The school run
The national curriculum, like so much else in the way we run schools, is a Labor project that has failed to deliver what it promised. By Nick Cater.
What do you get if you put eight Labor education ministers together in a room? You get a National Curriculum and a burst of hot air. In November 2008, Labor was in power in Canberra, and in seven states and territories, when the ministerial council issued the Melbourne Declaration of Educational Goals for Your Australians, a document that provides the fragile intellectual underpinnings for the curriculum that is currently being reviewed.
The partisan origins of the curriculum, together with the perfidious character of intergovernmental bureaucracies and the folly of central planning, explain how this exercise came unstuck. It also explains the dilemma it presents to a Liberal education minister, since the national curriculum, like so much else in the way we run our schools, is a Labor project that failed to deliver what it promised.
The 2007 PISA rankings released on the eve of that fateful COAG conclave showed that the performance of Australian schools was stagnating. We were still in the top 10 OECD nations but there was room for improvement. Kevin Rudd’s so-called education revolution was in its early stages. His government had promised to spend $1.5bn on laptop computers, “the toolboxes of the 21st century”, and more money was to be dedicated to maths and science. Above it all would stand the National Curriculum, which the Melbourne Declaration declared would help make Australia “second to none amongst the world’s best school systems”.
Today, Australia is second-best to 15 OECD jurisdictions: China, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Sweden, New Zealand, the US, the UK and Japan. The National Curriculum has not only failed to lift educational standards, it has actually made them worse, and viewed from anywhere other than government would be declared a failure.
Julia Gillard assured us in 2008 that the National Curriculum was not Labor’s curriculum. “This is a curriculum being drawn up by experts,” she said. “It’s published framing papers to widespread applause across the educational community.” The nebulous group Gillard describes as the educational community would have included more professional curriculum engineers and pedagogists than working teachers.
Pedagogy, like most branches of the humanities, has taken an ugly turn. Teachers are no longer trained in practical skills, they are immersed in postmodern sludge for four years and indoctrinated with theory. Post-colonial theory, queer theory, gender theory and critical race theory have found fertile ground in pedagogy, framing the classroom not as a place where kids are taught but a frontline in the universal battle between the oppressors and the oppressed.
This dismal worldview permeates almost every paragraph of the revised national curriculum, which prioritises the cause of social justice over competent teaching. The National Curriculum is a symptom of the malaise afflicting education, however, not its cause. In a podcast interview, British sociologist Frank Furedi said it was important to understand that the curriculum has got nothing to do with the needs of Australian children. “This is the same curriculum that is more or less, with a few different words, produced for Americans, for Canadians and for English students,” he said.
The strong focus on global citizenship was embedded in the Melbourne Declaration and is embedded in the draft review.
“The very idea of being a global citizen is a fantasy concept,” said Furedi. “Global citizenship just simply creates a medium through which young people are encouraged to feel distant from where they come from, the way of separating them from their background.”
The new pedagogy represents a radical departure from the traditional approach to education, which aims to pass on the wisdom and values of the past. The curriculum engineers expressly break with the past, creating what Furedi calls education year zero, where “everything that is good is going to happen from here onwards, everything that is bad is what they used to teach in the old days”.
The curriculum’s lack of attention to the history and meaning of modern Australia is not mere carelessness on the authors’ part, but a deliberate attempt to hide it from children lest they be drawn into thinking there is anything virtuous in our liberal heritage. The previously essential virtues of courage, responsibility and duty have been brushed aside in favour of a philistine morality of diversity, inclusion and sustainability.
The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, which costs us $36m a year, has downgraded the profession of teaching and handed more power to subversive educational theoreticians than they ever would have dreamed. Its curriculum has become a superspreader of infected thought that has been fomenting in the darker corners of our universities. Furedi draws attention to what he calls the paradox of education: “The more society invests (in) and expects of education, the less that schools and universities demand of students.”
The duration of bachelor of education courses has lengthened in inverse proportion to educational achievement in schools. The extra money spent on educating children has bought poorer results and, while most students study in smaller classes than those of previous generations, they are apparently learning less.
Listen to a podcast of Nick Cater’s interview with Frank Furedi: The Curriculum Engineers
