verging_on_random

John Howard’s school days

July 23, 2007 on 4:40 pm | In Uncategorized |

The SMHerald’s been running random extracts from a new biography of John Howard … mainly political stuff that makes you ask again how Howard’s mob ever got to run a country for 11 years but nothing excitingly new to anyone who’s been paying attention (although Costello’s whine about never having been invited to dine tête-á-tête with John and Janette at The Lodge is a delicious item that should give Labor fun right up til the election).

There was however one bit in the weekend’s excerpts that made me think a bit. Howard’s Leaving Certificate result (the predecessor of the HSC) consisted of two As, three Bs and one F.

I thought this was noteworthy for two reasons. One is that it gives me an excuse to disclose my own results, which consisted of two first class honours and four As . The other is that Howard’s was a truly mediocre performance.

Two As, three Bs and a Fail (they were the only grades they awarded unless you did the special honours supplements – I did two … oh yeah I already said ). Not to put too fine a point on it, these were the results of a kid who wasn’t very bright. At my school kids were put into classes on the basis of their academic performance; brightest kids in the A class, dumbest in the F class. Howard would have been right at home in 5D.

The contemporary equivalent would be a UAI of, IDK, low 70s I’m guessing. Not remotely close to enough to get you into law or any of the other professional degree courses today, but in the 1950s law was run much more on the apprenticeship model with less emphasis on academic course work. Even so, it demonstrates the enormous changes that have occurred in university entrance practices over the last 50 years.

Howard’s two As were in English and Modern History. Surely it’s no coincidence that these are the two areas where he wants to tell the states how to run curriculum? As a low achiever who managed to get respectable marks in those two subjects he’s probably convinced himself that he’s well-qualified to make judgements about how they should be taught.

His failure was in Maths and he got a B in Economics. Someone who did that yet went on to become federal treasurer would have needed to do some fancy subconscious rationalisation to persuade himself that he was qualified for the position. Howard responded by adopting a condescending attitude to the whole education system and you can see that pretty clearly in Howard’s persistent campaign to de-fund public schools and transform education into just another commodity to be bought and sold in a market.

At school, Howard was what would these days be called a nerd, without any compensating flashes of genius. At sport he was a plodder who couldn’t make the top teams in either cricket or football. He was slightly deaf. It would be hard to imagine less promising prime ministerial material.

Yet he made it. God alone knows what’s been going on in his head since he finished school with a deeply ordinary Leaving Certificate. We know he has an enormous ego – that’s not a snarky comment, enormous egos are pretty much essential requirements for modern politicians – and he lacks any capacity for self-reflection (same comment). I wouldn’t be surprised if his whole life has been a journey to prove to everyone including his three older brothers that he could Amount To Something.

I just wish he’d done it in business, or public administration, or the military … anything but politics.