Tag: featured

Education

What skills does a person need to be a wise citizen?

Ari Sharp

If schools are to succeed in the mission of helping students to become wise citizens, we need a clear idea of what that wisdom looks like.

Here are the citizenship skills I reckon every student should have a chance to learn:

1. The ability to figure out your values. Schools typically encourage students to embrace a variety of hard-to-dispute values (such as honesty, kindness, fairness). All well and good, but the hard work of citizenship involves grappling with trade-offs between these values, and to do that properly we need to think deeply about what our personal values are.

2. The ability to argue your case. Wise citizens need to be able to persuade others to their cause. Doing this means framing their argument in terms of the values that their listener holds rather than merely their own values. This is a feat of empathy requiring focused effort and a conscious awareness of our own subjectivity.

3. The ability to listen to others – and change your mind. Our political culture brands any change in position as a humiliating backdown, but wise citizens need to adapt their view as they learn more. We all need to know how to do this with grace and dignity, lest our future selves be held hostage to the myopia of our past selves.

4. The ability to defy the mob. The path of least resistance is to go along with the popular consensus among those we identify with. Wise citizenship requires us to take the time to form our own view – based on our own values – and be willing to stand true to that, even when it makes us uncomfortable.

5. The ability to see how power is distributed. As citizens we need to understand who holds power and who doesn’t, the source of that power, and what levers are available to change its distribution. Only by gaining this understanding can we seek to influence the world so it better aligns with our values.

6. The ability to separate truth from truthy. We are all at sea if we do not have the tools to know what information we can trust. But beyond those tools, we need skills of metacognition to understand the biases that may corrupt our search for truth –motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, for starters.

7. The ability to critique institutions. Much political discourse is a dialogue of the deaf between those who reflexively uphold every existing institution and those who reflexively seek to tear them down. Wise citizens need to do the harder work of critiquing why these institutions exist and identifying if they are fit for purpose, if they can adapt, or if something better ought to be built in their place.

What have a missed? Keen to hear your ideas.

First posted on LinkedIn in August 2026.

Education

Who says? Discerning truth from truthiness

Ari Sharp

Who says?

I’ve just finished seven weeks as a student teacher in an NZ secondary school, and this was a question I posed whenever students would make a claim as part of a class discussion or assignment. And I reckon it’s a question every teacher should be asking often.

For a decade we have talked about an informational crisis – how do we know what sources we can trust to make sense of the world? – and now we are in the midst of an epistemological crisis.

Everyone (and every bot) can be a publisher, AI is generating plausible bullshit at an industrial scale, and deep fakes mean we cannot even trust our sensory organs.

As educators our job is to help students to understand the world so they can change it. Essential to this challenge is to give them the tools to discern truth from truthiness (thanks, Stephen Colbert).

Fortunately there are some great resources out there. Check out Squiz Kids’ Newshounds program in Australia and its recent podcast series The Big Threat.

Teaching media literacy is not merely the domain of English teachers – every educator needs to instill in their students media literacy habits of mind: critiquing sources of information as a matter of course.

This might involve students interrogating the credibility of the source, verifying facts independently, probing the biases and motivations of authors, and triangulating evidence from multiple sources. When it comes to AI-generated content, teachers should mandate that students probe deeper for the originating source.

Yes, that means that teachers themselves, and the sources they use, should be subject to scrutiny. We should expect – indeed, teach – our students to activate their bullshit detectors whenever we make a claim.

Some teachers may find that the sources they rely on do not stand up to scrutiny. Good. We should do better.

I look forward to hearing students ask their peers, their teachers and themselves, “Who says?” – and listening hard to the answers.

First posted on LinkedIn in July 2026.

Education

There’s one thing AI can’t do: be a citizen

Ari Sharp

Another day, another story about AI upending the workforce.

As confronting as it is for everyone already working, for school students the impact is greater still.

Who can have any certainty about what jobs will exist beyond 2030? What skills and habits of mind will be necessary to function?

No one knows with any certainty – and anyone who claims they do is probably trying to sell you something.

