"the crisis he inherited"

This is a new low in the defining of "crisis", what next, the crisis cuased by the sun coming up?

The fed governament needs to get out of education altogether and leave it to the states.

Minister Pyne, and at least one of his inquiry members, is steeped in the beliefs that have kept humankind shackled under the influence of goat herders for 2000 years.

We need to develop inquiring minds in all our citizens as they pass through our education system. NAPLAN and other testing will not help to achieve this. Anything that Pyne adds to or subtracts from the efforts in curriculum development and the Gonski scheme will almost certainly prove a disadvantage to those already disadvantaged in our society.

A good start could be made on real progress for our students if every parent viewed the video of Pasi Sahlberg's address to Melbourne University in September 2012. Dr Sahlberg is Director of Education for Finland, the country with the best education system in the western world at least.

Very interesting but the claim that these obvious problem was a result of some coordinated plan is ridiculous.
More like unintended consequences, which is more or less the norm for just about everything we do regardless of who puts it in place, and what side of the culture wars that they are on.

From the kind of things I have read the situation is far worse in the USA. Henry Giroux writes about the cultural context in which this has occurred - or more correctly the absence of anything remotely like a nurturing culture. You have to be nurtured first before you can even begin to face and pass through the challenges of adolescent and adult life.
Even so, back in the good-old-days I think you will find that many more people were functionally illiterate than was commonly known.

Meanwhile any analysis of how our so called education does or does not work needs to take into account how the now dominant sceen "culture", especially TV, that young people participate (even from age 2) has programmed their brains and thus affected their cognitive skills. And their attention spans - they "live" in a world of 5 second sound bites. This is especially applicable to boys, even more so when they tank up on ENERGY drinks.
And the junk "culture" in which many children on the lower end of the socio-economic scale grow up in at home. Including the junk "food" full of sugar and toxic chemicals.

Cobber,

Your 2 sentences contained 2 spelling errors. Does that say something more about the 'crisis'?

Why mislead to make your point? It just undermines your argument. A simple example? You claim no phonics in ACARA English. Rubbish!
Three content description items from Grade 1 ACARA English:
Understand the variability of sound-letter matches
Recognise sound-letter matches including common vowel and consonant digraphs and consonant blends
Manipulate sounds in spoken words including phoneme deletion and substitution