Item 2 - Discipline Model - the essential elements

I believe an adequate discipline model should encourage students to monitor their own behaviour and provide them with the opportunity to examine the reasons behind their misbehaviour. I believe every teacher's discipline model should be unique to them. Each individual has the ability to choose from a litany of educational and behavioural theorist's research. It is up to each individual teacher to choose elements that are best suited to their personality and personal values and beliefs.

AN ADEQUATE DISCIPLINE MODEL SHOULD:

• be implemented consistantly.
• make rules/expectations and consequences crystal clear.
• seek to identify the cause; as opposed to simply REACTING to the misbehaviour
• be based on kindness, thoughtfulness, dignity and mutual respect.
• be firmly and sensitively reinforced.
• take into account school discipline policies and proceedures - these often use stage development discipline models that can be very effective especially when dealing with common school issues such as bullying.

PREVENTION IS THE BEST STRATEGY...

• be organised.
• be an active role model.
• create a fun, positive, creative and safe learning environment.
• know your students - by getting to know your students you are providing them with the option to come and speak to you before there is a problem in the classroom. You also gain the added advantage of knowing what the real problem is if they ever do 'act out' in your class. And often a student will be more willing to moderate their behaviour if the teacher is taking some quality 'time out' to help FIX the problem rather than ignore the problem and continue to insist on a disciplinary REACTION.
• create a sense of community and belonging.
• have your class collectively develop and agree on a list of class rules/expectations.

This last point is particularly important because it gives the teacher something to fall back on if things do begin to unravel. Make sure the list is explicit, fair and that everybody in the class understands and agrees with the contents.

WHEN THINGS DO GO WRONG...

• avoid power struggles - you will never win and it will not fix the problem the student has.
• rather than attempt to control a students behaviour aim to manage/coach it - Glasser and Maslow both discuss the concept of satisfying the "basic needs" which I find an exceedingly practical place to begin!
• be consistant - as teachers we must create a discipline model that is compatable with our individual values so that we do not cause confusion in our students or personal conflict within ourselves.
• act immediately - there MUST be a clear association between the act and the punishment. It is no good watching a student misbehave one day only to punish them the next - they will very likely see this as unjust.
• try to make your lesson more relevent - this comes back to Glasser and Maslow; meeting the students needs.
• Sometimes words of encouragement are more effective (and unexpected) than words of reprimand. We all know the saying 'praise where praise is due' but the act of trying is just as important (perhaps even more so) than the act of achieving highly.

References:

Classroom Discipline & Management (an australian perspective) CH Edwards & V Watts Wiley

Education Psychology (Constructing Learning) McInerney & McInerney Pearson Education Australia

http://www.disciplinehelp.com/

http://www.virginiass.qld.edu.au/pp/Behaviour%20Management%20Plan.pdf page 9, 11, 12

Item 1 - Code of Conduct

The following is a 'Code of Conduct' for parents and care givers who wish to create a positive family environment for their children. I think it is important to note that many of the points established in the guidelines below can be applied generally to a range of relationships and indeed should not remain solely centred on the parent/carer/child dynamic. However some points specifically relate to dealing with school aged children.

• Actively show your son/daughter that you love them.
• Provide a physical home environment that is safe, warm, caring and supportive.
• Have clear boundaries and approriate expectations.
• Show a genuine interest in your son/daughter(s) lives - school, home, friends, work - but also allow them the right to privacy.
• Show a positive attitude towards school policy and expectations.
• Show respect, listen and be sensitive - seek to understand others point of view even if you don't agree with their point of view.
• Be honest in your communication.
• Seek to find positive and constructive outcomes from any conflicts that may arise.
• Challenge your son/daughter to do their best - encourage individual execellence and high self esteem.
• Be flexible and adaptive to the needs of your son/daughter.
• Be responsive to presesnt and future ideas, endevours and failings.
• Allow your son/daughter the opportunity to make choices for themselves.
• Allow your son/daughter room to learn from mistakes.
• Be an active role model - promote acceptable community behaviour.

References:

www.education.qld.gov.au/corporate/codeofconduct/respect_for_persons.html

www.readingtuition.edu.au/default.asp?id=724

http://www.virginiass.qld.edu.au/pp/Behaviour%20Management%20Plan.pdf

Teaching Styles

Click here to discover your classroom management style?

Authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and indulgent are four styles of teaching covered in ISU Physics Teacher Education Program a brief description of each is found below. (NB: these styles are extremes - most teachers will probably be a combination of some or all).

AUTHORITATIVE: based on behavioral principles, this teacher is likely to have high expectations of their students. The authoritative teacher expects appropriate levels of behavior to be demonstrated at all times. The authoritative teacher makes clear statements about why certain behaviors are acceptable and why others not. The authoritative teacher has warm relationships with their students.

AUTHORITARIAN: teacher regulates behaviour and is often seen as punitive and restrictive. Students do not have a say in their management, nor are they given explanations by an authoritative teacher. At times the authoritative teacher can be perceived as cold and even punishing.

PERMISSIVE: the permissive teacher lacks involvement, has few expectations of students and subsequently makes few demands. The permissive teacher gives students a lot of freedom.

INDULGENT: the indulgent teacher makes no demands of the student. This style of teaching actively supportes students in their efforts to seek their own ends using any reasonable means.

("Research has shown that the type of management style used results in characteristic behaviors. The authoritative style helps to produce students who are socially competent and responsible. The authoritarian style helps to produce students who are ineffective at social interaction, and somewhat inactive. Both indulgent and permissive styles help to produce students that are immature, show poor self-restraint, and who exhibit poor leadership skills" http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/pte/311content/classmgt/mgtstyle.html).

Item 3 - Glasser & Maslow - student motivation

Passionate, creative teachers = students who WANT to learn.

A motivated student = belief in the intrinsic value of learning.

According to Glasser and Maslow, fulfilling the needs of the student is what it all comes down too.

GLASSER...

...believes that student motivation, and indeed ability to learn, is based on satisfying the following five requirements for effective learning (which he also explores in Choice Therapy);

• survival
• love/belonging
• power
• freedom
• fun

In Control Theory in the Classroom (1986) and The Quality School (1990) Glasser suggests that for a person to succeed at life in general, they must have an initial experience of success in an important aspect of their life.

For the majority of people this initial success would be school related - specifically academic, or though many schools now acknowledge and reward different sporting, community, art and social achievements as well. Glasser argues that traditionally success (specifically academic success) in school was determined by comparative grading and suggests that this system, which only allows a minority of students to achieve A's and B's, effects feelings of successfulness in the majority of students who fail to recieve higher than average grades. According to Covington (1985) 'the self-worth of the remaining students (who may be quite capable) suffers, which depresses their motivation to achieve on subsequent classroom tasks'.

NSW schools have switched to outcomes based assessement which helps to promote self confidence and esteem in a more considered and practical way than past programs. The student can now see which outcomes he/she did not meet and work toward that goal, thereby recognising a personal achievement. This is in stark contrast to the numerically based system of old.

School should be a place that satisfies all of Glasser's five requirements for effective learning because school should be about the development of the whole person not simply about that person's academic ability. There are, so far, nine different types of intelligence. Why then should we, as teachers, ONLY acknowledge and cater for the high achieving academic student. By acknowleding individual differences and allowing for creative expression we are able to foster self efficacy and increase the self esteem of our students. As a student, having the support to discover your talent and the self confidence to achieve is certainly a lesson worth learning and according to Glasser one that is often left unmotivated because often too much emphasis is placed on academic ability alone.

MASLOW...

...believes meaningful learning occurs based on a physiological and psychological heirarchy of needs - he stresses the importance of meeting basic needs before embarking towards the pinacle of self actualisation.

I find Maslow to be more structured than Glasser. Glasser seems to suggest that his five requirements for effective learning are altogether collectively and simlutaneously essential in the effective development and motivatation of student learning. Maslow on the other hand suggests that one stage cannot be met without the stages beneath being satisfied. Maslow's theory takes the form of a pyramid because he considers the first and most basic need is also the greatest. The aim is for the student to develop towards self actualisation. While Maslow's structure makes more sense to me personally, I see the value in Glasser's theory because he seems more in touch with the idea of educating the whole person. The sum of the parts don't necessarily make up the whole - so it is with trying to psychologically deconstruct a person. We only come in 'wholes'.

