As per the other comment, we pay peanuts & naturally we can expect to
find monkeys in the teaching profession. We need to have higher quality teachers especially in the primary schools or even at preschool where the early formative years are the most important period in the learning process for the child. Developed western economies undervalue the importance of teachers in schools.It's
time that we make the teaching profession as glamourous as law,
IT etc.

ChrisC re;
"500,000 studies have shown that “the sage on the stage approach to teaching” leads to students knowing more than the alternative “guide at the side”. Dr Ken Rowe is the source. If a teacher does not know more than the students, he or she should not be a teacher."

In this age, when reports on nearly every aspect of learning are so readily available, students need to know how to evaluate what they find. The thing they need to be most competent at is thinking, even thinking outside the square. They need to be able to evaluate the information that is available on the things that are important to them and the society they live in.

The teachers and lessons that I remember from my school years are the teachers and lessons that stretched my thinking ability. In my era I think Euclidean Geometry was taught, not because it was all that important in itself, but because the subject taught the students to think. I loved that subject, and physics. Some decades later I still do.

The Khan Academy has a free site which carries an extensive range of free lessons in "sage on the stage form" but to evaluate what is there the students need to be able to think clearly. That is what the first of the two reports referred to in Mr Turner's paper is all about - starting early to teach children how to evaluate evidence and opinions. Thanks to GlenC for providing the directions to that report.

Thanks for raising the Khan Academy, Foyle. I think I know how to while away my weekend now, without doing the chores I had promised myself I would do!

A bit like bald men fighting over a comb, Education is an industry on the precipice of disruptive change. Why have your child held hostage to the latest fads flooding through the bowels of the local school when an average internet connection will provide instruction from the best on the planet. Locality is no longer a protection for sub-standard teaching.

Smart Educationalists are grappling with this now (starting a few years ago), particularly the current State system of factory style education is steadily becoming extinct. They cry "where is our respect", someone should tell 'em its earned not issued.

Even the great unwashed out Blacktown (you know citizens, remembered by Labor every pre-election) voice the opinion that schools are sheltered workshops for the staff and try to get theirs into the local independent (usually) Catholic school.

Australia faces a bleak future. We either go the track of traditional manufacture which means competing with Asia and there cheap labour. Which means a large drop in standard of living (for some, the worker). Or the alternative which is go high technology industry development.
The problem with high tech, is that you need masses of well educated people who have the ability to "think out side the box".
Since the 70's our education system is based on memory. Not understanding. My children can remember mathematical formula, but what it means is lost too them. All they know is that if they remember it and spit it out at exam time, they'll pass.
Successive Australian Governments have led us down a path of fools where education is concerned. Why? Because industry mostly only want fools. Educated people know there worth and how too get it. For example, look at the leaders of industry, not too many fools there. Fools are cheap for industry. For Governament, there is the old saying, "a fool and there money is parted easily".
One third (and probably more) of all your income, goes to taxes. Your taxes pay for most children's education. Wake up Australia. Demand value for money. It's your money. Your children. Our future!

Interesting point - though your assertion that education based on memory rather than understanding had its rise in the 1970s isn't entirely true. The model of schooling endorsed from the Victorian period to the present has always been based largely on memory rather than understanding. That's what didactic ('good', according to Mr Pyne) teaching is best at. It is, perhaps, best satirised in the opening lines of Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

Interestingly, moves away from regurgitation of facts are often vehemently opposed. Queensland's controversial Critical Literacy Syllabus in English was panned, opposed and eventually suppressed. Many of the things said about it were simply untrue; others, unfortunately, became the truth in some classrooms because some teachers were unable to cope with the push for thought, understanding and analysis it endorsed. Ultimately, the 'back to basics' approach won out and we settled for kids who could read texts without thinking about them, write texts without putting thought into them and recount other people's interpretations without ever understanding them. It's certainly true that some teachers are substandard practitioners. Others, however, are capable of working well above the expected standard but forbidden from doing so and hamstrung by substandard curriculum expectations.

Perhaps you're right, then: the nation wants people who can do without thinking, rather than people who can understand what they are doing.