Sensational-Adelaide? Jesus, it's like Rann's still in power. Spin, spin, spin.

You want a tsunami? The state public service super fund is $1.3 billion short in it payout of public servants and the short fall is getting worse every year. That's just for starters.

Veritas, go with God and find your destiny elsewhere. You're too good for Adders.

Anyone else think Cheryl is Malcolm's Friday night persona? So much negativity and hate from one person. I feel for you living your life in this way.

OK - let's try another info byte. SA consistently performs poorly in the NAPLAN tests. And every year (this one being no exception) there is a discussion about how to reduce the scope of the curriculum in this subject or that, "in order to improve student performance"! (This year it is 'science' in the spotlight). If you have children, Yuyutsu, or grandchildren, or an acquaintance with the children of neighbours or others, try and figure where they are going to be as adults. Your halcyon retreat, with rose gardens in hills settings, and sipping wine in the golden glow of the setting sun, this won't be an option.

veritas,

NAPLAN SCHMAPLAN....this American-inspired style of testing is a blight on "education". Diane Ravitch, who was the under secretary of education during the Bush Administration and a champion of school testing has written a book panning it as "failed'.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/books/review/Wolfe-t.html

The sooner we stop "teaching to test", and learn to inspire our children, the better.

Hello Poirot,
Welcome on board. Now about Ravitch, seems to me that Ravitch Mark I was cleverer and more on the ball than Ravitch Mark II. Furthermore, her transformation seems to have had more to do with the failure of her friend to get an appointment within New York's educational world than with anything else. However, taking the point seriously, that testing as practised has some drawbacks, is not an argument against the utility of tests, examinations,accountability, challenges that require children to rise to meet them, etc. We had forty years of 'inspiration' based teaching, and look what happened. The only way 'progressive,'child-centred','constructivist'pedagogies actually work is when you have highly knowledgeable teachers using their techniques. At the moment the western world is heavily reliant on graduate expertise derived from students reared in Chinese, Indian and Jewish families who respect knowledge, skills and manifest achievement as the basis for a good life. The greatest enthusiasm in Australian culture is reserved for football and other sports. We thus follow Sparta rather than Athens. So our little 'Athens of the South' is currently spending a heap of its resources on ovals and stadia. If the new hospital gets built (on rehabilitated land!) it will need to be staffed primarily by those from other cultures who value knowledge and like passing exams. Ditto for most other fields of endeavor in the great south land of ours - within which we will shortly find our smug Anglo selves to be the new class of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Already we have a managerialist and largely culture free bunch of bureaucrats running the show. They can't last. The tsunami (see earlier comment) will comprise genuinely well-educated and substantively knowledgable people.

veritas,

"The greatest enthusiasm is Australian culture is reserved for football an other sports. We thus follow Sparta rather than Athens".

I enjoyed your post and agree that we present as a culturally barren society at present. We absorb a generic mish-mash of Western consumer culture and struggle to grasp a strand that identifies our own place in the modern world.

My main point was pertaining to the robot-like rote "teaching to test" that has become an integral feature of the system. Where are the skills taught that encourage children to develop an ability to think for themselves and to embrace some self-direction in their learning? By the time they leave school they are thoroughly conditioned to passively absorb...and they continue to do so whether it's sport or consumer mass culture.

The idea of "paideia" is a far off dream to some of us.