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03.16.11 - 2:54 PM
School Phone Message: "If You Want Us To Raise Your Child, Press 6"
Shocker: With teachers' bargaining rights and school budgets on the block, a new study finds that teachers in the U.S. work hard, make nothing and get no respect. But teachers and staff at a high school in Australia have had enough. In what is being billed as a real phone message, their response to the abuse has been making the rounds. It's probably fake, but still hilarious.
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36 Comments so far
Show AllI don't care if it's not real: this is glorious and all too true. Too many parents - let alone people - live in idle fantasy worlds that don't overlap with reality. More schools need messages like this.
"Hilarious?" To Judge Judy types, maybe.
Amusing and clever enough, and no doubt there are parents who deserve it.
But I'm mildly surprised that this passed Abby's "progressive" filter enough to get a big thumbs up.
It's pretty much classic low-brow reactionary sarcasm, on a par with "If You Don't Like the Police, Next Time You're In Trouble, Call a Hippie!"
Australia and the U.S. were both extensively colonized by the UK's notoriously racist and culturally intolerant Anglo-Saxon, Scots-Irish underclass. Their self-righteous descendants are the target audience for this sarcastic broadside against the stereotypical low-class, hopelessly irresponsible parent who blames society and its institutions for their woes instead of looking to themselves.
The anti-multicultural "language" twist at the end should give a "progressive" pause, too. It's a nice little bone to the Amerikan nativist contingent here, though.
Don't like my comment? Call 1-800-BITE-ME!
I have only one problem with your comment:
The implication that calling hippies in times of trouble can be of no benefit.
I have personally been in trouble on several occasions where the assistance of a hippie was of great help indeed!
Wait.
Did you mean troubles OUTSIDE of being low on weed or forgetting exactly how to do that thing where the hackey-sack stops on your toe for just a second?
Never mind. ;)
The British "underclass", often prisoners, who were sent to Australia, did not run the slave trade nor colonize the "natives" of Africa and Asia. It was the oh so refined upper classes who were in charge of these things.
Exactly. I'm well aware that colonial empires initiated the policy of "transportation" as an alternative to warehousing criminals and undesirables in the mother country.
Actually, Great Britain ramped up transportation to penal colonies in Australia because the North Amerikan colonies couldn't absorb the growing population of criminal deportees; Amerika had its share of indentured servitude, and other immigrants who were sent away from their native lands by coercion rather than free choice.
Of course it's the overclass who initiates, sponsors, and oversees the administration of such practices-- they're the ones who believed themselves appointed by Divine Providence and common sense to judge their social and economic inferiors.
And even after the heyday of the prison colonies, Australia had a vast influx of economically disadvantaged immigrants attracted by its natural resources and opportunities-- e.g. goldrushes.
That doesn't change the point-- which BTW is eloquently and persuasively expressed by Joe Bageant in "Deer Hunting With Jesus"-- that certain deeply-ingrained cultural characteristics, habits, and attitudes persist in populations even when they're long removed in time and space, and rationally and politically freed, from the circumstances in which said characteristics, habits, and attitudes originated.
In charge of, yes. But the actual "running" of day-to-day operations, whether trading in slaves or subjugating indigent peoples, was in the hands of those British (or whatever empire) "underclass" people you excuse. Unless you really think that rich, aristocratic land-owners actually worked all day just for a chance to open up a slave's skull or shoot a "native".
Those being exploited by the rich and powerful better their condition by exploiting those weaker than themselves; in the absence of a colonized people, their women and children will do nicely, thank you.
No different than the working-class (makes less than I do, in fact) cop, member of a union, protecting delegates to a G-8 summit or IMF-World Bank conference from me, a fellow union member. As a 128-pound, 60-year-old suffering emphysema, I surely deserved to have MY skull cracked for doing nothing.
