Politically correct Play School exploits kids

It's no exaggeration to say that generations of Australian children and young parents have grown up with the ABC's Play School. Whether it was Big Ted, Little Ted, Noni or Benita, Lorraine, John or Don, viewers of all ages found some character they could identify with over the 40 years of its existence. But the harmless happy-family content has fallen victim to the nauseating politically-correct agenda that drives so much of the ABC's news and current affairs programming on radio and television.

ABC Children's Television head Claire Henderson says Play School owes its success to the fact "we respect the child, we respect the audience. We don't patronise, we don't exploit them, we don't preach to them, we don't talk down to them. We will always have the nursery rhymes and things children know and love, but the program will always be a program for today."

Except it isn't. The show does patronise kids, it does exploit them, it does preach to them, it does talk down to them and it doesn't have the nursery rhymes the children know and love, it has bowdlerised humbug that the ABC's in-house ideologists know and love. Take Play School's recent treatment of the classic nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep, for example, as rendered by Christine Anu and an associate, which began:

"Ba Ba Woolly Sheep/Have you any wool?
Yes, O, Yes, O/Three bags full. One for the jumper/And one for the socks," etc, etc.

You get the drift. Black sheep are out, as probably are diminutive people of the male gender, but the reader who sent this in was so bemused by the attempt to scour any possibly offensive material from the nursery rhyme that she didn't pay attention to the rest of the verses. But if black sheep have been magically erased, it seems likely that words such as "master", "dame" and "sir" have also been banned for fear of upsetting the sensitivities of the ABC's young audience.

This sort of hamfisted attempt to induce culturally anodyne thinking into the minds of youngsters would be laughable were it not of a piece with the efforts of the trade union movement and the ALP to ensure that organised Labor's messages, too, are pushed upon malleable young minds. Having exposed Labor's "real life" cases campaign against the Howard Government's industrial reforms as bogus, The Daily Telegraph can also reveal that the union movement is asking teachers to assist it in wooing school students to its cause with a campaign based on xenophobia and outdated class war materials.

Just as parents should pay more heed to Play School's rewriting of the classics of nursery, it would also pay them to monitor the "factsheets", "case studies" and other resources provided for teachers on Labornet's UnionTeach website. With union membership rapidly eroding, the diehards are trying to staunch the flow and save their jobs by pandering to youthful insecurities with scenarios designed to create fear and insecurity. In a "case study" of "globalisation, redundancy and Australian workers", for example, "Ben", a network administrator in his 50s who has been in the telecommunications industry for the past 20 years is advised by a new manager that all jobs in his team's field are to be declared vacant and staff must reapply for their positions. At the same time there is also an announcement that about "300 jobs in the company are going to be performed from India". The discussion points suggested for the lesson include "What are the advantages and disadvantages of union membership in a call centre?" and "How could the union assist in dealing with workplace conflict?"

Suggested activities include calling the ACTU for a call centre charter on workplace rights and responsibilities, designing a brochure promoting the role and benefits of a union in a call centre, developing a pamphlet or poster showing how to contact call centre unions, and watching a video titled Working it Out: ACTU. In the proposed group activity, the teacher role-plays with the students as the call-centre employer and changes the conditions of work by setting time-limits or quotas on simple tasks, "students complete tasks and teacher pressures them. Conflict is created."

There are laws designed to protect the young and impressionable from perverted adults who target them for sexual abuse. This campaign and the pap served up by the ABC's Play School would suggest that there should be laws protecting them from adults who want to rape them intellectually. The new workplace reforms contain specific protections for young workers, in addition to those which cover employees generally, and concerned parents can contact the Office of the Employment Advocate.

The ALP's media arm, the ABC, is well-known for its ducking and weaving whenever its core ideologies are challenged, from its recent biased Behind the News program on Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, to its four-year refusal to admit that the Palestinian groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah are terrorist organisations. ALP or ABC, it doesn't matter. The exploitation of young people is rife with misinformation, disinformation and blatant untruths and propagandising being foisted on unsuspecting minds. The young must be able to learn without having their minds mortgaged to politically-correct causes by their teachers and agenda-driven institutions.

