‘The number of Australian school children seeking help from homelessness services has increased by more than 80 per cent over the past three years, according to new data analysis.’ Almost 40,000 school children sought homelessness help last year posted on the Pro Bono news website.
Pages from the children’s book Our Home. See the book’s Facebook page here. Contact author Sue Coad for copies – $20 inc P&P in Australia (email: suecoad@adam.com.au)
Some of the cartoons drawn at the Australasian Association for Environmental Education conference ‘Tomorrow Making, our Present to the Future’, in Adelaide, South Australia, 5-7 October.
Craig Greer writes in the latest South Australian Teachers Journal about the lack of special needs funding. ‘It’s an issue that is becoming more critical by the day and, if not addressed with the rollout of needs based funding as recommended by the Gonski Review, has the capacity to severely impact on outcomes in public schools for years to come.’
GERM is the global education reform movement, as described in the latest Australian Education Union Journal (South Australian branch), is pushing radical proposals for the privatisation of government schooling.
These ideas are becoming mainstream in countries like Britain and Sweden, and are being promoted by independent schools lobby groups in Australia. ‘Sweden has led the way with for-profit schooling…. which media mogul Rupert Murdoch praised as an example of “IKEA schools” ‘.
Mike Willis, the author of the article, uses the example of the miner’s canary, warning that these developments are a threat to public education.
Here is the cartoon I drew to illustrate the article.
‘Hole in the wall’ is a project begun by Indian researcher Sugata Mitra in 1999, to inspire curiosity and working together in children around the world. By putting an internet-connected PC in a hole in a wall in a slum in New Delhi the researchers saw slum kids playing with the computer, exploring websites, learning English – and teaching each other. 13 years of study on the nature of self-organised learning has earned Sugata Mitra the first ever $1,000,000 TED Prize award. Read more on the Pro Bono news website.
This news story inspired today’s Kneebone cartoon on the Pro Bono website…
Most people have had a back-at-school bad dream. I’m sure it’s good therapy to work through it, write it down, reconstruct the story, deconstruct the story and see what the entrails can tell you.
My bad school dream seemed to focus on Mr Perkins’ French class …
School Doze 1999
… unfairly, as you see, he was doing his best for us.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 