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To paraphrase The Witches of Eastwick’s Daryl van Horne (Jack Nicholson): a generation of illiterate children – mistake… or did they do it to us on purpose?
You really have to wonder, after all, if the teaching bureaucracy, another institution almost wholly captured by the Long March Left, isn’t literally on a mission to create generations of children who can barely read or write, but have been thoroughly indoctrinated in groupthink.
But the literacy and numeracy problem has gotten so bad that even the socialist Albanese government is trying to put the brakes on.
Schools have been caned over failures in teaching children to read and write, as the Albanese government’s chief education researcher demands an end to “culture wars’’ in the curriculum and a focus on facts.
Well, this would see the immediate removal of almost the entire curriculum.
In a blunt intervention, Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan has called for changes to the national school curriculum so lessons are “knowledge-rich’’ and clearly taught. She insisted it was the job of teachers, and not parents, to teach children to read, warning that too many teenagers have “sub-par’’ literacy.
So, the teachers clearly aren’t doing their job, then. And, in fact, it is the job of parents to at least set their children up to learn to read. Both of ours could already read by the time they started school, largely simply by being read to every night from the age of six months.
Education Minister Jason Clare, a rare beast in the Albanese government, seems genuinely determined to try and arrest the decline in Australian education standards.
Dr Donovan and federal Education Minister Jason Clare have championed the use of explicit instruction – a clear and sequential method of teaching and testing knowledge – as well as phonics-based reading instruction so children learn to sound out words, instead of guessing by looking at pictures and whole words.
Mr Clare, who has pronounced the “reading wars are over’’, has insisted that states and territories adopt explicit instruction and phonics as part of a 10-year deal for an extra $16bn in commonwealth schools funding.
He has also announced a rapid review of how maths is taught in the early primary school years.
A good place to start would be dumping the idiotic requirements for “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives” in maths and science, unless we want them to spend the rest of their lives having to take their shoes off to count past 10.
The curriculum as it stands is literally basket-weaving stuff.
When year eight maths students solve problems involving the circumference and area of a circle, using the pi formula passed down from ancient Greece, the curriculum suggests they explore “traditional weaving designs by First Nations Australians and investigate the significance and use of circles”.
And you though I was joking about taking their shoes off to count to 20?
Four-year-olds learning to count can use “body-tallying that involves body parts and one-to-one correspondence from the counting systems of First Nations peoples of Australia to count to 20”.
Remind me again of why we’re supposed to fawn all over this literally Stone Age culture?
But taking this garbage out of the curriculum is clearly a red pill too far for Labor.
Dr Donovan did not want to comment on controversy over the decades-long inclusion of the “cross-curriculum priorities’’ of sustainability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture, and Australia’s engagement with Asia.
Instead, we’re supposed to take advice on advanced computing from a culture that never even invented something as simple as an abacus.
Teachers have been instructed to consult indigenous communities before using artificial intelligence to teach Aboriginal and Islander history and culture, due to bias and inaccuracy.
‘Bias and inaccuracy’ in fact describes the entirety of the ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives’ poison in the curriculum.
Meanwhile, the left’s racial separatism continues apace.
The first curriculum advice for the teaching and use of AI, issued by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, cautions teachers against and students using AI to generate indigenous art.
The advice, released on Monday, singles out Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture – which must be taught across every subject area – in a warning to educators that AI can easily generate deepfakes and biased information. ACARA advises teachers to consider consulting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as “a primary source of information and gaining permission’’ before using AI to teach First Nations content.
Yet, no other race or culture is treated to the same hyper-sensitivity. This sort of racist double-standard is exactly why Australians voted ‘No’ to the 2023 referendum.