As I have been studying to be a teacher, I have been thinking about what it means for schools. The perennial question of recent years – Why should I bother learning how to do something myself when AI can do it better and faster? – is becoming more frequent and the answer more dispiriting.

We need to level with students. On the vocational front, the best we can do is teach students foundational skills and good habits, and wish them the courage and good humour to figure it out when they get there.

But here’s the thing. Even if many jobs of the future will be done by AI, the most fundamental task in life cannot be done by machine: citizenship.

Whatever happens with AI, it will ultimately be humans – as citizens – who decide how it is used. Citizens will set the guardrails of the technology, shape the ways we deploy it, and determine the supports to those whose lives are impacted.

Axiomatically, no matter how capable the technology becomes, it will be citizens who decide its place – short of extending citizenship to HAL’s descendants.

(The argument that big tech wields greater influence than citizens in the actions of governments is largely true. This only strengthens the case for centring citizenship. Such a situation is a function of an undervaluing of citizenship, and will only be rectified by more active citizenship.)

So I think there is a compelling case that educators should focus our attentions on instilling in students the attitudes and skills of good citizenship. We know with certainty that these attitudes and skills will be central to building a better world.

When I talk about the attitudes and skills of citizenship, I mean the characteristics that enable societies to make collective decisions. To answer questions like: How do we navigate through differences to achieve a consensus? How do we truthfully inform ourselves about things that matter? How do we fairly share efforts and resources? How do we reckon with the legacies of history? How do we hold people in power to account? How do we protect individual and collective rights?

Enacting the answers to these questions cannot come from the machine. Humans need to do the work. So as schools and teachers, we need to equip our students to do it. If we get this wrong, the worst techno-dystopia becomes possible. But get it right, and we can use the technology to enable human flourishing.

Schools have few more important jobs than nurturing good citizens. Let’s do it.

First posted on LinkedIn in May 2026.

History

Still angels: A tribute to the porters of Kokoda

Ari Sharp

“Don’t look at the top of the mountain. Just look at your next step. Then the step after that. And the step after that.” 

I had only known Jonathan for a few hours, but already he was giving me sage advice. As my ungainly figure lumbered up the first big mountain we encountered on the Owen Stanley Range, my 22-year-old porter with a mop of braids in his hair had clearly sized me up as a neophyte in need of some gentle encouragement. 

Such is the lot of a porter on the Kokoda Trail, the treacherous 96-kilometre path that winds its way up and down mountains, along ridgelines and across creeks in Papua New Guinea. Each year thousands of Australians seek to walk in the footsteps of the soldiers who fought and beat the Japanese on this muddy track in an effort to repel Japan’s southward thrust during World War II. 

Kokoda offers some magnificent vistas. Photo courtesy of Sean Collins.

Stories of that 1942 campaign typically centre on the stoic acts of heroism undertaken by frontline troops, trekking through mud and heat with limited supplies, often let down by senior command that is variously portrayed as ignorant or indifferent to the circumstances on the ground. And secondary roles in this wartime drama are given to the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, the Papuans who supported the Australians with transporting supplies and famously stretchered the injured to life-saving medical care.  

In a famous newsreel Kokoda Front Line, the work of journalist Damien Parer to give Australians at the time a glimpse of what was happening on the Trail, the voiceover intones: “The care and consideration shown for the wounded by the natives has won the complete admiration of the troops.” (It then goes on to say, “With them, the black skinned boys are white.”) 

Porters kept us safe (and mostly dry). Photo courtesy of Will Harper.

More than 80 years on, the next generation of these Angels are an essential enabling force for Australians on the Trail. Many of the porters, like Jonathan, are personal porters, carrying much of the gear of particular travellers, and others are group porters, carrying the collective supplies that are essential for a group heading into remote mountains for a week. 

(Just what is considered essential? Beyond the tents, medical supplies and food staples, some porters carry giant cooking pots strapped to their sides and one we spotted on the trail was clutching a bright blue guitar.) 

Our group of 13 Australians, a bunch of neighbours and colleagues whose age ranged from 16 to 59, quickly came to rely on these porters. We had 18 porters, with our group, a ratio of nearly one and a half porters for each trekker that is pretty typical for the groups who undertake the arduous journey.  

