I don’t think much can be believed from anyone in education anymore.

It costs about $15,000 to educate a student per year.

Private schools receive about $5,000 from governments.

Public schools receive about $15,000 from governments.

To get more money going into education, the public has to earn more so they can pay more tax, and to earn more the public has to be better skilled and also export more.

That is unlikely, but I would like a member of the education system to state what area of government spending should be reduced, so that there can be increased spending on education.

Also “Society must work harder to educate parents, and teach them that dads who read to kids and mums who help with homework do more for their kids than any school can ever do.”

The education system taught the parents originally, and which dad is being referred to. The natural father or mummy’s current new boyfriend, and which mum does a child have when they spend most of the afternoon with their day care mother.

And here I was thinking this article was about something meaningful like the shutting down of any opinion different from the established leftist dogma pushed on campuses.

Just the other day in my politics course at Newcastle University I heard a lecturer talking about white Australians as though they are racist because we didn't want to accept the Afghani's on Tampa.

He had the gall to suggest that the Norweigan freighter's captain refused to turn back on humanitarian grounds, saying that the people on board were humans and needed medical care.

What utter garbage. He refused to turn back because he had knives to his throat.

Academics in general have always placed themselves upon so high a pedestal thus creating an apartheid solely based on intellect albeit a smokescreen one. In general they have an information intake much greater than most but sadly this information is rather devoid of substance hence the general uselessness of academics in everyday life.

I'm sympathetic to the points that the author made. But the dishonest comments of Benjam1n and the anti-academic comments show why its probably better in the long run that we don't allow the riff raff into our universities.

Thirty years ago, principals were perfectly capable of leading the teachers in their schools to achieve good results for their students without having the power to hire or fire, so the demand for more power by today’s principals seems misplaced. Perhaps the principals of the current era just aren’t that good.

I was the timetabler of Waterdale High School, a disadvantaged school in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, from 1976 to 1980. Its teachers were paid more than today’s are. Its classes had fewer than 25 students. The average teaching load was 15 hours 29 minutes in 1979 – well below the 20-hour maximum imposed by the use of retrospective legislation in 1992 and still in place. It was sufficiently staffed to employ 13 per cent of its teachers in literacy and numeracy programs. The Commonwealth’s Disadvantaged Schools Programme provided teacher aides and materials. Its staffing, conditions and approaches to teaching produced a measurable improvement in students’ achievement, as can be seen in the evaluation reports I still have.

It achieved this success as part of a system. It had principals who accepted the professional judgement of their teachers and who were capable of working with them, who did not need the bully’s power to fire to be effective leaders. It did not have to waste its energy on mission statements, charters, strategic plans, local selection of staff, performance pay, endless government reports written in Latinate abstractions, onerous and pointless accountability measures or box and whisper graphs. It got on with its job of teaching.

the philosophies of schools obviously has and always will create a form of apartheid. Many parents want their kids to have values at home reinforced at school. Many State schools work against these values because secular humanism produces the deluded state that we can behave however we want and get away with it. Leaving the Creator out of the equation leads to the very dumb conclusion that we are not accountable. Only those blind can't see that secular humanism has led to more immorality, more teenage pregnancy, more drugs and drunkedness, more suicide, more hate, more intolerance. No wonder parents are voting with their feet and money. Now the 'wise ones' in Victoria want to give 12 year olds condoms. Thankfully many are rejecting these social engineers who are bereft of conscience.