What's the point in having a federal minister for education if he is powerless?

Instead of fussing about republicanism, we should be pushing for the abolition of the states. Our system does not work any more.

"When we say we want education to be secular, the word doesn't just mean that it shouldn't entrench any religion, we mean that it should be evidence-based and materialistic, teaching facts and methods of rational analysis." A sound analysis of a more or less traditional basis for educating our children. Trouble is, history shows that many have always disagreed with it and think that education should be the way of turning their own offspring, as well as the offspring of other folk, into more or less clones of themselves. That division will remain a persistent social split. So the problem is deep: how to eliminate the inevitably divided popular opinion on the purpose of education as a basis for curriculum. This will always involve a power struggle. Rational parents are now losing. Continuing articulation of the secular basis for curriculum as this piece wisely argues is certainly needed. But I fear it won't be enough.

Alan Tudge is not powerless, ttbn, he holds the funding purse.
It is always interesting to hear the comments of those who have no background in education, other their own brief schooling a decade or two ago, who insist that they have the answer to whatever question is being asked.
I look forward to hearing the comments of those with many years in the classroom: them I will listen to, neophytes I will ignore.

I believe I mostly agree with this, Graham. The dumping of phonetics has had disastrous consequences for a huge body of students!

And militant unions have made competence in the classroom subservient to other control issues. And that same body spreading fear over the spectre of teacher competency revealing examinations!?

Not ever in our time has there been more fixing of what ain't broke nor more untested and unproven intellectual concepts ben foisted on our children by alleged teachers than now?

And to the point where or kids are little more than lab rats being gromed to fear tests that where no bother to previous generations who understood they were no more than a useful tool to establish who needed extra help and with what subject matter.

I get that teachers should teach an have admin duties done by other qualified staff!

High performing schools have by comparison, less militant, unionised teachers in their classrooms! And have more focus on learning to learn and critical thinking? The core role of education!?

And where the best, most attention-getting, classrooms are invariably outdoors!
Alan B.

"Alan Tudge is not powerless, ttbn, he holds the funding purse".

Then he is useless. He is also ignorant. I have contacted him twice to ask what he intends to do instead of just bellyaching with Andrew Bolt about the situation. No response.

Given your smartarse remarks, I don't think too many people will be listening to to you either, Brian.

Dear Alan B,

You write:

"And militant unions have made competence in the classroom subservient to other control issues. And that same body spreading fear over the spectre of teacher competency revealing examinations!?"

Given we have charged to having over a third of our students now attending private schools this is hardly going to support your contention. Indeed it really does flag this as the reason for our declining standards.

Steele. Disagree with your take as would the overwhelming body of critical thinkers who do not allow others to think for them! I believe we should support excellence with appropriate financial reward, rather than the lowest common denominator and mediocracy currently foisted on us by unions!

And should not need militant unions to achieve that very outcome! Just a rationalised and guaranteed reward remuneration objective set as it should be by a non-government tribunal If amounts as large as 2 million P.A. are ok for NDIS executives, then why not for thoroughly more valuable, ultra-competent teachers? Were that the remuneration paradigm, how many of our best and brightest be drawn to teaching as
their preferred career path?
Alan B.

If English was a phonetic language, through and through,teachers would be leading the call for phonics. Please, can we all accept the fact that English is NOT a phonetic language and that pushing the inclusion of phonics, or worse the exclusion of all other ways of teaching the language, will NOT solve all the problems that learners face.

It is reasonable for lawyers to have a lawyer as Attorney-General. It is reasonable for doctors to expect someone with medical knowledge as minister for health and farmers to have a farmer as minister for agriculture.

Why appoint someone with no recent knowledge of education other than their own distant schooling as minister for education and let them start fiddling with curricula that classroom teachers have to deliver.

The article is a clear and lucid explanation of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to restore things Even more worrying is the future prediction that those in charge will run our country into the ground I do not think this is a future prediction it is already happening and unless people wake up and begin writing to their members of Parliament and the ministers of education both State and Federal and stating clearly they want this dangerous and inferior educational model to be thrown out and replaced by a sequential generous curriculum with a rich and deep offering of music ,art ,sciences, physical activities, reading, writing, math ,history and geography.

My comments are not 'smart-arse' comments, ttbn, but reflections by someone who was a classroom teacher from 1968 to 2012, who completed a degree in Education and Geology as an external/evening student, a master's degree as an evening student and who is completing a doctoral degree as an external student.

A major theme for me, throughout my high school teaching and learning, was literacy in the subject I taught. I see myself as someone with a bit more knowledge of literacy than most people. People who have made no attempt to see what schools are actually doing but who push 'fads' can be really annoying.

The greatest danger facing every Australian child is the education system & left wing feminist teacher.

imacentristmoderate,

Yes, aided and abetted by politicians who are lazy and gutless, or they actually support the nonsense. Generation Z has shown itself to be the most ignorant and uneducated in history. Lord knows how much lower future generations will descend into uselessness, at best, and hazardous to society at worst.

