If what you say is true Peter-and I have no reason to doubt it- then a number of interesting questions can be examined.

What is the cause of children behaving this way (imitation from adults, problems with identity, not enough discipline, do they merely reflect values that society at large holds, pot smoking parents, loss of religion, decline of the nation state, TV, food, machinations of the Congress for Cultural Freedom etc)

Are there periods in history where similar declines took place and if declines did take place then there must have been other periods where learning gained in value (the renaissance comes to mind).

Also your description of kids today is subjective, as it initially must be but I wonder how we could measure decline and what insights it might give us.

It might be true, it might not but all anecdotal. Seems to be confused about who to blame. Parents with permissive attitudes to childrens' behaviour or progressive education. It is perhaps a plausible position that if the children have the attitude the author suggests then the good old ways would not work any more than they really worked for most children when I was a child.

I'm probably not much younger than you Peter, I went to an excellent co-ed state school in the 70s, and I don't remember many kids being all that interested in school work back then. Those that were went to Uni, those that weren't got a job and both groups, 30 years later, have done well. What was exciting about school back then was all the stuff you question now. We were challenging accepted wisdom and the world seemed to be opening up, certainly for girls, and it was thrilling.
My daughters now attend an excellent co-ed state school and they and their contemporaries seem about as interested in school work as we were back then. The difference is, they look at the future much more grimly than we did. They need to train for a job, not learn (as I did) about a subject they love. No wonder they don't value an education the way some of us did back then. It has become a device for getting into the middle class, not the way to gain a well stocked mind. They see a world of work, we looked forward to a life. That's what we need to change, not a return to the pompous, self important verities of the past.
By the way, enough with the propaganda about left wing public school teachers. With two exclusively public school educated kids in years 9 and 12, they have been exposed to all sorts of opinions and attitudes. That's what differentiates a public school education from a private one, they get exposed to all sorts of beliefs, not just the Catholic one, or the Anglican one, or the Jewish one or the rich one, or even the left or the right one. I suspect just as many of their teachers are conservative as progressive, but its true most public school teachers don't like the current Fed Govt, but that's not bias, they don't like the (Labor) State Govt either.

Peter West makes some interesting claims here.

If students are more questioning of traditional histories and discourses, I wonder if this isn't a product of understanding, not ignorance, as Peter claims. Even if you don't subscribe to the social justice model Peter describes (as one might surmise from Peter's tone, there are those who see it as a kind of "leftist" ideology), it is hard to deny that women and minorities have been excluded from the historical discourses commonly available in school curricula.

Secondly, the idea that a student at high school level shouldn't be able to study for the joy of knowledge (naive, I know) or that vocational education and rote-learning is the only way to make children smarter seems to me one of the fundamental issues impeding a stronger sense of community and social justice. While we may want our children to be equipped for careers, surely we also want them equipped for life, to build a broader understanding of the world in which we live and the history that has shaped our society. As parents, we should also feel engaged enough with our children's education to actively engage in this dialogue.

You're right Peter, you can't "fast-foward" an education, but you can learn to be curious, to love learning, to question the knowledge presented to you in a way that is constructive. The best teachers (and there are thousands and thousands of them), in partnership with parents, espouse these values. George W. Bush claimed that "teachers are the only people teaching our children": this couldn't be further from the truth.

None of this of course, changes the fact that many university students are now juggling study, work (often low-paid) and sometimes families with the "traditional" activities of studenthood - student activism, vigorous debate, sport and (gasp!) social lives. University life has been bred in some students' minds as another responsibility that is not joyous but necessary and perhaps it's not unreasonable for those students to feel grudging about this.

On the whole a very prudent article. There is absolutely no doubt the education system in this country is an absolute mess-we should start there (rather than with the faults of generation y) to evaluate the shocking state of affairs.

Firstly the system wraps kids in cotton wool. No substantive learning until they are six (perish the thought of learning a foreign language before your teens), no phonetics (only picture association), and no vocational learning before year 12!

The left has pedalled the idea that all Australians should be university educated. Then they wonder why it is that young men who are good with their hands, and have energy to burn become resentful or run off the tracks. From personal experience many of my best friends were labelled rat bags at school only to become competent builders, mechanics, and miners-without blowing $30,000.00 in HECS fees.In fact I remember on more than one occasion students being excluded from year 12 meetings solely because they were not enrolled for tertiary study.

I've just spent 5years at university doing a law degree/ arts degree only to find that in a paractical sense I am less prepared for a law firm than I was before hand. While I was at university I spent 10 times (no exaggeration) more time being taught the feminist/indigenous/socialist critique of law rather than drafting a pleading or writing an advice. Now I'm enrolled in a post graduate course to teach me the fundamentals of practicing!

Is it any wonder that generation y thinks school a waste of time, and expects their working life to be one giant cake walk in which massive salaries are handed out regardless of performance, commitment, and respect for your superiors?

Peter,
Yes, education is not the same anymore but neither are the social and conditions that surround education provision.

Yes, kids tend to rote learn standardized responses (one liners) to every challenge to their knowledge about the world around them. It’s from what watching 2 hour condensed stories about life and the universe in cinemas etcetera. Life is for them is a string of one-liners.

My youngest son comes home from school with loads and loads of homework and assignments and I sometimes wonder if this is compensating for the lack of meaningful classroom dialogue and learning. They are usually very well thought out and interesting assignments but I do question if this sophistication is just all show.

He likes one of his 6 teachers, the rest he despises (and may I suggest for good reason)

The sense of custom and tradition that many private schools foster as part of their school culture can only be sustained if they balance this against the external cultures that kids are immersed in outside of school hours.

In the 1960s this was easy to do. Today its a different story.

Yes, I'm not saying anything new, but I don't feel its irrelevant.

If we did an audit of what kids needed before they entered university (the final frontier) then I don't think we'd come up with 12 years of schooling, dressed in ridiculously stupid uniforms, five days a week, hundreds of assignments and exams all while their hormones are doing backflips every few months.

The cultures of youth are distinctly out of sync with traditional modes of schooling. But I don't think they are irreconcilable.

We just havn't caught up with the world we created for them.