Alan Jones: We are crushing our kids’ lives under educational terrorism
Much has been said about the effect of COVID-19 on the elderly, but the young are also at a great disadvantage as their lives, schooling and even sport are held back, writes Alan Jones.
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I often wonder, do parents understand the abject betrayal of their children that is taking place in schools under the guise of education?
Never has this been more apparent than in the unscientific response to coronavirus. On that, may I just say that in October 2019, the WHO issued an “advice on pandemic and epidemic, October 2019.”
It said, in tabulated form, “Not recommended in any circumstances”, and then listed, “Contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, border closure.”
Our governments’ responses to coronavirus have included all of the above. Work that out.
Our nation’s children were locked out of their schooling and, in Victoria, it is still the case.
Generally speaking, the children of Australia were already at a pronounced disadvantage because teaching systems and curricula have been stood on their head. Parents could apply a test. Ask their children a couple of simple questions on Australian history and geography.
Do they know where Mackay is?
What river is it on?
Who were Burke and Wills?
How did the early explorers get over the Blue Mountains?
Could they recite one verse of poetry?
Or don’t these things matter? If the don’t, surely the term ‘education’ has lost its meaning.
It is worse than this. There is no commitment to spelling, punctuation or syntax. Indeed, forget the children, many teachers would not be able to define “syntax”.
But if our children do not know how the language works and are not taught in a way which cultivates a thirst for knowledge and a curiosity about the world around them, what is being taught?
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Last year, the Federal Shadow Education Minister, Tanya Plibersek, argued that entry to teaching degrees should be restricted to the top 30% of final year students. Mark Latham, the One Nation leader in NSW who makes more sense on education than any politician in the country, argued similarly last week.
Well, what does that mean?
Firstly, it draws attention to what currently exists as the cut off point for entry into a teaching degree. The figures are staggering.
The ATAR is the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. It is a complicated formula based on relativities between students sitting for the HSC or final year equivalent. No one is afforded a rank of 100. But thousands upon thousands would be in the 90s.
Yet, the cut-off point for entering a teaching degree gives rise to the concern that the teachers themselves need teaching: Canberra University, 51; Newcastle, 58; Charles Sturt, 58; La Trobe, 60; Griffith, 62.4; Wollongong, 64; Catholic University, 66.
These are not academic highflyers.
Is it any wonder, last year, we failed for the first time to exceed the OECD average in maths and, according to PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, our results in reading, maths and science declined. In fact, we are not in the top 20 in the world.
Yet 8.5% of the Federal Budget is directed towards education and the government boasts that it will grow its spending on education in the 10 years to 2027 to $243.5 billion; and another $9.9 billion per year, adjusted for inflation, to higher education.
Can anyone seriously suggest we are getting value for our money?
Parents know one of the outward manifestations of this, impinging on every family, is the scourge of homework.
Increasingly, it is the case that children, at the ridiculous age of 13 and 14, are being burdened with hours of homework. It is beyond the child, let alone an adult, to comprehend how this could be managed.
The subsequent mental trauma cannot be underestimated with corresponding dislocation to families. The tension that this creates within families is modern day educational terrorism.
True education is not something that can be pigeon-holed between 9am and 3pm. The education of a child is a continuous process.
But by piling on homework, the child is denied the educational benefit of listening to music, talking to parents, reading a book of their choice, doing nothing more than star-gazing, watching the sunset. These are avenues where the curiosity of the child is extended and rewarded.
Which brings us, of course, to the latest attack on the emotional wellbeing of schoolchildren, especially in NSW.
Their education has already been significantly compromised by the dictatorial responses by state leaders to keep children away from school.
There is no epidemiological justification for this and, indeed, leading infectious disease epidemiologists like Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, formerly of Mainz University, Germany, has argued, “All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.”
One of the releases for children from the tedium of the classroom is sport. Yet, in one of the most wilfully arbitrary decisions, the Berejiklian government last week cancelled inter-school sport, in a decision full of typical coronavirus contradictions.
As I write, a school like Asquith Boys’ High School in Sydney’s northwest, as reported by Jack Morphet for News Limited, is free to play schools as far as 35 kilometres away; but St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, cannot play St Ignatius College, 5 kilometres away.
At the same time, we have government leaders from, Berejiklian down, prattling on about mental health and youth suicide, prospering the argument that we need more school counsellors. This is addressing the symptom, not the disease.
If young people are studying for an HSC or their final year equivalent and are prevented from going to school, in a decision with no scientific justification; and even being prevented through border closures from returning home from boarding school; and then, they are being “taught”, to use the word loosely, by people who have graduated with a teaching degree, who themselves are not in the upper levels of academia; and then face daily piles of homework; and then the release from all that, for many, via sport is denied; what teenager would not believe the fortunes of life are stacked against him/her.
Political leaders will tell us that this is modern education. It is nothing of the kind. It is a rank abuse of the concept and a total betrayal of the ambition and ability of thousands of young Australians.
Politicians will not be forgiven for this behaviour.
As a headline in The Australian newspaper said at the weekend re coronavirus and education, “We are saving old lives but ruining young ones.”