May 2, 2026 (Brisbane, Australia)
Index to the full interview series.
The following transcript has been cleaned up slightly (using AI), and filler removed (errors may remain). Starts a bit slow, but really gets going!
Michael Nielsen: All right, another interview. This one a little bit closer—saying for posterity that I'm actually about five meters away in Samford. But Riverside is so good for generating transcripts and all that. Well, we'll see whether or not the internet connection actually works. So last time was a bit of a miscellaneous. I think where we'd gotten up to in the chronological narrative was more or less, you'd just gone through all this stuff at Castledine and with what's his name, Bob Elliott and people like that. Then you'd started doing consulting work, started working at the Brisbane Ed Centre. So this would have been getting towards the late 80s basically. I would have been in high school, Stuart would have been maybe starting high school, Kate would have been in primary school. And you'd stopped playing football by that point and were doing your consulting work more or less full time. So I'm not sure what the next major milestones were from your point of view. I would have finished high school and it was probably a lot of kid-related stuff. I don't know if you have any particular striking memories. I was probably—all three of us were probably somewhat challenging in different ways and hopefully somewhat rewarding in some ways as well. Does anything particularly stand out from that?
Howard Nielsen: So what years are we talking about now? That's in the 90s.
Michael: Late 80s, early 90s. I was in high school and then going off to university, Stu was in high school, and Kate was still probably in primary school at that point.
Howard: Well, I think you pretty well wrapped it up in terms of what you're doing in those years, in terms of being at uni. One thing I remember that was a bit different to just being at uni was we ran two conferences when I was doing some consulting work with the Ministerial Council on Curriculum. You came to one of those conferences up at the Sunshine Coast. And then the second one we ran was called the Tough Learning Conference. That was held in Brisbane and I asked you to speak on what it's like to be learning in an environment where, you know, it could be tough at times—managing new things, new learnings—as different to other speakers who were recognising tough learning is sometimes for students with disabilities and what have you. So it was a whole gamut of variations of what tough learning was and what teachers or others—whether parents or teachers or friends—could do to help somebody out of a situation that was tough or difficult. I think that was a bit innovative at the time.
Michael: Can we just go back a bit? I'm just remembering the timeline. The Tough Learning Conference was in 2001, I think. And the ministerial consultative thing—the MCCC—that was 1991 or 1992. Something I wanted to ask you about, actually, which is maybe a predecessor of both. I have some memory—and I don't know whether this is true or not—of you being involved in setting up what I think was called the PET program, Parent Teacher Education, which I remember as gradually coming into schools and apparently spreading over the whole state. Were you involved in setting that up somehow?
Howard: Yeah, that's right. It wasn't PET, it was PEP—might have been Parent Education Program, but similar thing, concept the same. It was a program where we trained up volunteers to work one-on-one with students in schools who maybe didn't operate as well in the classroom environment as they did one-to-one. And not just kids who had difficulty finishing work or doing essays or whatever—people who needed extension of their thinking and what have you as well. That process was actually invented by a woman called Penny Penhall, who was a parent at Banksia Park High School in South Australia. She became very frustrated with being a volunteer at the school when the kids just didn't seem to—they seemed quite aimless. So instead of just not volunteering anymore, which is what a lot of volunteers would do—go away, "I know, it's too hard for me"—she went to the deputy principal, who was fortunately a good listener, and said, "Why don't we try something where it's one-to-one and we train up a few parents to just be good listeners and good supporters?" She did that at her own high school. I got wind of that from somewhere along the line and invited her to come up to run training programs in Queensland. Then we started in Queensland. I think certainly dozens of schools, and maybe hundreds of schools, eventually adopted that program. That was when I was working with QIPC.
Michael: It's funny, because that was done at my high school. It was done at Newmarket High School and I had absolutely no idea whatsoever it was connected to you. I just remember it as being this thing that—I don't remember what fraction of kids did it, probably 10% or something. I just remember having a vaguely positive impression of it. The kids that were involved seemed to enjoy it—they probably enjoyed it more than they often enjoyed the rest of their classes. And it was sort of interesting to see these parents coming in as well. That seemed somehow positive. It was just years later—I can't remember—I think you offhandedly mentioned that you'd been involved in creating this. And I was a little bit "wow."
