’s papers highlight the political reasons against monopoly curriculum (this is as much a criticism of the current state monopolies as the national curriculum). Read the rest of this entry »

A CBS poll on gays in the US military finds that the American public is much happier with the idea of ‘gay men and lesbians’ serving in the military than ‘homosexuals’ serving in the military. For the ’strongly favour’, ‘gay men and lesbians’ adds 17 percentage points to the total.

‘Gay’ is a word with more positive connotations than ‘homosexual’ – a legacy of its old meaning and not prompting respondents to think about sex acts that they don’t want to think about, even while liking some gay people and enjoying aspects of gay culture.

But this theory of connotations is better at explaining why people go from ’somewhat’ to ’strongly’ than to explaining the shift from oppose to favour (homosexual – 59%, gay – 70%). It’s surprising that near-synonyms can lead to a non-trivial minority offering different views on the substantive issue.

HT: Marginal Revolution.

The Grattan Institute has released its first report, an analysis of student progress measures by Ben Jensen. It argues that ‘value-added’ measures – that is, how much students improve between NAPLAN tests – are a more useful way of assessing a school’s performance than simply looking at its absolute results.

The report meets Grattan’s claims to be ‘objective, evidence-driven and non-aligned’. It is well-researched, uses data, and presents ideas that could easily be adopted by either major political party. While the media played up its differences with the about-to-be-launched My School website, it’s hard to imagine that Julia Gillard would have any fundamental objection to the ideas presented. And that was pretty much how she handled it today:

From what I’ve seen of the reports of the Grattan Institute work, they are saying that this is a good start but they are wanting to see more. Of course we are going to keep building on this website year by year as we get more results from national testing, more results on Year 12 retention, more results on vocational education and training pathways and attendance at school.

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When I am in doubt about a point of style or grammar, first I always see what Pam Peters has to say. Her Cambridge Guide to English Usage miraculously foresees almost every question I want answered, and offers sensible suggestions based on Australian usage.

But I am also a big fan of Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage, the third edition of which I received last week.

The most useful addition made in Modern American Usage’s 3rd edition is its rating of evolving words and usage not as correct/incorrect but on a scale from new usage to universal acceptance:

Stage 1: A new form emerges as an innovation among a small minority of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage.

Stage 2: The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s turning into a bad month for conservative pundits -with first Irving Kristol and now William Safire moving from the opinion page to the obituary page.

In Safire’s case, however, he will be remembered more for his interest in other people’s words than his own words of political commentary. As the NYT obituary says

from 1979 until earlier this month, he wrote “On Language,” a New York Times Magazine column that explored written and oral trends, plumbed the origins and meanings of words and phrases, and drew a devoted following, including a stable of correspondents he called his Lexicographic Irregulars.

One of my (rather too many) nerdish interests is in the origins of phrases and sayings, and his Safire’s Political Dictionary is invaluable for the history of political terminology. Read the rest of this entry »

For reasons I do not understand, a large proportion of the under-30 population believes that plurals are created by adding ’s. An error that was once restricted to Italian and Greek greengrocers (banana’s $1 a kilo etc) is now common. It is still relatively rare in professionally produced publications, but appears in an ABS release today.
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In 2001 I wrote an article for Quadrant tracking the changing terminology used to describe the Australian Right, in which I noted that ‘neoliberalism’ was starting to replace ‘economic rationalism’ as the favourite term of the left for the free-market right (with ‘economic rationalism’ having itself largely displaced ‘New Right’.)

I’d tracked down uses of ‘neoliberalism’ to 1989 and 1990 in Australia, but beyond noting its global academic use not worked out where it started internationally. I now think that this incarnation of ‘neoliberalism’ (there are other earlier ‘neoliberalisms’ that I doubt are connected) probably started in Latin America, and came to Australia via US academia.
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1,201 people answered the Australian political identity survey question on which political philosophy they identified with. Of these, the single largest group (a third) regarded themselves as social democrats. Just over 20% called themselves classical liberals, 15% described themselves as libertarians, 8% saw themselves as greens, and conservatives made up 14% of the sample, 8% describing themselves as social conservatives and economic liberals and 6% simply as conservatives.

