Sunday, May 29, 2005

Mosaic tiling

I was watching Frontseat this morning at 6.30. I was dead chuffed to catch it, because usually I'm well on the way to sleep when it screens on Sunday night.

They had a story which was all scathing of the government, because night classes are being threatened with fee increases on the back of all the palaver around dodgy polytech and Wananga courses (like singalong guitar and suchlike).

Now, I love arts shows, and wish there were more and that they were on at a civilised hour. But (and remember to ignore everything before the but), Frontseat showed absolutely zero objectivity. They had the gall to show all these nice, white, middle aged women sitting around at Wellington High doing Mosaic-ing and suggest that for some reason we the taxpayer should continue to fully (well almost fully )fund them.

I'm all for free education, but I'm just not confident that learning to tile mosaic is really enriching the state of the nation. Same applies for the photographic class where they tried to justify continued high levels of funding because one woman had found that she wanted to be a photographer after doing the class.

As I understand it the classes cost about $80 a term. I really think that perhaps people could dip a little deeper in their pockets and pay for their own hobbies. And I firmly believe that Frontseat can give us better reporting.

Or am I being affected subconsciously by all this talk about tax cuts?

1 comment:

Martha Craig said...

Oh god, don't get me wrong. I have a BA myself in not very useful subjects. I was more pissed off in the lack of objectivity in the reporting.

I sincerely believe that arts need to be taught too. I would have the same scepticism about a class on say, writing blog content.