zahira

Any evidence for your diatribe against schools? Or is this just talk from the seat of your pants?

I hear all these stories ot woe about the education system; but they don't match my experience or that of any of my friends.

I have had four children go through and now three grandchildren going through the State schooling system and all are avid readers and history buffs (even the one who is an engineer).

The grandchildren are still at primary school. They are being taught brilliantly. My oldest children have tertiary qualifications (two at the Masters level). My youngest son is doing a History Honours course - his last semester results being 3 1st Class Honours and 1 2nd Class Honours. My oldest grandson is fascinated by history and reads endlessly about it (often under the bedclothes with a torch after lights out).

So when you talk airliy about "the current lot of students leaving Primary School are entering Secondary School, largely functionally illiterate", "dumbing down" of the curriculum and removing History, I just scratch my head and wonder what you mean. Are you softening us up for more cuts to State schools and transfer of funds to private schools?

Sometimes I wonder whether this type of posting tells us more about the state of mind of the poster than the state of education.

Frank you are only making reference to the experiences of your highly intelligent prodegy.I assure you that this is not the norm in our education system.We need to get back to teaching the basics and not just let children Google their way through school.History should not be excluded,nor Maths,English and Science.

Highly intelligent children will learn regardless,however the masses need guidance and good dedicated teachers.

Arjay,

Schools have not given up teaching the basics. Even during the thankfully now gone SOSE years, it remained possible to teach history in good schools, and now that Victoria has returned history to the curriculum and the other states and territories (other than NSW, which never gave it up) are to follow suit, all schools should be teaching it again.

International studies show that Australia performs well in comparison with other countries in education. We do, however, have a significant number of students who do not reach a satisfactory standard. We have been told incessantly for close to thirty years that you don’t solve problems by “throwing money” at them, yet in all those years there hasn’t even been one month in which education had money “thrown at” it. Perhaps we will start to invest seriously in education, meaning highly, paid highly able teachers with small classes and healthy, manageable teaching loads. Then the low achievers will improve, in literacy, numeracy and history.

If you leave aside the underfunding and the continual attacks on the teaching profession, the real danger to education (certainly in Victoria and maybe in other states) is the recycling of the failed and relabelled open classroom of the 1970s, under which more than a hundred students can be placed in the one room for a large part of the week, with teachers placed there with no or little regard for their subject expertise, so that everything becomes a stew of projects, and actual teaching, which Ken Rowe of ACER has pointed out has 500,000 studies showing is necessary, becomes impossible.

Arjay

So you and I and zahira swap anecdotes. Your experience against mine. Your negative outlook versus my positive one. You say my experience is not typical and I go tit for tat.

That's why you have ask posters to provide the hard evidence - and there is plenty of it. Take the OECD research for example.

Look at its 2003 results on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)
(http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/58/60/34624460.pdf)

Approximately 276 000 students aged 15, from 41 countries took part in PISA 2003. In Australia just over 12 500 students were tested from 321 schools around Australia in PISA 2003. The schools and students were randomly selected.

Australian results were “good to excellent” compared to these other 4o nations. Australia’s results were above the OECD average in each of
* mathematical literacy, including each of the mathematical literacy subscales
* scientific literacy
* reading literacy and
* problem solving.

Only one country - Finland - achieved significantly better results than Australia in reading literacy. Three countries - Finland, Japan and Korea - achieved better results than Australia in scientific literacy.

Only four countries - Hong Kong-China, Finland, Korea, and the Netherlands - outperformed Australia in mathematical literacy in PISA 2003.

Only four countries - Korea, Hong Kong-China, Finland and Japan - performed significantly better than Australia in problem solving.

These are reputable measures by an internationally regarded authority.

Now what does zahira mean when she/he talks about the "abject failure of the current process that has the audacity to call itself education"? And what do you mean when you say we should not "just let children Google their way through school".

Why do we continue to slander Australian children, teachers and their schools when we continue to stack up well against world standards? Credit where it's due. Let's leave the slander to the tabloids.

Hi FrankGol, I actually speak from experience as a Secondary School Geography and English teacher in a State School. I was teaching a grade 8 SOSE class, who weren't able to do the following: a) write in cursive writing, they were still printing at a grade 3 level, in pencil - at best, b) weren't able to comprehend, let alone even read a very basic grade 8 text, c) had no science education at all, they didn't even know what an atom was, which is basic science, d) they had no knowledge at all of basic Australian History, e) they didn't know how to write text from the blackboard into their school books, they were never taught how to, etc, etc, etc. I was also teaching year 9 and year 10 classes who were also functionally illiterate as well!

Oh, and these children were supposed to be one of the top grade 8 classes in our school! and trust me the experience as described above is common.

Yes, zahira, as I said: we can swap extreme and somewhat implausible anecdotes about hopeless teachers and desperately badly taught students. (By the way, where do they still ask children to copy from the blackboard? How nineteenth century!)

I have met mediocre secondary teachers who bemoan the fact that their classes can’t do things that they think should have been taught. It happens at every level of education – it’s comforting to blame the teachers the kids had before they came to me. Makes me feel better when I’ve fixed them up. And I’ve met students who wind up gullible teachers. I was in a class once who conned the teacher that the front of the room room was shifting away from their desks!

But I’ve also met brilliant teachers who wouldn’t dream of asking kids to copy text from the blackboard; they really teach. And these brilliant teachers see it as their task to identify weaknesses in students and to teach them what they don’t know.

But my key point is: international testing agencies like the OECD show that Australian students are in the top flight compared with equivalent students in similar nations. Why do you carry on with this caricature of illiteracy while totally ignoring the solid evidence that Australian education is in very good shape?