Essay

• The NDIS is the “lifeboat in the ocean”, “an oasis in the desert”, “a plane being built mid-flight” or a “limitless magic pudding”.
• I research disability policies and services and confess I’ve used more than a few of these in my work.
• They are a way of explaining complex concepts we might not be familiar with and helping others to make sense of the world.
• The latest Quarterly Essay Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS written by author Micheline Lee weaves together personal testimony and detailed analysis of history and policy.

The deficit model of disability

• Disability was firmly seen as being a problem or deficit within the body of an individual who needed to be cured.
• Lee’s discovery of the social model of disability challenged how she had been raised to understand it.
• The social model sees disability as produced by
  social and environmental barriers such as discriminatory attitudes and policies, inaccessible buildings and transport, and inflexible work arrangements.
• Disability activists, such as Rhonda Galbally, have documented the rise of the disability rights movement in Australia, which fought for the establishment of the NDIS.

Citizens or consumers?

• As Lee describes,
  Disabled people wanted more than just survival, getting out of bed, showering and eating, and maintaining basic health.
• Disabled people wanted more than just survival, getting out of bed, showering and eating, and maintaining basic health.
• Yet, inherent within the design of the NDIS are two competing logics: citizenship and consumer rights.
• The former sees the role of the scheme, in collaboration with others, as enabling and empowering people with disability to engage with the community and broader society.
• Disability is seen by many as something specialist professionals and services should handle, not a facet of the human condition.
• I want to get bogged at a beach in my wheelchair and know people will help.

Draining the ocean

• The market-based system is not operating as intended and changing attitudes outside the scheme have been neglected.
• The current NDIS Review is hearing about all these issues, but none are surprising to disabled people.
• It is incumbent upon those of us within the non-disabled community to listen and act to create a more inclusive society.
• Making the NDIS work as intended, is a job for all of Australian society and not just disabled people.

• No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.
• But like any major thinker, there are risks in summaries – some of which give us clues about Rousseau himself.
• Although he is known as a social and political philosopher, Rousseau’s creative output does not resemble that of a contemporary “theorist”.
• These are now conventional tropes, but they were only emerging at the time Rousseau was writing.

Natural or artificial

• Rousseau had shot to fame a decade earlier, after winning an essay competition advertised in the literary magazine Mercure de France.
• Where much philosophical discussion had been centred around the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”, Rousseau opposed the natural to the artificial.
• He argued that what we ordinarily think of as civilisational progress creates – and then aims to satisfy – new and artificial vices, serving our vanity and not our natural needs.
• In fact, he proposed there were many good reasons to think they were greater in both.
• Read more:
  Guide to the Classics: Voltaire’s Candide — a darkly satirical tale of human folly in times of crisis

Society and inequality

• Developing these ideas, in 1754, Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.
• In it, he attempted a thought experiment which imagined what humans may have been like in a “pre-civilisational” state.
• Rousseau was aware that this act of imagination was speculative and he could not be sure of its results.
• He held that inequality was artificial.

Education and politics

• The first was the institution of a new kind of education; the second was reorienting politics towards a new moral foundation.
• In Émile, or On Education (1862), Rousseau wrote a treatise on education in the form of a bildungsroman – the first and likely the last of its kind.
• He sought to outline the conditions of a good education, which he thought should be based on lived experience and the development of individual character, not rote learning, mechanical memorisation, or even the reading of books.
• As for moral education, young people should learn about the consequences of their actions.
• Rousseau’s terminology has oriented discussions of morality, self-development and politics from the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s, the New Age movement of the 1980s, and beyond.

Deism and human nature

• According to Rousseau, we know what we know of God from Nature and Reason alone.
• In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (1776), Rousseau addresses this question directly, and in typically Rousseauian fashion:
  whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
• He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.
• whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
• He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.

• SEATTLE, Sept. 21, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Top 100 U.S. law firm Akerman LLP and the National Court Appointed Special Advocate/Guardian ad Litem (CASA/GAL) Association for Children are proud to announce the recipient of the 2023 Akerman Academic Excellence Scholarship.
• Only 15 percent of youth in foster care attend postsecondary institutions, with only about three percent completing college.
• Youth in foster care who do attend college often leave before graduation due to insufficient support, lack of appropriate guidance, and unmet financial needs.
• “Supporting youth who have experienced foster care as they continue on their path to success is an important initiative of the National CASA/GAL Association.

• In the pilot, 92% of students preferred the Breakout Learning experience to the traditional reading assignment and essay.
• Instead of reading static lesson material, students using Breakout Learning’s educational format meet online in small groups and engage with rich scenario-based learning content.
• Then, instead of submitting traditional homework, they participate in peer-to-peer discussions, which are moderated and graded by AI.
• Led by CEO and Co-Founder Ramit Varma, Breakout Learning closed a $4 million funding round earlier this year.