The porters whipped up some remarkably good tucker. Photo courtesy of Andrew H.

Beyond the obvious logistical support they offer, these porters help keep trekkers upright and moving forward during the steep ascents and descents that are a hallmark of the walk, wade through waters at creek crossings to help trekkers find the optimal route and provide encouragement and morale-boosts to weary travellers, just as Jonathan had on my first day.  

And each afternoon, as we arrive at our next camp, while the Australians rest their legs, our PNG porters continue to work – pitching tents, gathering firewood and preparing our dinner. Grumbling is entirely absent. “Just because they don’t look tired, doesn’t mean they’re not,” observes my Australian guide Matt. “They don’t like to show any sign of weakness.” 

The backpack technique of the porters was quite brilliant. Photo courtesy of Will Harper.

As we trudge through the mountains, Jonathan reveals some of his story to me. Unlike most porters on the trail, he is actually from Port Moresby. Not married, he has a brother and sister still at school, and works as a porter to support them. Jobs as porters are considered decent earners for people who otherwise have limited opportunities. An eight-day hike can earn a porter around A$700, a decent amount in a country where GDP per person stands at just A$4,500. 

The porters share much in common. Some things are obvious from our first hour together – they are all fit young men, most are from the mountain villages that freckle the Owen Stanleys, they are enamoured with Rastafarian cultural markers and bring endless reserves of energy. 

But other details about our porters only become clear as our week progresses. Most porters are devotees of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which since the arrival of missionaries early last century has had a strong grip on the communities along the Kokoda Trail. The influence of the church becomes clear during the trek, as our porters lead an evening sing-sing filled with tunes reminding us that Jesus walks with us on the road to Port Moresby, and later as they abstain from the usual revelry on Saturday, the Sabbath for Seventh Day devotees.

We made it to Owers’ Corner. Photo courtesy of Bronwyn Hinz.

Four days into our trek we make it to the village of Kagi, high in the mountains. This is where many of our porters come from, and their families are keen to welcome us to the village. As a church service comes to a close, our group of trekkers are corralled into a line for a welcome ceremony. A church elder offers some words of encouragement for the trek, before families sing a song with voices that carry the resonance of a life spent in church choirs. Later we share some balls with the children and play with them on a dusty field, the children bustling with energy as they demonstrate their rugby league prowess. 

Back on the trail, I note that while the feet of trekkers in our group are clod with trail shoes or hiking boots, many of our porters are either barefoot or in flimsy sets of thongs. Those who grow up poor in the mountains develop feet with an affinity for the landscape, it seems. And it works for them – even as the Australians were slipping and sliding, our thonged porters stayed upright. “This is how we’ve always done it,” one porter explains.  

My porter Jonathan was the embodiment of patience.

As the final day arrives, we carry our lumbering frames up one final steep ascent to the heroic arch at Owers’ Corner. Soon after I cross the finish line I collapse to the ground, my energy spent. Jonathan checks if I’m okay, and I nod in the affirmative. Later that night at a farewell dinner back in Port Moresby, he hands me a wood log carving he has made across the week. It is an apt memento, with my name and a silhouette of trekkers on its side. It also carries a phrase in Tok Pisin. “Insait lo leg mak blo masalai.” “You are walking with the spirits,” Jonathan answers my unspoken question. A step ahead the whole way. 

I walked the Kokoda Trail with a team from Australian Kokoda Tours. Thanks to founder Mick O’Malley and our guide Matt Bragg. Thanks to everyone in our group (June/July 2023) for making the experience possible, and for supplying photos. And deepest thanks to the many porters who kept us happy, safe and well fed. This article first appeared in the October 2024 edition of Paradise, the inflight magazine of Air Niugini (available via PDF and Issuu).

Parenting

Where are all the dads?

Ari Sharp

Curious about the lack of hands-on fathers, I hunted down the evidence and wrote this piece more than a year ago. My circumstances have changed a bit since then, but the central argument is as strong as ever. Love to hear your thoughts.

“IF YOU’RE happy and you know it clap your hands,” I jauntily sing, a rictus grin pinned to my face and my palms mashed together. My daughter Amelia, nuzzled in my lap, looks at me quizzically and makes little movement to match my impression of a performing seal.