Howard: Well, the story behind the story there is that you were at Newmarket High School and Penny Penhall, when she came up to Queensland, I teamed her up with a woman called Pat Beattie, who was a parent at Newmarket High School. She had a son or daughter or whatever there. Pat became the PEP coordinator in Queensland eventually. She was the clued-up person. There's a fair chance—I can't remember this exactly—but a fair chance that Newmarket High was, if not the first school, one of the first schools that ran the PEP program. PLP it was—Parent Learning Program. Apparently no, that isn't right. But anyway, we know what it is. So Pat became very well known in the field, and she became the coordinator that we helped fund basically.
Michael: When was this? I was at Newmarket from 1985 or 86 to 1989. Do you remember when this would have started?
Howard: It would have started in probably about '83 or '84, because my days with QIPC were from 1981 to '85 or '86. So it would have started probably a couple years after I started with QIPC.
Michael: It wouldn't have been much after '85. My memory was you pretty much completely moved on from QIPC by about the time I was 10 or 11.
Howard: I finished in '85 in QIPC. And then I went to Kurwongbah School.
Michael: That sounds right. Okay, that's really interesting. I've always had this memory now that you helped get that program started, and it was just a random fact that I remember learning years later and being a bit "wow" over. Eventually I realised—I don't know how many schools were running it, but it was clearly a very widespread thing, and quite an interesting thing within the frame of a school where they were really doing something just a bit unusual. Schools are so oriented at the time to "there's the teacher and there's the students," and bringing in these outsiders is a very interesting pattern.
Michael: All right, let's clear up another little piece of childhood mystery for me. You talked about listening before. That's something else that I've always—I don't know. I think most people don't really have a theory of listening. Listening is the time you spend thinking about your own thoughts and what you're going to say next while the other person's mouth is open. I always feel like you value listening in some very deep way. You often have quite strong opinions about it. I'm curious what you think about that.
Howard: Well, I'm not sure what I think about it. I'd have to talk about that. What I discovered when I left high school and had to decide what I was going to do with my life—it ended up being teaching. I was going to be a phys ed teacher to start with, but I decided that's probably not what it might be cracked up to be, so I didn't do that. But I did discover that I enjoyed listening to kids say their thing, talk about stuff. So I had a natural predisposition to listen to what kids say, because I used to find it always very interesting and sometimes quite funny and sometimes quite poignant. So you have to listen properly. If you have a predisposition of curiosity about what people are saying or thinking, then it's not all that hard to listen, because otherwise how do you find out, to sate your curiosity?
My theory of teaching—well, not theory of teaching, but—was to say, rather than assume young people don't know too much and need to be filled up, assume that they know an awful lot more than you think they know, try and find out what that is, and then work from there. Sometimes in primary school, of course, that wasn't always subject related. It was just general living stuff, whereas at high school probably it was a bit more about the content. So that's why I think I probably valued listening—just recognising that I'm pretty curious about what people think and why they think it and what they know and what they might want to know.
It's hard to fulfill that thing if you're not listening to somebody. But then of course you have to learn how does the other person know that you're listening? So by asking questions of insight rather than questions about knowledge necessarily.
Michael: What does that mean?
Howard: It's sort of like—I can't really think of an actual example, so I'll have to invent one—but a kid might be saying, "I'd really like to do X or Y. Why do we need to do it that way?" Instead of giving a response which might be, "Well, because that's the way it is," it might be—my response might have been, "Well, which way do you think it should be done?" So answering a question with a question, in a way, but it proves to the child that you are actually listening to what they're talking about, rather than just trotting out a line of "Well, that's just the way it is."
Did I, or does anybody, do that perfectly all the time? No, we don't, because you get carried away with some of your own ideas and some of the other stuff that you feel is absolutely essential to have input on. But yeah, I think that probably answers as much as I can answer on questioning and listening.
Michael: I'm just thinking about—one of the things that you do that is, I think, very unusual, and certainly something I've learnt from you, although I don't do it as well as you—you do this sort of thing where, I think of it as enabling listening. Somebody will be presenting a problem or some situation or something they're thinking through, and most people would switch to giving advice at that point. You instead tend to do two things. One is you tend to ask questions, which often gets the person's thinking more open. They start to sort of—maybe they'll be laser focused on some little particular piece of the problem, and you ask questions around other pieces of the problem, and they start to answer that and they get—they build up context, and then they go back and they're like, "Actually I just see what the solution to my problem is."