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The current education system is hard on teachers too

The quality of teaching has seriously deteriorated in the most critical areas of literacy and numeracy. As a school head I have seen for myself that teachers are not as literate as they used to be. I have given up as teachers continually make errors in written communications to students and parents, and in school newsletters. In speech, fuzzy thinking results from their confusion of subject and verb, illogical prepositions and no longer amusing malapropisms. Vocabularies bled and logic was wounded.

Now we have evidence I am not just a boring old pedant. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan's welcome research, which appeared in these pages yesterday, has done education a great service by providing an evidence base for what school heads and employers already know: the quality of teaching has seriously deteriorated in the most critical areas of literacy and numeracy, and therefore in primary education, science, technology and other subjects.

Let me defend teachers. They too are victims of deteriorating school systems. Only a handful remains whose school education predates the 1960s and '70s, when teaching was overcome by a fashion for coddling children. Don't correct errors: you might damage their little psyches and destroy their self-esteem. Don't tell them what to write about: it's undemocratic. Let them express themselves. We call their efforts creative.

The distinction between self-expression and communication was lost. Self-expression can take place without an audience. Communication requires compliance with the niceties of spelling, punctuation (including apostrophes) and diction that are also understood by the audience. The ability to structure a line of thought is gained through lots of writing practice to establish clear thinking: it requires knowledge about the subject. That is, communication requires discipline, academic and personal. Today's teachers cannot teach what they have not been taught.

Younger teachers also copped postmodernism. Before they had learned to read thoroughly and carefully and to love reading (whether fiction, history or science), they were taught to be sceptical of everything and wary of giving it value in their own lives. They were made to see literature, history and science through "frames" of feminism, Marxism, racism and who knows what else. The frame mattered but there was not much of a picture in it as syllabuses lost content and no longer required students to have substantial knowledge of facts, names, dates and events.

A young person's search for vicarious human experience and understanding was distorted by the views of others before they learned to follow story and character development effectively. The view was through adult frames rather than the framework of childhood or adolescence. Teachers cannot now teach what they do not know. Many complain of the difficulty of finding a "good secretary like we used to have". Teachers, like secretaries, are traditionally women. I celebrate that women now have the full range of career choices but one consequence is that we no longer can rely on a large enough supply of talented women to populate our teaching positions.

Leigh and Ryan have shown the impact of what is otherwise a welcome social change. And men? Men are a valuable but rare species in education; it takes courage to be a male teacher. A closed door can ruin a career. An adolescent girl might make allegations that will never wash away. Suspicion lurks. Can a male teacher comfort a crying child? How do you teach gymnastics or tennis without touching? It is difficult enough for women in this climate of lewd suspicion. Wouldn't you rather be an accountant?

Schools are no longer havens. Guns and knives are not common, but regrettably they are far from unknown in schools, whether brought by students or by invaders of the premises. Students who threaten teachers directly or by innuendo prevent effective teaching and obliterate the teacher's motivation. Almost any reaction from the teacher or school head will be wrong by the time it gets to the front page. Failure to break up a fight is a failure of duty of care. If a teacher physically separates two warring children, they might reap a charge of assault with the possibility of never working with children again. After victory in court, who will resurrect the career and reputation of the teacher? Wouldn't you rather be a lawyer?

Teachers are increasingly powerless and vulnerable. Some parents defend their children no matter what the allegation and the evidence. It is extraordinarily time-consuming, emotionally taxing and increasingly difficult to help children in trouble or investigate alleged misbehaviour. The school can't search lockers or school bags, can't question students without parents being present and can't separate presumed malefactors. By the time action is taken, the problem has blown out of all proportion and parents have called in lawyers. It is easier to avoid the challenge; behaviour in schools gets worse. Wouldn't you rather be a doctor?