So goes another Tuesday morning at Dickson Library, where an army of under-threes and their big people take over the mat for a half hour of songs and stories. “Giggle and Wiggle” has become such a hit in this pocket of inner-north Canberra that the library schedules two sessions back to back, and tickets are distributed online at 7am on the day.

Looking out at the few dozen parents whose fast fingers have secured them a ticket, it is evident I am the only dad. While there are sporty mums and homebody mums and underslept mums and juggling-several-kids mums camped out on the carpet with their little ones, dads are nearly absent from the swirling humanity.

Our typical absence from the scene makes us a novelty when we are there. The presence of a father on the carpet is a source of bemusement for many of the kids, who eye me off as if I’m an alien who just joined the checkout queue at Woollies. The mums play it cooler than their uninhibited offspring, but still glance my way to check I have mastered the thumb-and-index finger movements on Incy Wincy.

Such is life as a hands-on father. Even in an era when many people gleefully smite stereotypes and where women are making strides in the workplace, it is still rare to see men being the primary carers for their offspring. Sure, there are many hands-on dads on evenings and weekends changing nappies and pushing on swings in a way that would have been an anathema to their grandfathers, but there are few who are filling their days with it as their primary activity.

About 68,500 Australian two-parent families have at-home fathers, compared to 495,600 with at-home mothers, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies. But after the proportion rose from almost nothing to 4 per cent by 2001, it has since plateaued there. (By comparison, the proportion with at-home mums sits at 31 per cent, with both parents working at 57 per cent and with neither parent working at 7 per cent.) So even over decades when increasing numbers of women are heading to work, the proportion of dads manning the craft box has stayed steady.

In her 2015 book The Wife Drought, Annabel Crabb explored the effort to increase female workforce participation. “What if we are looking at things the wrong way?” she asked. “What if the structural problem here is not just how to get women into the workplace, but how to get men out of it? All this time we’ve been trying to win equality by eliminating the disadvantages women incur when they take time out to have children. But what it we just accepted that people might well be disadvantaged when they take time out of work, and concentrated instead on spreading the responsibility around?” Bingo.

The barrier to more hands-on fathering is not a legal one. Fathers are now as entitled to parental leave and other forms of workplace flexibility as mothers are, and face protections from discrimination should they seek to use them. But having a legal entitlement to it is very different to a social entitlement.

“As a lawyer, I do not know any men that manage to work part time without drawing criticism, and in my view, limiting their career progression,” said Adam, a Melbourne dad who puts his share of the caring load for his 4-year-old son at just under 40 per cent. “It is certainly the case with women also, however there is an expectation that women will be more likely to work part time and that men should ‘want’ to work full time.”

And just what is the source of this expectation? When asked in a HILDA study whether children do just as well if the mother earns the money and the father takes care of the home and children, only 50 percent of fathers and 57 percent of mothers said they agreed. That’s a lot of people who declined to endorse this seemingly anodyne statement. Clearly many people remain uncomfortable with the idea of fathers as primary carers even as they mouth the platitudes of gender equality and progressive social roles. To understand just why men are so rarely being hands-on dads we need to look at the construction of masculinity in Australia, and the way that male identity is often bound up in vocation.

FIRST, though, consider demographics.

Take an archetypal couple: a woman with an older male partner. If both partners are advancing their careers at the same rate, the age difference means the man will be more advanced at any given point. When babies come along, it makes sense that the couple will choose to forgo the lesser income, hence the woman taking the longer period of parental leave and perhaps only returning to work part-time afterwards. Over time the professional advancement gap between the two parents widens, increasing the economic incentive for the lower income earner to be the primary carer.

But fewer and fewer of us are living that archetype. For starters, there are plenty of same-sex couples with children, and single-parent families. Then there are heterosexual couples in which a younger man partners up with an older woman, and the growing number of households in which women are out-earning men.

The demise of male-dominated factory jobs and the rapid growth of female-dominated health and education jobs has improved earning opportunities for women, while equal pay for equal work has belatedly permeated parts of the economy that previously hid behind sexist pay policies. Women today have more earning opportunities than did their mothers and grandmothers, so it follows that they are either the leading breadwinner in households, or have a negligible income gap with their partners.

