Recently, economist Saul Eslake blamed Tasmania’s plummeting educational performance on the state’s “college” system. This sees students graduate from high school in year 10, then (optionally) go to college for years 11 and 12. Tasmania and the ACT are the only places in Australia to use such a system: yet, the ACT has much higher completion rates and educational results. So, clearly, the college system alone isn’t to blame.
It’s true, of course, that Tasmania’s college system is historically rooted in the state’s heavy reliance on agricultural industries. Kids could complete year 10 and easily get a job. That’s no longer the case.
But kids still like the college system. There is, after all, a vast gulf of maturity between a year-seven and a year-12 child. Years 11 and 12 students benefit from a campus atmosphere where they’re surrounded by kids their own age and which is much less formal than high school. College functions as an intermediary between high school and the very different world of university.
If college isn’t to blame, what is?
Decades of governments and bureaucrats foisting one trendy and useless educational ‘theory’ after another on long-suffering students and families. The rot began in earnest with Paula Wriedt’s ludicrous “Essential Learnings” (ELs) curriculum, in 2000. Successive changes of governments and education ministers did nothing to stop the rot. Each new bright spark handed the education portfolio had their pet ‘modern’ curriculum idea. Shoved from ideological pillar to post, it’s no wonder Tasmanian students wound up confused and steadily dropping off educational attainment.
Tasmania is just the pointy end of a sharp decline in educational standards Australia-wide. All at the hands of education theorists and bureaucrats who’ve probably never taught a single child in their life.
At least one state has had enough.
A back-to-basics teaching revolution will bring the biggest changes in half a century to reading, maths, history and geography across Australia’s biggest schooling system, after the NSW curriculum chief declared teachers are struggling to teach the existing content.
Children as young as five will learn about ancient civilisations, grammar and human anatomy, in a stripped-back syllabus designed to give students the knowledge needed to think for themselves in the age of artificial intelligence.
But, but… who will teach them about the 72 genders or the Welcome to Country ceremony?
In a reform that will put pressure on other states and territories to simplify their own syllabus, NSW’s teaching resources have been gutted of academic jargon so that teachers, students and parents are able to understand what children are expected to learn.
NSW Education Standards Authority chief executive Paul Martin said the teaching of writing “is really explicit for the first time in maybe 50 years’’.
Explicit, teacher-led learning is ideological anathema to Long March leftists – but it works. It worked in classrooms for centuries. It still works in Asian classrooms, whose students top global educational league tables.
“Some of the earlier syllabuses were written at a high point of what I would call progressivist ideology – the ‘choose your own adventure’ of education,’’ Mr Martin said on Tuesday.
“Some things were potentially wrong – like whole-language reading – and we took grammar out of syllabuses.”
Some of the content apparently in the new NSW curriculum sounds promising in addressing areas where, for decades, the education system has clearly failed.
Compulsory content on civics and citizenship will teach children about democratic roles and responsibilities, including voting in a democracy.
For the first time, primary school students will learn about the human body, including the skeletal, respiratory and circulatory systems.
And the two human sexes?
Children will be taught to understand maps and globes, and to identify the seven continents and five oceans of the world. Primary school students will need to be able to locate the Australian states, territories and capital cities using maps.
Even the youngest children will learn about the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, Egypt and China – replacing a syllabus that now requires children to repeatedly learn about their own families and place in society.
Even more promising, it appears as if the ‘indigenous’ guff will be siloed into a single subject, instead of being foisted on the entire curriculum. As if Aboriginal culture had anything worthwhile to contribute to maths or science.
First Nations culture will be covered in the “human society and its environment’’ syllabus, so children learn about Aboriginal languages in the local area, as well as Aboriginal knowledges and practices to care for country.
Does that mean the kids get to bash wombats to death with sticks? Burn down the school footy ground?
There’s probably still going to be a fair proportion of bullshit, of course.
Primary school students will be taught about the establishment of British colonies in Australia, as well as its impact on Indigenous Australians.
Children will learn why explorers Gregory Blaxland, William Wentworth and William Lawson crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813, and the consequences for Aboriginal people, free settlers and the landscape.
The question is whether they’ll be taught such inconvenient (for the Aboriginal Industry) facts as endemic tribal warfare, the brutality of traditional law, or the British government’s explicit instructions:
To endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of Our Subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary Interruption in the exercise of their several occupations. It is our Will and Pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment.
Still, this new curriculum seems like a promising start, at least. And from a Labor state government, no less.
