Thank you for this article Dale Spender. I have seen, on a number of occasions in The Australian, reports from ACER which indicate that Australian school children do quite well in literacy and numeracy according to some internationally accepted measures. I cannot recall however whether this information was contained in articles printed by the newspaper or whether it was in the Letters to the Editor section in responses to Dr Donnelly's articles.
It is incredibly difficult to measure educational achievement through decades of time and across national and language divides in order to compare standards. My understanding of the information is that Australian schoolchildren seem to do quite well in international comparisons of higher order literacy and numeracy skills but not so well at tasks involving rote-learned knowledge. (I am not knocking rote learning). Also, I gather that whereas our average achievements are high we have too high a proportion of students who do not do well.
Before we get too political about all this and argue strongly about the relative dispositions of funds between sectors, we need more intelligent debate about the successes and weaknesses of our system.

I thought we'd heard the last of the lugubrious Kevin Donnelly and his asinine views. But he materialises, like Banquo's ghost, to whisper "political correctness will be the end of Judeo-Christian Civilization as we know it". Kevin reminds me of the educational reactionaries of my boyhood who forced us to write with nib pens and bottled ink (ballpoint pens being a device of the devil).

Education should be about more than job skills and Shakespeare still has a place. But we also need to realize that the world has changed enormously since the days of the manual typewriter. I'd be hard-pressed to get a job with the skills I left school with. Things need to come out of the curriculum, to make way for the new.

For a bit of fun, I checked my favorite jobs website and found 25 jobs using Shakespeare as a keyword (mostly companies with Shakespeare in the title). Using J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) I found more than 2,000 jobs and nearly 2,000 jobs for XML (Extensible Markup Language). Looks like PHP or VB might be the languages to learn, rather than Latin, eh Kev?

DEMOS, don't you ever get sick of writing the same post all the time? I know I'm sick of reading it.

Championing education. Someone needs to champion public education –that’s for sure.

Ask yourselves who benefits from the idea that public schools fail to provide a decent education.

I recall twenty years ago that the religious right started undermining peoples’ faith in public education. Of course pubic schools are a public institution so it’s in the “public interest” to defame and slander teachers and schools; while the private schools have their army of lawyers to silence critics who level similar charges against them. This is regardless of the fact that the public taxpayers fund these private corporations.

They have a similar curriculum and failings that we never see beat up in the media.

As the old saying goes:

“If this were played upon a stage now
I could condemn it as an improbable fiction”

Or as the punk song goes:

“Still got a funny feeling that my times are caught in a jar
Madness and insanity have arrived”.

Or as the pop song goes: “Don’t let the loonies take over..”

How much money does the music industry make? Hmmm. For instance: Did Michael Stipes Philosophy Degree help him write the best songs around. Did Thom York and the boys come from a university background? Did Casey, Barr, the Kid (forgot the drummers name)and the crew make their living from singing the best kick- in- the- arse songs around. Hmmmm.

Faack education that stifles creativity, ideas and understanding –why just concentrate on instrumentality and practicing parroting to produce perfect-spelling perpendicular pronouns to pander to the needs of producers of pointless products.

Where would we be without thinkers who produce gaffiti such as: “Dyslexia lures KO”. Heee, heee, heee , gotta laugh. Just imagine if you where a shiat-stirrer like that would you want some pedantic teacher correcting your rowds. Gotta laugh, mustn’t grumble.

P.S. A friend of mine was dyslexic and he knew the score even though he had big trouble spelling. The private school he attended threw him out – impatient fools. Conscientious, brainy as, great lad with Catholic ethos (the good one) working in a factory. What a waste?

yes, jj, i do. glad to see you noticed. now, if i could just see some evidence that you grasped the futility of supporting a feudal system of governance while talking about the web society, i'd be even more gratified. so far, all that's happened is that ozzies shrink away from the difficulty of being part of the changes needed to meet possible ecological disaster, and even more likely economic disruptions.

just skip over my posts, if they bore you. i'm not at all confident that i'm doing a lot of good, but occasionally people write some variation of "demos is right", so i'm hopeful a few people are enlightened or encouraged.

Public education doesn't need a champion. It has millions of them already. It's time for all of us to value and support the young champions among us.

Dale Spender, it's not up to any one person to "champion" public education. Such a messianic notion is straight out of the play-book of those who are doing their best to undermine public confidence in our schools. This is not some gladiatorial combat between media personalities. It's a deep and enduring conversation that Australian society has with itself.

In any case, there are many tireless defenders of public education who actually do get a fair bit of media attention: Columnist Maralyn Parker in the Daily Telegraph, Jim McAlpine and Judy King of the Secondary Principals' Council - and Geoffrey Robertson's speeches are also invaluable. Ironically even some private school principals such as Judith Wheeldon have done a lot to balance the public debate. And there are many private individuals and teachers such as Chris Curtis who often get a run on the Letters page.

In Australia today there are thousands, if not millions, of champions of public education. They are the teachers and students and parents who are building strong and cohesive communities centred on their local schools.

These champions do not need the putative approval of some newspaper editor to continue their good work. Their contributions to Australian society will last for many years after Kevin Donnelly's tiresome rants have served their higher purpose - to wrap the fish & chips.

Dale, as long as High Schools continue to 'teach the curriculum' and not the teenager in front of them, your arguments, and those of Donnelly are a bit irrelevant.
Primary schools are quite brilliant at addressing the individual students' needs. High Schools however, particularly years 7-10 still ride roughshed over student needs. This despite a doubled budget per student compared with Primary schools.
The emphasis on curriculum over student development can have dire effects on a student who will stop progressing in a subject at the point where they first encountered problems.The lack of remedial teaching to fix this is disastrous for the child. But the structure of our high schools means that the juggernaut just roles on. This is an issue of philosophy of teaching, not one of budgets. The harm done to too many kids by this systemic failure is the big problem with our education system, and most controversy would fade away if this was fixed.
Whether its Shakespeare or Sex in the City- without a proper grasp of the tools of analysis a student will suffer.I'm a parent who has suffered along with my child as she has been punished for not doing work demanded of her,despite her protests that she did not understand what was required. BEING FORCED TO GO OUTSIDE THE EDUCATION SYSTEM TO FIX THIS WAS A BAD JOKE and an indictment of the system.
While your article makes many valid points I reckon its not really the main game.