The journey towards self actualisation shows there is a vast difference between learning because you HAVE to and learning because you WANT to. Maslow argues the importance of making learning relative. As teachers we have to find within ourselves the creativity and inspiration to convey a genuine passion for our subject and inspire our students to WANT to learn. It is not just our subject that will inspire a student it is the way we, as teachers teach them to learn, as well as a whole range of other factors in a students life that also act as important contributers. As teachers we must continually reassess how we relate to our students. By continuing to redefine our expectations and attitudes towards each student we can help them to become well rounded, self actualising individuals.

References:

Classroom Discipline & Management (an australian perspective) CH Edwards & V Watts Wiley

Education Psychology (Constructing Learning) McInerney & McInerney Pearson Education Australia

http://college.hmco.com/education/pbl/tc/motivate.html

Control Theory in the Classroom (1986) and The Quality School (1990)

Graham English - Catholic Religious Education in Australia

Catholic Religious Education in Australia
Graham English

http://www.catholica.com.au/lbol/001_ge_050607.php
Catholic Australia 6 June 2007

Catholic Education in Australia faced a major crisis in the 1960s to the point where the bishops of the time seriously considered having to close the entire system down because they simply did not have the resources to sustain it any longer. The new system that was established in the 1970s, thanks largely to government funding, is fundamentally different to the system of religious education that had existed in the past. In today's commentary, Dr Graham English, Senior Lecturer in Religious Education at ACU National, explores some of the other social and cultural factors that make Catholic Education today so much different to what it was in the past.

The changing nature of the Church is confusing for some...
Religious education in Australia has changed a great deal since Vatican II and there is therefore some confusion among Catholics and others. That is not surprising.
In the 1880s the Australian Catholic bishops made the decision to have a system of Catholic schools that was intended to be the primary socialising influence to make children into Catholics and to form a particular kind of Catholic community based on the model set up by Cardinal Cullen in Ireland. By using religious sisters and brothers they were able to do this for about eighty years because they were working with a Catholic population that was mainly Irish-descended and in many ways socially homogeneous. Almost all the Catholics were working class, poorly educated and were prone to accept the bishops' will. The sisters and brothers who taught in the schools were also working class, poorly educated and trained to do as they were told. The bishops had societal and cultural pressure that they could bring to bear on Catholics to ensure that they sent their children to Catholic schools; especially fear, peer pressure and the need for identity and security. And so eventually, though not without some argument and resistance parents wanted to send their children to Catholic schools. They could see the physical and religious benefits of doing so.

For Australian Catholics the Church became part of or almost entirely their primary community. Whether this was all a good educational move for their children is open to debate but from about 1920 until the 1960s, Catholic schools, taught mostly by sisters and brothers became the main socialising agency for producing Catholics.
The social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s...

Then in the 1960s and 1970s almost every advantage the bishops had in making the schools their main socialising agency disappeared and they disappeared quickly without anyone, bishops, priests or people being prepared for the changes or having any clear idea about what to do next.

Ever since there has been uncertainty and confusion among some Catholics.
Catholics became multi cultured before the rest of the Australian population. Italians, Dutch, Poles, Czechs etc became part of the church and did not necessarily follow the Irish line. Catholics moved class and voting patterns, ironically because of Catholic education and Mr Santamaria's and some of the bishops' attacks on the Labor Party. Ordinary Catholics became educated and no longer took the bishops' and priests' word as law. The church changed at Vatican II. God's love for us became crucial to most Catholics' belief. Fear dissipated as a motive for church practice. Humanae Vitae and other church decisions convinced Catholics that they could make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, and the sacrament of confession died, thus depriving priests of the power to influence people's decisions especially about sexuality. Then quite quickly the teachers in Catholic schools became lay people and most significantly they had not done a strict novitiate and were not trained to do as they were told.

By 2007 almost all executives and almost all teachers in Catholic schools are not trained in novitiates and most teachers have not experienced religious sisters or brothers as teachers. For many the church has ceased being their primary community. It has become just one community among others that Catholics are part of.
Catholic schools adapted to the new circumstances. Catholic education offices and thoughtful educators realised that in the light of the new circumstances and the teachings of Vatican II the role of the school could no longer be a primary socialising agency as it had been. They realised that it was a place of evangelisation, social justice, a sacramental approach to life, and a way of introducing children to a Catholic way of being. Religious education took scripture and theology more seriously and devotion became much less prominent.
Research showed that parents no longer wanted the school to be the primary socialising agent of the Church. Parents stressed pastoral care, discipline, good quality education, and other aims for schools and consistently put religion towards the end of their top ten requirements for Catholic schools. Parents do not come to the religion teacher on parent teacher nights to ask how their child is going in religion now because they never did. They were always most interested in how the child was going in examinable subjects and they still are.