Police and soldiers do the dirty work of the ruling elite for some money and a little power of their own. Somebody explain to me how that makes them less detestable than those in power, please.
thank you, Obedient Servant, couldn't agree more. while of course there are many well-meaning folks working in public education, i'm getting sick and tired of this put-upon, under-paid, overworked, doing god's work attitude.
compulsory public education, as you point out, has been used -- and continues to be used -- around the world to promote -- no, to COMPEL -- a mechanized, western, industrial world view on both westerners and indigenous peoples.
the public education bureaucracy has become a centralized, mammoth, top-down, administrative-heavy conglomerate that essentially sorts children into "successes" (those who submit to authority and do what they're told) and "failures" (those who don't). wouldn't you know it, there's a near one to one correlation between the first group and high income families and the second and low income families! in effect public education legitimizes a pre-existing class structure.
bizarrely, progressives cling to the myth that education eradicates poverty and ameliorates inequality despite statistical evidence that inequality and poverty rates actually INCREASE wherever compulsory public education replaces traditional forms.
i know i'll be lambasted on this website for saying it, but, while i detest the corporate-sponsored right wing movement to destroy organized labor, i can easily see how the public education system and its self-righteous membership and leadership have become such easy first targets. should we be limiting executive compensation in this country? yes. should we have a far more progressive tax structure? yes. should we massively reduce defense spending? yes. is everyone entitled to a living wage and health insurance? absolutely.
are teachers the most put-upon class of victims in the land? hardly. it's a shame they have become the rallying focus of long-overdue progressive activism in this country. with public relations geniuses like the folks who put this phone message together -- especially the pointed racist gem at the end -- that progressive support will likely be short-lived.
Agree. Especially the "Can't speak the language? Move somewhere else" finale.
Doubt this thing is real, anyway. I think teachers would display better punctuation and spelling.
9
Just like religion is the problem with religion, schools are the problem with schools.
Meaning that it is not the idea of educating our society's children while they are in Public daycare so their parents can work outside of the home that is to blame for the problems of schools, no more than spirituality and philosophy can be blamed for the problems of religion.
It is the particular form a religion takes that makes some truly horrific (Nazi Aryanism) while others seem mostly beneficial (Zen Buddhism).
Just as it is the particular form our schools have taken that is making what could be a unalloyed good (public childcare and education) into a tarnished fiasco.
A national Union for teachers has done as much for education as the AFL-CIO has done for industrial labor: worse than nothing.
"Appropriate" or, depending on who you ask, "Imperially extravagant" budgets for schools have given us medium-security prison eduplexes on the suburban fringes dependent on fleets of buses and automobiles that manage to be completely unsustainable, massively soul-crushing, thoroughly mind-numbing, AND wildly expensive, all at the same time!
Both have worked in turn to give us an "education system" that feels the need to attempt to cultivate a knowledge of chemistry, mathematics, and physical law that would have qualified Einstein for University inside every destined-to-be-a-store-clerk/pot-dealer 13-year-old in this country. When this "system" realizes that the attempt is failing, it can then be relied upon to claim that more Internet-connected computers and Cable in the Classroom programs are needed. Thus begging both the questions: "If all a kid needs is TV and the Internet, and almost all of them have it already, what the hell are the schools for?" and: "Just how educated are these 'educators' anyway?". (the answers are "public day-care" and "as much or more as most of the rest of us" BTW)
Supporting the NEA and current school expenses just because the people loudly targeting them are insane quasi-fascists is like supporting the Blue Party just because the Red Party are insane quasi-fascists.
It is a mistake. One that you can get away with for awhile. But the longer you get away with it, the worse the bite's gonna be when it get's ya.
The educators have failed us, and we have failed the educators. It was probably inevitable with the changing times. Now we should all start thinking about a new way to educate our children and our society that won't fail as this one has.
I think we could start by learning and thinking about how an Aristotle or an Archimedes, an Aquinas or a DaVinci, a Newton, or a Leibniz, or a Luther, or many, many others were educated, and how those educations were different than the "education system" now "under attack", how they might have been better, and how we can employ them in something new and even better.
-matti.
I have roundly chastised supporters of the NEA for mindlessly giving into a curriculum that does not work, yet I still support the NEA as better than what is being proposed, for-profit control. One can only hope against hope that eventually some sense will come into the workings of the public schools, which at this point do little more than breed boredom and anti-intellectualism. As John Taylor Gatto argues, this is by design, the real intent of the educational “philanthropy” of the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations: keep them dumb and bored, they’ll make better workers and consumers that way. An education that focused on solving practical problems that the students could see as relevant to their lives would be dangerous. We hear about unleashing the good old American ingenuity of our kids, to make them scientists and engineers and creative thinkers. What bunk.
