Author: admin

I’m currently reading Stanley Aronowitz’s ‘Against Schooling’. It’s powerful stuff. What Aronowitze does is set out a damning critique of the current state of higher education in the US, showing the way that higher education colleges and schools have been transformed from a places of critical thought and freedom into instrumentalized gateways into the workforce….

I’ve been struggling with Bourdieu’s Distinction for a little while now. My supervisor believes that my work will be improved if I have a working knowledge of the French sociologist’s ideas regarding social and cultural reproductions so, like the dutiful student that I am, I went straight to the source – the 700 odd pages…

Firstly, I should apologise for that rather ridiculous title, but I couldn’t think of anything better. Obviously, I’m referring to the fact that the Prime Minister has declared an election for September 2013. It’s a pretty big deal, regardless of the politicking that’s already taken place about the matter. Some people have claimed that it’s…

So, that’s that. Week One is done and dusted, thank goodness, and there are only ten weeks until the next holidays. And what a week it was. In my role as admin coordinator, I was new to the level of organisation needed to get a school up and running – from really basic things like…

I think I write one of these messages every year. It seems that, just like everyone else out there, I’m troubled by what Australia Day means, and what it means to be Australia. I’m not going to spend too much time on that in this post, though – I think more than enough time and…

So, another school begins. You might think that I’ve jumped the gun a little bit, with more than a week of school holidays still to go, but that’s not the case – today was the first day back for the exec at my school. To be honest, I haven’t really stopped working at all during…

It seems like I spent a fair amount of my childhood holidays in the car. We were forever travelling south to visit the family in Melbourne, or heading the other direction to visit cousins in Brisbane. It seemed like, wherever we were living, we were the ones on the move, and summer holidays often seemed…

Brisbane: a town of hills and old Queenslanders. XXXX and ceiling fans. It’s a town with a beach culture, even though it’s not really on the coast – it’s along the imaginatively titled Brisbane River. It’s a town that’s outgrown it’s boots, and now looks uncomfortable and out of place when compared to cities like…

So, I’ve noticed that there’s been plenty of debate, for whatever reason, about the government funding of private schools. Admittedly, most of this ‘debate’ has taken place on twitter, which means that it’s limited in its efficacy or meaning, but I still find it surprising that we are talking about this old chestnut – I…

I’ve finally got around to doing some focused reading on Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000). For the uninitiated, this is the book that kind of made social capital an important and relevant topic of conversation in modern academic thought. Basically, Putnam suggests that, based on an analysis of a range of different kinds of social measures,…