Last week I joined more than 1100 cyclists on the annual Big Bike Ride, which this year went from Miles to Mooloolaba.

Nine Unity College students also joined the ride, along with a teacher and three parents.

The students were taking part in the ride of almost 600km to help raise money for Lavally Lodge, a residential care facility for the intellectually disabled that is without any government funding.

I want to say up front how it impressed I am with these young people.

A few weeks before the ride they were taken down to Lavally Lodge to meet the residents and for a sausage sizzle. They played games with residents and talked with them for a couple of hours.

When I was told of the way these young people related with the intellectually disabled, I remembered with shame my own childhood, when we would laugh at and poke fun at intellectually disabled people. I think we did this because they seemed to us to be “funny”.

At the same time, in the early and mid-1950s, Australia was experiencing a migrant boom. A lot of Italians and Greeks coming to the country after the World War II, and many Australians laughed at and poked fun at these migrant people trying to learn English.

Almost 20 years after that, when I first travelled to Italy and found myself in a country with a different language which was causing me troubles, I experienced the Italian people helping me with their language and telling me they were honoured that I was trying to learn it! A far cry from us laughing and poking fun at them in our country.

Something very good has happened in our culture, and particularly in our education system, since my primary school days.

Every so often I meet people who are critical of our school system. They complain that there is no discipline in schools any more, and even that children are not being taught properly.

I am not sure what such people mean by discipline, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they are referring to the violence that played a real role in teaching young people that violence is often the solution to a difficult situation.

I am convinced that such a tactic bears real responsibility for the amount of domestic violence today, and even promoted our tolerance for international violence.

When some people talk to me about the need to get back to the “good old days”, I ask them to remind me just how good they were. There is no question that many good things happened in those years, but there are many aspects of our society then that we are much better off without.

I am very proud of the students of Unity College, and in fact of all of our younger generation.

I would like to see governments of all persuasions regard education from prep school through to university as one of the best investments we make, rather than an expensive cost that should be cut back.