The Teachers Are Blowing Their Whistles!

The Australian Education Union's 2008 survey of new teachers ranks student misbehaviour before concerns about pay and class sizes, and second to workload as the chief source of concern.

Secondary teachers rank it as their No. 1 concern at 71.4 per cent.

Primary teachers rank it second at 66.1 per cent.

• New teachers say classroom violence their biggest concern, Kevin Donnelly, director of the Melbourne-based Education Standards Institute, The Courier-Mail: 16 November, 2009.

It is interesting to note the similarity between this AEU research result and The Teachers Are Blowing Their Whistles results.

Surely Education Departments must have a duty of care - to teachers who want to teach and to students who want to learn - to deal more effectively with disruptive students?

When I was in Bali recently, I noticed that many housewives were producing wonderful little items for sale to tourists - interesting headbands, hand-made dolls and toys, children's clothes, etc.

The people of Bali achieve so much because there is no employment benefit and they need to work really hard to make money.

• It made me wonder how much more Australians would achieve if there was no unemployment benefit.

And the people of Bali really value education.

When you take away the need to work, you take away the need to learn.

And children lose interest in school.

• We need to re-establish the relationship between work and money and freedom of choice.

Maybe we should consider providing unemployed people with free accommodation, shopping tokens for fruit, vegetables, basic food and basic necessities, transport tokens and free health care.

But take away their power to choose to spend taxpayers' money on junk food, smoking, gambling, drinking, etc.

This would re-establish the relationship between work, money and freedom of choice.

And children might become more interested in learning.