This week, Q&A plunged to an all time low in the arena of ideas. 5 non-teachers arguing the merits of education and baring their ignorance without a moment of self-doubt or hesitation. As Australia falls further and further behind in most areas of education and intellectual endeavour, the conservatives see a new opportunity to play politics with people's lives and futures.
According to Pyne, Minister for Whining and Shallow Self-Deprecation, the most significant challenges in Education are the supposed insidious influences of the communists. In a classic Cold War 'reds under the bed' moment, Pyne opined that someone who has a past in which they belong to a political party cannot, despite their expertise in the field, generate a worthwhile curriculum in History.
Apart from this being a tired re-run of the History wars, it is staggeringly stupid logic. By this line of argument, Pyne must certainly be incapable of his job as Education Minister as a direct result of being a member of the Liberal Party. Thence, sack everybody who holds any position concurrent with party membership or with a history of party membership because this precludes them from doing their job.
As a History teacher, I would challenge Pyne to actually find one instance of something recognisably left or communist in the national History curriculum. Could it be that study of the Khmer Empire as an OPTIONAL in-depth study in Year 8? After all, they became communists, didn't they? Or perhaps it's the study of the Catholic Church in the Medieval Period of European history? Everybody knows Catholics are closet commies.
But just as insidious, in Pyne's breath-takingly moronic evaluation of the National Curriculum, is these nasty cross-curricular priorities. In common language, these are things you incorporate in every discipline because they have general applicability. Dangerous, left leaning considerations such as, wait for it, Literacy.
I know you are shocked to discover that teachers would want literate students and for a moment would step outside the subject area in which they teach (subject areas that are convenient categories anyway and generally not reflected past Year 10). Clearly, there is an international conspiracy of Literacy advocates seeking to destroy the family unit, social fabric, Christian homes and our freedom.
Amongst these cross-curricular studies are ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) and Numeracy. Most teachers extend these to include good manners, punctuality, organisation, personal hygiene, self-control ... Now you see why Pyne is so alarmed. How many international conspiracies can one sustain (pardon me, swear word, swear word) an opposition to?
Of course, the most alarming of these cross-curricular priorities is the dreaded "themes". Teachers have "themed" learning experiences for the past 100 years, but now we must face what we all dreaded - national themes. Now I'm supposing that, should the national themes have been sheep, John Howard's eyebrows and rorting travel allowances, Pyne might have simply missed them completely. But we have those disastrous themes - Indigenous perspectives, Sustainability, Australia's place in Asia.
Of course, you can see how negative such themes will be. Here I am, trying to get the kiddies to get their 6 times tables and I have to stop and talk about Aborigines for 9 minutes, Greenies for 6 and the Chinese for 8 minutes. Good gracious me, when do they ever do Maths? Clearly, it wasn't like that in the old days when everybody knew their times tables - you know that skill they use to ... to ... well, surely it has a use, don't you worry about that.
Judith Sloan is an economist. She's meant to say intelligent things. She wonders about how these themes work in Mathematics.
Here, Judith, let me, like a good teacher, step you through it, slowly, one concept at a time. There'll be a test later, and your results will be published internationally and you will be ranked by Ignorance Quota against all the Ignoramuses of History. Are you sitting up straight? Like all good teachers, I hope you do well, but, you know, I have an opinion about that that I keep to myself.
First, it is actually entirely impossible to teach anything with referring to something not directly relevant to the subject area. Every Maths (yes, that's short for Mathematics) text book uses multiple examples of 'real life' scenarios as examples in which Maths can be applied. Can we possibly explain how references to ice-creams can possibly have any bearing on the Mathematics of Finance? Put your hand up. Yes, Judith, that's correct. People buy ice-creams with money. Good girl.
Some of the best teachers go so much further. They do radical (yes, the reds again) things like going down to the tuckshop and getting the kids to look at the price of all the items sold, compiling a list, asking how many items of each kind are sold ... Now, Christopher. Can you please tell the class whether using that Tuckshop theme (sorry to use that expletive Tuckshop - I know, quite unacceptable in public) is responsible for declining church attendances in Western countries? Yes, it is. My, you are coming on, young Mr Pyne. I think a call to your folks is in order.
Of course, those independent minded teachers have always used themes to help them out in teaching things. Usually they look around for aspects of their charges' lives and try to contrive a theme which will engage - woops, sorry for the Edspeak - I meant, "make the kids sit still and be brainy". But now some fagotty, left-wing, tree-hugging, evolution-believing Islamist has thought national themes should be employed as containers for learning experiences. And its driving us all to the brink of disaster.
Take indigenous perspectives. Now we know how wonderfully our country has valued Indigenous perspectives - we're the nation of Myall Creek, Stolen Generation and intervention. But, like the saying goes, in the presence of Germans, "don't mention zee war". In the presence of Australians, don't for God's sake, mention indigenous history. Certainly don't let it infiltrate proper study.
You and I both know that in our Tuckshop theme, comparing the nutritional content of the food (that theme in which we, radically, decided to incorporate Science and Health - you will immediately recognise what a disaster that is - you might persuade children to eat well, thus avoiding obesity, and if we don't have obesity, how can we possible sound alarm bells at a convenient political moment?) with those of say a traditional Aboriginal diet or a Malaysian child will, almost entirely, rot the brain of a good Aussie kid to the point of oblivion.
See, I'm one of those disgusting communist child-hating types who has actually used the poetry of Paul Kelly ("From Little Things Big Things Grow") and Archie Roach ("Took the Children Away) to study poetry because they have wonderful allusions, literary devices, and .. the kids love singing them. Perish the thought that the kids should interrupt their spelling to sing.
In the theme of Sustainability, our Tuckshop theme finds real legs. Let's pull all the rubbish out of the rubbish bins, wearing gloves for hygiene and teaching hand washing as a barrier to preventable diseases, compile the rubbish according to manufacturing process or material, measure its weight, volume and compressibility, calculate the proportions of recyclable material, benign material and environmentally dangerous material and construct a graph ...
Wait one moment, children. Please stand back. Yes, Christopher and Judith have fainted. Put your gloves back on because we may need to resuscitate them. Yes, we actually did Mathematics in a relevant, engaging way within the theme of Sustainability. Who would have dreamed of it. A teacher actually able to manipulate a theme for multiple learning purposes!
But, I digress into rationality. I, like you, recognise that Education is not the issue here. This is shameless political positioning for re-election - at its most sordid. And the rest of the panel could not muster an objection - well, Wendy had a go, but she was well out of her depth.
As we wander aimlessly into the future, public dialogue on important issues becomes progressively two-dimensional. As the Titanic lurches, our conservative leaders will swear that the unsinkable economy of good hardworking folk is the antidote to the iceberg of foreign boat invaders, CO2 haters and Gollum types driven by Gina envy.
I, for one, do not want a society for my kids where the importance of Asian country as our future markets is made apparent, where valuing everybody's heritage is normal and trying to live within our environmental means is the standard ethos. No, join me as I sing, "Australians all let us rejoice for we are baaa baaaaaa"
