Ian, on OLO to make any constructive criticism of the Liberal politicians, upsets their beloved followers.
Their response will make a Banshee sound like a Dove.

The 'comments' section of On Line Opinion certainly demonstrates that for some people the education system has failed. Why is it so often that by about the sixth comment discussion degenerates into name calling, characterising people as 'left' or 'right' and observations based on hearsay rather than evidence. A good education system should produce a citizenry capable of informed debate.

Ian

Agree heartily

What hypocrites the author of this bit of nonsense and his sycophants are.

The recent OECD PISA tests showed Australian school children falling well behind in maths, science and reading.

The blame for this lies squarely on the useless shoulders of left wing progressive educators who sought to duplicate their English counterparts so aptly described by Melanie Phillips:

"Today’s uproar is because the doctrine of equality of outcomes is the sacred shibboleth of the left. Anyone who wants to understand Britain’s education disaster only has to listen to the asinine knee-jerk reactions from teachers and Labour and LibDem politicians all baying for Gove’s [or Pyne’s] blood because he wants to raise education standards. Thus the left sets its face against Gove’s [or Pyne’s] determination to give children a good education and positive life prospects – in which cause parents are cheering him on –and instead lines up in defence of lousy education, mass ignorance and entrenched social disadvantage. Well done, comrades!"

Part 2:

"The farce of worthless public examinations has arisen from the farce that education has become. The education world believes with every fibre of its being that tailoring education differently to meet different pupil aptitudes is to crush the self-esteem of the less academic. The result of that piece of idiocy – which would be laughed out of court in say Germany or Switzerland – is that not only academic children are short-changed but the non-academic who need high quality vocational education.

Britain’s educationists were also zealots for ‘child-centred education’, which held that what a child brought to the classroom was as valuable, if not more so, than anything a teacher could deliver.

Education thus stopped being concerned with the transmission of knowledge. Teachers stopped teaching and turned instead into ‘facilitators’ of pupil learning. The tried and tested structured reading schemes were abandoned because — horrors! — some children were faster than others at mastering these, and children were told to guess or memorise words instead, leaving them functionally illiterate. Creativity was fetishised over knowledge. The essay, which taught children how to think, was replaced by stories which allowed them instead to make things up.

Children were thus abandoned to ignorance and unreason. It was an approach whose wickedness was exceeded only by its imbecility.”

I bet everyone of the anti-Pyne commentators on this thread approve whole-heartedly of the propaganda about global warming currently being foisted on pupils in schools today.

Schools have become training grounds for left ideology; it's a simple as that; and like the wretched ABC, education has ceased to work in Australia's favour.

The blame for this lies squarely on the useless shoulders of left wing progressive educators
cohenite,
The frustrating part is that they themselves were indoctrinated by their own nonsense & now remain too stupid to comprehend it all. If only there were a chance of making them realise how progressive they are in their regress.