Let's get back to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, so that when the students get to high school (we don't have technical schools) they will have the competence needed to get a useful education in the subjects required to become useful citizens. They don't need all the peripheral ideological crap at a young age, they can't understand it anyway. Later in life when they get some experience in the real world is time enough to indulge in a study of the rest of mankind.

David

Very well argued Chris.
And a well made case for fixing the fundamentals, like critical thinking and literacy, first! And the fact we are but one country!
You should be the education minister mate.
At least that way, we'd have someone in charge, who actually knows and understands the problems. Or that english is both the international language and or, the language of science!
Rather than how to be a really good bean counter/entrench privilege/or pursue a personal predilection for pompous parsimonious ponderous pontification/polysyllabic pollywaffle!?
Otherwise known as the Sargent Shulz Syndrome x the power of 10!
Seriously, if it wasn't so serious, it'd be ridiculously risible!
Go get em tiger.
Rhrosty.

Yes I was wondering how you would teach the Aboriginal perspective on trigonometry, Shakespeare, and ancient history.

But then I remembered "Oh yes!" (face-palm) "This stuff was produced by left wing academics."

If only they would do it on their own coin, in the privacy of their own homes, with consenting adults, that would be fine.

But no. They want to do it with non-consenting adults, to indoctrinate children under compulsion, in public; and teach them to spread this idiocy throughout society to the highest and lowest levels

One of the most irritating things about the left wing is this idea that public education and public broadcasting are their private playthings, to do with whatever they want.

And did you notice that the people nastily and openly dreaming of genocide in a recent thread JUST HAPPEN to be all from the established orthodox state Church of Sustainability?

I can’t take seriously an article that says, ‘Even within the unionised common rooms of the nation's public schools, where the virtues of "all must have prizes" pedagogy and the evils of rote learning are routinely celebrated’.

The context suggests that by ‘public schools’ the author means ‘government schools’ as opposed to GPS schools. GPS schools may have ‘common rooms’. Government schools do not. They have ‘staffrooms’. They are generally highly unionised, but I have never been in one - and I’ve been in a lot - in which ‘where the virtues of "all must have prizes" pedagogy’ or ‘the evils of rote learning are routinely celebrated’. In fact, I have never been in one in which ‘where the virtues of "all must have prizes" pedagogy’ or ‘the evils of rote learning’ were ever celebrated or even supported. I would ask for evidence, but I know evidence has nothing to do with these recycled stereotypical caricatures of government schools. It’s all part of the same old ‘provider capture’, ‘militant teachers unions’, ‘money makes no difference for students in government schools’ sloganfest that infects discussion on education by the forces of ‘the Right’.