It has a couple of really interesting effects. One is, you're not giving advice in that frame. Instead, the person is discovering what they already think. So they tend to be very enthused about the solution that I have so brilliantly just come up with—sort of with this help. But it actually has another really interesting effect, which is on a few occasions you have offered me advice. And it's so unusual, it's so striking for you to do that, that I instinctively want to take it very, very seriously. Like, "If he's doing this…" Most people, when they offer you advice, they're just sort of thinking—they've pattern-matched your situation to something from their experience and they just say whatever it is, without being aware that of course your situation is not the same as theirs and your proclivities are not the same as theirs. So sometimes it's helpful, but you really want to be pretty careful about it. Whereas I always felt as though when you did that, it was done very carefully. So it didn't mean you were always right, but it was often advice where I was missing something pretty badly and you would say, "Look, you're missing this." And I don't know that you were ever wrong. Anyway—that enabling listening, where did that come from? It's obviously related to your general…
Howard: I don't know. I'd certainly try to do that. I don't know for myself when you do that all the time, or all the time that's needed, or just some of the time. I know one thing I purposely did when I was running programs where I had groups of people working with me—if one of them would come up with an issue or a problem or a question that they thought was fairly critical to be answered, instead of giving an answer, what I would frequently do is say to the whole group, "Okay, so Fred's got this at the moment, sitting in front of him. Just pair up with the person next to you and try and decide what's the most important question you could ask Fred that's going to help him with that."
So first of all, it made sure that everybody had to think about it, because they've got somebody else they're talking with about it. They kind of can't just escape into some dream world of, "I don't think I need to engage with this." And secondly, of course, it got them to really think about the whole concept of questioning—what I call questioning insight. You can deliver an insight through a question, and in some cases you can actually deliver a solution through a question. But that doesn't always work because it's basically couched as advice. Theoretically, a question could be, "Have you thought about doing this?" Well, that's a question, but it's actually advice.
Whereas questioning insight might be—let's say I thought that they perhaps should speak to an expert about that problem. Instead of saying, "Why don't you speak to an expert about the problem?" I might say, or encourage others to ask, "Is there anybody else that you think could help you with this issue?" And they might say, "Well, my best mate could," or "Then again, I don't know, maybe a psychologist could." So questioning insight is not so much telling people what they should do, but asking them to consider another layer of thinking about it.
The other purely practical thing is that oftentimes when you're working with groups of people and there are issues that need to be resolved and people jump to a conclusion about what they should do, it usually takes about ten times longer for that thing to get solved, because usually the first thing somebody suggests is not actually the considered thing. Then you have to put out bushfires for the next six months purely because people jumped to a conclusion about what should happen, rather than spending—investing—even just ten minutes of time to say, "What enables us to solve this problem?"
So I haven't really thought much about why I did that. I guess it just seemed sensible to me. From my own experience of problem solving or issue raising—I used to often reframe problem solving to issue raising or opportunity setting, or whatever. Same thing really. Just depends on how you look at it.
Michael: Very often what I think happens, when you ask a question in that context, is you build up more understanding of the other person's context. So the question is helpful in its own right, because the other person gets their thinking jogged in just a small way, they learn a little bit more about what they already know. But then you also get deeper into their context, so you're less inclined to actually offer bad advice or try and problem-solve.
Howard: Well, it's not ill-informed advice, isn't it? I mean, you can't know instantly. Otherwise, you have to keep making assumptions about what people are thinking and why they're thinking it, rather than actually clarifying that through conversation. So solution-giving is, as you said earlier, probably something that I keep for special moments. Basically, if I really think that we're going down a track that's not useful as a group particularly, then I would say, "I think that's what we're [doing]," and then look at how to solve that problem or how to reorient what we're thinking and doing.