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Sugary drinks pulled out of schools



Soft drink manufacturers will remove sugared drinks from school canteens and stop advertising directly to children in a major overhaul of beverage marketing. The Australian Beverage Council today unveiled tough new guidelines in response to increasing pressure to alleviate childhood obesity. The policy was signed by almost all major bottlers of non-alcoholic carbonated, non-carbonated, juice and water-based drinks, and will be introduced over two years. Measures include the removal of all sugar-sweetened drinks from primary school canteens and supply to high schools only on request. The companies also propose to not advertise any such products directly to primary school-age children or in TV programs watched primarily by children. So-called diet drinks would not be included in the bans.

The companies also would relabel products to declare kilojoule content on the front and additional nutritional information on the back. Australian Beverages Council chief executive Tony Gentile said the changes were designed to help manage the complex public health issue of obesity. "With this document, the beverage industry is flagging to both consumers and Government that we see ourselves very much as part of the solution in assisting consumers in making informed choices," Mr Gentile said. "Through these policies, I believe that the Australian Beverages Industry is now clearly and unambiguously indicating to the community its commitment to both its customers and to the wider community."

The document, called Commitment Addressing Obesity and Other Health and Wellness Issues, includes nine major initiatives. Others include increasing the range of low calorie products, encouraging downsizing of portion size to avoid over-consumption and boosting educational programs. The companies also pledged to conduct independent research on consumer behaviour to encourage healthier lifestyles

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Criminal doctors OK by the "regulators"

It was a brutal crime, committed by a drug addict with a long history of erratic behaviour. The accused had already lost several jobs as a result of his drug addiction, and he was allegedly becoming increasingly violent. On November 3, 2000, the Queensland man dragged a woman into a bedroom, bashing her as she screamed and attempted to escape. He forcibly removed her clothes and raped her. In 2002 he pleaded guilty to rape, deprivation of liberty and assault and was sentenced to five years' jail.

However, the case stands apart from other cases of sexual assault because the rapist is a doctor, and last month the Medical Board of Queensland renewed his registration. James Samuel Manwaring had previously been struck off the register in the mid-1990s after a psychiatric evaluation found "he constitutes a significant danger to any patient he may have to look after".

However, Manwaring is not the only doctor in Australia with a criminal conviction. Two weeks ago, another Queensland doctor had his registration cancelled after it was revealed he failed to disclose a previous rape conviction. In 1981 Eugene Sherry and two other doctors were convicted of raping a nurse in the US. Sherry was imprisoned for six months and moved to Australia in 1984, and worked in Sydney for 20 years. His 2004 application to work in Queensland was approved under a process that allows doctors to be mutually registered in other states. Sherry disclosed the conviction to the NSW Medical Board, but when he moved to Queensland the NSW board did not inform its Queensland counterpart, and nor did he.

The cases illustrate weaknesses in Australia's fragmented medical registration system and raise the question: should doctors convicted of sexual assault be allowed to practise? In many instances, medical boards allow doctors found guilty of sexual assault to continue to practise if they are closely supervised, or a "chaperone" is present during consultations.

The NSW Medical Board decided last year that a cosmetic surgeon charged with aggravated sexual assault on a patient could continue to practise as long as a nurse was present when he examined female patients. However, Joanna Flynn, president of the Australian Medical Council - which assesses overseas-trained doctors and accredits medical colleges - told The Australian that doctors who cannot be trusted to treat patients unsupervised should be struck off the register. Flynn, who also is president of the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria, says "if a determining body believes it is necessary to have a doctor chaperoned because they are not confident the patient would be safe, in my view that doctor should not be registered. "Patients must be able to trust their doctor. They may want to question the doctor on medical information, but they need to be able to trust they won't be mistreated by the doctor."

The Australian Medical Association's Queensland president Zelle Hodge says the idea of supervising doctors with a criminal past is fine in theory, but almost impossible to implement. She says medical boards and organisations that employ medical staff don't have the time to consistently monitor doctors. "The medical boards simply do not have the resources to go out and police these restrictions," Hodge says. "It's up to the doctor's employer to monitor the doctor's performance and make sure they are supervised, and sometimes that doesn't happen."

In a case currently before the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria, a GP is facing suspension for a second time over allegations he conducted a pap smear that was more "sexual than medical", while making sexually suggestive comments to the patient. The GP, Richard George Young, had his licence suspended for 15 months in 2001 after engaging in sexual relationships with two vulnerable female patients. His licence was renewed on the condition a chaperone be present when he examined female patients.