Another 9%, 106 respondents, did not find their own beliefs in the political labels I chose. The single most popular response among these was ’socialist’ or some variant on that, with 16 socialist respondents and 1 Marxist. ‘Social liberal’ or some variant on that was the next most popular from 14 people, with a couple of small-l liberal responses as well. We also had people who wanted to be simply a liberal, a liberal conservative, and a liberal democrat.

Though academics and commentators routinely discuss ‘neoliberals’ and ‘neoconservatives’, not a single person used those labels to describe themselves. In my question on which political intellectuals respondents had read, the ‘neoconservative’ thinkers – Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss – were the least read. Even among self-described conservatives and social conservatives, only 14% had read anything by Kristol and just 8% had read anything by Strauss.

It raises again the question of whether labels like ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neoconservative’ have descriptive or analytical value. My own reading of work by local academics (eg here or here) suggests that the main effect of the labels is to lead them down the wrong path, importing global academic concepts (neoliberalism) or distinctively American political ideologies (neoconservatism) rather than trying to understand the local variants of liberalism and conservatism.

In the next post, I will look at what classical liberalism and libertarianism mean in the Australian context.

The word ‘voucher’ sure has journalists confused. Last week the SMH took Gillard’s spin at face value. And in today’s Australian we are told this:

The system isn’t a voucher system. Students aren’t being issued with a portable amount of money they can just cash in where they like. For all the talk of empowering students with greater choice, it is the universities, and ultimately their vice-chancellors, that will frame that choice, since it is they that will decide what is on offer.

And while universities can be expected to tailor offerings to attract students, not all universities will seek to expand. Offerings will be influenced not just by what students want, but also by the relative cost of delivery.

There are two confusions here. One is the point I made last week about the technology of delivering the subsidy. This is irrelevant to the concept of a voucher, which is that a consumer’s decision, rather than a bureaucrat’s decision, triggers the payment (under the current system, no payment is made unless a student occupies a place first authorised by the bureaucracy).

The second confusion is about the role of suppliers and prices. In this respect, ‘voucher’ system is preferable to Bradley’s language of a ‘demand-driven’ system, since what is delivered in a market or quasi-market system is not whatever consumers want, but the intersection of supply and demand, mediated by prices. So the actions of suppliers and the role of prices are integral to voucher systems, not features that make a voucher system not a voucher system.

More later on the first instalment of Julia Gillard’s response to the Bradley report, which includes accepting the recommendation to ceate an uncapped demand-driven scheme, but her speech to the Universities Australia conference contains this gem:

Let me be clear about one important point: this is not a voucher.

Students will not be receiving a set dollar entitlement to be redeemed at an institution of their choice. Rather, there will be a Commonwealth payment to universities – with the amount varying depending on the course – on the basis of student numbers.

The core idea behind ‘vouchers’ is that public subsidies be allocated on a market basis.

The actual choice of technology – distributing bits of paper called ‘vouchers’ or cards (like Medicare) or a report-and-audit system with suppliers (as with private schools) – is a management decision, and not fundamental to the underlying idea. Where the eligible persons are easily identified, such as any Australian citizen or permanent resident in the case of schools and Gillard’s proposed higher education system, report-and-audit is likely to be the cheapest and therefore the best option. Nobody wants pointless distribution of bits of paper from Canberra (except maybe DEEWR, experts in bureaucratic make-work).

Nor is the idea of a flat amount intrinsic to the idea of a voucher, though if it is to be a subsidised though otherwise undistorted market like cases should be treated alike. For example, in Medicare there is a higher rebate for specialists than GPs, but no government steering between specialists or between GPs. The private school system is an impure voucher scheme, because public schools receive much higher per student subsidies than private schools for teaching the same things. It looks like Gillard is proposing a pure voucher scheme for higher education, with subsidy depending on course of study rather than institution.
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