Michael: My general impression is that you've thought about this a lot. You have a lot of interesting different models—even just the little pieces of terminology in this conversation are pretty interesting from my point of view, just new little ways of thinking about what's going on. Different people are very focused on different things going on in conversation. Most people are pretty good—they're sort of aware that the other people in conversation have their own goals and stuff that they want to get out of it, and they can be differing degrees of generous about trying to help the other person meet their goals. But I don't know that most people develop little frameworks around it and little patterns. Even the terminology that you've got is pretty interesting. It's so interesting that when you go with a problem to somebody, so many people's first response is, "Let me tell you my solution." It's not bad—it's nice, it can jog your thinking in certain ways—but they never really have the context that they need to. It's a bit of luck if they actually say something which is helpful.
Howard: That's what I mean. Therapists learn how to do all that themselves. I guess it's one of the things that I developed. I don't know whether you've actually seen the paper on collaborative action learning, which has got about 15 or 16 little things that I think are important in terms of what people learn. So maybe have a bit of a look at that.
One of the things that I find important that's related to listening is to say—there's a little formula, that commitment to action is proportional to the number of yaps per minute when you've got people in a space.
Michael: What does that mean?
Howard: It means that if you can get people talking a lot, you're more likely to get commitment from them about what it is that they're talking about. If you're the one holding the floor almost entirely, then it's less likely—even though what you're saying might be phenomenally amazing, unless they get a chance to talk, they don't actually commit much to it. That's all about what you do to design conversations and workshops and what have you. I would hesitate—if you've ever designed a workshop where more than one third of the time was taken up by any single person making their judgment or statement, then it's less likely that people would be committed to that. Not to say they can't—because I mean, there are people, theoretical learners, who can learn immediately from a theoretical statement and they don't even need to talk about it, they just understand it. People in your milieu are probably very—in the science area—they're tuned into that theoretical learning model.
Michael: To some extent. A lot of them, they have to talk it over and make it as real to themselves as possible. Some people, sure, will just sit there and you might think that they're not even listening at all—maybe they're planning their grocery list or something—and a year later you run into them and it turns out they've essentially got like a bullet-point list of everything that was said, and you're like, "Oh my God, I don't know how you do that, but apparently you do really, really, really listen and you don't actually need to say everything back and talk it out." But I think most scientists—I know several scientists who I think of as amongst the world's great talkers, in the sense of—one guy, the way he works with his PhD students, basically, all he does all day is talk with people. That's the medium. A lot of PhD supervisors will meet with a student an hour a week or an hour every two weeks. He likes to spend, at a minimum, six or seven hours with each of his students, as well as a lot of group time. He doesn't like to think without talking. And he's not dominating—there's a lot of backwards and forwards somehow. That's how he thinks. He's an amazing conversationalist in some ways. Really interesting pattern.
Howard: Yeah, that's a conversationalist. There's a guy that I know—his name just escapes me—but he described himself as a conversationalist. That was his professional job role. He'd be in his 90s now, so I'm not sure if he's still alive. I think facilitators of programs and processes generally ought to be at least good conversationalists, or understand the way in which people interact, to explore their own knowledge base. But I think what you said earlier is really important too—if you can enable people to explore their own thinking about something, that's probably the most important thing to do, because eventually if they adopt that practice all the time, then it becomes like—teach somebody to fish rather than give them fish all the time.
Michael: Okay, I could probably come back to this at some point. You probably don't realise, but all of that kind of thinking and modeling has had quite a large impact on my life.
Michael: To change the subject quite a bit—I've also often wondered, even at the time in different ways, Stuart, Kate and I all struggled as kids do. I struggled a lot, I think, probably the end of primary school and then particularly in grade 11. I remember—was it the school?—demanded that I go off and be evaluated by a psychologist or psychiatrist. I certainly had lots of meetings with the school principal and various other things. I was thrown out of my physics class for a month. I was probably pretty down and pretty depressed for some fraction of that time. I never really understood what was going on for you. I imagine that was probably a pretty difficult thing for you to experience as well. I'm just curious, all these decades later, what it was like for you at the time.
Howard: Well, there are very specific things that popped up—the one with John Bright and being kicked out of physics class and blah, blah, blah, blah. I can remember feeling—I'm not sure whether I actually told you this, but I thought it was fair enough that your conversation with him was entirely appropriate. And for him to then kick you out of his class for what he did was not appropriate. So you acted, I thought, really well in saying—well, he said, "You're not coming back to my class until you apologise."
