Education

This topic has been around since the beginnings of recorded history, and probably beyond. Not withstanding this it popped into my consciousness this week when I finally got to listen to the inauguration speech of president Obama. In his speech the new president stated that 'our schools fail to many' . This rang a bell loudly with me because it has been obvious for most of my adult life that Australia's school have the exact same problem as was referred to by the New US president, namely that they fail to many.

The reasons for this are complex, as I am sure anyone involved in the processes will tell you. Never the less the problem remains, and the collective efforts of our education bureaucracy don't appear to be doing a great deal to fix that. Then I sat back and had a sort of epiphany on the subject. Of course our schools are not improving. There is no reason for them to change, as the for the people in charge of the process they actually worked. The majority of people working in education have in essence never been anywhere other than school. At age 5 they started school and followed that with a trip to university and a diploma in education and returned to the school system that had made them what they are. Why would these people even perceive a need to change? The system obviously worked for them! Therefore the problem in their minds is with the student, not the process.

Compound this level of apathy to change from the 'teachers' with the almost insatiable desire of politicians to introduce more and more supposedly important curriculum topics and even to me an outsider the problem appears clear!

Schools are being asked to take the place of family in the education of children in social and community issues. Taught by teachers that are at best only half convinced of the need and the result is a whole lot of disenchanted student and teachers.

What we need is to find a way to get 'real world' experience into the education system. By this I don't mean just the teachers. Those undertaking curriculum development and setting education goals need to be drawn from somewhere other than academia. Our current school system is university focused, with a huge input into the whole process coming from the universities themselves. It is wrong minded to allow this lunacy to continue. The significant proportion of those starting school will never complete a university course. WHY are we positioning our education system to focus on the entrance needs of less that 40% of those children to university. By default the system is failing the remaining 60%.

Conversely, we need to get politicians and other assorted social engineers out of the system so that education can get on with the fundamentals of literacy. Until the fundamental issue of literacy (both in word and number) is solved then the entire process is moot.

There is no point trying to increase university enrollments, and make ourselves a smart nation if we are not capable of delivering basic numeracy and literancy through our education system!