With this archetype slowly being eroded, you would expect more men to become primary parents. After all, if economic logic is guiding your behaviour, when a child is born and the mother is the higher income earner, it makes sense for her to get back to work as soon as possible after recovery from birth, and for the man to take a longer period of parental leave or part-time work.

But that does not seem to be the case. There is evidence that in a vast majority of heterosexual households, it is the woman who takes on primary caring responsibilities for their children, even when she is the higher income earner.

Boffins from the National Bureau of Economics Research in the United States looked at this in 2013. They found that in households where a wife earns more than her husband, she takes on an even greater share of household tasks (including childcare) than in typical households, which are already heavily weighted towards women doing unpaid work at home. “One explanation for the observed pattern is that, in couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the ‘threatening’ wife takes on a greater share of housework so as to assuage the ‘threatened’ husband’s unease with the situation,” the researchers wrote. It is unlikely that things are much different in Australia.

Why are couples so keen to ensure that mothers are taking on primary care roles? Or to put it another way, why are couples so keen to ensure that fathers are spared from primary care roles?

A FEW MONTHS into my time as a hands-on dad, my wife and I left our daughter with her grandparents and headed to a dinner party. Much as I love spending time with Amelia, it was a small relief to enjoy the company of adults for an evening, finally spared the need to wipe a snotty nose and interpret babble. It was a fun gathering of people from across Canberra, the usual mix of public servants, journalists and government affairs types, chowing down on a pot-luck selection of risottos, curries and quinoa salads.

As the conversation rambled on and people volunteered some gossipy tidbits from their various lines of work, I awaited the question that would inevitably come my way. “So what do you do?” I shared the truth about my circumstances, and was rewarded with some mushy praise from enlightened types for whom respite from the professional rat race is a stated objective even if rarely enacted. But suddenly my domain of expertise was shrunk from the world at large to my home, and at a stretch, to my neighbourhood, with anything I might have proffered on the state of the planet discounted accordingly.

It is a belittling that generations of women have complained about, and right then I was feeling its sting.

For many people, our occupation is an integral part of our personal identity. It informs how we see the world, but also how others see us. It is a reflection of the skills, knowledge and commitment of which we are often proud. Clearly it applies to people of both genders, but for many men, denied the primal capacity to bear a child and give birth, our achievements at work are often the greatest accomplishment we have.

To be a man without work (and the income that goes with it) is a humbling experience that invites a pitied response from others. Couple that with a breadwinning wife who is putting in the hours at work, and the sensation is emasculating – a word that has fallen out of favour in an era of supposed gender-blindness but still carries plenty of heft for a man experiencing it. The data offers some clues in how at-home fathers are responding to that emasculation. When the Australian Institute of Family Studies crunched HILDA data, it found that even in households with at-home dads, mothers are more likely than fathers to take on the lion’s share of housework and getting children dressed.

The obvious rejoinder is for us to mentally categorise child-raising as a form of employment. But such a label is problematic in that it turns an act of love into a burden. Many of us cringe at a father whose looking after his own children is described as “baby sitting”, thereby grouping it in with childcaring-as-employment rather than childcaring-as-love. To extend this mis-description to the primary activity of an attentive father seems wrong.

Perhaps the answer lies in creating the social expectation that both parents will make a significant professional sacrifice in order to take care of their children. Paid parental leave is available to most working parents, and employers are obliged to consider requests for significant extra unpaid parental leave. It is not unreasonable for each parent in a two-parent household to take an extended period of time to be the primary carer for pre-school-age children. Countries in Scandinavia have introduced parental leave entitlements that need to be shared among both parents, and perhaps something similar might work here.

As it stands in Australia, the emasculation of reducing paid work commitments in order to take on parenting responsibilities comes from the sense that not only are you doing it, but you have chosen to do it. Were this to be the default setting for more couples, it would change that parameters of the conversation – a father reducing paid work to care for children would be the standard approach and opting not to do it would be the choice.