I’ve been posting for a while now that the computer will replace the teacher. The day care work will be paid about as well as day care workers do now, or maybe security guards would be a good idea?
Elizabeth,
So well said. Our corporate system could not survive if our youth are tought to think critically. They may see the truth.
Satire or another product of the backroom hacks employed by some reactionary group that puts out these things? (They all have the same tone and flavor.)
Interesting too that Australia is often claimed to be the source of these things as if there was no internet connection there to check out the validity of the information. (Maybe in America they think Australia is a made up country to stand in for any place beyond human accessibility?)
No one in Maroochydore sounds like the voice on the recording unless they are a recent immigrant from England.
I suspect the recording is from a British radio or television satire program and that the text and context has been added by the previously mentioned backroom hacks.
I hope this is not actually from a school, because the transcription is full of spelling and grammar errors.
That almost guarantees that is from a school, a public school with unionized teachers.
I learned proper grammar and spelling from union teachers in public schools, and I suspect you did, too. I don't know why you would want to waste your intellectual gifts disparaging the things that make (or made) our country strong and good. Now that you and your GOP buddies have had things go your way for a while, note how fast the country has slid irretrievably into the sewer. Oh, but the corporations are doing well.
This has been around for a long time....I got an email of it from a friend several years ago.
As a former teacher, I appreciate the sarcasm in this recording, especially now when so many Repuke govs are trying to break teacher unions and/or privatize education.
One of the things they Always bring up in their speeches about 'improving education' is to get rid of tenure and pensions and implement a Merit Pay system for remunerating teachers. This has been going on since I was a teacher back in the 1970's.
This phone message, fake or not, illustrates the major problem/flaw with merit pay - on what criteria do you judge teacher performance?? If students are of low academic/intelligence standing, do not attend school, do not pay attention during lessons, do not do their homework, and have little or no respect for teachers or the whole process of education....AND are aided and abetted by their parents - how can the teachers be held responsible for the students progress???
A democratic republic capitalist system - which is what our gov't/economy is supposed to be, needs to have educated, well informed citizens...and a functioning and vibrant middle class. Public education for all is what is required to achieve that....but teachers cannot do it alone and parents must also be accountable.
"A democratic republic capitalist system - which is what our gov't/economy is supposed to be, needs to have educated, well informed citizens...and a functioning and vibrant middle class. Public education for all is what is required to achieve that....but teachers cannot do it alone and parents must also be accountable."
That's the ideology, but it has nothing to do with reality. Education (for most people, not the rich and the occasional talented poorer one who's willing to sell out (mostly without even recognising it)) in reality is about creating a proper "flexible labour market". A reserve army of the unemployed. An oversupply of labour, preferably with its probable "natural leaders" integrated into the controller class. Couple this with a managerialised, centralised, technologised organisation of production based on deskilling workers and making them interchangeable and more and more unneeded for actual productive work (mainly in agriculture and manufacturing and more and more in education and even healthcare) and you have an economy that doesn't need people and doesn't serve people. In this case, education needs to serve to put the lower classes, the large majority of people, into their places in the gutters. Preferably we should go willingly. That's what education is about now.
From "THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by
Emmanuel Goldstein," 1984:
"From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. .”
A professor recently asked a large class this question: if you were to protest something, what would it be? Not one student had an answer.
perfectly said, atomsk.
Quite the contrary. It is crap. Someone posing as an intellect.
There is not the slightest change that this is legitimate. The accent is posh british, not Australian. And the idea that an actual government run school (or *any* government institutiuon) would actually have this ... some people live on a very weird planet indeed, to think that such a thing would be possible *anywhere*.
Home educate.
That would only work if you have someone educated in the home.
Chicken! Egg!
This is a terrific idea that has been around forever. Teachers and retired teachers could also put up a list of suggested comments for report cards that would hit the marks, too.
The only problem I have with this whole thing is the horrible grammar and punctuation. The content is great;the written execution is weak.
