When I returned to university to study journalism, it was quite an eye-opening process. I’m not just talking about the blatant left-wing bias of so many of the lecturers, who would spend entire lectures spouting conspiracies about Evil Rupert Murdoch and promoting “journalism through a Marxist lens”.
No, what I’m talking about is the often shocking English skills of students who aspired to a career where written English was the foundational skill. As part of the course, students frequently shared their work on the class online forums. Spelling and grammar were often atrocious. Not just the expected typos, but malapropism, repeated misspellings, and clumsy sentence construction.
This shouldn’t have surprised me too much. Some years prior, I worked in the educational sector, at a school for kids in Year 11 and 12 (Tasmania is, with Canberra, only one of two states or territories to split secondary education into “High School” and “College”). There were more than a few kids who, despite passing ten years of formal schooling, were all-but illiterate and innumerate.
How could this even happen?
Illiterate teenagers who copy and paste Wikipedia for assignments and maths teachers who can’t teach children to count show the need for universal testing and a “back to basics” approach in classrooms, according to new government research that exposes systemic failings in Australia’s school system.
We’re constantly told by teachers’ unions that more money is the answer. Yet, Australia has steadily increased education funding for decades, with an inverse return in students’ results.
The taxpayer-funded Australian Educational Research Organisation (AERO) is warning that one in five students are struggling at a Year 4 level of English and maths when they start high school.
Its research shows that too many high school teachers lack the training, time or teaching skill to help students with the basics of English and maths that are meant to be mastered in primary school.
I suspect that part of the problem is that, for too many, teaching has become the easy option at university. Hardly surprising, when the response to a shortage of teachers has been to lower admission standards to courses. Which ultimately means that good, dedicated and inspiring teachers are being dragged down by a whole lot of dead weight deadbeats.
And generations of children are being permanently held back.
AERO chief executive Dr Jenny Donovan said one in five students starting high school at the age of 12 or 13 have the maths and English ability of children three years younger.
“You’ve got students who just can’t read and write, so they can’t engage in lessons at school and it translates into behavioural problems or leaving school early,’’ she said.
“It is a problem that high schools don’t necessarily see it as their task to teach literacy and numeracy, even though the ability to read is necessary for students to access the rest of the curriculum.
No, they’re too busy teaching children how to bind their breasts, tuck their penises and dress in drag.
Dr Donovan said the AERO study, to be released on Monday, showed that nearly half of high schools “don’t do anything to actively address the problem’’.
Well, they can groom kids for sex changes and climate protests, or they can teach them to read and write. Guess which they choose to do?
Then there’s a national curriculum cobbled together by Long March left academics that blathers endlessly about “colonialism” and “white privilege”, but does bugger-all to teach kids anything useful.
Maths teachers said they were required to rush through teaching concepts outlined in the national curriculum and did not have time to help kids catch up.
The gross gender imbalance of teaching also appears to be a factor.
Student disengagement was flagged by a teacher from Sydney, who said young boys “will just put their pen down and not do anything’’.
“They don’t bring a pen, they won’t bring an exercise book, they won’t bring a calculator, and that would be probably 20 per cent of our cohort across the school,’’ the teacher said.
The Australian
Why on earth would boys be so disengaged? Could it possibly have anything to do with a profession overwhelmingly dominated by women and obsessed with raising girls’ standards — when girls are already out-competing boys in results — and feminising the curriculum and the classroom?
You know the answer, of course.
