verging_on_random

The history wars

The forces of reaction, otherwise known as the Howard Government, keep finding new ways to try to take Australia back to the 1950s. Well actually they’re not “new” ways, they’re the Government’s obsessive apeing of everything that happens in the USA, which Howard seems to regard as a kind of heaven on earth to which all other countries should aspire. Well George W Bush, the self-proclaimed leader of the ‘free’ world, wouldn’t argue.

But to history. The federal government is threatening to make its preferred history syllabus compulsory in public schools, by withholding funds from states that don’t go along with its views. Only public schools of course, private schools can apparently be trusted to teach history correctly. But public schools have to be rigorously disciplined to stop mad radicals like Peter Beattie taking over the curriculum and turning all the kids into wild-eyed revolutionaries who think that some of the things done in the past were, you know, like wrong.

The government’s objectives are clear: kids should be taught Australian history as a series of dates and Great Men (oh OK, we can accommodate a few token women I suppose … tennis players and swimmers and the like). These events and people are to be turned into a humungous good news story that validates our current society and makes us out to be pretty much the bestest country in the whole world, always excepting our great and powerful friend the US of A.

It’s exactly the history I was taught 50 years ago, except that in those days it was Great Britain that was the nation we were taught to love and admire. It’s completely consistent with other Howard Government school initiatives such as encouraging mindless jingoism with rituals like singing the national anthem and saluting the flag every morning, and over-riding state year 12 English curriculums with its own, based on “quality” literature like Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters. God forbid that kids should be encouraged in English classes to think critically about the stuff they actually read and watch, like web sites and movies. Much better to make them learn to hate serious literature because that way they won’t read it when they grow up and will therefore not be exposed to dangerous ideas.

The education agenda is just one of the many fronts on which the Howard Government is relentlessly trying to roll back the social changes of the last 50 years. They are not original ideas of course, the government is merely following its American idols. Getting rid of ‘post-modernism’ in schools, forcing women back into their ‘proper’ roles (i.e. subordinate to men), demonising Muslims, bashing gays, opposing stem cell research, removing civil liberties in the name of the War On Terror, we copied all these things from the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party. I don’t think Howard can bring himself to adopt Bush’s scary “I am doing God’s will” public line but there are others waiting to take his place who wouldn’t hesitate …. Abbott the mad monk for one.

I find it all extremely weird and I can only conclude that they get away with it because so many people have simply stopped taking any interest in what governments do. Well if Howard stuffs up this terrifyingly dangerous double game he’s playing with Indonesia, and finds himself forced by public opinion to take a belligerent approach to the world’s biggest Muslim nation right on our doorstep, Australians will wake up to the fact that letting governments be run by people obsessed with ideology and ‘values’ has very nasty practical consequences.

We’re so obedient

Today’s mood:

The way the Australian public allows governments to do pretty much whatever they want never ceases to amaze me. I remember Vietnam moratorium marches and demos against the Springboks and mass rallies over environmental issues. The vast majority of the people who did these things had no personal interest in them ….. except for those of us who were eligible to be called up for army service and sent to Vietnam, which certainly made me take a lively interest in the matter  …. but most people just did it because they believed passionately that their government was acting wrongly.

These days governments do things that clearly do affect everybody’s rights and people passively sit and cop it sweet. Consider some of the things the Howard Government has done over the last 10 years:

• Supported an Australian citizen, David Hicks, being put in prison indefinitely without access to any of the rights that people of English descent trace back to Magna Carta, 800 years ago. It’s OK to do it apparently because Hicks is a Terrurist and anything goes in the War On Terror. The fact that Hicks hasn’t broken any Australian laws is used as an excuse to justify leaving him in an American concentration camp. To my simple mind, it means that he should simply be allowed to go about his business.
• Passed a series of laws that allow public servants to lock up people indefinitely on the grounds that they are “illegal immigrants”. This week the Senate will consider the latest proposed laws that will let us ship these wretched people off to some god-forsaken place like Nauru and leave them there for pretty much as long as the public servants feel like. Once again, hardly anybody seems too fussed. After all the boat people are probably damn Terrurists. Or Muslims. Or *shudder* both. Anyway they’re definitely foreigners so fuck’em.
• What else …… oh yeah. ASIO can lock you up because they think you know something about a Terrurist. You’re not allowed to tell anybody and you can’t even find out what it is you’re supposed to know because that’s secret information. Don’t you know we’re at War Against Terror?