Michael: Just to give you a piece of context—Karen Hart, who was the principal, I think nailed it. The context was something like, he said to me at one point, "You're speaking garbage, Michael." And I said back, "No, it's you who's speaking garbage." And that was the final straw. He said, "Go and talk to Karen Hart, the principal." I went up and had a conversation with her, and she just—she was funny. She knew what had happened, which was, at some level, I'd baited him into doing that. I think locally he probably was wrong—if you just looked at that five-minute interaction, he probably—yeah, it was a mistake on his part, I think she even said. But she also knew at some level that I was pretty oppositional and probably wasn't the easiest student to have in that particular class. So I think she probably had at least a little bit of sympathy for his position as well. I know she had a lot of sympathy for mine. We would just sit and have a nice conversation and then she'd be like, "I guess you'll go off to the library and do what you want. Please let me know if you're planning on…"—keep me apprised seemed to be her basic thing. I don't know whether I ever told you, but on that particular occasion, I looked up at—she had files on all of the students of course, and they're up there. She told me at one point that she had two special files for "pests" and "pestettes."
Howard: What's a pestette?
Michael: "Pest" as in P-E-S-T, and "pestettes." I just asked her, "Am I in those files?" And she just laughed and said, "No, Michael, you're not." Even though I think I probably caused her quite a bit of grief.
Howard: You didn't tell me that one bit. Well, I remember I—what I remember is that I actually had a meeting with her as well, with Karen. I don't think you were in the room at the time, and John Bright wasn't, I don't think. We were trying to search for what might be a way for John Bright to escape with some level of whatever he felt he needed. But your need for—well, it just didn't make sense for one person to apologise to another for something the other person had already done to them. There's no logic to that. So I wasn't going to enforce. I made it clear what my opinion was, and whatever the school does, the school does. I can't remember exactly how it was in the end. Did you both end up agreeing to disagree, or what? I can't even remember.
Michael: I had no idea that that had happened, and that's actually interesting context. I spent a month out of that class, and I was skipping a huge fraction of my other classes as well at that time. She caught me back up and said, "Michael, Mr. Bright has agreed to apologise if you apologise." So there was a mutual apology. I could see, actually—I didn't really care much about what he thought. I liked her. She did that thing that I think good teachers often do, which is that she treated kids as people. So they had a right to their opinion, and even if she thought that they were wrong very often, there was some basic level of respect. Several of the senior staff there were really quite good in that way. Helen Edwards always did that as well. Janelle Deacon, to some extent—she was a severe person, but she did respect kids. And of course some of the staff had no respect for kids at all. John Bright did, but he was a funny guy.
Howard: He just got caught out on subconsciously knowing, "Here's a kid in this class who knows more about bloody physics than I do. What am I going to do about this?"
Michael: That's not true. That just wasn't true at that time, I didn't know very much at all.
Howard: No, but he was thinking that. Anyway, well, I've got no idea because I didn't…
Michael: I don't think that's what he was thinking. He was an okay guy actually. He was very officious—had that very fussy kind of personality, which, you know, I don't think he was very well liked by most of the other teachers. Even though, as personality types go, it's far from the worst. There were a couple of other teachers there who were nasty, and he wasn't nasty, he was just very officious and he sort of needed to be the guy. Of course, when you're dealing with a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old, that's a bit of a target. But somebody like—what was his name, Mr. Simmons or Mr.—I've forgotten the guy's name. They were more people who I think didn't like kids and sometimes were actually quite nasty to them. That's a different type of person. That type of person shouldn't be teaching.
Howard: Okay. So in terms of events that I recall, that's…
Michael: I'm just thinking about—you came up [to school] quite often. I'm thinking about various other teachers where you intervened sometimes. I remember a couple of teachers who were being quite unpleasant to classes, and not really necessarily to me. Mr. Niner—that's right, that guy. I would come home and keep you informed a little bit, and I think you actually—he wasn't being particularly bad towards me, but maybe towards the class. He would sometimes get a bit of a grudge against some kid that wasn't really deserved.