Author Tim Winton has spoken out recently about the rise of toxic masculinity among Australian men, in which rank displays of misogyny have become pervasive. “So often I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them,” he put it. Much of that toxic masculinity is grounded in enduring perceptions of the rightful roles of men and women, with a generation of men feeling threatened by the challenge to their position of cultural privilege, and so lashing out in a desperate bid to reassert their waning dominance. While calling out displays of toxic masculinity is a worthy endeavour, it does little to prevent the rise of future generations of boys adopting these behaviours.

Far more constructive is an effort to broaden ideas of the rightful roles of gender. Already this is happening in the advancement of women in the workplace, but it is only in its infancy in the advancement of men in the domestic sphere. Making emphatic the idea that real men play with their kids may open the eyes of many young men to their full potential. What better way to preserve the tenderness Winton observed?

BUT THIS furrowed-brow approach to the issue ignores a central fact of which I have become deeply aware this past year: hands-on parenting is a heck of a lot of fun. Rather than grinding through the hours and days like I imagined I might, parenting my daughter has been a joyous experience in which many days have flown by in a whirr of galleries, parks and libraries.

To be a hands-on parent is to be the biggest single influence on the life of a child, and to instil the behaviours that will last a lifetime. Perhaps the most satisfaction I have got out of the experience is to see the best of my actions reflected back at me – Amelia mimicking my habit of returning things to their right place by volunteering to put away her scattered Duplo – while the biggest disappointments have been to see some of my worst qualities on display in her – Amelia letting her frustrations show just as I occasionally let the angst of the day get to me.

Days out and about with a child allow you to rediscover the place you call home. While revisiting places of culture (high and low) can become tiresome on your own, done in the company of a child it offers a whole new perspective. It is a simple pleasure to wander through Canberra’s underappreciated National Portrait Gallery, as we have done many times, pointing out the quirky details on the works on show to a little person eager to see the next one and the next one and the next one.

Even the most unpleasant parenting task can become a thrill if framed the right way. What if a dirty nappy in a shopping centre prompted not a resigned shrug about the necessary course of action, but instead a Mission: Impossible logistical stunt, in which the two of us dart around for a flat surface that could suitably act as a change table while considering what toiletries supplies we can repurpose? We all need ways to make ourselves the heroes of our own lives, and as I successfully wiped away the detritus from my daughter, I’d briefly found mine.

Watching mums and dads with their offspring in a busy park, you cannot help but notice the different parenting styles each gender often adopts. Many mums linger close to their children, conditioned to be on hand for any contingency, while many dads hold back, giving their children space to move and figure out things for themselves.

It can be tempting to perceive the fathers taking this approach as distant, physically and emotionally, failing to fulfil the parental obligation to shield their children from the dangers of the world. But look closer and you will see that these are just fathers with their own style, showing their love for the children by allowing them to make their own mistakes and discover things on their own terms. If we want dads to play a more active role, we need to accept that they will often “do” parenting differently to mums, and spare the tut-tutting that may be tempting.

There’s plenty of evidence that a hands-on father can make a positive difference to children’s lives. According to Dr Leanne Lester’s analysis of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, the presence of a father (or father figure) can be correlated with higher NAPLAN performance, greater rates of school attendance and even lower body mass index scores. “Children have significantly better health, academic, social and emotional outcomes when their fathers have a consistently warm parenting style,” she found.

AS I GOT ready to return to work part-time after a dad break, I looked back on how I had invested the past year. My wife and I had had some grandparental assistance, and I had taken some time to study, but a majority of my waking hours had been spent looking after Amelia. I’d seen her grow from an adorable infant into an insatiably curious toddler, full of her own ideas about how the world should be.

The morning of my first day back at work, I was getting Amelia dressed for preschool and we were having a standoff over socks. She thought they were unnecessary, but I demurred. When tasked with selecting a pair from sock drawer, she opted for a garish panda-themed pair, that even me, as a helplessly unfashionable type, could tell was a bad fit with the rest of her outfit. “I want these,” she implored with a doe-eyed plea. Fair enough.

As she marched out the door in her panda socks, I hung back and admired. It had been a damn good year, and there were plenty more like that ahead. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.