Ilana Snyder
Ilana Snyder is President of the New Israel Fund Australia and an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. With Susan Feldman and Barbara Kamler, she co-edited Something That Happens to Other People: Stories of Women Growing Older (1996).
It doesn’t take much to realise that John Hartley admires the work of Richard Hoggart, the famous English literary critic and founder of the field of Cultural Studies. The titles of several of his books are tributes to Hoggart, including this one. As Hartley explains on the first page, The Uses of Literacy (1957) set the agenda for educational and disciplinary reform in schools and universities. ... (read more)
When Richard Florida, the peripatetic celebrity academic from George Mason University, was in Australia to promote The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), he described Sydney as one of a dynamic new generation of cities that is attracting global talent. The following year, as a guest of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, he included Melbourne with Helsinki, Stockholm and Minneapolis–St Paul as model ... (read more)
Joanna Mendelssohn is best known as an art critic and historian. After the publication of an essay in The Griffith review entitled ‘Going Private’, Pluto Press commissioned her to write a piece for its Now Australia series. Similar to Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essays, but even more determinedly non-academic, the Pluto Press format is part of a publishing phenomenon and covers a range of politic ... (read more)
In 2011, when businessman David Gonski was reviewing education funding in Australia, he visited two primary schools in Sydney’s west. At the first, he found the principal dealing with glass from a break-in the night before. As he sat in the school’s reception, he observed that the children arriving for school were from non-English-speaking migrant backgrounds. When they toured the school, the ... (read more)
This books has a number of admirable qualities. In times when open subscription to a social justice agenda runs the risk of ridicule, it is a brave book. It does not shy away from identifying the universities – specifically, the sandstones – as integral to any explanation of why Australian secondary education is inequitable. And both authors work in one: the University of Melbourne. The book a ... (read more)
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The Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a never-ending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of full-scale wars, with immense suffering on both side ... (read more)
Readers of The Australian could not fail to have noticed the numerous articles written by Kevin Donnelly over the last few years complaining about the ‘parlous’ state of Australian education. With extraordinary repetition, Donnelly has called for a return to a syllabus approach, the books of the canon and teacher-directed literature classes, where students are presented with universal truths.
... (read more)
In Israel’s recent election, Benjamin Netanyahu desperately defended his position as Israel’s prime minister, but perhaps also as a free man, because he may soon face trial for corruption charges. As Israelis learn more about his lavish life style, many yearn for the days of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), whom they recall as an ascetic statesman of vision and integrity. Netanyahu is seen as t ... (read more)
In the foundation Jean Blackburn Memorial Lecture in 2014, David Gonski observed that Australian schooling was unfairly funded – that the money wasn’t going where it was needed. To our national shame, this is not a new phenomenon. Successive governments in Australia have adopted school-funding policies for which there has been little educational justification and which have contributed to the ... (read more)