Review: Destroying the Joint, edited by Jane Caro

The catalyst for the collection of essays that is Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World was a comment made in 2012 by a male radio shock jock. I'm not going to mention his name - even though some of you may already know it - but I will tell you about the comment since it did set the context for this book. 

The comment was made in relation to the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard's intentions to donate money to women in the Pacific for the development of their leadership skills. This shock jock claimed that women were doing enough damage in the world already - specifically naming ex-Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon and lord mayor of Sydney Clover Moore as examples - so surely we needn't be giving more leadership opportunities to women. In fact, women were doing so much damage in the world that they were 'destroying the joint', thus laying fame to this phrase. 

A cheeky tweet by Jane Caro in response to this shock jock's comment - 'Got time on my hands tonight so thought I'd come up with new ways to destroy the joint, being a woman and all. Ideas welcome.' - led to an unprecedented national response from women who were very much angry/disgusted/exasperated that such comments were (and still are) being made about them publicly in 2012. The women involved decided to unite, and so the Destroy the Joint campaign was born.

Thus the essays in Destroying the Joint are in response to this very notion of women 'destroying the joint'. They provide a variety of angles on this idea, such as whether or not women are actually in 'the joint'; whose joint it is that we are/are not destroying; who has a right to say whether or not we are destroying the joint; and, if we accept that we are destroying the joint - as this doesn't have to be a negative thing - whether or not we should take more pride of destroying it.

Written from political, social, environmental, creative, educational and disability perspectives, Destroying the Joint provides a variety of lenses through which this issue can be viewed through, as well as how it relates to wider feminist issues. The way the essays are written make it very accessible for those curious to learn more about feminism and it's vast scope. For me, they provided a solid introduction into avenues of feminism I'd like to pursue further.

I guess my next question with a book like this is how to keep the conversation going? And how do we start including people that might not normally pick up a book like this so that they can enter and be part of this conversation? Because I believe that's so important if we do want more action to take place to help feminist messages spread and start having more of an impact on everyday life for women and men. Now, I don't quite know the answer to this question I have posed, but I do know that I want to keep engaging in these issues and conversations so that change can become more of a reality.

I'll finish off by including some cracking quotes from the contributors to Destroying the Joint so that you can get a taste of this fantastic collection of essays. 

Michelle Law:

'Being a feminist is not about despising men, or overtaking them...Feminism is about despising an idea. And the idea is that women are unequal to men. It is that they deserve or should expect the kind of sexism, misogyny and mistreatment that they receive. It is that any women who rejects this treatment will be met with aggressive, irrational and sometimes unintelligible scorn. When we are destroying the joint, we are calling out sexism and misogyny.'

Catherine Deveney:

'The truth is, there is not one feminism, but many feminisms. And just because you are pro woman does not mean you are anti men. I think one of the main reasons I am a feminist is because I love boys and men so much and I have hated the way society has expected them to live, love and be. Feminism is not anti men. It's anti arseholes, misogynists, pricks, creeps, thugs and bigots.'

Senator Penny Wong

'We live in the same Australia, we share many values, but our experiences and therefore our perceptions of reality can be so different. If we are to understand across these differences, we have to be capable of more than tolerance. We have to try to imagine another's experience and to do so with imagination, compassion and respect.'

Overall, Destroying the Joint is very much an informative, refreshing and entertaining insight into current Australian feminism and one which I very much recommend.

Want more?

Keep engaged in the conversation by following the Destroy the Joint community on Facebook or Twitter.

I've also recently discovered Cherchez la Femme, a fantastically entertaining and engaging feminist podcast that I also highly recommend you check out.

Review: The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education, by Chris Bonnor and Jane Caro

Why are private schools called 'private' when they receive substantial government funding? Why are public schools considered the lesser option out of private and faith-based schools? Which types of schools deserve government funding the most? What are the consequences if some sectors receive more government funding than others? These are the sorts of questions raised in Chris Bonnor and Jano Caro's provocatively titled, The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education.

