READING, maths and science are at risk of being over-emphasised under the Gillard government’s drive to lift education standards, the primary school principals association has warned.
In their submission to the House of Representatives inquiry into the Australian Education Bill, the principals also question whether the three core subjects will be considered important by the international community in 12 years’ time.
…
APPA says the OECD group of industrialised nations is already asking what students should learn in the 21st century, and points to a recent blog discussion proposing “a much broader knowledge base; skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration; character-related traits in both moral and performance domains; and a meta-layer of learning”.
This is why throwing money at education fails. It is the attitude of educationalists that is the problem. Can’t have the children spending too much time reading, it just gets in the way of the meta-learning and knowledge co-creation.
(HT: Steve of Ferny Hills)
All the fluffy stuff that allows dumb teachers to keep their jobs, in other words.
C.L.
19 Feb 13 at 1:17 pm
Fair comment, too!
Look at Wayne Swan. According to Juliar Gillard, John McTernan and numerous similarly respected Greek economists, he’s the “World’s Best Treasurer” and couldn’t add up to save himself.
The Australian LABOR Party.
It doesn’t need “U”!
Up The Workers!
19 Feb 13 at 1:23 pm
How many people have a kiln at home and make their own pots, and crap? Almost no one, so why the bloody hell did I learn that at school?
Harold
19 Feb 13 at 1:24 pm
A dumber population, incapable of arithmetic, science or even logical thinking, so they can’t hold a future Labour government (horrid thought, John!) to account, maybe?
JohnA
19 Feb 13 at 1:24 pm
They do this then wonder why kids are graduating highschool being unable to read, right, understand science or understand basic logical reasoning.
Then again, teaching a child to read, do mathematics and think logically usually results in them not voting for a left wing party. Can’t have that can we?
MattR
19 Feb 13 at 1:24 pm
“the principals also question whether the three core subjects will be considered important by the international community in 12 years’ time.”
That reading thing is so passé now we can fit computers in our pockets. We’ll just have Siri tell us what the squiggles mean. And a calculator is a built-in app, who needs maths? As for science, it’s not like our entire civilisation depends on it or anything.
Jarrah
19 Feb 13 at 1:25 pm
What exactly is a ‘meta-layer of learning’?
Can you meta-layer reading, writing and maths?
Ellen of Tasmania
19 Feb 13 at 1:26 pm
“a much broader knowledge base; skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration; character-related traits in both moral and performance domains; and a meta-layer of learning”…funny, I would have htought that’s exactly what wide-rangning reading provides, but what would I know?
Anthony
19 Feb 13 at 1:27 pm
Sounds LIKE a future Labor government.
Andore Jr
19 Feb 13 at 1:27 pm
We demand you judge us by that which cannot be measured.
Jarrod
19 Feb 13 at 1:28 pm
How can students engage in “creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration” without being literate, numerate and thus disciplined thinkers? Honestly!
dover_beach
19 Feb 13 at 1:31 pm
as with Aldi cheeses, leftist elites are concerned that the plebs might get too much of a good thing for far too little.
JamesK
19 Feb 13 at 1:33 pm
Ok, the government wants a circuit breaker, here is one on a plate.
Sack him, disband that group and loudly proclaim “Reading writing and arithmetic will always be the core of an industrial society”.
Get whatever fool is running the education portfolio to be aggressive on this.
thefrollickingmole
19 Feb 13 at 1:36 pm
I can tell those principals now, Students actually would much rather a focus on the fundamental subjects rather than all of this ‘creative’ fluff.
Andrew
19 Feb 13 at 1:38 pm
But when they say reading, that isn’t English, that’s, well, reading! So we’re talking about kids in the under 10 range, who will be learning fairly elementary mathematics.
It won’t look too good when they fail their critical thinking class because they didn’t have the perquisite ability to multiply numbers, understand percentages etc.
Harold
19 Feb 13 at 1:41 pm
prerequisite (cat could do with an instant edit)
Harold
19 Feb 13 at 1:42 pm
Or, Harold could read what he’s written before pressing the submit button.
Joe
19 Feb 13 at 2:16 pm
READING, maths and science are at risk of being over-emphasised
Adam Diver
19 Feb 13 at 2:57 pm
Sorry?
Maws
19 Feb 13 at 3:07 pm
It’s possible to “over-academicise” and the field of education is the prime example.
Learning how best to teach is really not so hard that it justifies the amount of study of it. It’s also something we’ve done for centuries. But the education researcher believes there are many brilliant, new, as yet undiscovered, methods.
Result: too many new ideas (fads, even) that too often make it from academia to the classroom… until they fail. Yet they can’t conceive the possibility of them failing… “failure is not an option and we will not fail!” But, as expected, failure is not acknowledged… “it just needed more funding is all!”
Mick H
19 Feb 13 at 3:14 pm
When I did VCE we had English A and English B (lit).
What is there now?
Harold
19 Feb 13 at 3:17 pm
Home school your kids if ytou have the means to do so people… use the school system only as a last resort.
Fleeced
19 Feb 13 at 3:29 pm
Home schooling on steroids. A bunch of parents home school the group of kids. One parent might give 1-2 days a week. Can still hold a job.
Harold
19 Feb 13 at 3:33 pm
You must do either Literature or English. There are some foundation levels which are for a very small minority. You can do both Literature and English as well. I did English (Might I add that I scored top 2% in the state). There are 3 sections involved in the course.
Section A: Reading & Responding/Text Response
Section B: Language Analysis/Using Language to Persuade
Section C: Creating & Presenting
Many in the year level, who did what I did, do not know the difference between ‘their’, ‘there’ and ‘they’re’.
Andrew
19 Feb 13 at 3:46 pm
Write, proof of my spelling
Adam Diver
19 Feb 13 at 4:28 pm
I’m not sure how you can study ‘reading’, maths and science without employing ‘creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration’.
