Poor Babies

When I was a boy, I had to walk ten miles to school — in the snow, barefoot, uphill, both ways. But yeah, this is sorta horrifying too:

[Australian] teachers have been told to stop marking school children's work with red pen because it is an "aggressive" colour. Queensland's Deputy Opposition Leader Mark McArdle told parliament today that teachers were being advised to reconsider their pen choice because it may offend children. Mr McArdle tabled a Queensland Health document proposing "strategies for addressing mental health wellbeing in any classroom". It says: "Don't mark in a red pen (which can be seen as aggressive) — use a different colour."

Comments

[McDuff]

Horrifying? Why?

[Rogier van Bakel]

My devilishly clever ambiguity allows you to choose whether the horror lies in traumatizing school children with every stroke of a teacher's red pen, or in the fact that there's a bevvy of busybody bureaucrats with nothing better to do than advocating the abolishment of the dastardly practice.

[McDuff]

Perhaps the horror was, as mentioned in the article, that this was yet another populist politician taking something from an advisory publication and using it to score cheap points about "bureaucracy gone mad," possibly to take attention away from the fact that they have nothing of substance to talk about and would hate for the voting public to notice?

See, aside from that, I really struggle. As usual with this kind of thing, clicking past the DEATH BY PC headlines you find that sensationalism has inflated a couple of lines of suggestion into bans and abolishments of dastardly practices, along with all manner of out of context quotes about how we're so deathly afraid of offending people, when of course we should be making sure we offend people all the time just to toughen them up.

There are, of course, people who spend their time looking at how education happens, just in case there are ways of doing it better. It's possible that you think all such public endeavours are a waste of time by interfering busybodies, and that we should simply rely on our natural instincts when it comes to these things. If that's the case, then the red/green ink is the least of our troubles. If that's not the case, then there really isn't a problem at all. When you study minutiae sometimes patterns jump out. If someone spotted what they think is a pattern whereby marking in red had a negative effect on children's ability to learn, then it's reasonable for them to point that out, I would have thought. Since there's no enforcement here, and since red ink is not significantly cheaper than green ink, it seems like even if this advisory is wrong as wrong can be it's a costless piece of advice. It's either going to have a positive effect or a null effect -- it might help and it can't hurt. As such, what on *earth* is the point of banging on about it?

The answer to that question, of course rests in the first paragraph.

You know, for a political group who claims to be so anti-government, you libertarian types don't half get *played*.

[S]

I agree with McDuff. This is silly, but its also being sensationalised. It has probably been taken somewhat out of context.

I am ready to be outraged when they pass a law banning red pens, but until then, I wont let the offhand remark of some poli upset me.

He's the opposition anyway - he's just trying to get attention the poor darl'.

[bobl]

Hey, this is total bullshit. Signed: Red Ink Manufacturers Assoc.

[Dan Hill]

Queensland is to Australian politics what Louisiana in the darkest days of Huey Long was to US politics. Please don't judge us by the ravings of Queensland politicians who have had a little too much of the tropical sun!