Mark Latham: Education fads are failing our children
DAFFY trends that celebrate poor performance are cheating young people out of a rigorous education, writes Mark Latham.
Opinion
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Welcome to Failure Week. That’s how Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School in Melbourne greeted its students last week.
Just when you thought Australia’s education system couldn’t get any wackier, another piece of PC nonsense has created a new low in standards and teaching philosophy.
According to the school’s Facebook page, six days ago it celebrated “Tolerate Wednesday”, which was “all about acceptance and tolerance of failure”.
Yippee. How the nation’s taxpayers must be rejoicing at this educational breakthrough — knowing we are paying good money to show children how to flunk out.
In special workshops, Ivanhoe’s “senior students started to learn challenging new skills, including abstract painting, juggling, cryptic crosswords, origami and dance”.
If they are relying on juggling and origami to find good jobs later in life, these kids will need to be very accepting of failure.
On what the school called “Strive Tuesday”, the students “tried challenging new activities, including abstract drawing where they weren’t allowed to look at the paper and trying to run faster than Cathy Freeman”.
I’m striving to understand what any of this has to do with maths, science and English.
Undoubtedly, by the end of the week, every student received a prize, in recognition of how well they failed.
This is an apt parable for the entire education system.
Ivanhoe has simply formalised what we already know: Australian schools are failing our children. In international academic rankings, we have fallen below Borat’s Kazakhstan.
NAPLAN results are either stagnant or, in the case of writing skills, falling apart faster than a senator’s citizenship eligibility.
Fashionable, ill-thought-out teaching programs — such as radical gender theory and project-based learning — have turned our classrooms into laboratories, not for scientific inquiry, but political indoctrination.
As a nation, we are bound to pay a heavy price for this deficiency.
Students who deserve the very best opportunities in life have had to settle for second-rate teachers working off a second-rate curriculum.
Second-rate results have inevitably followed.
Perhaps Failure Week was named in honour of the maths teacher at Coonamble High in Western NSW, who last month was found to be teaching his Year 12 HSC students the wrong course.
Amid this madness, where are the voices of sanity to save our children?
One of them is Peter Crawford.
He’s a former state Labor MP who, after he lost his seat of Balmain in 1988, returned to teaching.
Crawford has seen both sides of the education debate: as a legislator and as a hands-on practitioner, having worked as an English teacher in NSW government high schools for 25 years.
He’s the kind of hard-headed realist we need in these troubled times. His starting point is classroom discipline.
“You can throw all the Gonski money under the sun at schools but it makes no difference unless teachers have got control of their classrooms,” he told me yesterday. “Australian schools are now effectively segregated on the basis of class, race, religion and economic affluence — hence the problem of residualisation.
“In many state comprehensive schools, discipline is out of control, making classrooms unworkable.
“One has to experience teaching in one of these schools to realise the extent of this horrible problem.
“Another elephant in the room is that discipline often relates to the ethnicity of the student population in a given school.”
Crawford believes these behavioural issues are so acute Australia is at risk of churning out a generation of illiterates. He points to two solutions — an increased emphasis on vocational training from Year 8 onwards, and placing the hardcore troublemakers in special schools.
Unless solid, aspirational students can work free from classroom distractions, Australia has no chance of reversing its slide down the international league table.
Crawford’s other great passion is for curriculum rigour.
“Syllabuses are far too complex and often inappropriate,” he says.
“At school level, political correctness is central to teaching directions.
“While there is great emphasis on indigenous issues, anti-racism and gender equity, there seems to be minimal teaching of essential facts about Australian and British history.”
Crawford identifies the turn-of-the-century as the point when senior English became “post-modernised”.
“Since then the course has become infected with politically correct texts, such as Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, reducing it to (an) exercise in cultural studies,” he said. “Now it is proposed to introduce multiple choice exam papers and restrict essay responses to a mere 800 words.”
In junior English, the syllabus has become more complicated yet also more vacuous.
“When I returned to teaching in 1988, pupils in a good junior high school year could cover about eight novels, 10 poems and several plays,” Crawford recalls.
“When I left in 2010, we were down to about two novels and half-a-dozen poems per year. “Over time, film studies, animation and media material have replaced the basics.
“Teaching of English should be redirected towards simple literacy, clear expression, word meanings and a selection of easy-to-comprehend novels and poems.”
Crawford is not just an education expert. He’s also a legend of the inner-Sydney Labor Left, having worked with Peter Baldwin and John Faulkner in the 1970s to take control of local ALP branches from the old, moribund right-wing machine.
When someone of his political pedigree wants to remove Leftist teaching fads from our classrooms, then it’s time to act.
Crawford’s ideas are needed to stop Failure Week in Australian schools from becoming Failure-All-Year-Round.
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