Re: LOGO-L> Intensive Logo in Australia

[KERRB@Magill.UniSA.edu.au]

Gary Stager wrote:-

>I actually worked at Coombabah before I worked at MLC and naively 
>believed that THEY would succeed and not MLC. At the time, the Queensland 
>Govt. was promising a laptop for every kid in the state within a couple 
>of years. Within that period they abandoned support for just 60 kids. ALL 
>schools and administrators have a problem with attention-span.

 One of the few government schools in Australia today that is running an 
intensive Logo program is Batlow Technology School in the NSW countryside. 
Apparently this is being run as a magnet school model. 

 The administrators I know here in South Australia are very suspicious of the 
magnet school model because they see it as a generator of inequality. If we 
can't offer something to everybody then we shouldn't offer it to anybody. 
Competition and difference in the government sector is viewed with suspicion. 
Private schools aren't weighed down by these considerations.

 My wish would be for government schools to encourage more diversity without 
abandoning the social justice principle. ie. equal but different. 

 It seems clear from my growing list of Private schools doing intensive logo 
(cf. very few government schools) that risk taking and innovation is more a 
virtue in Private schools now than government schools -- whatever the situation 
has been in the past.

 Part of Seymour's philosophy was to take the tools of the wealthy and 
sophisticated and give them to the poor -- well, it aint happening!

-- Bill Kerr

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