The author is Director of Melbourne-based Education Standards Institute. ESI is a conservative think-tank committed to an education system based on standards, equity, diversity and choice.

The article makes no suggestions about teaching students how to think clearly or how to overcome early indoctrination. I suggest that philosophical discussion of open ended questions early in each student's school life would be the best first step in a real education revolution.

Allowing principals to have their own way will allow one person, whose views may be warped by their own history, to have too much influence on the lives of students attending a particular school.

The description of the think tank aims, as stated above, mentions standards. Standards require some centralised design and control of curriculum and they requires supervision to see that standards are adhered to.

Equity, another of the ESI aims, requires that no student is disadvantaged and surely that requirement should mean that students from the most disadvantaged areas get the most assistance to overcome the disadvantages of their social and family circumstances.

The author makes no suggestions how such equity could be achieved.

A centralised approach is a positive one in some aspects including uniform school starting times (age) and a broad based curriculum that is transferable from state to state. Speak to many Defence families and they will tell you about the irregularities and anomalies encountered in regular school changes.

However, the Government's Education Revolution is a nice catchphrase but is meaningless and the bottom line is it is about fostering Degree factories with little attention to merit or quality - something that won't be found in a business model approach in the tertiary sector.

Literacy and numeracy are the building blocks early on but rating schools from widely different demographics is pointless in the My School website approach. The NAPLAN tests have always been around even if known at times under different acronyms and they can gauge not only how a school is faring on the standardised tests but whether more resources are needed particularly in the dismally poorly resourced remedial education.

Foyle is right, education is not only about providing a foundation but developing critical thinkers, open minds and a questioning nature. The Japanese learnt much later that their students were smart and hardworking but were missing much in the innovation area because they were never encouraged to question or think creatively or look outside the square. This has relevance in a nation's ability to adapt, to innovate and to compete in the technological fields.

Foyle:

...You make some interesting comment, but I think a more candid description of the Liberals educational philosophy, with their more traditional approach, is a segregation of rich and poor, by a click and a drag back to the 1950’s model.

"I honour my country, I serve my Queen, I salute the flag".

Dr Kevin Donnelly’s article is important – and he obviously cares about the welfare of teachers. There are some serious issues here.

Last year, a NSW teacher told me about how Gillard was making his school’s life hell. All the bureaucracy for starters. Throw in NSW Labor too and you have a real bogan education.

Part of the problem is a devotion to political correctness, as opposed to reading, writing and arithmetic. Kids are trained to talk about Al Gore videos and their feelings (within leftwing boundaries).

Meanwhile, teachers are busy catching up with new conference buzzwords, and politically-correct views on discipline. If you know an illiterate kid, thank the Labor-first teacher unions.

I would argue that nobody really knows what to do about educating children and young people in schools any more, and that they never really did.

Plus any analysis of education that fails to take into account the fact that TV is easily the most powerful formative influence on the psyche, emotions, minds and bodies of children, is seriously deficient.

The Jesuits used to say give me the child up till the age of 7 and the church will have them for life.
How many hours of TV does the usual child watch in their first 7 years? Beginning from quite literally day ONE in many cases.

So too with the inter-net in all of its variations.

And the unalterable fact that we now live in a instantaneously inter-connected multi-cultural globalized world, which is here to stay. Which also means that exclusive emphasis on the old-time Western canon is no longer sufficient.

Old style education was never ever about cultivating Real discriminative intelligence and thus encouraging students to understand themselves and the nature of the culture in which they live.

On the contrary it was always purposed to clone young people into the dominant socially-constructed world-view. To produce docile obedient fodder to work in factories and offices, and to obediently march off as cannon fodder to be ("gloriously") slaughtered in the inevitable ever-ending wars of imperialist invasions.

There was only one allowable interpretation of HIS-story. HIS-story as a set of "objective facts", all of which were an extension of the power and control seeking Western Gaze, or the self-evident conceit that the christian white man was born to rule.

Meanwhile of course the growth of "conservative" and fundamentalist christian and islamic schools is a retreat into the provincial dogmatisms of the past.

I would thus argue that such an "education" is woefully insufficient in preparing young people to live with Real Intelligence in the 21st Century

I can't share Kevin's excitement about school autonomy because, like much of what he claims, the evidence just isn't convincing.

For me the bottom line is how and how much students learn. Research coming out of PISA says that the association between autonomy in a range of school management measures - such as control over school budgets, buildings etc - and student performance is not very clear.

On the other hand, autonomy given to schools to design curricula and establish assessment policies is certainly associated with higher performing systems, as long as it is not accompanied by increased competition for enrolments.

I would have thought that someone who has created something called an "Education Standards Institute" would have a better understanding of what it is that creates high standards.