A Parliamentary Committee with responsibility for oversight over education in Queensland would be only one step, enabling democratic input into this monolithic State responsibility.

Unfortunately education, especially State education, has become the new "Church". It can't be criticised without its supporters, attacking critics mercilessly, and seeking to exorcise and punish them for their heresy and different, evil non-State sanctified ways. Its high priests, the behind the scenes bureaucrats, are so far removed from the realities of classrooms, life in the real world and parents and young people's needs, yet stand so high on protected pedestals of their making, that they don't ever need to stand in public to debate and defend the ever changing directions of the education system that they control.

A Parliamentary Committee with real powers of enquiry and reporting about education would go some way to assuaging my abiding criticism of an education department and system that is run along the lines of a totalitarian regime, or a medieval Church.

I don't think this new State Education "Church" will allow a Parliamentary Committee to be established and operate. It would be like assailing the walls of their castle in which they exercise so much control and direction over people's lives. Even if it did, the department would prevaricate, bluff and bluster Parliamentarians and seek to destabilise the Committee and its role.

Remember that great recent act of hypocrisy, when the department was successful in removing the role and oversight of State inspectors of State Schools, where the great bulk of State money is spent, and then inflicted external, usually ex-State School Staff, assessors on non-state schools where the State spends a pittance.

With a Parliamentary Committee, even those who support and select State Schools for their children may have access to information and give input into an education department that can spend $35m on an Academy for the selected few Students with an intake of 180, but has not been able, in the recent past at least, to maintain existing School facilities or determine where asbestos is installed, even obviously on School roofs.

Dr Prosser should be congratulated on this article. Excellent stuff. It has been evident for 20 years that the Education Establishment is running wild. Syllabi are feeble, weak and hopeless, assessment pathetic, internal school organisation fails to respond to the fact that children vary in ability, student teachers are 'trained' by people who have little idea of what really happens in schools, the trainee teachers are, on average, intellectually weak requiring only the ability to pass the pulse test to get in etc.

The Ed Establishment will not change, it cannot change. Hence it falls to parliament to break the TEE power by exposing it, and its outcomes to the light of public scrutiny. The Prosser idea of a standing parliamentary committee for education is excellent. It is hard to think of any reason why an elected member of parliament would object to such a committee structure.

I urge Dr Prosser to take his article to every member of parliament that he can.

Of course this is NOT a party political issue. All governments of every political stripe has, by gross negligence, had a hand in the degradation of education in Queensland. It is their combined responsibility to work to rectify the situation very quickly because each year a few more tens of thousands of students will be damaged.