I must copy out 100 times: “I lack character-related traits in both moral and performance domains; and a meta-layer of learning”.
Dr Faustus
19 Feb 13 at 4:30 pm
Not to defend the Education lobby, but a big reason why the western education system is so prized is because it encourages more than just rote learning. The Chinese system for instance is brutal in pushing reading, maths and science, yet I’d rate the long term ‘benefit’ to the individual and economy/society much higher for the average Australian educated student against the average Chinese educated student.
The education system needs major reform, it needs an embrace of digital and new forms of learning, and ways to reduce overall costs. But simply insisting on more testing of core units, just as insisting on more money, won’t solve the larger problems.
Andrew
19 Feb 13 at 5:06 pm
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
cohenite
19 Feb 13 at 5:13 pm
Andrew I’m going back 20 years and that is close to what I remember. There was book review (themes, analysis, “Why did Nurse Ratched lobotomise Jack”), creative writing (tell a story), and technical writing.
Harold
19 Feb 13 at 5:16 pm
Fucking teachers.
I was at a ‘gathering’ which included some teachers and I quoted Peacock’s elegant aphorism:
And the dumb bastards analysed it like pulling the wings off a butterfly.
cohenite
19 Feb 13 at 5:18 pm
A great counter point podcast this week. With John FlemingHead of Berwick Campus at Haileybury College, on Explicit Instruction.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/explicit-instruction/4521294
Vanstone is doing a great job I think.
simon
19 Feb 13 at 5:18 pm
Meta-reading is where the average person doesn’t have to read – it is interpreted through a member of the elite hence meta-reading.
So writing – which was considered one of the greatest inventions of history – will be redundant in 12 years?
Once we get one with the earth and embrace an Indigenous culture there will be no need for reading, writing or arithmetic. We will be living in harmony with the earth and oral traditions will preserve our culture.
That’s not my idea of a future.
Samuel J
19 Feb 13 at 5:48 pm
Kevin wrote that bit…
Forester
19 Feb 13 at 6:06 pm
These “educators” are no better than creationists and other anti-science cranks. Of course they would recoil at the association, but it’s true. If you are going to say that these disciplines are less important, you are opening the door to conspiracy theorists and other people who prey on ignorance.
Fisky
19 Feb 13 at 6:10 pm
But Flannery thinks it’s a great idea: a super organism
Now that’s meta!
cohenite
19 Feb 13 at 6:12 pm
It seems that reading really is undervalued, presumably including by the people here. Out of curiosity, I wondered what they had actually said. And here is there number 1 point, in context:
“1. This goal privileges reading, mathematics and science over other subjects that many Australians would argue are equally important. That said, APPA has acted in the knowledge that reading is the cornerstone of literacy by making it the focus of our very successful Principals As Literacy Leaders (PALL) Project. Even so, to focus national attention on reading in this way masks the significant role listening, speaking and writing play in ensuring Australian children become literate.”
Seems reasonable to me. You need to learn to write as well as read (indeed writing helps reading), and verbal skills are also important in early reading.
Then point 2 says:”This goal risks narrowing the Australian Curriculum by overemphasising the importance of three subjects and undervaluing the creative aspects of the primary school curriculum. It may also encourage teachers to place more attention than they otherwise might on those aspects of reading, mathematics and science that are more readily assessed.”
That last sentence seems reasonable to me. Maths isn’t so straightforward to learn. If you just teach symbolic maths specifically, you won’t learn things like quantitative approximation, which is one of the key early skills you need for numeracy (look it up if you don’t believe me).
“3.This goal will focus Australia’s attention on aspects of curriculum which may well not be viewed as important by international testing authorities in 2025. Already the OECD is asking, “What should students learn in the 21st Century?” In response, Charles Fadel, writing on the blog oecd education today proposes a much broader knowledge base; skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration; character related traits in both moral and performance domains; and, a meta-layer of learning.”
A bit like waffle for my liking, but the idea that you need to win on OECD charts over everything else seems reasonable.
conrad
19 Feb 13 at 6:36 pm
I did look it up and I don’t believe you; perhaps you can elaborate?
cohenite
19 Feb 13 at 7:02 pm
Rohan
19 Feb 13 at 7:54 pm
Reply to Samuel J
Meta-reading is where the average person doesn’t have to read – it is interpreted through a member of the elite hence meta-reading.
A bit like the Dark Ages where the priests held all knowledge safe from the masses.
old44
19 Feb 13 at 9:46 pm
Arithmetic is crucial for life, as is Mathematics for Science or Engineering or Logic.
face ache
20 Feb 13 at 7:53 am
And they wonder why the status of teaching is in decline.
kurt
20 Feb 13 at 8:08 am
“I did look it up and I don’t believe you; perhaps you can elaborate?”
Sure, go and look and the writings of Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard or Stanislas Dehaene at the CNRS in PAris. They are the two word experts on it. It’s not like I’m saying anything new or controversial. But perhaps you can propose a different theory.
conrad
20 Feb 13 at 9:30 am
old44, erroneous analogy. It is rather like your knowledge of the ‘Dark Ages’, where you, in this instance, don’t have to be familiar with the historical period, it is interpreted for you by a member of an elite, here polemical historians and non-historians, most of whom are long-dead.
dover_beach
20 Feb 13 at 10:13 am
Dover,
What was that Dark Ages book you recommended?
I already got that history of the church one so I hope you’re not copping a fee without some kickbacks to me…
.
20 Feb 13 at 10:40 am
I wish, dot! Just think of your kickback being my nudging you ever closer to the beatific vision.
On the book, I can’t recall. Was it this?
dover_beach
20 Feb 13 at 12:58 pm