NSW Medical Board chief executive Andrew Dix defended the use of chaperones to monitor doctors who had committed serious offences. But he admitted the system did not guarantee the doctor would not re-offend. "We have a comprehensive chaperoning protocol which requires the regular submission of the chaperone's reports to the board," he said. "But if doctors are determined to be dishonest, some will manage to get away with things." Dix says it's a balancing act to ensure the patient's right to the best possible care and the right of doctors to be given the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves. He says each case is assessed individually and there are no offences that automatically lead to a doctor being struck off the register. "There are doctors who have been struck off a long time ago who periodically apply for restoration who are denied. "But historically the system has been based on the idea that people are able to redeem their character. And there are no black and white rules about what constitutes good character."

However, some argue that while doctors may have the right to a second chance, the public has a right to know if their doctor has a criminal record, or restrictions placed on their registration. Merilyn Walton, an associate professor of ethical practice at the University of Sydney's school of medicine, says patients should be notified if their doctor has been disciplined by a medical board. "Doctors should be required to put a notice in their waiting room saying they are supposed to be supervised," she says. "If I was a patient of that doctor, I would want to know."

Flynn believes all the details of a doctor's registration should be easily assessable to the public. However, Australia does not have a national medical register. Rather, each state has its own slightly different system of assessing and registering medical staff. In April 2004 all the state health ministers announced that a nationally consistent medical registration system, called the Australian Index of Medical Practitioners, would be introduced. The ministers agreed the new model should provide greater public access to medical register information, including an online index of medical practitioners. Two years later the states still operate independently and there's been little progress in improving public access to medical board information. Currently only the medical boards in Queensland, South Australia and the ACT have websites that provide detailed information about doctors' registration.

Walton says most medical boards have failed to inform patients about the medical registration process. "The big challenge for medical boards is to improve the level of transparency of their processes so the community understands how and why they make decisions. The public need to be engaged in the discussion about what standards they want."

The failings of the state-by-state system were highlighted in March this year, when it was revealed that the Hunter New England Area Health Service in NSW waited almost 18 months before investigating an overseas-trained doctor banned elsewhere in the state for misdiagnosing 208 patients in 2004. Farid Zaer, a pathologist trained in India and the US, was banned by the Illawarra Area Health Service in April 2004 after a review of 6300 patient records found he had failed to correctly analyse tests for many diseases, including cancer. In late 2004 it notified the Hunter New England Area Health Service, where the doctor had worked between 1999 and 2001, that it was investigating him. The Hunter service did not begin to review the records of 7300 patients diagnosed by Zaer until March this year.

The doctor has since moved to Queensland, where he is registered to practise unsupervised as a GP and as a pathologist under strict supervision. The case again prompted calls for the establishment of an Australian index of medical practitioners that would record whether doctors have been disciplined by any of the state medical boards, or had any restrictions placed on their practice.

Walton believes the mutual recognition process allows doctors of questionable character or ability to move interstate and continue to practise. "We have mutual recognition, but it caters to the lowest common denominator," she says. "So if one state is weak around disciplinary matters, then that person can be registered in other states based on a weak disciplinary structure. There is also a lack of exchange between regulatory boards and the community. I can't believe we don't have a national registration system yet."

In July, the Council of Australian Governments meeting announced medical boards would be abolished and replaced with a single national registration scheme covering nine health professional groups. For the plan to proceed, each state and territory would have to introduce legislation. The proposal overrides the Australian Medical Council's plan to revamp the existing medical board registration system. The AMC had wanted to give every doctor an identifying number that would allow their details to be accessed through a national register.

Flynn says she is unclear about the details of the proposed specialist registers and what impact they would have on the AMC's plan. Whatever plan is eventually implemented, she is adamant that it must give patients better access to doctors' details. "The public has a right to know if there are conditions on a doctor's registration or if there have been serious disciplinary or criminal offences proven against the doctor," Flynn says. "It's long overdue."

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