In the days before email, every editor would regard the pile of mail submissions on the desk with a shudder — what fresh horrors awaited? After a few years, you could tell the maddies by sight. They preferred green ink, their submissions were an inch thick. Should you venture into them you would find that they all the did the same thing in different ways. They attempted to explain current reality — everything from tariff protection to urban planning — in a theoretical extravaganza that began with either the Big Bang or a theory of neural operation, and proceeded from there.
Noel Pearson is no green ink maddie, but he comes pretty close to sounding like one in Radical Hope, an essay ostensibly on education, equality and race in Australia, but which manages to take in the question of whether quantum mechanics supersedes Engels dialectical materialist approach to dualism, how cognitive science has disproved Lockean rationalism, and how Western education would have been thoroughly transformed had the world listened to an obscure educationist named Engelmann.
There is everything in this — everything but an account of the failure of education in the far north that would give the reader sufficient evidence to judge the charges Pearson is making against it.
The essay begins with a compelling section reflecting on the an oft-hidden but essential component of any healthy society — what conditions are necessary for people in it to be serious, for their norms and values to have meaning? But the core of the work is an argument for a certain type of educational practice to be adopted in indigenous learning — a mode called “direct instruction” as pioneered by a US educationist named Siegfried Engelmann and some colleagues.
In the great split between analytic and synthetic approaches to learning, Engelmann comes firmly down on the analytic side. Everything should be broken down into bits, learning should be scripted so it is bad-teacher-proof, phonics is essential to reading instruction etc.
DI has made solid gains in areas where it can be applied — especially compared to overly synthetic approaches, which focus on creativity and jumping towards totalities — whole words, whole concepts. It has also generated a cult of proselytisers who ignore its shortcomings and limits.
Pearson has jumped into this cult boots and all, declaring Engelmann to be the “Darwin” of education, and adopting the myth of the zigheads, as Engelmann’s followers are sometimes known — that testing of DI was discontinued in the US out of political pressure and nefariousness.
Actually it was mostly budget cuts to everything. And DI’s acolytes rarely mention its shortcomings, chief among them that it provides little basis for more synthetic thinking at higher levels. In a situation of educational collapse such as indigenous communities face, that may not be an uppermost concern, but the other thing is — absenteeism. DI is hard yards for kids coming from unstructured backgrounds, and in places where school attendance is not an internalised value they stop turning up.
It was because of these sort of problems that more “synthetic” educationists developed things like ‘culturally appropriate’ education which Pearson constructs as the great other, the monumental failure in indigenous education practice over past decades.
Maybe it is, but Pearson doesn’t bother to show us how or why. In this hundred page essay devoted to addressing indigenous educational failure, there is no material or historical account of its development or practice, of what is being taught, of curriculum contents and approaches that Pearson finds so wanting.
Instead what we get is a mixture of amateur philosophising, often deeply embarrassing (Engels?! On dualism?!), and a naive and uncritical acceptance of the latest fashions in cognitive science. This is largely oriented around new theories which suggest that problem-solving capacities of infants and small children are far more hard-wired than previously suspected.
This is a highly technical debate for specialists, and the theories predispose no fixed educational theory, but Pearson is convinced — just as, using the “science” of eugenics a century earlier, people found it obvious that ‘racial hygiene’ policies should be applied to remnant populations. It is scientism pure and simple.
From there, having failed to argue his case, Pearson drifts into a free-form remix of his favourite excuse — it’s all the fault of the progressive middle-class left. The policies they advocate remain undiscussed and uncriticised, but it’s all their fault. Freire the educationist whom Pearson lines himself up against is dismissed with a confession of bafflement ‘I’ve read him three times and never understood what he’s on about’.
Pearson could have given us a compelling argument for a new education approach. Instead he indulged himself in a new airing of old obsessions. The essay’s release coincided with startling news that truancy was way down in Cape York schools, standards up etc etc. It took Chris Sarra, someone Pearson quotes approvingly, to point out that with the amounts of money being pumped into four small communities within cape York, they would bloody want to be.
Is Pearson creating an education revolution — or a series of Howard-era Potemkin villages, from which he issues his Enver Hoxha style manifestoes? It’s about time he found the seriousness he seeks, in launching detailed and full critiques of the opponents he alleges have done so much damage.
And Pearson’s protege, Tania Major, is supposed to be running in the next federal election for the National Party. Says it all about that crew. They finally realise that education is important in improving the lot of our Indigenous people, but the path they follow is one which runs through the land of religious indoctrination & boarding away from their home and cultural influences; also, when it comes to choosing the most appropriate political party to run for, they choose the one with the longest history of racial intolerance and bigotry towards Aboriginals.