Now if parents do not send their children to Catholic schools primarily to be socialised as Catholics no number of teachers or anyone else wanting the schools to be primarily socialising agents for the church will make them that. The time for that has passed. Not because anyone chose it. It just did. The way blacksmiths' shops became redundant.

As most Catholic school teachers are themselves parents of children in Catholic schools we can presume that they want what most parents want. We also have to presume that the teachers' way of being Catholic is roughly the same as all other Australian Catholics way of being Catholic. We also have to presume that when Catholic school teachers use the word 'vocation' they mean something different from when 'vocation' meant being a priest, brother or nun. For example I have a vocation to be married as well as a vocation to be a teacher. And lots of us use 'professional' instead of 'vocation' but we mean the same thing. Our profession is that which we profess, like 'I am here to profess to you that the Kingdom of God is at hand.'

Catholic schools are no longer primarily about socialisation into a particular way of being Catholic because Catholic parents do not want them to be and as Vatican II says, parents are the primary educators of their children. Another reason that Catholic schools are no longer primarily about socialising the young into a particular way of being Catholic is that that particular way of being Catholic died during the 1960s and 1970s.

Catholic religious education today is about evangelisation and, when possible, catechesis rather than primarily about socialisation…

Now in line with the Vatican and other Church documents since Vatican II Catholic religious education is about evangelisation and, when possible, catechesis. It is about handing on a tradition in ways that children now can take part in. It is also about teaching children to read and value scripture, to know the religions of their fellow Australians, to take part as Catholics in the wider community. In addition it helps young people learn how to identify and negotiate spiritual and moral issues in life. It helps them develop values and meaning in life.

This does not satisfy some Catholics despite the clear will of the majority of the parents of Catholic children now in the schools. Part of the difficulty for these dissatisfied and often confused people is that they want Catholic schools to be what they were in the 1950s. This is no longer possible. Some bishops and priests and some Catholics want to restore what happened in the 1950s. They want an obedient, devout, uniform Catholic community. Even if this were a good idea it is not possible.
Religious education of Catholic teachers then exists in this atmosphere where the Australian society and its needs and desires have changed, where the Catholic population and its needs and desires have changed, and where education has changed. All educators in the current climate are working in a changing society and we are working in a changing Church as well. So educating teachers for Catholic schools now is about enabling them to know and teach the tradition but in ways in which they learn how to think, interpret, read, make sense of, and take part in the Catholic tradition if they choose. It is surprising how many, once they are really educated in scripture and theology choose to be active in the Church. It is also about evangelisation. That is it is about announcing and living by the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

I have been around for a relatively long time. I grew up thoroughly Catholic in the old way. In our house the fights were not if we would say the rosary but at what time. I was finished my teacher education before Vatican II finished. So I was formed in the old church. I am still here, though I am so glad the old church has gone. Many who were formed in the same way left it all when they had the chance, or now hang loosely from it all even though like me they are getting old. Many who were formed in Catholic novitiates and seminaries then have now given it all up, or hang quite loosely from it. This seems especially so among women.

Before The Council is not 'the good old days'. And now is not 'the bad old days'. 'That was then, this is now.' Our task as religious educators in a Catholic setting is to live in the now. The Kingdom of God is at hand and all the raw material for holiness is here in the now, just as it is.


Graham English is a senior lecturer in the School of Religious Education at the Strathfield campus of ACU National. His specialist areas of interest are the theory and practice of school Religious Education; Hermeneutics and Religious Education; Religious Education and cultural changes in the Church; the history of Religious Education; as well as the primary and secondary school religion curriculum. Further details about his research interests and contact details can be found on the ACU National website at rel-ed.acu.edu.au/ren2/staff.html.