I would give it an A for the content and a B- for the written work.
Since governments pay roughly $5,000 per student to schools and governments also build the facilities, wouldn't the old one room schoolhouse work better. We are supposed to differentiate for each student, so teachers could form cooperative learning centers or schools in their homes and only 8 to 10 students would be needed per teacher. The school could also teach them to grow their own food to lower school and teacher costs in this regard, and the localized aspect might also negate the need to spend $1,000 per month on a car, gas, insurance, etc., so the teachers could work for less, and, as owners would have an incentive to stay on.
This is completely idiotic and regressive. Instead of dumbass parents falling for reactionary propaganda and blaming teachers, this (if real, which I'm reluctant to believe) looks like dumbass teachers reacting like idiots and blaming children. I don't want to believe this is real tbh.
If there are more and more children with whom an educational system can't cope, it's the result of a social process, and not "someone's" fault, definitely not the children's. Teachers have a job to raise and educate children, and that's their ultimate goal, that's why they exist. There are no teachers without students. Teachers are there for the students. If they can't teach children, their job is worthless - not because they're doing their jobs badly but because the world has changed while school systems haven't (or for the worse).
This disgusting piece of shit "funny" video is just another way of putting parents and teachers against each other, obscuring the sources of the actual pedagogic pressures and trends that lead to this situation. And it's a pretty simple issue: it's about how much pedagogic pressure different components of society can exert on children - how much they are educated by their families, by school and by other sources, how the pedagogic influence that is exerted on children is structured in this regard.
It used to be the case that family and school were the source of most of this pressure, but this has changed completely. Right now, for multiple reasons, most of children's information comes from mass media, which is mostly entertainment and marketing (or rather, marketing posing as entertainment), and parents and schools have to compete with that - which they can't. There's not enough money in education, parents work too much and have too little time for their children, most parents and teachers aren't aware of the dangers of overconsumption of centralised propaganda oriented media focused on homogenisation and atomisation through entertainment, the connection between what you learn in school and what happens in real life is lost and so on.
In addition to this, a lot of people accept the concept that the task of education is nothing else but to prepare children for real life in the real economy, the real world of work as it is now, in order to provide a "competitive" and "flexible" labour force, that works well with the system as it is, and doesn't want to change or even understand it.
Schools actually do a pretty fucking awesome job of this, btw, considering what a "flexible labour force" ideally looks like, because it's not about knowledge or technical proficiency, but a set of attitudes and values: hierarchy, authority, violence, appearance and effect - not solidarity, community, democracy, critical thinking or even, you know, culture. Those things are counterproductive for a "flexible labour force", it's better for them to be educated on reality shows, violence and irony.
Most children will not remember much of what they learned past fifth grade or so, but the basic values in schools as they are now stay for life. If you see that bullying is accepted and even cool, you'll learn the value of violence. If you see that a teacher can be dumb and doesn't have to correct his own mistakes, they'll learn about authority. If they can get through a school by cheating or even memorising stuff they know is irrelevant, they'll learn the value of appearance. This is what the educational system is for. If teachers accept this and don't rebel against this, they're part of the problem. Children simply never are, because the system should be for them.
It's part of the school's job to teach children to be responsible and diligent ffs. Maybe it's impossible to do that now efficiently, but it's still its job. Parents and teachers have to work together on this, not blame each other and wash their hands if it doesn't work out and they fail. They have to recognise the real issues and real power games and processes, not blame each other, and certainly not blame the kids. That's just fucked up.
It is the schools job to help educate chidren, not RAISE them. Parents do a half-ass job at home, and want to blame the schools for their all of their shortcomings..in the US, the "6" would be pressed constantly.
I don't think you can distinguish and separate the two, and there are lots and lots of things that go far beyond pure "education" that schools traditionally do. In fact, I'd say that beyond reading, writing and basic arithmetic, the actual pedagogic effect of schools is mostly about "raising" children, forming their habits, values and socialising them. The most important things schools can and do really effectivelt teach are about hierarchy, authority, the value of violence and appearances (that style is more important than substance). These are way more important than the educational information content that maybe a small part of one percent of students will even remember, much less integrate into their thinking.
