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The Forum > Article Comments > The education elephant in the room: school illiteracy > Comments

The education elephant in the room: school illiteracy : Comments

By Jo Rogers, published 28/8/2018

Australia has a major problem. UNIFEC rates Australia's Literacy standards as 39th in the world out of 41 countries.

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The social engineers told us that smacking children resulted in violence.
runner,
At the risk of Lexi coming down on me like a tonne of bricks again, my guess is that these social engineers were 100% Academic.
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 28 August 2018 7:17:37 PM
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It would be interesting to know how many adults were functionally illiterate back in the good old "olden days" before the very questionable and dubious whole language approach became fashionable.

As far as I can remember I read some time ago that it may have as high as 30% or even more. As a corroborating anecdote I live in a Victorian country town, the population of which is 8,000. My lawyer/solicitor recently told me that 25% of her clientele (especially older people) both in my town and in Bendigo too are functionally illiterate.

There are also many other factors as to why a significant number of young people have difficulty in learning anything in school,
especially with reading - brain dysfunction for instance. For example do a search on the topic Kinesiology and learning difficulties, especially the work of Charles Krebbs via his remarkable book titled A Revolutionary Way of Thinking : From a Near-Fatal Accident To a New Science of Healing
Posted by Daffy Duck, Tuesday, 28 August 2018 7:20:29 PM
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Thank you for your article and highlighting how the apparently first world education system fails to deliver the basics: literacy and numeracy. Whilst de facto every child has a universal access to education, in reality the majority have to do with a local, often under resourced school that is located in a mortgage stress belt, defunct mining boom towns or troublesome neighbourhoods.

Add to this cocktail: an inconvenient truth that many of these children come from homes disadvantaged in some way for many reasons; and a fact that teachers today spend a disproportionate amount of time on admin and “risk management” tasks, not on teaching.

The end result is: the lucky few children at the “good schools” enjoy the advantages whilst the majority is left behind. My son attends “a good school” and his amazing teachers ensured that at the age of 6 he can read fluently, do arithmetic easily and can dissect a sentence into a noun, a verb and an adjective. But it is not the reality for many others of his age.

I do not have the knowledge of the education system in Australia in 1980s. However, as your article has correctly highlighted, whatever the system looked like, it delivered. So the questions is, where and when did it go horribly wrong?
Posted by AlexPJ, Tuesday, 28 August 2018 9:31:52 PM
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Actually, what's learning got to do with insufficient funding ? What more do some teachers need to show kids how to read & write ? How will more funding make teachers more intelligent ?
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 28 August 2018 10:06:42 PM
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BoB, it appears the balance of phonics versus word recognition is not right. To what would you otherwise attribute the poor level of literacy?

I remember as school kid having a graded reading comprehension system (like this: https://www.edsco.com.au/products/category/NAOMHAEK-sra-kits-reading-boxes ) that was challenging and gave a sense of progress being made.

From experience as a parent I know that reading to kids models an ability they then aspire towards themselves, and that correcting them as they read aloud is very effective. Parents need to prioritize reading, if nothing else kids get loaded with to do at home, as it is the foundation for further learning.

Why do teacher unions oppose diagnostic testing?
Posted by Luciferase, Wednesday, 29 August 2018 12:03:21 AM
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Thanks Jo Rogers for your article.
Posted by Canem Malum, Wednesday, 29 August 2018 8:27:54 AM
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