I had a good laugh at Brian's suggestion that the federal minister had power over the states because he held the purse strings. No federal minister has the guts to withhold money from the states.

Dear Graham,

Why just peck around the edges?

This whole sick idea of the state intervening in the "education" of children is wrong. It is about indoctrination, about the imposition of their goals, whatever they may be, into young brains.

There should be no ministry of education at any level of government.
Education and its contents should belong in the sole realm of the family, which may naturally delegate some of the actual day-to-day teaching to competent teachers of their choice which they trust.

The most that the state could perhaps have with it, if at all, is to ensure that poor children are not left without education because their parents cannot afford it, but this ought to be handled anyway as part of a general-purpose financial safety-net.

Well, it most definitely wasn't the work of Conservatives to dumb down education !
Why ? Because there isn't a Conservative in Education, it's all Left !
I wonder what sort of excuses they'll come up with over that mess of their doing !

Here is s definition of the usual dreadfully sane normal human being and the "education" that he or she has been subjected to, or brainwashed by.

The usual man or woman tends to be only minimally human - human only in the gross technical sense, and reduced by all of the usual social influences to a pre-programmed robot of unconscious personal drives, conventional ideas, and social motives, all of which are kept under control by the locally standard social propaganda and its closed system of stimulus-response educational techniques.
The social influences that are generated to "educate" and control human beings in every part of the world are all basically of the kind that is now popularly declaimed as "brainwashing" whenever the educational propaganda or techniques of "others" is being criticized or mocked.
People whose bodies, minds and selves are under the control of the machinery of the State collective are not generally involved with the free pursuit of Truth in any sense at all.

Meanwhile the principal "education" or brainwashing vehicle in the modern world has been TV and more recently I-phone social media.

Everybody becomes what they put their attention on!

Young people spend many hours a day transfixed (and being brainwashed by) screens of one kind or another. This all-pervasive dumbing down of intelligence has been described by numerous authors including Nicholas Carr the author of the book The Shallows and the Rough Type website.

What are young people being taught or brainwashed into being or becoming?

Faithful consumers of course. I shop for my favorite brand-name Logo!

How this is done is described in two books: This Little Kiddy Went To Market by Sharon Beder, and Buy Baby Buy by Susan Gregory Thomas.

At another level we now all "live" in a state of collective psychosis or a media mad world which features and includes the worst aspects of Huxley's Brave New World (and Revisited) and Orwell's 1984.

All of that having been said the content of any school curriculum however well intended or put together is more or less completely irrelevant!

Hi ttbn:- In my experience leftist governments sort of withhold money from the states by attaching conditions to money given to the states.

But conservative governments hand out money without any strings attached.

Hi Yuyutsu:- Democracy is guaranteed to fail if 100% of all families in a society or culture are not on the same page or supporting the same set of morals, ethics & principles.

Hi Daffy Duck:- So we should allow children to grow up dumb & dumber, so that it will be easier for Communist China to colonise Australia, is that what you are saying?

Dear imacentristmoderate,

«Democracy is guaranteed to fail if 100% of all families in a society or culture are not on the same page...»

Your statement is a grammatically ambiguous: did you mean that democracy fails if ANY family is not on the same page as the others or if there are no two families exactly on the same page? And does this failure happen if the above happens in both society AND culture, or just in any one of the two?

At present, different families do have different values and I doubt whether there are any two families in Australia with exactly the same morals, ethics and principles. But then, it is also safe to say that democracy is failing here (not that it has been a great success anywhere else).

Democracy is a tool, not a goal in itself, its purpose is to try to limit the number of people who lose their freedom at the tyranny of states.

If brainwashing in the education-system was successful in reducing everyone to the same morals, ethics and principles, then indeed we would obtain a technical, but sham democracy. The question would then be, all humans being the same, why keep more than one person alive?!

Ants can be very industrious and efficient, but if humans are to turn into ants (and China is indeed heading that way) then what is human life for?

Hi Yuyutsu:- An old lawyer once said to me "if 100% of the population was traditional christian & genuinely attempting to live according to the 10 commandments, almost all of our problems would disappear".

Enlightenment leaders who "wrote the book" on modern western democracy hundreds of years ago, also stated failure was guaranteed without monoculturalism.

Dear imacentristmoderate,

«Enlightenment leaders who "wrote the book" on modern western democracy hundreds of years ago, also stated failure was guaranteed without monoculturalism.»

I can also do Hocus Pocus and impress you with my great enlightenment:
Just wave your hands over your head for the next 12 hours and by the wonders of my magic, the sun will rise!

So easy to get your eyes rolling in wonder, because... [secret: the sun is guaranteed to rise again anyway, whether or not you wave your hands, just as democracy is guaranteed to fail anyway, with or without monoculturalism].

Thanks for the article Graham. I am very concerned with the state of children's education- some people have taken to educate their children from home. I'm sure that there are efforts to close this option so that the communists can exert monopolistic cultural hegemony.

Thanks again Graham.