Margaret Somerville - Fundamentalism

Somerville fundamentalism The Age May 07

Fundamentalism, religious or secular, gets us nowhere

Margaret Somerville
The Age May 28, 2007

Other related coverage
• Compass: The Root of All Evil
• CHERYL LAWRIE With God on side
• Heaven-sent for the non-believers
• The Root of All Evil - The Virus of Faith

Some critics of religious faith share the bigotry of those they criticise.
RICHARD Dawkins has done more than all religious people together, to put God on the current public agenda. He is on a highly publicised, international campaign to convince the world that "religion is the root of all evil". I think he's seriously misguided, at best, and that his campaign is dangerous.

Terry Eagleton, an eminent literary scholar, reviewing Dawkins' book The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, says that Dawkins' writing on theology and philosophy is equivalent to someone writing on science whose sole familiarity with science is The Book of British Birds. That's also an apt description of Dawkins' limited discussion of ethics in his book.

Dawkins confuses religion and the use of religion in order to promote his thesis that religion is evil. Religion itself is not evil — just as science is not evil — but it can be used for evil purposes, just as science can.

Basic presumptions are of great importance in decision making, although often they are unidentified. They allocate the burden of proof. When there is equal doubt about an issue the basic presumption prevails. Richard Dawkins' basic presumption is that there is no God and, therefore, that those who believe there is must prove it. But the equally valid basic presumption is that there is a God and those who don't believe that must prove it. Because both are tenable basic presumptions, both must be accommodated in a secular society.

In contrast, and, ironically, both Dawkins and religious fundamentalists want to impose their choice between these basic presumptions on everyone else. Where they differ is only with respect to their choice of basic presumption.

In short, Dawkins — who is a fundamentalist atheist (atheism is a secular religion) — and religious fundamentalists are similar in an important respect. They take an either/or approach to everything: my beliefs or yours; religion or science; reason or faith; and so on. They then seek to reconcile what they see as the conflicts between these pairings by dropping one or the other of them. Dawkins' call for the elimination of religion demonstrates such a choice on his part. But it is an extremely dangerous proposal, likely to escalate the culture clashes and "religious wars" we are seeing.

What we need to do is search for a shared ethics that can accommodate as many people of goodwill as possible. We will never be able to accommodate fanatics at either end of the spectrum of human beliefs, but we can articulate and develop an approach that will accommodate many more people in a big ethical tent than is now the case.
To achieve that will require us to change in some ways. Instead of starting from our differences, we should start from where we agree.

We should stop automatically associating having liberal values with being open minded and having conservative values with being closed minded. We also have to stop assuming that all change in values is progress and to be welcomed, and revalue wise ethical restraint.The correct question is not whether religion can be used for evil purposes — it can. And the correct response to religion being used in evil ways is not to eliminate religion as Dawkins proposes. The correct question is: How can we best reduce, to the minimum possible, the likelihood that religion will be used for evil purposes and prevent its evil use? As an aside, as a person working on how to prevent bioterrorism, I'd add that this is the same question we are rightly asking in relation to science.

I believe that spirituality is innate to being human — possibly new research will show us that the capacity for spirituality has a genetic base, although spirituality itself is not just a genetic phenomenon. Religion is one way people experience their spirituality.

The search for meaning and the desire to belong to something larger than ourselves is of the essence of being human. And humans have also always searched for morality. Religion is one way — I agree with Dawkins that there are other ways — in which, over vast periods of time, across all kinds of societies and cultures, humans have sought meaning, belonging and morality. Who knows, might Richard Dawkins and I agree on that, even though we strongly disagree about the role and value of religion in our contemporary societies?

Margaret Somerville is the author of The Ethical Canary: Science and the Human Spirit (MUP).

She delivered Canada’s 2006 Massey lectures which are available as The Ethical Imagination Journeys of the Human Spirit, Melbourne University Press, 2006.

An Australian, originally a lawyer, Dr Somerville is foundation Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, Canada.

Pamela Bone: Ask questions and atheism shall make you free

Pamela Bone: Ask questions and atheism shall make you free
The world might be a little safer if people stopped leaning on God

The Australian June 01, 2007

"ALL of the things all the religions teach us may be nonsense, yet some kind of god might still exist. If we can't prove God doesn't exist, shouldn't we be calling ourselves agnostics rather than atheists?" a member of a Melbourne audience asked French philosopher Michel Onfray this week.

