<a href="../97/08/ausrefm.txt">REFORM IN AUSTRALIA</a>

To:               The LOOP:;
From:             "James Kilpatrick" <jimmyk@tenet.edu>
Subject:          Fwd. ECC: national curriculum and assessment in Australia
Date sent:        Thu, 30 Oct 1997 18:39:35 -0600

>Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 10:05:26 +1000
>From: Dr Kevin Donnelly <kevind@netspace.net.au>
>Reply-To: kevind@netspace.net.au
>Organization: Education Strategies
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>To: education-consumers@tricon.net
>Subject: national curriculum and assessment in Australia
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>hurricane.netspace.net.au id KAA16130
>Sender: owner-education-consumers@tricon.net
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>
>Hello from Australia!
>
>I joined the Clearinghouse some weeks ago and I have very much enjoyed
>following the debates about American education.  Just about all the
>issues in the US have their counterparts in Australian education;
>whether it is literacy, school choice or fuzzy maths the problems are
>very much the same.
>
>Some years ago Australia experimented with a national curriculum and
>assessment system; similar to what is now happening in the US.  Below ia
>an article which I wrote at the time criticising what was about to
>happen and supporting the various state governments for knocking back
>the national initiative.  Hopefully, you might be able to learn from our
>mistakes.
>
>Best wishes,
>Dr Kevin Donnelly
>
>Louise Watson argues that the reason why the Ministers of the
>conservative states failed to endorse the national curriculum was
>because of a conflict over states’ rights. Watson describes the events
>in Perth as representing “a policy failure that can be traced to
>Australia’s federal system of government” and “the latest triumph of
>parochialism over the national interest”.
>
>While Watson is entitled to her beliefs, it is important to note that
>not all of those who have expressed an opinion on the national
>curriculum agree with her point of view. Dr Alan Barcan, for example, in
>the current edition of News Weekly, describes the decision as “welcome”
>and characterises the national curriculum as representing a “confusion
>in content and standards”. During the months leading up to the Perth
>meeting there was also widespread public comment raising significant
>doubts as to the nature, quality and standard of the curriculum material
>being put forward.
>
>In the areas of science and mathematics, for example, a great deal of
>criticism was directed at the national profiles and statements by
>professional bodies and educationalists. The Australian Institute of
>Physics attacked the science curriculum for containing “serious
>educational mistakes”. Not only had subjects like physics, chemistry and
>biology disappeared to be replaced by the more generalised subject of
>science, but much of the material appeared to be based on the premise
>that education had to be immediately entertaining and accessible.
>
>The Royal Australian Chemical Institute also stated that the national
>curriculum documents were unsound. The institute argued that the
>documents offered an impoverished view of science, that chemistry as a
>subject was not properly dealt with and the statements and profiles
>failed to adequately meet the needs of the “academically able”. The
>institute also pleaded that, in attempting to promote participation, the
>school curricula must not be “diluted to the uniform standard of
>mediocrity”.
>
>The mathematics curriculum was also roundly criticised. Some months
>before the Perth meeting over 200 senior academics across Australia
>signed a petition describing the work in mathematics as a “disaster”.
>The documents were described as “substantially flawed” and incapable of
>properly preparing students for tertiary studies.
>
>Such was the intensity of the criticisms in relation to mathematics and
>science that an editorial in one of Melbourne’s daily newspapers argued,
>in relation to the curriculum material, “Frankly, their credibility is
>shot. Even allowing for what CURASS believes is a certain narrowness and
>conservatism among the ranks of the critics, the weaknesses are so
>manifest that the statements in their present form cannot be allowed to
>proceed”.
>
>The study Studies of Society and the Environment  has also suffered its
>fair share of criticism. Kevin Andrews, the Federal Shadow Minister for
>Schools, Vocational Education and Training, in a speech to the National
>Catholic Education Commission Curriculum Conference, described the
>document as embodying the worst examples of “politically correct
>thinking”. Andrews argued that the profile, in particular, was biased in
>that it emphasised the study of indigenous Australians to the detriment
>of Australia’s mainstream Anglo-Celtic culture. Much of the curriculum
>material also appeared to reflect the Labor Government’s cultural agenda
>with its preoccupation with matters of gender, ethnicity and class.
>
>Within one of the six areas of study that make up the profile, one third
>of the outcomes relate specifically to Aboriginal people and Torres
>Strait Islanders. Andrews described the approach embodied in the
>curriculum document as reflecting “a massive cultural cringe” and
>observed that one looked “throughout these documents in vain for any
>consideration of European History”. Significant is that Bill Hannan, who
>was closely involved in the work of CURASS, has stated that of all those
>who have criticised the national curriculum, it is those with
>“ideological objections” who have a “defensible case” (The Australian
>Education Review, August 7-8).
>
>Whenever criticisms are made of the way in which curriculum has been
>politicised by the left, the reply is that education has always been an
>instrument for social engineering. Academic studies, a belief in
>meritocracy and the ideal that education should be impartial are simply
>elements of what Althusser termed the ideological state apparatus and a
>key instrument in supporting the dominant class. Progressive and radical
>teachers argue, in reconstituting the curriculum to achieve their
>social, economic and political goals, that all they are doing is
>redressing the imbalance.
>
>That this view of education is both contradictory and dangerous should
>be obvious. If education is simply controlled by the ruling class to
>enforce its ideology, then how can one explain that the most strident
>critics of the status quo have arisen from the education system. It must
>also be remembered that if the role of education is simply to
>indoctrinate students into whatever the government of the day thinks is
>acceptable, then individuals would no longer have an independent,
>critical viewpoint from which to evaluate conflicting social, economic
>and political agendas.
>
>Rather than schools and universities being made the plaything of
>whatever political party is in power, education should be concerned with
>the autonomous ideals of inquiry and truth. As argued by Matthew Arnold
>in Culture and Anarchy: “But, in truth, the free spontaneous play of
>consciousness with which culture tries to float our stock habits of
>thinking and acting, is by its very nature, as been said disinterested.
>Sometimes the result of floating them may be agreeable to this party,
>sometimes to that; now it may be unwelcome to to our so-called Liberals,
>now to our so-called Conservatives; but what culture seeks is, above
>all, to float them, to prevent them being stiff and stark pieces of
>petrifaction any longer”.
>EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE
>

Jimmy Kilpatrick                                Phone   713 520-9715
Coordinator of Community Programs               Fax     713 520-7214
Advisor for Reading and Reading Disabilities
University of Texas at Austin                   Home    281 265-2368
Charles A. Dana Center                          Mobile  281 536-4713

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