the 'wise ones' in Victoria want to give 12 year olds condoms.
Runner,
Actually not a bad idea to give condoms to the intellectual achievers.

Over the past 200 years or so, academic achievers and people at universities like those scorned above, churned out people like these:

Alexander Graham Bell- developed the telephone.

Marie Curie- discovered a treatment for cancer -using radioactive isotopes.

Louis Pastuer- discovered pasteurization (wine and milk) and developed vaccines against cholera (1880), anthrax (1882), and rabies (1885).

Alexander Flemming- discovered penicillin.

I am assuming then that people like Vanna, with such a serious dislike of all academics and anything to do with universities, does not avail himself of any of the multitude of life-saving and life-changing discoveries and inventions given to the world by these people and many others?

If not for academics, think of all the health disorders that would have wiped out most of our ancestors- eg polio, diphtheria, anthrax,
tetanus and tuberculosis, just to name a few.

Who will you turn to when the next deadly virus or bacteria hits the world

suzeonline,
Aren't you confusing Academics with Scientists & Scholars & other people whose intellect enables them to be useful in society ? Don't for one moment believe that the bulk of Academics could fend for themselves or indeed achieve anything without heavily depending on the everyday providers of goods & services. The gist of this is not to portray academics as people who are so beneficial to society as to imply that they can do or be so without input from others. An efficient economy is run by pragmatists, an inefficient one by academic bureaucrats. A competent economist creates credit, an incompetent one creates debt, much like the various Governments in Australia in the past few decades. If you look closely you can easily deduce which administration has the greater %age of academics in its ranks. Then google & look up national surplus and national debt.

Suxanonline,
Only about 10% of worldwide research is now carried out in universities.

In Australia, most universities cannot fill maths and science courses, and in many of those courses, the majority of the students are now foreign students.

A look around any university will find that nearly every piece of equipment, textbook and piece of software is now imported, and so much for university research.

The author wants more money for education, but as more money has been poured into education, the standards have continued to decline, and it is now highly debatable whether or not one cent more should be handed over to those employed in Australian education.

The UK’s schools have devolved powers for schools – they have local boards made up of parents with local control. This leads to schools expressing the idiosyncrasies of those involved; and that can be extremely damaging. Total local control will produce schools that are disastrous for some students – the outcomes will be haphazard.

Bureaucracies’ primary purpose is to service the Minister of the day; to provide politically sensitive advice and form the backdrop to political ambitions (as well as be a vehicle for some bureaucrat’s ideological beliefs). Senior staff are on short term contracts increasingly controlled by the Minister – they will not go against the needs of their political master.

Bureaucracies will always exist, governments won’t become totally hands off and parents will not want it as schooling would become chaotic. It is better to invent a means to tie the fate of bureaucrats to that of schools instead of the political whims of Ministers.

Yes, there is a monetary divide occurring in education; but this reflects the belief of society that markets rule – or more precisely advantages to those with resources and control. Education as a leveller of opportunity does not fit to that mindset.

It seems the responses have slipped into looking at tertiary education and academics. Given the rise in participation rates at Universities initiated by Whitlam and the Dawkin’s reforms turning CAEs into Universities the absolute cost of tertiary education has increased substantially, but the real per head expenditure has decreased.

1. Setting someone up with a degree to have them become clerical staff is an absurdity. Once institutions had to prove demand for graduates before they could start a course, now with markets if there are jobs for 50 graduates and institutions turn out 200 then supposedly the market will sort it out – it hasn’t!

2. Turning CAEs into Universities was also absurd – the majority of students need scholarly training in a field. Having the majority of Academics also be researchers is adding to confusion.

Supposedly 4 exabytes of knowledge (4x10^19) were produced in 2008, equal to the entire accumulation of knowledge in previous human history. In technical fields what students learn in 1st year will be outdated by 4th year.

What is needed is not more who add to the noise but those who can take the noise and make sense – scholarship not research.

3. Universities being ranked on research output in terms of publications is counter productive; that which gives people rewards is what they will do. The plain English movement started because academics thought engaging with the general population was a good thing – it is time academics returned to that thought and Universities judged on the same basis