Posts by Tom Semmens
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So... Do writers being paid by the word always use "it is," "would not," and "should not"? Thats another $1.20 right thar.
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*in our visual age.
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Tony Veitch, Paul Henry, Martin Devlin - They have an audience and is there any difference except in the details between them? I can't stand any of them.
I also suspect a setup with Susan Boyle, but after watching the video I am glad that she has finally had at least one moment of triumph in her life. Simon Cowell has already apparently said he will offer her a record contract regardless, and I am sure that hard nosed bastard isn't doing it out of altruism. I went onto google images after she sang and looked at Edith Piaf, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone and tried to imagine how they would have looked like as unemployed 47 year olds, and wondered at what talent we must be squandering in our visu
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"...Even now whenever I hear some Grammar alumni talking,be it some businessperson or some minor sporting hero on the TV, I can still hear the echoes of that boastful ego-tripping that I and all my schoolmates acquired there, and which many of us worked hard to rid ourselves of..."
Well said! It is hard to get rid of to. I've said here before I've puzzled over what we were being educated FOR within our school culture of an all-male, all-white incultated superiority complex and an excessive deference to strict hierarchy.
The only thing I've come up with is we were all being trained to go off and rule the Indians.
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Eddie, every child withdrawn from the public system isn't just an exercise in choice, it is an attack on public education.
1/ Buying advantage for your children over and above their abilities is wrong in a democratic society.2/ Those who are privately educated and privately educate their kids have a vested interest in making sure the state provision is not as "good" as their system.
3/ Private schools entrench privilege through peer group. Banning private schools would result in much greater cross social group mixing, and make available much greater organisational and financial networks to schools that are currently less advantaged in these areas.
4/ Withdrawing the wealthiest, gifted or most motivated parents and children from the state system isn't just an act of private choice, it is also an attack on the overall talent available to the state sector.
However, banning private schools will not be to bring state schools up to the academic standards of private schools. To me that doesn't matter, because schools in a progressive, egalitarian democracy should be about more than just academic results. Which leads me to the bussing question. Yes, believe that might be necessary. I can't see how taking kids and putting them into an artifical environment that in no way reflects the society they will live in does anyone any good, except in very narrow class terms. And class and privilege are two things we expect to education system to diminish, not reinforce.
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Bugger. GRAMMAR.
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Education is a society that at least pretends to still believe in the clarion words of Clarence Beeby that:
"every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his powers."
needs more than just zoning or non-zoning. What we need is to do is abolish all private schools, all zoning, and require our schools to reflect in their students the demographic and economic make up of the nation as much as is possible.
And if that means bussing kids from Otara to Epsom Girl's or Auckland Grammer and vice versa, then so be it.
Education in a democracy shouldn't be an exercise in the middle class doing everything in their power to skew the playing field as early as possible.
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"... I'd go as Craig. Now, where's my top hat and monacle?
Dude, that's Tom..."
Wot, this Tom?I wouldn't wear a monacle. Or a monocle. And definitely not any manacles.
Just trying to remember, was the 1975 water polo test at Eden Park the first test televised in colour in NZ?
I was very small, but I think I remember seeing it on our colour telly at home.
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"Dare I venture into that foetid cesspit, even for the purposes of self-indulgent amusement?"
Dooooooooooo eeeeeeeeeet!
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Judy, As they say on the Antiques Roadshow, provenance can increase the value of anything exponentially including gossip... So immortal words of an Antiques Roadshow expert, "firstly tell me a little about how you came to possess this nugget of insider gossip???"