Forced to Stir
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Boys are suffering in our school system. The vast majority of learning problems, behaviour problems and children under chronic medication are boys. Boys also achieve well below girls in scores needed to enter university. We are creating problems for future manhood, which will inevitably impact also on women and children.
Many people believe that if there were a more natural balance of men in primary schooling, the situation for boys would improve. Many schools have no men actually teaching. The government announced a plan to create many scholarships to entice men into teaching. This was seen as discrimination by some feminists and unionists - never mind the fact that the school system was grossly discriminating against boys.
The Age newspaper of Melbourne published an article by Tim Ferguson (9/10 April 2004), arguing that masculinity is redundant. I thought this was a very flawed position and I wrote a short letter in response, arguing that masculinity was both valuable and ineradicable. The Age did not publish my letter, nor any letter opposing the Ferguson article.
I complained to the Editor-in-Chief, who dismissed my complaint by return letter saying I was calling them names simply because they hadn't published my letter. The Age within a few days published two more letters against the plan to rescue boys. I sent two more letters, addressing the further arguments put. None were published. The last one I sent in desperation also to the Herald-Sun, the Melbourne daily for the less educated classes (but with much greater circulation).
I couldn't believe that the Age was so hell-bent on giving no oxygen at all to the boys' cause. Then, at the end of this fortnight of one-sided publishing, I happened to turn on the radio and hear the boy-rescue plan being debated in parliament. I had been denied any opportunity to influence or contribute to that debate! The Age was acting as a factional tool, and not at all as a forum for community discussion of a vital subject. I was disillusioned.
The next day, I opened the Herald-Sun to see my last letter published. I had sent it a little too late to affect the parliamentary debate. But I recalled then how often over the years the Age had suppressed letters of mine which were regularly published by other papers including other “educated" papers such as the Australian. I even had letters published in the Age's inter-state sister paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, when the Age would not publish them.
I realised then that my long-held assumption that newspapers serve democracy by carrying the debate was naive. Some newspapers are, in effect, owned by an ideology. Perhaps all newspapers can be measured on a scale of how balanced and fair their coverage of important issues is, and how given over they are to serving as a propaganda tool for a particular faction. The Age in my opinion is far down this scale, and I now believe this partly explains why it has such a poor circulation per capita compared with other states.
The irony is that, if I am to contribute to the public forum in my own state of Victoria, I am forced by the Age's tactics to take my case to the Herald-Sun. Most of my letters are on educational issues, based on my lifelong work as an educator. This means that instead of sorting out the problems of school service delivery with the providers, the teachers who read the Age, and their masters who are of the political faction it serves, I am pushed into addressing my concerns directly to the parents (most of whom read the Herald-Sun).
Poor overworked school teachers, already carrying the burden of many unenlightened policies imposed on them by the faction that runs the Education Ministry, will come under yet more pressure from (properly) dissatisfied parents. When the system comes under sufficient strain, extending the suffering of the students, parents and teachers, only then will the faction masters act.
This is a messy way of doing things, an approach I have never wanted to take. But what choice is left to me?
Philip O'Carroll