Dear oh dear Gadget. Such venom against the poor old "Lefties." Such hatred leves me to wonder which of the religious cults you belong to? Exclusive Brethern, Assembly of God or maybe the Hillsong Church?
The problem with education these days is simple. Total lack of community respect for those that attempt to educate our young. Learning maths for example, is to many young students a slow and very boring process. In fact, many students find the whole school system a complete waste of their "precious" time. To learn means you have to concentrate, but that's impossible when you have too many toys to distract attention away from the teachers, such as malls to hang out in, mobile phones to play with, gameboys, x-boxes...the list goes on and the teachers are powerless to do anything about it. They can't lift a hand against a child now or some do-gooder parent will be pursuing litigation. I think Gadget, what we need is to bring back a "bit of biff" in schools. Nothing like the fear we knew as kids to make you sit up and pay attention. I once learned a whole new song in just one hour, the alternative being beaten by an old nun with a specially hand made leather "gat." Time to ignore the do-gooders in our spoiled society and bring back the sound proof Head Masters/Mistreses room. Defiant child goes in, humble child (willing to learn) comes out. The first do-gooder to whinge about it gets the same treatment in a very public place. Only then can we get back to the three basics...reading, writing and arithmetic.

Wildcat,
In the good old days we peasents were seen and not heard, the blue bloods reigned supreme. Things have changed ever so slightly, we are still on starvation wages, however thanks to the brave men who stood under the tree of knowledge and defied their "masters" and the A.C.T.U was born, we had a voice at last. Gadget would like to silence us permanently, and I would like to return to the 1930's when we waited for the "evil" bosses and gave them a touch up, mind you there were some great bosses, Gadget would not recognise one though, not made of the right fibre.

Never, ever, ever confuse education with training. Education is the equipping of young people with skills so that they are still learning when they are old people. Training is what many teachers have done and continue to do to this day – show them how to do it and then make them do it over and over. Education is difficult and demanding. Training is much easier and favoured by the lazy. It is not the educators who have failed our kids but the trainers. And no wonder the educational authorities are asking questions! How many many many millions have been squandered in the name of education? The public has been duped! We paid for our kids to be educated but the arrogance and laziness of the trainers won out. While the rest of the world embraces education we are been held back by the twisted elitism of those who gauge their success by how well they have trained someone to sit for an exam.

The sky is falling! We’re only ranked fourth for literacy, seventh for science and ninth for maths in the entire world (OECD, 2003). As Australians, shouldn’t we come first in everything, like we do in the soccer, the cricket, the rugby?…oh, hang on a minute…

The fact is, Australians perform far better in the educational stakes than we do in sport…only a few nations play our favourite sports, and we can’t even come first in them most of the time. But in the whole developed world, we’re consistently in the top 5 or 10 for every subject.

James Ridd’s claim about declining maths standards in years 11 and 12 is specious, because in this generation 75% of students go on to year 11, whereas 30 years ago, it was less than 30%. So all those decades-old maths results that everybody likes to dust off to make up their chicken-little stories were drawn from the top 30% of academic high-fliers in generations past. These days, every Tom, Dick and Jane goes on to year 11 and since, by definition, 75% of the population cannot be exceptional, then the results we are getting are only to be expected.

In the postwar years, the poor, the ill-disciplined, the disabled and the just plain slow were simply excluded from the system. These days we strive mightily to educate everybody. Nevertheless, even though we’re no longer drawing our HSC students from the top third of the population as we used to, Australia still ranks in the top 10 in the world, which is a fantastic achievement.

So retired teachers like James Ridd and Kevin Donnelly should stop snarling and sniping from their armchairs and recognise that these days teachers are educating kids that, in generations past, were considered to be ineducable – and getting world-class results.

Teachers should get medals for working in a comprehensive system that means they have to deal with every single kid that comes their way. Instead, all they get is buckets of bile from retired teachers who are safely out of the firing line. Thanks for nothing, James Ridd.

The first OLO thesis this morning immediately gets one thinking about sleazy political points.

1. Surely every Aussie Sid and Sal should be questioning the right for a democratic government to try and alter the substance of a syllabus on our Australian history.

2, It is blatantly political, especially with the Iraq controversy alone having got most of our public fed up with the increasing US military disorder there, thus wanting to bring our troops home.

The long-running argument on Iraq, which unfortunately has sucked in terrorism as well, has got us wondering whether our leaders really know what they are doing? Meaning that following America is like the blind leading the blind - especially as it looks like with Blair near gone, Britannia is on tyhe way out. Indeed, we might wonder with things in such a mess, what will happen in the long run to Johnny Howard?

Further, before we get on about the weak opposition, including minor left-wing parties like the Greens and Democrats, for the Howard government to have stayed in so long, we could possibly be now regarded by Howard as in a wartime situation and forced to honour that unipolar order from the White House above - if you are not with us you are against us.

However, as Howard uses the “I” so much rather than the partisan “we” in his speeches, we could suggest he is imagining himself as a Churchill, or maybe even a George WB.

As if destiny is trying to make it even more tough for John Howard, in the West Australian Opinion column today, Brian Toohey edits the section with the heading - Rudd Gambles with God Talk.

Toohey begins by suggesting that a 5000 word essay of
Kevin Rudd's in the October issue of the Monthly Magazine could create risks for his future career.

Be that as it may, as an ardent philosophical researcher myself was much more interested in what Mr Toohey said in the next paragraph

Thanks, Mercurius. You said much of what I might have said. My father, a maths teacher,used to respond, when I proposed one or other addition to the syllabus, either, 'There are only so many hours in the school day', or 'What are you proposing to take out?' My guess is that today's young people are much better rounded and educated than my generation was, and that's because about 50 per cent of them will go to university and have done what is necessary to get there, compared to the 2 per cent in the early 1950s. And we were not the brightest of our cohort, only the ones whose parents thought that completing high school was absolutely imnportant, despite the easy availability of jobs. The world is such a different place!