Howard: I do remember that interaction. The other thing that I remember with you at that time—I think it was when you were in year 11 or 12—was when you were nominated to Lions Youth of the Year. Part of that was, I think from memory, that the nominees had to have an interview with a panel, and you had your interview with the panel. Then you had to give a speech to a group of Lions Club members and everybody else who was around. I remember that you weren't too keen on giving a speech. On the day that the speech was to be given that night, you said, "I don't want to do this." I drove you home from school and we chatted about it on the way. Eventually you decided that you would give the speech.
But then when you got there—I don't know whether you remember this, but I do, because it had quite a lot of impact on people who were there—when it came your turn to give your speech, you got up and said, "Well, the speech I was going to give, I'm now not going to give. So you'll just excuse me. This is what I need to say." And you talked about what your attitude was, your assumptions you were making about who the group was that was there that night, like Lions Club members and blah, blah, blah, blah. It was a great speech, by the way, and people at the table that I was at were quite astounded by the extent to which you were very lucid about all that and were quite prepared to say what you were really thinking about the whole situation. You made it into a positive thing. That's another thing I remember that was quite important, I thought. Do you remember that?
Michael: I do, actually, although I think you may remember part of what I said a little bit better than I do. There were a couple of little tidbits I had forgotten. But there's actually something you did that night that you probably don't remember that—I still think about it often. Probably in the last year, I've probably told a couple of people about this. Never mind the rest of it.
So the Lions were quite a traditional organization in many ways. Before dinner started, they toasted the Queen, which is, I think, unusual—and very traditional, would be considered a very traditionalist thing to do in Australia. They asked everybody to stand up, raise their glasses, and toast Queen Elizabeth. Everybody did that. You actually said, quite audibly to those around you, you toasted Bob Hawke. I just remember thinking several things. One was, I couldn't have done that on at that speed—it just wouldn't have occurred to me. Even if it had occurred to me, I don't think I—there's a question of belief. I probably didn't really care very much about republicanism versus the monarchy at that point, but I thought, even if I had been a dedicated republican or "replace the monarchy" person, I'm not sure I would have had quite the conviction to do that.
Howard: It's one of those spirit-of-the-moment things that you either do at the time because you feel okay about doing it. It doesn't have to be premeditated. So mine wouldn't have been premeditated. I've been to Rotary Club meetings where some Rotary Clubs still toast the monarchy, and I just stand up. I don't toast anybody. That can get you into a little bit of trouble at times.
This is probably one of the stupidest slash most courageous things I've done with a large group. I was a QIPC person, and we were at a conference of senior members of Education Queensland. All the regional directors were there, and they were all sitting behind me in a row. There were about three or four hundred people in the room, all principals. We were going to be spoken to by the minister. The minister arrived and the moment he arrived, everybody stood up. And I thought, "Not really. Like, if I was a minister, I wouldn't expect people to stand up for me." So I didn't. Everybody else did. I think I was the only person in the room that didn't. He wouldn't have known, but the regional directors who were all very important to my network were sitting behind me and would have all noticed. It didn't seem to impact on our relationship, which was good. But at the time it was probably not too smart a thing to do. The easiest thing to do would have been to stand up. I still can't figure that one out.
I traced that one back to—I didn't trace it back at the time, but probably now—I remember when I was a kid, I was probably 10 or 11 or 12, my dad was involved in politics, got involved with Labour Party politics in South Australia. A very close friend of his had just been elected in our local area. So Mum and Dad and I think the family were invited to the opening of parliament in Adelaide. I went down—Mum and Dad—I think I was the only one there. But I couldn't go in to Parliament for some reason. I had to stand outside. So I was standing outside of Parliament House, sort of in like a paved walkway, and just hanging around, waiting for the whole thing to finish inside.
Unbeknownst to me, I didn't know that they had a big walk. So all the members of Parliament were in a line, or three lines. At the front of them was this guy who was speaker of the house, who had all these robes on and was carrying a large orb. He was trundling along to fanfare in that walkway. I was standing leaning against one of the pillars. They were just coming towards me. I didn't realise they were going to come straight past me, like within a metre or two of me. As they got close to me, I just still leaned on the pillar. The guy at the front looked down his nose at me from about five metres away and said, "Stand up, son."
