Peta Credlin: Major flaws in Australia’s education system

Schools are full of politically correct fiction masquerading as fact but ministers are too timid to do anything about it, writes Peta Credlin.

Despite nearly $60 billion of your money spent on them every year, our students’ academic performance against their peers from other countries has been plummeting for years based on standardised tests.  

As well, the marks required to enter teaching degrees are way lower than the marks required to enter almost all other professional degrees.

Then there’s the politically correct insistence, brought in by Julia Gillard when education Minister, that every single subject, from French to physics to PE, be taught from an Indigenous, Asian or sustainability perspective – under the national curriculum – which shows what the educational establishment really thinks about our Judaeo-Christian ethic and the way our country has developed.

Policies developed by Julia Gillard when she was Education Minister have had a negative impact.

And despite being exposed this week as largely fabricated, Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu looks likely to remain a fixture in classrooms and school libraries across the country.

Liberal and National NSW MPs last week voted down Mark Latham’s bill to remove it from schools, even though a new academic study says that it’s “poorly researched”, “distorts and exaggerates many old sources”, “contains a large number of factual errors”, and “selects evidence to suit the author’s opinions and ignores large bodies of information that do not”.

How is it that our schools are full of politically correct fiction masquerading as fact even after a decade of supposedly conservative government in NSW and eight years in Canberra? Essentially ministers are too timid or too ignorant to do their job.

So here’s something that should give some power back to parents and grandparents and won’t cost the taxpayer anything. Let’s mandate that every school publish on its website all its reading lists plus course materials too.

It’s all documented anyway, so why shouldn’t we be able to see it?

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