How to be an education Expert.

Have you ever wanted to know what is really going on at your child's school? Well, the good news is that whether you are a doctor, a journalist, a burnt-out ex-teacher or a prison inmate, you know much more about education than you think. Certainly more than serving teachers know.

That's why you too can enjoy the public acclaim and consultancy fees that come with being an education expert! Just follow this prescription for success and a government grant can't be far behind...

1. There is a crisis in education - your business depends on it. Take every opportunity you can to point out the crisis. Think of it as advertising.

2. Teachers are Marxists. Teachers who deny they are Marxists are postmodern Marxists, which is worse.

3. Postmodernism is a world-view that makes it impossible for people to see that you are right. Postmodernism causes teenagers to challenge authority and spell badly. Before postmodernism, these problems did not exist.

4. There aren't enough men in teaching. And by men, I mean real men, not these postmodern Marxist nancy-boys you see flouncing about our public schools (there's something suspicious about them...). Be careful not to make too much of this however, because men will demand the same salaries they can get in other professions.

5. Repeat after me: repetition works. Studies have shown that a claim becomes true if you say it over and over again without listening to any alternative suggestions. Studies have shown that a claim becomes true if you say it over and over again without listening to any alternative suggestions. Try to make your claims truer than everybody else's.

6. Paying for private education is a noble act of self-sacrifice, made by parents without any thought for the future social or material benefits that may result. Parents who send their kids to private schools love their children more and are better people than public-school parents. If public-school parents only loved their children more, they would be able to afford a private education for them.

7. Public schools are not failing enough students, and are heartlessly providing them with nothing but support and encouragement. Fortunately, there is lots parents can do to balance things up. Start by telling your child every morning what a disappointment they are to you, and provide them with years of shaming and criticism. This will result in a happy, well-adjusted individual ready to negotiate in the modern workplace.

8. Teachers are to blame for teenage delinquency, moral relativism, greengrocers’ apostrophes, multicultural policy and Leo Sayer's comeback. However, to give credit where it's due, we should remember that when young Australians make great achievements, or grow up to be decent individuals holding down a job and raising a family, it is all thanks to their parents.

9. In the modern classroom, students don't do any real work. Instead, they get given namby-pampy "assignments" where all they have to do is think of a topic, find research materials, form a logical argument based on the evidence and make a persuasive presentation to their classmates. But since they do all that without copying anything down from the blackboard, they haven't really learnt anything, have they?

10. The golden rule: If you ever let anybody think that Australian education is doing well, they won't give you any gold to fix it.

Mercurius, brilliant! couldn't agree more!

how dare those nancy chardonnay socialist teachers try and encourage critical thinking, because if they start to think critically they may pick apart those extraordinarily misleading workchoices commercials, that im guessing Dr Donnelly had a hand in?

The irony is astounding, Dr Donnelly criticises the QLD curriculum for teaching students 'to analyse texts in terms of how more dominant groups in society use texts to silence and marginalise others.' THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOUR FORMER BOSS MR ANDREWS HAS DONE! Sounds like the QLD curriculum is spot on in preparing students for modern Australia.

Mercurius is clearly a very bitter person. Although his 10 points are written from a cynical perspective there is a lot of things in them that are in reality quite true.

Most teachers are hard working people and do care for their students. I should know having spent over 40 years in the Government secondary school system. However, starting in the 1970's and over the last decade in particular there has been a serious decline in both the recognition of the value of the direct teaching of core things such as spelling and tables and the commitment to put in the effort needed for students to learn to spell and compute mentally.

Many English teachers do not view their main task as to give students the groundings of reading, writing, grammer, spelling, sentence and paragraph construction and how to write essays and reports. Rather many have gone down the postmodern path because it makes them feel far more relevant or important or whatever and to them it gives English an "inner meaning". However, that is all utter rubbish and the sooner we return to the situation where English teaching is mainly as a tool for other subjects the better it will be for our children.

Kevin Donnelly is a master of recycling tired ideas and today’s essay doesn’t disappoint. What his latest pot boiler comes down to is a claim that the teaching of literature across Australia has been politicised in a direction he preferred it wasn’t.

Literature teaching has traditionally been - in Donnelly’s own words – “based on teaching students to read with sensitivity and discrimination and to value the aesthetic and ethical value [sic] of the classics”.

But what precisely does Donnelly mean by “read with sensitivity and discrimination” and “value the aesthetic and ethical value [sic] of the classics”? He refrains from giving an answer – except in the negative. If we let students study what the classics might have to say about those nasty things called relations between the sexes, for God’s sake don’t let in feminist perspectives. Or if we must read about the oppression of the powerless keep Marxism at arm’s length. Or when we read about Shylock, do it for some intrinsic value but don’t go into all that background nonsense about racism.

Above all, when our students are studying texts keep it nice - let it be “literature for its own sake”. Don’t let the kiddies in on our little secret about how language can be used to silence and marginalise people. Don’t let them in on our little secret that there is more than one way to read a text. Never, ever let students ask the critical question: "Whose interests are served by representations of the world in texts?”

These are dangerous ideas best held close in the bosom of people we can trust like Dr Donnelly.

Two quick points. I left Andrews' office just after the last election and had nothing to do with the workchoice ads. Secondly, workchoice ads, while it is OK to analyse them in the classroom, are not, I repeat not, literay texts.