Feminist geography

The wages of sloth. I only read the back and front pages of the Herald this morning and thought there was enough nonsense there for one day. But no. Having a peek inside I come across this cobblers. If it weren't all too true you could construe it as funny.

We start with a NCEA Level 3 Geography question.

Five photographs of scenes ranging from a park to a city's central business district were shown, and students were asked to explain how each image could be be viewed from a feminist perspective.

My answer to such an exam question would be to write 'Sod off' on my paper and be disappointed if I didn't get 95%. Some parents complained, with great justification I would think, and then the fun really starts.

Feminist geographer Dr Julie Cupples, of Canterbury University, said feminist geography had been around since the late 1970s.
It incorporated women's experience in a male-dominated area.
"It's really good if you can start to understand how gender shapes people's lives and our world in different ways," Dr Cupples said.
The suburbs could be highly gendered in that many women were at home with children "and the interesting stuff that is happening downtown they are excluded from".

What a load of bollocks; but we are only getting up to flying speed. We next hear from Dr Wendy Lawson, head of the geography department at Canterbury University. Now she should be really good at rivers, mountains, fertile terminal moraines and stuff like that. One would hope she wouldn't buy into this errant nonsense. No way.

She said the exam question, while sophisticated, was "perfectly legitimate".

She suspected parents who regarded the question as politically correct were "taking a certain definition of feminism, and feminist, that is a colloquial understanding of that term - rather than an academic or intellectual understanding of that term".

The exam question was 'sophisticated' - give me a break. It's nuts, stupid, crap. Right then, everyone in the University of Canterbury Geography Department is barking and the NZQA will rein them in a and tell them to stop messing about with kids education.

Fat chance. This from Bali Haq (who I always envisage bowling leg spinners for Pakistan) head honcho at the exam emporium.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority said the question was in keeping with the standard for geography examination. Perspectives could include knowledge, practices and beliefs "such as Maori, indigenous, gender, scientific, environmental and post-colonial"

This crap has to stop. These loonies have been given their head for too long. The feminist geography department at Canterbury University should be shut down forthwith and geography should go back to rift valleys, wheat belts and rail heads in Rhodesia. Whilst they are at it they can close the Feminist Nuclear Physics Department at Waikato and the Rainbow Department of Soil Research at Otago. The Oppressed Indigenous Minority Department of Mechanical Engineering at Lincoln can then get the elbow to be closely followed by the Deaf Mute Department of Logical Positivism at Massey.

Stop all this bollocks at once - it's costing me money.

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