I thought, "I beg your pardon, you don't talk to people like that." He's me—12-year-old—you know, this guy who's whoever he was. So I didn't stand up, I just stayed leaning on the pillar. I thought there was nothing wrong with that, really. I think that experience probably helped me with my decisions I make about toasting the Queen or toasting the minister or whatever else. I wouldn't feel so bad about doing it. For the life of me, I would hate it if people stood up for me if I came into a room. Everybody's sort of equal enough, or should be.
So that's a bit of a story behind that little thing, which could be seen by some people to be a positive outlook on life and others a stupid outlook on life, depending on the politics of the situation.
Michael: I think a lot of people would say, right, that there's some sort of interesting level of just deference to the office in those kinds of circumstances. So in the case of the Lions thing, I can, I think, make quite a good argument for toasting the Queen there, and I can also make quite a good argument against it. It's just maybe a bit interesting to me that you in particular—you have a lot of time for collective institutions. You have a lot of time for not necessarily the specifics of government—you disagree with a lot of that—but you have a lot of time for the idea of government and the ideal of government. It's interesting to me, anyway, that you have so much reverence for that. I suspect your dad probably did too. And yet at the same time, you're a little bit resistant to investing too much of that in any one person. Sometimes there'll be structural decisions—I mean, the head of government in Australia was the Queen, and I suppose that's a design choice you weren't entirely happy with. You expressed your… A different kind of person would be like, "Okay, at the moment our head of government is the Queen, and even if I disagree with that, I sort of have enough time for our institutions as a whole that I will pay my respects." It's an interesting little—I don't quite know what it says, but certainly the courage is a very interesting thing. A lot of repetition of courage there.
Howard: The weird part is that I think you already know that when I was at Teachers College, I was plucked from obscurity to host an event with Princess Anne. You know about that one, don't you? Yeah. When I was asked if I would like to do that—I wasn't an extreme monarchist or extreme republican, but probably leaning on the side of, because I didn't see the guy at Parliament House representing the Queen or anything like that. He was just representing arrogance, in my mind, at the time. But I accepted the offer to go and host with Princess Anne because I was genuinely inquisitive about what she was actually like. So I thought I was still being driven. And I did discover what she was like, in part—that she had a good sense of humour, at least a sense of humour that I appreciated. Hopefully that's a good one. Did I ever tell you the story about what she said during that event that was the cloak of Australian fashion?
Michael: Yes. You told it in one of these interviews. So it is all recorded for posterity.
Howard: Yeah, I thought it might have. So where'd all that start? That started from listening.
Michael: Well, it started—I asked specifically, just how you found dealing with—I said all three of us struggled in somewhat different ways. Probably—I don't actually know, it'd be interesting to ask Stuart, but I think probably Kate and I in particular in quite different ways. I'm relying to some extent on Kate's self-report. She was enough younger than me that I was living away from home. It seemed like it must be a stressful thing as a parent to see your kid struggle and you can't really—you can influence what's going on but you can't really control it. I appreciate—just hearing that, I didn't realise you had had that conversation with the principal on my behalf. There were quite a striking instance, but there were a lot of issues for me over probably about an 18-month period.
Howard: Yeah, no, I think we were obviously concerned about where you're up to in life and things that were affecting you that were not good for you. I'm not sure whether the school suggested you see a psychologist, but we did anyway. There was a guy called Brian, Brian O'Hanlon or something like that. He seemed to be a good guy that you seemed to get along well with and sorted through some of the stuff that was going on. I don't know how you see that now, whether that was useful. At the time we were wanting to—it's interesting, isn't it? Sometimes you want to help, but sometimes you help most by not interfering with another process, and other times you do. Choosing the moments.
Michael: A couple of things happened there. He wasn't the first person I saw. I was actually taken to see a psychiatrist who—I essentially instantly disliked this guy. He was overbearing and arrogant and just seemed like a twit. I refused to talk to him. He apparently told—I think it was Mum—at the end that I needed to be hospitalised and put on medication. And Mum said, "Thanks. Don't call us, we'll call you." Then she took me to see Brian O'Hanlon, who was much better. There was actually one thing in particular that I think he told you first—actually, he might have only told you, but you told me. The context was that the school had insisted that I see somebody, and he eventually told you guys—I think it was Mum told me this—she said that Brian said, "Yeah, Michael's fine. He's great. Some of the teachers, on the other hand, could maybe do with some sessions."
