Sending young children to childcare institutions, forcing child-like simple finger painting doesn't necessarily give children increased skills if children use such lessons as competition between children as child carers and teachers may have been told to encourage. Young children seeking approval from adults only to have some bully child laugh at what was said to be good work by a childcare giver, confuses emotional judgements. Better that children were not encouraged to find stimulation from judgements and to merely take in the environment, avoid poking themselves in the eye with a pencil. As teenagers should avoid doing anything seen on the “Science Of Stupid”.
If too younger children feel punished for attempting to learn, that such environment behaviour continues, children will on sensing they may be learning something, quickly stop taking any notice, keeping themselves dumb, trapping themselves in a state of child-like “keep everything simple” intelligence.

Politicians wanting to encourage child early learning, are sabotaging children's future continued depth of intelligence, creating a robot/zombie workforce, obedient to political (repressive at times) authority. If future computerised driving vehicles technology works, truck driving employment will fall, that as many employment opportunities are transporting goods, increasing percentage rate of workers with falling work force IQ intelligence, resulting in dumber workers, dumber work force can't easily complain about fewer employment opportunities. The dumber a population are the fewer capable complainers there will be, the less free speech representation separate from controlled media will exist.

steve101

The answer to bullying is simple. Bullying exists where bullying is tolerated. Attempts at indoctrination, education etc have little evidence of efficacy unless the carrot is accompanied with a stick, which is why the safe schools program was such a farce.

The school I sent my son to had a no tolerance of bullying policy, along with education with respect to their rights, bullies were subjected to a policy policy. For physical bullying, the first time the bully was suspended and the parents read the riot act. The second time a longer suspension, and the third time expulsion. In severe cases expulsion could be immediate and the police involved. The result was that it very seldom went past stage one, and bullying was nearly non existent.

Verbal bullying was treated in a similar manner, but escalating less quickly. In my son's time there was at least one boy told not to bother to return the next semester.

Dear Shadow Minister,

You were very fortunate in your choice of school.

Initially our two boys also were sent to an exclusive
private Catholic School, very well known in Melbourne.
We had them booked in from birth because we firmly
believed in the Jesuit upbringing. I won't go into
the details of what we discovered after a few years,
needless to say we ended up taking them out of that
school - and both boys were far happier for it. Both
ended up graduating from university and are very happy
in their career choices. Both are great human beings.
I am very proud of them both - no thanks to their
earlier school.

Returning to childcare:

I seen a short television news story on changes to government financed childcare, not staring Malcolm Turnbull. A scene showing aged 3 to 4 years, roughly ten children wearing colourful clothing, sitting around a table, seen occupied with coloured boards, a close up scene shows a child placing large coloured cardboard disks with pictures onto same size coloured spots on a large cardboard board. An adult female child carer was seen sitting with the children.

The scene looks ideal picture perfect child-caring.

It only takes one child to get bored, leans over, grabbing a disk off a child to experience how far (s)he can get away with stealing something, that the child carer will tell the child not to take things from other children, good lesson learned. If you believe stealing problems are going to end there, you're delusional.

Young aged children: being stuck in one place for long periods; having been influenced by arguing parents; having been watching hyperactive cartoons; having been watching ball chasing sports; having the enthusiasm of a dog to chase a ball; hyperactive self-medicating from some traumatised event while inside and/or outside of childcare; being bored, will learn often bad habits from any number of hyperactive children... the child carers will in order to maintain control, after first asking children not to do something, second time warning will come with a stern voice and stern look, that bored forgetful children will try to do things child carers are warning children not to do to experience how far a child carer is willing to threaten and/or punish the child, that some children may find punishment like cutting-the-self less boring than being held in a room being constantly asked not to interfere with other children after being warned several times. That many children are witnessing childcare givers bullying attempts, learning from the hopelessness the childcare giver attempts are failing.

The real lesson is that forced to be held in confined spaces: childcare rooms; school classrooms; youth detention centres... punishes human curiosity to reduce youth into doing nothing new boredom. That children being held in childcare centres will eventually become bored by a lack of new experiences, begin to become creative, not merely by stealing another child's stuff, but to experience how far adults will punish children, to even blame other children to witness what child carers will do to other children, to whether child carers will believe the lying child. All of which in honest good learning experiences, children are forced to undergo by placing many children together for too long in one repeated location, doing the same limited experienced tasks.

Over a long term, children are trying to repress: boredom; bullying; mental stress; forced to do same tasks year after year; learning to bare the daily pain and boredom. Children start cutting themselves to merely feel something as complained.

I believe there are people running things from behind the scenes, like generals/boardroom chairmen, passing broad commands down a chain of command, who are paying people to provide: irrelevant; misleading; fake science stories; fear warnings; confidence gaining; political decisions which are often designed to fail and/or fall short of expectations; media's unrealistic entertainment dysfunctional behaviours... that by Google information which to collect information on how to do computer repairs, search pages lead to useless forums. That even when being guided to a computer geek website, information is generally incorrect, not being what was asked and/or Youtube hurried through on hardware difficult to see; websites want to sell courses; going down search engine pages seeing posted date going back 10 years... many people in the entire world would be asking the same questions, that some excuse is, website providers only care to draw people to a website to score a hit so advertising revenue can be collected.
People become frustrated at not finding relevant information as though they were at school. Monthly charging wired to house service providers I would think would desire users to be satisfied with the content of information being searched on the Internet. Yet I believe the generals/boardroom chairmen are satisfied by many providers of public knowledge to that of: political arguing; religions speaking for god confidence tricking; serious media constantly criticising well known people whom I believe intentionally make mistakes to be criticised; the content of technical knowledge depends on the monetary income gatherers can gain from knowledge whether easy, cheap and quick access can be obtained.
Much knowledge can be found: easily; cheaply and quickly... about the solar system and the Milky Way, yet readers can't earn a monetary income unless they teach the same information back to other people for a wage, seemly not going to happen.