The author highlights the current structural defficiencies within the Australian education system and the challenge for the new Rudd Labor Government to start to align the system with one that opens up educational opportunity to all students. The issue of public funding of private and public schools and the inherent injustices within the SES funding model seem to be a logical starting point for Rudd but one that has huge potential electoral costs. Many supporters of Labour are looking to this government to make a stand on the issue and wait for Rudd to back down on what was an election driven promise to guarantee the existing funding system well into the next decade. The effects of Howards' policy has been to further drive the walls of division between school systems and to intensify the self selection processes within all school systems. The challenges are great but the crying need for educational justice for all children within our society is obvious.

the mechanics of parliamentary society make fragmentation easy. a ruling party facing a difficult election offers a plum to a segment of society, and reaps the few more votes to stay in office. menzies did it with private/religious schools, and trying to put the genie back in the bottle is simply electoral suicide.

not to be wondered at, parliament after all was designed to be the clearinghouse of the rich and well-connected. it is meant to allow the rich to stay that way.

if oz were a democracy, if we had citizen initiative, we could reach over the shoulder of pollies and make 'difficult' but necessary laws. one might be "no public support of private schools".

without this power, without this means to harness the will of the electorate, special interests will always capture parliament. it's to easy to bribe or threaten a few hundred people who have to reapply for their jobs every 3 years.

there'll no revolution. let's just hope for superficial renovation, even that much would be a nice change from the libs.

The whole public system is corrupted and grossly unfair.

Our Government has created Selective Schools so that they can use the results to present the public system as competitive and succeeding but in reality the students in these schools were not taught the skills they needed to obtain access to these schools from the public school system. Many students who are successful for Selective School placement come from Private schools and many more are coached. Selective Schools just allow those who are in the better learning environment to have an even greater advantage and at fraction of the cost. The poor smart kids in the disadvantaged public schools and homes will struggle to compete and have little hope.

To make matters worse the system is capable of being manipulated and corrupted and we have evidence that clearly shows that the Selective Schools unit is manipulating with applications and test scores to deny children opportunities and to 'payback' parents who have made complaints. Bureacrats in the system have the opportunity and safety net to segregate at will without question or challenge.

The biggest problem in the public school system is that their failures, biases and prejudices are being covered up and as a result the foundations of the education system are flawed and corrupted.

The priority should be integrity, openness and accountability as this should always come first.

Education - Keeping them Honest
http://jolandachallita.typepad.com/education/
Our children deserve better

The priority should be integrity, openness and accountability as this should always come first.
Jolanda, I couldn't agree more. Problem is, how could we achieve it ? I am a firm believer that before a new teacher is being let loose in a classroom full of utterly impressionable human beings he/she should perform at least 12 months of any kind of work other than academic. The reason why education is at rock bottom is because of the utter ignorance of new teachers. then, as they get older, they still don't aquire any life experience to pass on to students because of the closed-circuit mentality of the education system. 25 years ago teachers were offered remote allowances to go into the bush. then they wanted an extra airfare back to town because of isloation. They got it. Then they wanted airfares to be accumulative to go anywhere. they got it. Then they wanted the money instead. They got it. Then they wanted the money up front so they could earn interest. They got it. Did their innocent victims (students) benefit from all this ? Obviously not.
Introduce 12 months national service (not military) for anyone aged 19 and you'll see a gradual improvement in both integrity & benefit to students.

Jack,

It will be much easier to obtain an agreed list of goals for education than it will be to determine the priorities amongst them and to determine what they mean in practice.

I notice that you omit the individual aims, like the development of rationality, and giving people access to worthwhile activities (such as the arts). Yet these are the only aims which justify compulsion, at any rate for teenagers. They are also ones which the non-systemic private schools claim excellence in achieving (falsely in many cases).

If the economic aims are seen as subordinate to these, you get one kind of curriculum. If on the other hand these are seen as principally important only because they provide a means to employment (an perhaps to developing business enterprises) you get quite a different curriculum.

Two examples. To teach languages in order to open up to students the literature and philosophy of other cultures, and thus to foster a critical approach to their own; and perhaps also to teach them in order to teach students about language and its interaction with thought, leads to a "bookish" kind of teaching. To teach them for economic purposes leads to quite a different approach, in which conversation is stressed above reading lliterature, and everyday vocabulary above that required for substantial thought.

We can teach Euclidean geometry (even though it is not true of space if Einstein is correct) as an axiomatic system, with many proofs and few applications; or we can teach it mainly as a handmaid to trigonometry (which is, by comparison 'practical').

Then there are the issues of how much time you spend on each subject, and on each part of each subject. (Australian history or the struggle for democracy? History or languages? What to omit in order to fit in civics?)

The arguments have gone on for a couple of thousand years or so. Though we understand better the choices and why they matter, consensus is not obtained. How do you think it might be achieved?