Bonnor and Caro's main concern with Australia's current education system is that we are perpetuating social and class divisions through our current arrangement of schools. For, Australia has the highest funded, but least regulated private school systems in the world. This is placing increased pressures on the public school sector, which is highly regulated yet is struggling to keep up with policy demands and the ability to cater to the diverse needs of students enrolled in them. Bonnor and Caro propose that our system is so unsustainable that more and more public schools will be forced to close down in the coming years, meaning that free access to education will become less and less available. Is this the sort of future we want for our country?

Before unpacking this idea further, Bonnor and Caro explore how Australia has come to this predicament. They suggest that an unwarranted hysteria has been created about the quality of Australia's education system, which actually isn't as bad as it's been made out to be. However, politicians and the media have incessantly played on the fears and anxieties of parents, who are made to feel increasingly uneasy about their role as caregivers and the security of their children's futures. These fears are so influential that just as 'you can't hear terrorism without thinking war, you can't hear public schools without thinking they need to be fixed' (p.44). All the while, the private school and faith-based sectors continue to flourish. 

Federal politicians in particular have been adding fuel to the fire of debates regarding who most deserves federal school funding, often defending their financial support of private schools (public schools are state funded). John Howard's encouragement for schools to be free markets - where parents are entitled to choose where to send their children based on whether they're willing or able to pay school fees - and the supposed lack of values prevalent in public schools sewed the seeds for the current generation of parents concerned about how to ensure the best futures for their children.

But is it really that bad if parents who can afford to send their children to private schools do? Absolutely, Bonnor and Caro argue. After all, a successful and prosperous society relies on all citizens having access to quality learning, as well as learning how to live and work alongside a diverse range of people. Public schools help this cause as they 'build the social capital and the social bridging that keeps our society and communities together, and create a stable and prosperous society' (p.224). As Bonnor and Caro point out, this is why the public education system was created in the first place - to ensure that everyone had equal access to quality education, no matter what their personal circumstances were. '[T]hey are the best way we have found to help overcome the inevitable inequalities that are visited upon all of us at birth' (p.168). Unfortunately our governments don't seem to support these same values.

Not only is the deterioration of our public education system bad for the fair and cohesive development of a nation, but Bonnor and Caro also suggest that it is a poor economic choice for parents to send their children to private schools. Interestingly, they claim that private schools don't actually offer students any advantages in terms of achieving high results compared to if the same student attended a less prestigious school. While comparisons of end-of-school results may cause people to argue otherwise, the fact of the matter is that there will always be different trends in results of private vs. public schools when the former hand-picks students and/or has students attending the school from (generally) more privileged backgrounds. They also site research which claims that high-achieving students aren't actually that disadvantaged from being in classes with lower-achieving students, whereas there are many benefits of the latter being in environments with the former. The perks of private schools simply tend to appease the anxieties of parents wanting to send their students to a school with a particular reputation and a particular demographic of students, rather than having any definitive benefits for student outcomes.

The issue with all of this isn't that private and faith-based schools exist in the first place, because they do and they are here to stay. The issue is the social divisions they are creating, which is all funded by the public purse. Neither private schools, the people that work there, nor the parents who send their children there are necessarily to blame for our unravelling education system. Rather, it's our governments and politicians who have a lot to answer for, as they have continued with this unsustainable model. For, as Bonnor and Caro point out, 'Governments should be making sure that public schools are so well resourced that there is no need for parents to feel they must sacrifice their time, energy or standard of living to access decent education' (pp.116-117). Unfortunately this hasn't been the case.

Therefore the purpose of this book is not to pit each system of schooling against each other. Instead it unpacks the myths and sheds light on the issues which have become highly politicised by the media, so that Australians can start an informed dialogue regarding how we can improve our education system. Given that the most successful education systems in the world are cooperative, rather than competitive in nature, these are the models we should look for inspiration. For, the latter is proving to be detrimental for the success of our students and nation as a whole.

Overall, The Stupid Country is a highly insightful exploration of how Australia's education system has become what it is today and the consequences of these decisions. I've only just scratched the surface of the many compelling issues raised in the book, which itself is only an introduction to them. Thus The Stupid Country is a very important read if we are to understand what changes should be made to better our education system, so that Australia does not become the stupid country.