Yesterday NSW teachers held a stop-work meeting.
The media report “a big turnout” of teachers with over 2000 schools being affected.
The NSW Teachers’ Federation listed grievances including the government’s proposed policies failing to guarantee class sizes, salaries etc. and that too much control is passing into the hands of local school principals.
No doubt persuasive cases can be made for both sides of the argument . . . .
* * *
A separate issue is whether teachers should ever strike.
I suggest that they should not.
This was called a “meeting”. But it was a strike.
They could have held their meeting at 6am and then, after deciding their policies etc., grabbed a quick bite of breakfast and turned up to teach at 9am.
The point needs repeating again and again that if you are a teacher, you are teaching all the time.
If you go on strike, you are still teaching . . . .
. . . teaching students that the way to get what you want in life is to inconvenience others – to do “whatever it takes” to get them to knuckle under.

A local psychologist told our local paper, “I absolutely despise web-based social media”.

He works with young people harmed by cyber bullying and considering harming themselves.

But these social (anti-social?) media are not going away. More likely, they will increase.

What to do?

There is no law of nature dictating that only superficial/mean/meaningless material can be transmitted electronically . . . .

Or is there?

Is the fault in human nature itself?

A flawed nature armed with technology enabling instant, irretrievable expression of frustrated self-absorption — with no built-in cooling-off period mechanism.

* * *

Those aware that it is God who gives us existence second by second . . . .

That life is a conversation/transaction between oneself and God . . . .

That God is closer to us than we are to ourselves . . . .

Those who understand all this must painstakingly seek to share it with those who don’t.

How?

Best, perhaps, by word of mouth.

The people we meet each day – let’s love them with a selfless, ordered, God-centred love.

This week, the New Zealand newspapers have reported how girls are now more violent at NZ schools than boys.

They quote percentages from various surveys.

Boys have always traditionally had rough-and-tumble, outgoing, assertive natures.

After all, it was their job to grow up to defend their family from outside threats, to be the breadwinner and to make leadership decisions.

To keep their forcefulness socially constructive, males have needed the help of their womenfolk — ensuring that their masculinity doesn’t lead into disrespect for women, and especially not into sexual promiscuity, but into fulfilling their family privileges and responsibilities.

* * *

The feminist movement is the worst enemy of boys and men.

The worst enemy of society.

Modern primary schools have too few male teachers.

Mixed-gender secondary schools are, for many boys, hostile places where girls do better.

Many young men find themselves so ill-prepared for coping in the outside world that they “boomerang” back to living with mum and dad again.

Their days spent playing video games, drinking alcohol and occasionally — in sheer frustration — committing violent antisocial acts.

Last month a group called Australia21 released a report entitled “The Prohibition of Illicit Drugs is Killing and Criminalising our Children and We are Letting it Happen . . . .”

Aus21calls itself “an independent, non-profit organisation” doing “multidisciplinary research and inquiry on issues of strategic importance to Australia in the 21^st century”.

Independent? Not very.  They receive funding from federal and state governments.

Our politicians are being very cute.

The Prime Minister and Premiers all commented unfavourably on the report.

Keeping their noses clean by protesting how they disagree with it . . . .

Yet having, perhaps, gone to some trouble to ensure that a report stating exactly these views would eventuate.

* * *

Observe Australi21’s membership: Peter Baume, Geoff Gallop, Alex Wodak etc. — famous “harm-minimisation” protagonists from way back.

Anybody ever involved in attempts to get real action against drugs will have come up against these very chaps . . . .

. . . immune to logic and with all the perfect connections to stop anything happening.

The September 2007 federal parliamentary report “The Winnable War on Drugs” exposed the uselessness of “harm minimisation”.

Better for the government to turn to its recommendations.

The Aus21 report could be filed away somewhere.

Yet another teenage boy killed in a surf carnival at Kurrawa.

The third in recent years.

But organisers plan not to cancel the rest of the championship — body found today, business almost as usual tomorrow.

One barrister wants surf carnival officials to face criminal charges for not enforceing the use of high-visibilty flotation vests as recommended by the Coroner after a previous similar death.

But organisers give the excuse that the measure is “years away” because first “all options had to be tested”.

With vests in use, injured or unconscious competitors will float  —visible and able to be rescued.

With no vest, an injured competitor goes under the water, is invisible, and dies.

To allow participation in such events without vests is like sending workers onto building sites without safety helmets and boots.

We Australians need to re-evaluate the place of competitive sport in our lives.

It is currently a form of idolatry — too often spiritually and/or bodily fatal.

The move towards same-sex marriage is a shocker and resented, one hopes, by most normal people.

But didn’t we bring it on ourselves?

Back in Prime Minister Whitlam’s era, the standing of marriage was weakened by the introduction of easy-to-get, unilateral, no-fault divorce.

Not enough fuss was made at that time. What has happened since was almost inevitable.

Once no-fault divorce is “normal”, every marriage, including yours, is cheapened.

The next step was disempowering parents from guiding their children’s development and search for meaning.

Social workers, English teachers, school nurses etc. reinforced the messages of the pornographic music, pornographic videos, pornographic television, pornographic internet material etc. to which the young were exposed 24/7.

The message being that parents can’t tell you how to behave in this day and age.

* * *

The final step looked like being easy — just knocking the last nail into the coffin.

Namely passing laws handing over young members of a new generation to be raised by parent-substitutes obviously biologically nothing to do with them . . . .

And who have no interest in being mother/father role models . . . .

However that last step might blow up in the faces of those seeking to engineer it.

Enough might be enough.

The anti-family pollies might start losing their seats.

Stand by.