Have you ever noticed what happens when you lob a stone into the centre of a mass of insects feeding on a dead carcass? There is an instant explosion of movement away from the point of impact. The vermin flee as rapidly as possible from that spot where the most immanent damage is liable to be experienced.
And so it is with bureaucrats when there is bl...ame to be apportioned for an error, mistake or system failure. Alas, we are experiencing such a moment in regards to Bryany, another hiccup in her short but already slightly checkered history.
It all began when she wanted to study a ‘grown-up’ subject for her SACE, that is; she chose the way of VET (vocational education training) as one of her subjects for year 12. Great, we thought, having a TAFE qualification should prove advantageous in her still to come (then) employment prospects. Little did we know the extent to which the increasingly bureaucratised (see: blame adverse) Australian education system would play its part in upping the discomfiture levels of those ‘unusual’ students and in particular the parents of such children?
As it turned out Bryany’s powerful personality, natural charms and abilities procured for her a dream job without the need for the nod of approval from said academic overseers however, the ongoing farrago does appear to have the potential to put a spanner-in-the works regarding her longer term university plans, that is in our current understanding of how things pan out (though she has this uncanny ability to circumvent such mundane barriers).
Thus we are embroiled in the battle for culpability. This is a significant struggle I can assure you because at the very mention of the word responsibility, collars are turned up, faces averted and tremulous tones assert in true Shultzerian terms: “we know nothing!” , it’s not our fault”, we were not told” and so forth. When evidence is produced to disprove such disclaimers the lines change to: “WE cannot be blamed, it is the students fault, they knew this was an adult course and therefore we adults cannot be blamed for the student’s error”. And would you not know it but all of the relevant documents that attest to failure, apportion blame etcetera, have been ‘lost’.
We are currently maintaining the path of proportional benevolence and giving the relevant educational authorities room to recant but soon I fear we are going to have to pass the details onto authorities with an axe to grind and see if political election sloganeering translates into actual action.
Watch this space.
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