BotlBrush

A Queensland School principle has, get this, banned children from Cartwheeling in school!

A north Queensland school principal is under pressure to perform a policy back flip after he banned students from doing cartwheels and handstands in the playground.

Belgian Gardens State School in Townsville has banned all gymnastics activities during breaks, claiming it is protecting students from injury.

Education Minister Rod Welford today called for a review of the decision made by the principal.

The government as a whole is playing being all ‘yeah well… it’s not our school!’

This morning, Education Queensland defended the school’s autonomy over school rules.

“Decisions regarding local student safety issues are taken by individual school principals,” a departmental spokesman said.

“The school is committed to ensuring that children can continue to do hand stands, cartwheels and similar movements, but in a safe environment under appropriate supervision.”

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Rod Welford told AAP the principal was “reviewing the decision and the minister has given his support for that”.

“Obviously there’s been quite a bit of community backlash against the decision so the minister just asked for them to have another look and see if that’s what they really want to do,” the spokeswoman said.

Children have been cartwheeling for centuries, millenniums even! How is it suddenly a dangerous activity that needs to be banned?

Govt backs school’s cartwheel ban

Psychologists believe our schools are not doing enough to offset the medias pressure on young school aged girls to be skinny. A report was recently published by Melbourne Children’s Hospital saying approximately 10% of girls between the ages of 15 and 17 experience some form of eating disorder, often times exhibiting symptoms for worse kinds.

Professor Susan Paxton from La Trobe University (hey, that’s where I go!) believes school based health education courses don’t touch on the issue enough saying “It’s more than just awareness raising, in many ways a lot of girls already know that the media presents a lot of pressure, but knowing that isn’t sufficient to change a persons body image, they have to really change the way they’re thinking about themselves and their friendship environment”.

Back when I was a lil kid and doing sex ed I learned a lot, from how to actually have sex to how if I don’t wear a condom while doing so would ruin the rest of my life. In fact I was psychologically scarred in that regard. More to the point, the course was fully fleshed out, it didn’t hold back and my teachers were more than willing to answer any and all of the insanely icky questions we would come up with. In some ways though I think it went a little overboard, this one day when they made us put condoms on plastic penises (which were cleverly hidden in plastic banana cases while being distributed throughout the class, I kid you not).

Since eating disorders are a rising concern and perhaps especially for teenage girls who are the victims of the ongoing media onslaught it would make sense to focus a whole lot more on eating disorders. With any luck and some shifting in public perception we can hopefully end anorexia in its entirity.

Bring out the bananas!

Australians with lesser educations and immigrants, typically older males, refuse to work with depressed people according to research by the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. According to one of the researchers, Kathy Griffiths, “personal stigmas (about depression) were higher for males, those with less education, those born overseas and people with greater psychological distress”.

Still the stigma against mental illnesses such as depression, a very real and very dangerous mental illness, is not as widespread as the public believes though it is a problem. Kathy Griffith explains, “We already know that stigma is a leading cause of concern with people suffering from depression, but up until now not a lot has been done to examine it.”

“It is encouraging that in our Australian sample, those who recalled the national depression initiative, and those with better depression knowledge held less stigmatising attitudes,” the researchers said.

“However, it is not possible to determine if this knowledge leads to lower personal stigma or if lower personal stigma leads to improved knowledge.”

One in five ‘won’t work with depressed person’

Labor’s plan for a comprehensive new program to get computers into schools may get a $1 billion boost as the plan may recquire an overhaul of the schools infrastructure to make room for highspeed internet and the computers.

Ms Gillard said the policy was working, with applications closing on Friday night for the first $100 million for schools with the greatest need – those with a ratio of one computer per eight students or less.

Funding applications received in this category covered 90 per cent of schools, she said.

“This is a program that is being met with enthusiasm in schools because they want their children, their kids, their students to have the ability to learn in the modern environment, and that requires access to computer technology,” she said.

Ms Gillard said the states and territories were working with the Federal Government on delivering that first $100 million by June 30.

She said the Government was also working with the state and territory governments on spending the balance of $800 million on computers and $100 million on fibre-optic internet cables to the schools.

How about that? The government is actually spending money on public schools for a change.