A New Curriculum with the same failures

There have been statements made about the new national curriculum which will replace old state ones. It is said that it will lack Shakespeare, present a black armband view of Australia and overemphasize left wing propaganda. The chief fear in NSW is that it will devalue what the state prizes with its rigorous HSC. The curriculum is meant to be a centerpiece to the school revolution promised by Rudd, supplemented with new classrooms and facilities and computers for every student. By almost any measure, the education revolution is a failure. However it is not the failure it is portrayed as. The failure of the national curriculum is that it fails to remove the terrible, negative, anti democratic, anti academic views of the old curriculums of the states. It doesn't introduce a black armband view of Australian History, but it continues with it.

The computers are outdated before they are rolled out. They are a privacy hazard for the students who handle them with strangers gaining audio visual access to student bed rooms. The software needs to be improved, with programs asking for upgrades but users being unable to satisfy those requests. School facilities are not capable of running the expanded networks. Possible uses, like e-books for textbooks have not been implemented.

The school halls are nice, and will be labeled to have Rudd and Gillard's name before voters next election. And money for schools is good. But this is not money going to schools. The money here is being given to wealthy property developers who are charging multiple times what these structures are worth. Many worthy projects will be cancelled in the future because of the current waste.

But the worst failure is the curriculum. It is untrue to say that the new curriculum replaces ANZAC Day with Sorry Day. It merely places them on an equal footing. So that while little evaluation is made of how the left ambushed the ANZACS at Gallipolli so as to engineer a failure, this will be replaced with a failure to evaluate a sorry day which does not address a generation or even identify ten people who may have been stolen. The new curriculum will fail to address that failure which saw many fooled by climate warming hucksters keen on making a buck and using the worst forms of schoolyard bullying to achieve their ends. It won't improve on the failure of Australia to promote Mathematics Literacy for its new young professionals. It won't improve on the abysmal flight from high quality texts to the worst of celebratory navel gazing.

Many years ago, Dame Leonie Kramer remarked that the failure to implement an Australia wide curriculum may be viewed as good because it meant the worst excesses of some governments would not be rendered Australia wide at once. This is what she warned of.

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This has been written for Zaya Toma's Blog