Having known and indeed being related to a number of teachers, I’m well aware that report writing too often consists of finding creative ways to say, “Could do better.” Oh, and not say, “Your kid’s a little shit and I hope never to see him/her/they again.”
Thanks to the Marxist geniuses known as “education bureaucrats”, though, that burdensome task is about to get a whole lot harder.
If you are the parent of a young child, you had better get used to pedagogical gobbledygook. As The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, the NSW Department of Education has instructed teachers to begin each school report with a “positive comment”, irrespective of student performance.
Furthermore, the guidelines specify that teachers should “refrain from discussing student behaviour”.
Just send the kids home with blank sheets of paper. It won’t make any difference.
Welcome to the Australian education system. According to the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as of 2018, 20 per cent of Australian students have reading levels “too low to enable them to participate effectively and productively in life”. That is an eight per cent increase since 2003. As this masthead noted last week, nearly a quarter of our students will at this rate fall into that category by 2030. There is also the issue of universities enrolling people ill-equipped to work in the classroom. Around half of students who study teaching fail to complete their course.
I wouldn’t blame the last entirely on falling standards of teaching students. Not a few of them give up because they just can’t endure the Marxist and Critical Race Theory indoctrination any more. When a post-graduate teaching course spends an entire semester hammering would-be teachers with stuff like “Confronting Your Whiteness”, and not a single word on such teaching arcana as “lesson planning” or “classroom management”, it may well be the smarter ones who drop out.
The problem does not lie entirely with bureaucrats. Step forward the teachers’ unions which are more concerned with ideology than education. Witness for example the Australian Education Union, which last year called for “Trauma-informed anti-racism training … to give teachers the confidence to have effective conversations.”
Some teachers positively revel in this stuff. Others endure it. A growing number are, like the uni students, just giving up.
More than once I have seen comments from teachers in response to this column lamenting that they are unable to tell students inconvenient truths because the hierarchy refuses to support them. As for parents who attribute their children’s poor literacy solely to lax teachers, I wonder how many of them bothered to read to their kids when they were infants.
One thing’s for sure: kids will learn a lot more just from being read to by their parents than they will from “modun edyucayshun”.
In 1974, the NSW Department of Education published a syllabus document which asserted that “training in formal grammar does not improve pupils’ written expression”. Instead, the review concluded, “it could even hinder it”.
The Australian
One only has to read what passes for mainstream journalism today to understand clearly that a great many university journalism graduates are unhindered by formal grammar. As a mature-age journalism student in the last decade, I was often startled by the other students’ atrocious spelling and grammar.
At least, though, they could reel off a litany of pronouns, and sniff out “racism” in anything and everything they had been conditioned to not like.
