Hi Otokonoko

Yes, I do know many public schools are using the internet and I should have mentioned that.

I love your analogy with the pies - wish I'd thought of it :-)

I think we are only at the beginning. And whichever way you look at it I think more machine-guided self-learning is going to be in the mix. With the proper equipment I think a single teacher is going to be able to attend to a class of a hundred or more. In some cases the teacher may not even be on site all the time.

I recognise that many people will rebel at this notion. However I think as the educational software gets better, and budgets get tighter, its inevitable.

The Gillard government is planning an educational spending spree based on the mining boom continuing. That's a pipe dream. All minerals booms end in a bust.

Rather than thinking in terms of more dollars, we need to think in terms of getting better value for the dollars we have. In fact we may have to think of getting more with fewer dollars.

pelican

Thanks for the links.

Kenny

I hope I have convinced you I am not a right wing nut and that I do know what I'm talking about.

Steven,

Maybe I’m a bit grumpy, but it seemed to me that your article was like a film review written by a reviewer that wished the filmmaker had made a different film.

There have been other reviews of education; e.g., the Blackburn report that produced the low standard VCE and the 1980 Victorian green paper that produced nothing. There is always a case for reviewing various things, but there is no overall framework for deciding when to review what.

You do have a serious point to make. Technology has not transformed education as it has other fields of endeavour. In some fields, technology has introduced automation on a grand scale and cut jobs dramatically. In others, it has had no effect on workplace numbers; e.g., there have been huge technological advances in medicine, but we still have a four-to-one patient-nurse ratio because of the nature of caring for human beings. I suspect teaching will remain in the latter category.

I caution you against means-tested vouchers for parents. That is the ultimate Gonksi proposal (after the refined SES one). It won’t fly because of the outcry it would create about breach of privacy. The real objection to it is that it immediately changes the conceptual basis on which all education is funded. It will lead inevitably to vouchers for public education on the grounds that if the better-off have to pay for private education, the better-off ought to pay for public education. It is essential that education funding never be based in any way on the capacity of parents to pay.