But anyway, you're mixing up responsibility with power. Parents are responsible for their children to a large extent, but even those with the best intention might not have all the power they need. Responsibility and power cannot be separated if you want a just and working system. They can only control a very small slice of whatever actually forms and educates their children. Centralised media and propaganda exerts so much pressure that it's impossible for normal parents, who work a lot, don't have enough money and time and often don't recognise the dangers of the cultural environment to actively counteract their effects. You need a lot of effort and time and money just to keep children away from this source of pedagogical pressure, actually giving them a good education would need even more effort and resources.
This is a very wide based social problem. There's no simple solution. But imo parents and teachers, or at least some group of dedicated teachers, have to work together on this. For example, I can't imagine an educational system getting better without explicit large scale control over content and methods of advertising. There's a lot of (mostly proprietary) research into how to manipulate children, for example - these things should be public and most of the methods of manipulation should simply be illegal. The reason for this is very fundamental: schools need to extend the feedback cycle of effort and satisfaction, to lengthen the time between putting in effort and achieving a satisfying result while maintaining a good level of motivation. This is one of their most important tasks, but mass media and in fact the entire mass entertainment culture works to shorten it (which is imo a large reason behind shortening attention spans). The way this can be achieved is through collective political action of parents and teachers imo. (Of course, as I said in my previous post, this current state of affairs is actually a good thing from the point of view of a "flexible labour market", which doesn't really need most people to be smart. The controller class and the higher classes do have a pretty good educational system anyway, and they're definitely aware of these issues.)
Didn't like the bit at the end about language.
Schools in immigrant areas should provide services in the language of the parents.
I studied to be a secondary teacher decades ago, but near the end of the process, I asked myself: "Why would anyone want to do this type of work?", and dropped the education option from my major. I am so very happy I made that decision, even though a fair percentage of my worklife after that involved line work in a Southeastern factory at less-than-desirable wages, because teaching is a poorly-paid, thankless babysitting task that requires far more expensive education than it can ever be worth ...
Wonder if the kids will have to attend school into the vacation months in the u.s. because of all the snow days accumulated. Then the schools here can set up the same phone 'options' as the aussies did.
@ Michael Rogers, Atomsk, commenter:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who picked up on the unsavory reactionary quality of this video-- which is surely more significant than its cringingly atrocious, error-riddled text.
As it happens, I do recognize the error of reflexively pigeonholing things into conventional but obsolescent exclusive categories of "left" and "right".
But this video is definitely reactionary, and I still wonder why Abby Zimet didn't realize that, whatever its superficial humorousness, it's simply antithetical to the "progressive" values supposedly promoted at this site.
All I want to comment on is the practice of automatically failing students if they miss too many days.
I think this idea is despicable. It makes it very clear the purpose of school in our current system is NOT to create educated, critical thinking citizens but to create well trained, automatons that are conditioned to show up to demeaning work every day.
I mean if the students NEED to be there those days to learn the material so they'll pass, then why does it have to be a law that they automatically fail? Shouldn't missing that much just make it so they will fail because they didn't learn the material?
On the other hand if someone could miss and yet otherwise would earn an "A" because he or she somehow taught himself or herself the subject, then it is inherently unjust to fail them. What this is about is penalizing the gifted. No way can you just show up a few times, learn more than your peers, and then spend your time freely enriching yourself. No. We're not about helping you become a fully actualized citizen who thinks for herself or himself. No, we've got to pound it into you that you are required to march to someone else's drum beat whether you like it or not.
Oh fer chrissakes! Even If I didn't live on Australia's Sunshine Coast, where Maroochydore is, I would not have to think too hard to know this is a crock!
If nothing else, in Australia we don't provide school lunches, they bring their own or buy them from the 'tuck shop'
Secondly, the text and audio are clearly from different sources! One discusses the existence of the other for Julia's sake!!!! (more proof? in the UK they call it school 'dinners')
Its actually an old, and yes, you guessed it, American, piece of satire. And no, we would not countenance the racist crap at the end!
Maybe the school played it for an hour or something, but it is NOT what you hear when you call Maroochydore High, wake up people, and where the hell is quality control at CD? Did you hire Glen Beck's fact checker?
sheesh!