Kevin Donnelly: Five decades of woke fads that crashed our kids’ NAPLAN results

For the last 50 years teachers have been told to forget rote learning and memorisation, teaching times tables and teaching standard English, writes Kevin Donnelly.

Given the latest NAPLAN results it is obvious our educational standards are a national disgrace, putting over a million students at risk. Despite the additional billions of dollars invested and countless years of innovations and fads about 30 per cent of students underperform.

Worse still, there’s nothing new in the latest abysmal results.

In 2004 in Why Our Schools Are Failing I wrote, “The 1996 national literacy tests showed that approximately 27 per cent of year 3 students and 30 per cent of year 5 primary school children were illiterate”.

Numeracy results were just as bad. Additional evidence of how dumbed down and substandard Australia’s education system includes students falling backwards in international tests including PIRLS, PISA and TIMSS.

As to why the nation’s educational standards are third world look no further than bodies like the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, the Australian Education Union, the Australian Council for Educational Research and the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

The latest NAPLAN results show NSW children are falling behind.

Since the early 1970s these professional bodies have promoted experimental fads like whole language, inquiry-based and process learning, teachers as guides by the side and student-centred learning.

For over the last 50 years teachers have been told to forget rote learning and memorisation, teaching times tables and teaching standard English including grammar, spelling and punctuation. Teachers were also told to be facilitators and prioritise student choice, voice and agency.

The Australian Education Union has long argued the academic curriculum is a tool used by the capitalist ruling class to reinforce its dominance over the poor and dispossessed. The teacher union also has consistently argued if governments invest additional $billions results will improve.

Then-NSW English Teachers Association president associate Professor Wayne Sawyer once questioned whether young people were taught proper thinking skills after a Coalition victory.

The Australian Association for the Teachers of English, instead of championing a more explicit approach to teaching reading based on phonics and phonemic awareness, has prioritised whole language and look and guess based on the mistaken belief reading is as natural as learning to talk.

The subject association, based on the work of the South American Marxist Paulo Freire, since the 1970s has promoted critical literacy where the purpose of English as a subject is to turn students into new-age, cultural-left acolytes.

It should not surprise after John Howard won the 2004 election the then editor of the AATE’s journal English in Australia, Wayne Sawyer, argued English teachers had failed to teach critical literacy because too many young people had apparently voted for a conservative government.

Even worse when explaining Australia’s descent into educational mediocrity are the actions of the peak professional body representing teacher academics and subject experts, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association.

In 1998 ACSA co-published Going Public.

The editors described the book as “unashamedly partisan” and committed to championing “social democratic values that lie at the heart of progressive aspirations about public education”.

One chapter describes The Australian newspaper’s criticisms of progressive, new-age education as “setting a tenor of alarmist and negative reporting”. Reporting falling literacy standards is described as a “manufactured crisis” designed to enforce the power of “dominant cultural groups”.

In the concluding chapter the authors argue those criticising falling standards and the destructive impact of cultural-left ideology on subjects like English are responsible for “a wave of reactionary policy development which has fanned deep-seated prejudices, hatreds and fears” underlying society.

Such were the concerns about the mounting public fears about falling standards in August 2006 ACSA organised a major national forum involving “key curriculum decision makers and stakeholders” to address what was described as “a conservative backlash in the media” abetted by a conservative government.

Not unexpectedly, the key educrats and subject experts involved in the forum failed to take any responsibility for the untested and unproven approach to the curriculum that had condemned generations of students to a substandard education system guaranteed to promote failure.

Even worse, instead of being held responsible many of those at the vanguard of Australia’s descent into educational failure have been promoted based on the Peter principal – a situation where people advance to the least level of competence.

Even though the latest NAPLAN results are cause for angst, there is also much to be positive about. The NSW government has moved to ban mobile phones during the school day and, belatedly, to recommend schools adopt a more teacher directed, explicit approach to teaching literacy and numeracy.

In Victoria, the CEO of Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools, Ed Simons, is also advocating explicit teaching and a phonics and phonemic approach to the early years of schooling. University education faculties have finally realised that fads like whole language are ineffective.

The increasing numbers of parents and teachers around Australia establishing community-based schools committed to an academically rigorous curriculum based on great literature and sound classroom practice is also cause for optimism.

Dr Kevin Donnelly taught for 18 years and is a senior fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute.