There is not one person in this federal government, or the last one, or the next one, or in any state government anywhere in this country with the least interest in examining the current school systems.

Those who believe schools 'work' because it looks as if functioning people come out of them could be right though.

Perhaps a broken down anti-education system, which is what we have here, is the best we can get after all?

I saw a note from soemone about 'in pursuit of excellence'. Quite so, and what rubbish it is.

In pursuit of mediocrity is about what we have, certainly in Qld, where the overall ethos within the state is one of fearing debate, discussion, ideas, and what is called 'book learning'.

I too attended school in the UK... it was a shocking system and one that Australia has emulated with its GPS schools and low grade comprehensives.

However, that said, my children seem to fare better socially and intellectually here than many of us did over there, years ago. The difference being the change in young people, less prepared to tolerate what clearly is rubbish, and this has required teachers to start to address their worst teaching practices...well, a few of them have anyway.

But the schools are woeful, with no examination by anyone within the system of what individual principals do in our schools, and very little support for any teachers wanting to underatke further study.

Our high school remains a factory-like system, with 100 teachers for 1200 students. Of that 100, many only have a 'dip' of teaching, about 9 have a Masters, and the rest haven't studied much at all since they got their B.Ed years ago.

I suspect, as with the UK system, that so little is actually learned in schools we'd find that most 'learning' actually happens after school has finished, and that we all agonise far too much over what will always be a second rate option for getting some basics into peoples heads.

In the meantime, why we tolerate such second rate excuses for schools is beyond me.

Beginning with his book The Crack In The Cosmic Egg and through to A Biology of Transcendence, the author interviewed in this reference, has spent a life time studying and investigating what we do to our children and each other in the name of "education" and "culture".

1. http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/JCP98.html

Altogether he argues that our entire "education" and child-"rearing" system is a systematic assault on our latently open-ended genetically encoded potential.

Thus we have the obese couch-potato sitting in front of the idiot box with his/her remote "control" (ha-ha), being "entertained" as the ultimate product/outcome of Western "culture".

Such a person will of course be a sucker for a moose-hunting "jesus"-loving VP candidate.

How many guns would Jesus own? How many mooses would Jesus shoot?

Read his book Evolution's End and weep.

The education system is based on rewarding those who remember best. Most internal and all external assessment(HSC) is framed to discern those who can remember from those who cannot. Rarely does problem solving through the application of 'learned' material get a guernsey. As a result eclecticism and creativity are stifled.
Throw in my observation that there has been a decrease in the 'currency' of knowledge as the rate of social dysfunction has increased.
More and more children are coming from the lower socioeconomic stratum relative to the more fortunately placed, with a greater number of these children , as each year progresses, having to cope with family dysfunction of one type or another.
A parent or parents under pressure are sending their children to school undernourished, uncivilised and unprepared for the structure and application required in most school settings.

Ho Hum

Only those who have been in the teaching field (at the front-line) for sometime would understand what Darron C is writing about.

I was born in England in 1942, and grew up on Tyneside (North East) in a poor fatherless family. My experience in school education was very different from, and much more positive than, the author's. I went to a small grammar school at age 11, then won a scholarship to London University in 1961. I've generally been regarded as innovative and not class-bound, rather than being socially conditioned at school. I don't share her assessment of UK education in that period.

So far the so called revolution seems to not exist and what we have seen is revolting. That's a revolution isn't it? The peasants are revolting!