Rainier: Theoretically, technology should make knowledge more accessible. Of course, back when TV came out, everyone was going to learn all sorts of stuff and be geniuses, yet how many people use it educationally? The same is probably true of computers and the internet.

Renee: The basis for the modern education system goes back to a Prussian military model designed to produce an efficient industrialised state for war, which requires a population to be smart enough to work in an advanced economy, but not so smart that they actually start asking critical questions. There's nothing new there. The classical notion of education being to enlighten the individual or as an opportunity for personal growth has always been very much on the fringe since the advent of mass education.

Yes, I'm very much in favour of developing a truly beneficial community based approach to learning that would allow the individual self-development whilst serving the immediate community. However, this would require a massive, massive shift in the culture as a whole, and that will never occur because it would also probably make us quite second rate as an international economic player, and it would also mean that parents wouldn't get free babysitters while they went off to work so they could make the minimum payments for that huge new plasma screen TV they just bought on their maxed out credit cards...

The thing is though that most people, both the politicians and businessmen and also the average people, do want the status quo. The reality is that learning is irrelevant. People want qualifications and job opportunities, not a degree in something deemed useless such as philosophy, art history or anthropology. The cultural elite in the west, are perhaps rightly maligned (though not entirely) for espousing a "let them eat cake" attitude towards education. Ultimately, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

In the ongoing quest to find great deal on eBay or even to find items you can flip, one of the interesting approaches is by looking for misspelled items. One of the most common misspellings was "labtop" for "laptop". This misspelling is so common that some people listing laptops actually use the word "labtop" in their title. Check it out :)). See http://misspelling.kiev.ua - "Misspelling or Bad Spelling"

Effective educators need to like and respect their students and have a burning desire to teach their chosen subjects. The problem for academics is summed up in a simple saying coined many years ago,

Primary teachers love their students

Secondary teachers love their subject

Tertiary academics love themselves

With respect, Woodyblues, you do oversimplify matters concerning learning and love. The 'saying coined many years ago' is cute but also highly Romantic, imagining childhood as an idyllic time and academic pursuit in adulthood as narcissist.
I prefer to question the context. Perhaps it is true that the profound discoveries of young children, in learning how to read and growing in confidence in expressing their thoughts, are expected to receive accolades. Yet if this is so for the young, why shouldn't older people be encouraged and supported in their attempts to express their thoughts also?

In a different vein, my life has been changed wholeheartedly by my students' integrity and passion to rebel. Never have I been so moved as when students have looked to me for honest sharing about myself and what I believe. Ofcourse, a teacher cannot devulge private details on request, but the very questions (and questing way in which we sought to learn together) identified that power and purpose is found within relationship.

No job security, no infinite promise of monetary or emotional fulfilment enables such discretion as is required by the young of adults in their midst. Such discretion is love. It is the commitment to be present to the concerns, wildness, feebleness and injustice of the body of students. When this is a Eucharistic body, in a prayerful school, the students, staff and parent community is shaped by the power of the Holy Spirit. Somewhere, amongst the angels and the tigers, we become one in spirit and in truth.

In any discussion we have understand the causation of the problems first then work from there. This is particularly true in health and education as political interference in these systems is the root cause of the problems.

When a politician espouses his/her education dogma, especially from the two parties Labor and Liberal that are the only ones to have governed in Australia, we should first look at how these parties have contributed to the problems. On a different thread some of us put together a list of what the parties, allegedly so concerned about education standards, had done to destroy the State system.

These were:

1. Underfund public education giving State Schools less resources and a bad name.
2. Take money from the State schools and give it to the Private Shools.
3. Allow Private schools to expel problem kids and dump them into the State system.
4. Don't give back up support to State School teachers who have medically diagnosed learning disability children in their classes
5. With no training or support expect State School teachers to deal with the added burden of allowing more disbled kids into the State system ... lessening the use of special purpose schools.
6. Undermine the teachers further by blaming them for everything that is wrong with education.
7. Never acknowledge the marking and preparation that teachers do after hours in there own time and on the weekend and definitely don't pay them for it.
8: Allow children who do not speak even a single word of English into classes with only 40 minutes of English as a Second Language help each week.
9. Place inexperienced teachers into the most difficult schools then wonder why they leave and the children fail.
10. Underfund remedial services ... so the kids with difficulties get an hour a week when they should get 5 hours a week or more...
11. Overcharge Educational facilities through other departments for services rendered bleeding funds from the system.

Pollies can plead guilty to most of the things in this list and yet unashamedly bleat ... we have the answers.

Opinionated2:

1. & 2. Why should parents who put their kids into the private system have to pay twice for education? No, people shouldn't have to be part of the state system if it isn't in line with what they want their children taught (both curriculum and "values") and they shouldn't have to fund such a system. This may seem hard to believe to the mother-state fascists, but I'm pro-choice but I don't see why someone who is pro-life should have to have morally objectionable values crammed down his or her children's throats and pay for the privilege, just because such a person falls on the wrong side of the ideological line. The modern education systems of the west are quite laden with "values". If we really live in a society where there's a separation of church and state (which I hope we do), then let's get real and stop funding all "isms" via the public purse and make everyone fund their own dogmas. As it is, we selectively do that and then penalise people who don't want to be part of it.

3. Private schools are a business and their customers expect certain things. Should people at the cinema be forced to put up with idiots carrying on, or should the cinema be allowed to eject those who can't behave themselves?

4. I agree, although I think this could be better handled in a school that specialised in such things, rather than a one-size-fits-all system.

5. Ditto.

6. You're spot on there.

7. Yeah? So no other white collar workers do unpaid overtime? The seven hour working day must suck, and the twelve weeks of holidays per year must hurt too.

8. - 10. I agree.