"Non", replied the author of The Atheist Manifesto (Melbourne University Press). "We do not have to prove that God doesn't exist. It is people who affirm that God does exist who must prove it."

In any case, he added, philosophers have proved God doesn't exist.
Well, that's a relief (I should declare the questioner was me). Nevertheless, I insist on my point. Anyone prepared to give it serious thought must suspect that the God of the Bible or the Koran, whose words contradict each other all over the place, here teaching kindness and mercy, there preaching cruelty and vengeance, is man-made.
Just consider how would someone be greeted today who stood up on a box in the street and said God had authorised him to tell men they could have four wives, or as many slave-girls as they might own.

But this does not prove no God exists. Perhaps all the religions have got him wrong? I am unable to believe that the physical body of Jesus rose up into the spiritual place of heaven. Yet I know that millions of people more intelligent than I am do believe this. And that a virgin gave birth; and that the body and blood of Jesus Christ is really present in the Eucharist. Faith has little to do with IQ. What has it to do with then? Studies of identical twins adopted at birth by different parents provide useful clues as to what is inherited and what is learned.

The studies - of which there are now many - indicate that a tendency to religiosity is genetically determined; if one twin is very religious the other nearly always is too, no matter how they were brought up. For believers, such studies should raise a confronting question: why would an all-loving God create some of his people without the capacity for believing in him, and then, according to scriptures, send them to eternal hellfire for not believing in him?

Yet genetics do not explain why about 70 per cent of Swedes and 48 per cent of French are unbelievers, but only 25 per cent of Australians, 15 per cent of Spaniards and 4 per cent of Irish. Or what makes religious belief surge and wane across populations and over time. Or even fully explain what makes some people react to an event such as September 11 by becoming more religious and some to conclude that religion is just too dangerous to be tolerated.

These are questions people are thinking about. Onfray, who is also a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, spoke to a capacity crowd in Melbourne. The Atheist Manifesto is an international bestseller. So is Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion; and Sam Harris's The End of Faith; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, a piercingly brave denunciation of Islam's treatment of women. And so is Christopher Hitchens's engaging and reasoned God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Dawkins's two-part series on ABC-TV's Compass program provided some of the most thought-provoking television seen in years.

But while people are buying the books and watching the television and flocking to live audiences, the reaction of most Australian reviewers and commentators has been critical or dismissive. The God Delusion has scarcely received one positive review in this country. Even the hip panellists of ABC-TV's Tuesday Book Club canned it. Reviews of The Atheist Manifesto have been similarly scornful.

Some commentators have gone so far as to label the current crop of atheist books as "dangerous", which seems to me in itself to be a somewhat dangerous attempt to stifle debate. A book promoting atheism could only be dangerous if atheists were calling for religious believers to be put to death, or even discriminated against; and no atheist is calling for that.

Part of the reason may be the curious habit books editors have of giving a book opposing religion to a religious person to review. Do they really expect someone whose world view is being challenged to praise it?

Or it may be the great reluctance that still exists, even in a secular society, to criticise religious beliefs.

One wonders what there is about belief in a supernatural being that sets it apart from, for example, political beliefs. Why is a firm conviction held without proof seen as a sign of virtue?

Surprisingly, American reviewers have been much more positive. Apparently, in that home of religious certainty it is more permissible to have a conversation about unbelief than it is here.

It is a conversation the human race needs to have with itself. The uses to which religion is being put around the world dictate this. Intelligence may have little to do with faith, but culture does. I don't think it is an accident that Sweden, The Netherlands and France, the least religious of Western countries, are also the healthiest, wealthiest, freest and most educated.

Religion is not going to die out soon no matter how educated people become, or how many books explaining it away are written.

Billions of people derive comfort from religious belief, and they should not be denied this. Millions of people also are motivated by their religion to do good works (others find it odd that some people think they need religion in order to be good).

Learned philosophers might disagree, but agnosticism seems to me a sensible enough position. If the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved, it follows that it is no more moral to believe than not to believe, and there is no reason why religious schools and religious organisations should be preferred over others, or given special status or tax exemptions.

If more of us could simply admit that we don't know - which is not at all the same as saying we should stop asking the questions - this world, the only one we can know for certain exists, might just be a little safer and happier for all.
Pamela Bone is a Melbourne writer.