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October 12, 2006
I've watched the education debate with some concern about the fictions. Apparently the chief obstacle about education is no longer about resources it is about values and the need for a national curriculum. There is a need for national education curriculum.
However, the political message from Julie Bishop however, is that, unlike the private schools, government schools lack values except those acceptable to the teacher unions and those embedded in the curriculum by state bureaucrats.
Lefty ideologues who have hijacked schools' curriculums are experimenting with the education of young people from a comfortable position of unaccountability, safe within the education bureaucracies. And heaven forbid, these ideologues are Maoists are they are training school kids to critical read television programes on commercial television as well as read Shakespeare.
Maoists! There's a beatup aimed at trying to create a moral panic about Australians not being able to read or write. Gee we even have Bishop talking in terms of Marxist centenary conference and the poor writing skills and the dreadful state of many people's written English are due to postmodernist Maoists, not a lack of resources or the effects of commercial television.
What Bishop means is that conservatives use the label 'postmodernism' to defend canonical literature and to deny that knowing about the background and perspective of the author, the historical context in which the work was constructed, or the audience for whom the work was intended in order can help us to understand the meanings of a text.
So we have the commonwealth saying that we should history to one "approved" uplifting version and English to the great canonical works.
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Gary - I initially assumed you were talking tongue in cheek, but by the end of your piece I realised that I was well and truly mistaken. If you really agree with those who now actively prevent our children from learning the important basics to equip them for later life - how to spell words, how to do simple mental arithmetic without having to fall back on a calculator, and to know about some of the basic and incontovertible events of historical world importance, then you are sentencing them to carry a couple of buckets of sand in the 100 metre sprint of life, particularly if they come up against anyone who has had a primary education outside Australia. They will finish a long way back in the field. Just relect on how far you might have gone in your career if you had attended the shambles of what is now Primary School in the last 20 years. Fortunately for you, you did not suffer this handicap at school. The education industry (especially since the Teachers' Unions got rid of the School Inspectors and external exams in the 70s) is now the only one in Australia which has absolutely no regulatory regime, except for the Teachers' Unions.) I can imagine your outrage if a business was suddenly freed from the scrutiny of the ACCC.