Our governments also feel quite justified in lying consistently and deliberately about practically everything, just like their mates in London and Washington. I talk to a friend in England who reckons more than 50% of people there are convinced this latest Terrurist Outrage is all a scam to boost support for Blair and of course his mate in the White House. Who knows if that’s the truth? The fact is that these days governments are serial liars and it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction.

The changes that the Howard Government has made to our industrial relations laws will also change our society in ways that many people won’t like but once again nobody seems to give a shit. Students in France rioted in the streets earlier this year until the government there agreed to withdraw changes to the unfair dismissal laws but here people shrugged their shoulders and were like “we don’t really understand it cos it’s too complicated …. besides Big Brother live eviction’s on in a minute.”

I think most Australians have been sucked into such a materialistic frame of mind that they regard life as an endless series of transactions where they acquire commodities ….. cars and mobile phones and travel and child care and huge houses that cost 8 or 10 years’ income to buy (and that’s before tax) …. so all they have time for is wealth/families/small circle of friends …. and somebody else can worry about public policy because we haven’t got time for all that crap. That’s why we get a choice at election time between John bleedin’ Howard and Mark omfg Latham  (don’t blame me I voted Green).

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

Niemoller was writing about Nazi Germany and of course nothing like that could ever happen here ….. we’re good people, not like those damn dirty Germans. Except the Germans thought they were pretty virtuous and civilised too.

Which countries were the last ones to invade another country in an unprovoked war of aggression? That’s right, it was the USA, Great Britain …… and us*. We did to Iraq just what Russia did to Afghanistan and with about as much justification. How many Australians care?

Not enough.

ttyl

*I think the Poles might have been along for the ride too but honestly, who cares about the Poles?

Mental models and computers

In some of the courses I teach we talk about ‘mental models’. These are the unconscious assumptions that we make about how institutions work. For example, when we go into a fancy restaurant we expect somebody to show us to our table, take our order and so on. If we went somewhere where they showed us to a table but then left us to go to the kitchen and tell the chef what we wanted to eat we’d probably become disoriented; certainly we’d lose confidence in our ability to predict actions and consequences.

Being confident that we understand how institutions work is important to our sense of self-efficacy, i.e. feeling secure that we have the knowledge, intelligence and resources to look after ourselves. Once people lose a sense of self-efficacy they experience feelings of alienation and even panic, because they no longer feel in control of their lives.

Unfortunately our mental models are often wrong. Sometimes this isn’t a problem; for example, committed christians (and muslims for that matter) have a mental model of human existence which I think is absurd but if it helps them cope then good luck to them. On a more mundane level, however, using a misconceived mental model leads to dysfunctional decisions. We can see one example in the contemptible ‘lets lock up more people for longer’ crap that politicians like to come out with, pandering to the widely held but discredited mental model that punishing people who break the law will deter others from doing it (like “I was going to rape you when I thought I’d only get 20 years but now I know I’ll get life I’ll go take a cold shower instead.” Yeah right.)

But I’m getting off the point which is not unusual. What I wanted to talk about was the mental model most of us still use when we think about computers. The subject came up in one of my classes a couple of weeks back when I was suggesting that classroom-based education was a dying institution, certainly for adults, and that within a few years virtually all tertiary education would be internet-based.

In the discussion that followed it was interesting to see that many people still think of the internet as something that requires you to sit at a computer in a fixed location. This is the mental model that is now out of date, thanks to three developments in technology:

1. Wireless communication;
2. Relentless miniaturisation;
3. Negligible storage costs.

Thanks to these we can now store unimaginable amounts of data on a web server at virtually zero cost (I have about 10GB on my hard drive, I could store the whole lot on my web site for about $15 a month if I chose. Why don’t I? Well because I’m stuck in that mental model that sees data as tangible objects stored in a PC on my desk.) Once we get into the habit of storing data on the web instead of our own personal hard drives, wireless technology will let us get access to it from almost anywhere in the world. And miniaturisation will let us work with our web sites using a gadget the size of our mobile phones.

All that’s missing is technology that creates an image without the need for a screen plus new ways of entering data that don’t require a bulky keyboard and we’re into a completely new era of communicating information that will not only change the way we learn, it will change everything in our lives. The reason we can’t easily imagine how is that we’re locked into superseded mental models. But I reckon it’s all damn exciting.

Who said you can’t teach old dogs new tricks?

bye til next time