Teaching degrees earn a big fail

After decades of declining academic standards in schools, including the inability of one in three students to meet basic literacy standards in NAPLAN testing, the indoctrination of trainee teachers in wokeness and political activism is profoundly disturbing. In the interests of genuine social justice – not faux theories of identity politics and green-left waffle being pushed through most of the education system – strong intervention by government to reverse the trend is essential.

The problems are crystal clear from the long-running literacy wars, history wars and the fall-off in senior students enrolling in advanced maths and hard science subjects. Yet, for all that, only 10 weeks of four-year teaching degrees are dedicated to teaching literacy and numeracy, the first national audit of education degrees has revealed.

Bella d’Abrera, director of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Foundations of Western Civilisation Program, analysed 3713 teaching subjects in education degrees offered by 37 Australian universities. Only one in 10 subjects related to teaching children how to read, write and learn maths.

The economic and social cost to young people leaving schools without basic skills and a good knowledge of other subjects such as science and history is deeply unfair. And the economic cost of a lack of workers with science, technology, engineering and maths qualifications is dire.

Setting students up for life on Struggle Street, including disadvantaged Indigenous students, does not appear to worry highly paid academics in charge of teacher training, however. The University of Canberra, for instance, education editor Natasha Bita wrote in Wednesday’s paper, offers a unit in Indigenous education that criticises anthropocentrism for prompting “individualism, economic prosperity and global competitiveness”. Monash University encourages students to “engage with Indigenous and black scholarship that envisions the abolition and replacement of existing models and practices of settler colonial education”.

For teaching graduates and the children and teenagers they will teach, dubious social justice theory is no substitute for knowledge, skills and rational thinking. As we have argued before, a few institutions and savvy parents do much to inoculate youngsters against the problems.

But disadvantaged students are the most vulnerable. They, and trainee teachers, deserve better.