It’s been obvious to me for some time that Pearson & Co. are being used by the Right in this country(we only have to peruse La Albrechtsen’s latest piece about Pearson to realise he’s having smoke blown up his rear-end by her type), in order to give a veneer of respectibility to the policies which the Howard government were laying the foundations for, should they have been elected again(and which would have proven to them that their brainwashing of the Australian people was complete and successful); which, up until then, included the Intervention and removal of the Racial Discrimination Act, to see where their real agenda was heading. That Howard co-opted a couple of Uncle Tom’s, such as Pearson, only made this more plain to see.
If only Pearson would realise that the Quadrant crowd will only fill your head with self-serving rubbish, then there might be some hope for this obviously talented Aboriginal man.
I don’t agree with the Uncle Tom line for a moment Victoria. Pearson, Major et al are entitled to make whatever argument they like – and we’re entitled to contest it. The Uncle Tom charge is wrong – and coming from a white person, as you seem to be, pretty patronising in itself. I made a coupla cracks about Pearson in the article, but they’re part of the general run of politica rgy-bargy. Let’s leave the charge of being a ‘dupe’ out of it.
I believe that Mr Pearson has a lot of good things to say about indigenous disadvantage and we should listen carefully to his wise words. However, we should not think that simply because he is an indigenous person that he speaks with authority that is divorced from his own cultural and social bias.
An example of this was revealed in an interview Mr Pearson did not so long ago about indigenous education and disadvantage. He said words to the effect of “I send my kids to private schools because I can, who wouldn’t want to do that if they could”.
Well, Mr Person I wouldn’t.
I don’t believe that we should structure our educational system around a concept that puts decent education up for sale. A system that routinely disadvantages kids due to their socio-economic status. A system which makes parents feel they are denying their children a start in life by not sending them to a private school. A system that sees fathers trying to hold two jobs to pay school fees simply so that their kids can succeed. A system that entrenches advantage and entitlement.
As an aboriginal person, Noel Pearson was subject to disadvantage that others can only imagine, and his perspective on both his own experiences and those of his people are an invaluable resource for those of us far more fortunate – the ignorant white majority. However, as an educated person, his approach to educational solutions can be as biased as the next man and should be assessed that way.
To truly measure the worth of Mr Pearson’s words, we need to respect his heritage and experiences but also understand that he is a privately educated man in a white world with his own white-man biases.
Mr Pearson is disparaging of the progressive left, but as the disadvantaged in white Australia will surely attest, the system of private education established and protected by the conservative right will not provide the answer which he seeks.
Good piece, Guy. IMO Pearson is still a valuable voice in Australia’s intellectual landscape and his writing is usually thoughtful and sometimes contains flashes of true clarity. However, he also has an annoying tendency for bombast and oversimplification, often recycling material from American libertarian think tanks and personalities whether it fits the Australian context or not. I have no wish to defend educational holism here, but I think your expression of regret at the lack of evidence and close argument in the book fits with Pearson’s past record in that regard.
He is well read on a wide range of subjects, certainty, but he is hardly adequately engaged with the academic literature across the plethora of fields he so often seeks to adjudicate definitively. Maybe that’s not a fair expectation, but some more modesty in his approach would go a long way to defuse the problem. After all, even a true pragmatic, libertarian polymath such as Richard Posner — who makes many real academic contributions in a wide variety of fields — cannot avoid charges of his lack of depth in pure economics or pure jurisprudence; And Pearson isn’t a Posner by any means.
Pearson tends to fill in the gaps in his approach with narrative – latching on to specific personalities and creating goodies and baddies from what he finds. Sometimes these narratives arrive with some real sensibility about them, but other times they are little better than square-peg-in-a-round-hole agitprop. His farcical article on Obama and Shelby Steele is a head-desk case in point of the latter.
I think sometimes Pearson has carried the mallet of rugged individualism around for so long that he can only really see do-gooder left-liberal moles to whack, real or imaginary. That’s definitely a real blind spot, and it dampens his ability to cut through on the issues, which can be magnificent when it is aimed and calibrated properly.
There’s also this funny political obstinacy I get about him which strikes me as somewhat petty and counter-productive. Now, I don’t pretend to really understand what it must have been like to manoeuvre through successive governments, deal with all the actors who have contributed to the failure of indigenous policy fail over the years, including the stereotypical naïve lefties who are his bete noire. However, I really cannot fathom how he became so ensconced as an apologist for Howard right-wing zeitgeist in the Liberal Party, alienating so many potential allies with indulgent attacks, which look plainly foolish in light of Rudd’s then imminent ascendency. In that sense, he shares a certain degree of self-inflicted lost-in-space political irrelevance with someone like Christopher Hitchens.
Agreed on the moratorium on the slur ‘uncle tom’ — it’s unhelpful and unfair — don’t use it.
Noel Pearson has used the “Uncle Tom” crack himself. He even used it in the title of an Australian article More Uncle Toms than meet the eye: