A positive failure: Soft ideology replaces school of hard knocks

An OECD report has revealed 20 per cent of Australian students have reading levels ‘too low to enable them to participate effectively and productively in life’. Picture: Supplied

If you are the parent of a young child, you had better get used to pedagogical gobbledygook. As The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, the NSW Department of Education has instructed teachers to begin each school report with a “positive comment”, irrespective of student performance.

Furthermore, the guidelines specify that teachers should “refrain from discussing student behaviour” unless it relates directly to performance. This will make for interesting and creative reports. For example: “Unfortunately the police motor squad seized the chassis that Kevin assured us his cousin had acquired legitimately, but there is no doubting his ability in metalwork”. Or “For once Shiraz was way ahead of the class, and there is nothing more we can teach her in Family Planning”. Or “Yusuf’s impressive knowledge of weights and measures has been put to extra-curricular use this semester”.

Heaven forbid we upset students or tell parents their offspring are not the little poppets they imagine them to be. Welcome to the Australian education system. According to the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as of 2018, 20 per cent of Australian students have reading levels “too low to enable them to participate effectively and productively in life”. That is an eight per cent increase since 2003. As this masthead noted last week, nearly a quarter of our students will at this rate fall into that category by 2030. There is also the issue of universities enrolling people ill-equipped to work in the classroom. Around half of students who study teaching fail to complete their course.

Teachers should not be blamed over slipping education standards.

The news that policy wonks in the education department discourage frank feedback is not surprising to anyone who has attended a parent/teacher night in the last decade. It was not so long ago I emerged from one of these sessions wondering why I had wasted my time trying to decipher this feel-good gibberish. It was a far cry from 1980 when an angry high school teacher told my poor father “There are times when I feel like killing your son”.

The problem does not lie entirely with bureaucrats. Step forward the teachers’ unions which are more concerned with ideology than education. Witness for example the Australian Education Union, which last year called for “Trauma-informed anti-racism training … to give teachers the confidence to have effective conversations”.

To be clear, I do not blame teachers for the state of our education system. More than once I have seen comments from teachers in response to this column lamenting that they are unable to tell students inconvenient truths because the hierarchy refuses to support them. As for parents who attribute their children’s poor literacy solely to lax teachers, I wonder how many of them bothered to read to their kids when they were infants.

Like good fruit, the rot does not set in overnight. In 1974, the NSW Department of Education published a syllabus document which asserted that “training in formal grammar does not improve pupils’ written expression.” Instead, the review concluded, “it could even hinder it”. That report, incidentally, was published when Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was two years old. He is one of the many Australian leaders presumably taught according to the revised curricula. Just over a month ago he began a press conference by saying “Thanks very much for joining the Attorney-General and I to go through a number of significant announcements”. Needless to say, improving grammar was not one of them.

When did the use of ‘me’ become verboten? And while we are on the subject of object, what is this bureaucratic and pretentious obsession with substituting ‘myself’ for ‘me’? The former should be used only when subject and object are the same (‘I nominated myself’) or as an intensifier (‘I myself would not do that’).

Like teachers, journalists have succumbed to this grammatical malaise. Subject/verb agreement is seemingly optional these days. As SBS reported in 2019 regarding the then prime minister: “Neither Mr Morrison, nor his Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, were present as the Uluru tourist climb was closed for good.” Were? Try ‘was’.

The overreliance on a thesaurus is responsible for many a misapplied word. When Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall attended the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony at the Gold Coast in 2018, news.com.au reported that she appeared “disinterested”. Presumably the authors thought the duchess was officiating as a judge. Likewise, The Age, when covering bullying allegations made against the Victorian Premier this year, reported that Minister for Women Gabrielle Williams had “refuted” these claims. No, she only denied them.

Look through any newspaper and you will recognise redundant words. As an Age editorial recently speculated, a “binary choice between being in Beijing’s camp or Washington’s may now be too simplistic”. If a proposition is too simple it is simplistic. Similarly, the meaning of ‘comprise’ is ‘composed of’, hence one should avoid using the phrase ‘comprise of’. And how many times have you read that an important event occurred, for example, at 10am in the morning?

The expression ‘begging the question’ refers to the logical fallacy of circular reasoning, yet for many journalists it has become a substitute for ‘raising the question’. During the election campaign in 2016 the Sydney Morning Herald observed favourably that “the speeches by [Malcolm] Turnbull and [Bill] Shorten were remarkable for the lack of rancour”. Lack? To quote the title of an old film, that is absence of malice.

Ask anyone under 60 to parse a sentence and they will look at you with bewilderment. It is hardly their fault given they have not been properly taught the definition of nouns, verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. But thanks to the lunacy of gender affirmation, students can now recognise pronouns.