I don't know, there was something just very validating about hearing that as a kid who's struggling. You're worried that there's something wrong with you, or whatever. And then to have him just say that—obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, but you get the point as a kid that, "No, don't worry about it. Some adults have pretty significant problems." I think I'd realised by that point, mostly through reading a lot of the books that you had lying around—A.S. Neill and John Holt and people like that—that school is a pretty weird institution too. You lock a bunch of kids up against their will. I always felt like school was the place I went to stop learning. My learning would be interrupted for six hours each day.
Howard: It's interesting you talk about the institution because I know when I was working in the parent participation arena in particular, I used to speak to a lot of staff meetings as well, and principals and what have you, and parents. I'd tell them a bit of information, which was: "Do you realise that we compel children to go to school for 10,000 hours of their life? It's 10,000 hours minimum—that's only if you go to year 10." How many of you would subscribe to the idea that you are compelled to spend 10,000 hours of your next 10 years with no saying at all? And secondly, to what extent is it important for the people that care most for you—your parents and your teachers—to acknowledge that and do the best to make good what those 10,000 hours are?
I know that was a compelling argument for a lot of just ordinary teachers and ordinary parents. It wasn't a radical comment or anything like that. It was just like, "Geez, that's a bloody long time. We wouldn't put up with it." Sure, we choose to work somewhere, but that's our choice. We're not compelled to. So I think that helped people reframe what schools should really be about and what the link between parents and teachers should be.
Michael: You did have all these books lying around—quite a bit of unusual educational literature, I guess. I do remember—what was it?—John Holt's, I think it was Instead of Education, and A.S. Neill's book Summerhill, and Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society. There were two or three others which I read, and they had a really big impact on me. From your point of view, maybe a slightly annoying impact on me—probably made your life a little bit harder in the short term. But over the long term, it was just interesting to realise as a kid, you take for granted that the institutions around you—that's the way the world is. And then realising, "Oh no, they're just made up and they could be different. And some people think these institutions are pretty bad." Then realising gradually over time that you and Mum thought well of education, but you also thought it could be a lot, lot, lot better. It was a pretty interesting thing.
Howard: Yeah, and it is, when I think about it, an unusual situation for a child to be in—where parents leave books like that lying around. But you chose to be informed about that as well.
Howard: One of the other things that I've found to be important is that if you're wanting to get change to take place, either in people's thinking or in an organisation and what it does, or a community and what it does—and we were dealing with this with the parent education program—is whenever you're advocating for something, just choose one or two core things that are virtually inarguable, so that nobody can argue against. And don't deviate from that, because politicians and others use the distractions to say no when they're not really the core part of what you're really advocating for. People who are very passionate about a cause often do that, because they get carried away with the emotional side of it and they start arguing about stuff that, really, while it's important—I would agree it's important—but it detracts from the core thing.
So find out what that is. One of the things that reminded me about that was that the 10,000 hours thing was one of my core things that I found people could not argue with. So the question then became, "So what do we do about this? We agree this is the case." And then put the [solutions on the table].
Michael: Yeah, right. Well, it's just a fact.
Howard: That's right. It is just a fact. So I guess it's adults to look at it from a young person's point of view. The one line from me might have been, "Well, can you imagine what a student thinks if they can see that their parents and their teachers are at odds with each other or not really caring much about their experience at school?" And then to what extent—what are examples of this? There's examples from both sides, of course. Anyway, I won't go through all that, but just to say, I think that's an important thing I learned about advocacy: choose your battle. More chance of that. It doesn't always work. We tried that with—
Michael: And stick to the battle. Stick to the battle you want to fight, I guess.
Howard: That's right. We tried that with Samford Commons, but you know, when you've got a politician like Peter Dutton operating, you can't operate out of that paradigm and expect to win. Anyway. Where are we up to?
Michael: I think I need to take a break for water and food and bathroom. We might come back and discuss Samford Commons in another episode. That deserves a proper conversation, not five or ten minutes. And a bunch of other things. Shall we wrap it up for today?
Howard: Yeah, my brain's just about done enough. It's gone past its point of being useful, I think.
Michael: Okay, all right.