I shuddered when I read this closing sentence in The Australian:
NSW Teachers Federation President Henry Rajendra said the agreement ‘is the culmination of more than a decade of committed campaigning by teachers, parents and students’.
The comment was in response to an announcement about increased funding by our ‘Santa Claus’ Prime Minister on the almost, but not quite, campaign trail.
Rajendra is right – the NSW Teachers Federation has campaigned long and hard. For what? More money. For what impact? In my opinion, nothing that will last and make a difference. The way we do state-run schooling is broken, and the union is part of that brokenness because it does not see the deeper issues.
Once again we have an announcement about an increase in funding by the ‘let’s get into election giveaways without announcing an election’ Prime Minister. He sprouted about this being evidence-based improvement funding, using such techniques as ‘explicit instruction’.
This begs so many questions… Two of those questions were carefully articulated over ten years ago by Dr Kevin Donnelly and Professor Kenneth Wiltshire in their review of the National Curriculum for the then-Prime Minister. After noting some possible improvements that having a National Curriculum has given Australia, they identified some concerns.
One of their concerns was the change of process when it comes to how a child is taught essential topics. This change, which favours child-led exploration over strict guidelines, continues to cause harm to children’s educational progress. The results in our internal and external measures of knowledge progress since their report have proven their concerns to be correct.
If we knew this over ten years ago, why haven’t the union and the politicians been clamouring for change? I have not seen any commitment from the union to vigorously pursue this change of teaching strategy, then or now. Nor have I seen any coordinated commitment from the tertiary providers. Indeed, I see very few teacher graduates who have had any intensive and sustained teaching on how to instruct well. Professor John Sweller’s recent work in cognitive load theory has brought some attention back to the field, but in my observation it is piecemeal.
I suggest that the reason for this neglect of how to instruct well in prescribed content was linked to the second main concern of Donnelly and Wiltshire. They noted a loss of interest in and commitment to teaching the best from the past – notably, they identified the loss of attention to the important historical, scientific, and literary moments from the Judeo-Christian foundations of our Western Civilisation. That concern has also been vindicated in the last decade, with our tertiary providers swallowing in wholesome manner the reinterpretation of social history and social purposes as framed by the destructive socialists (more accurately, the post-modern cultural neo-Marxists) of our times.
And it is this second dominant social imaginary (to use Talyor’s term from A Secular Age) that makes all these pronouncements and promises illusory. Does our simplistic Prime Minister and slightly less naïve Federal Education Minister really believe that in a state like NSW, all those who have been committed to a culturally relativistic belief system about knowledge for over a decade are simply going to turn around the moral direction of their thinking? Are those committed to the prominent importance of sexual identity theory linked to social structures involving (often manufactured) sexism and racism simply going to stop in these beliefs? Of course not.
It is those beliefs that downplay the need for certainty of sequential core content. After all, if the dominant epistemology is ‘you finding your truth while I am in my truth’, why bother with any strict core content rehearsal and testing? Why do I need, as a teacher who believes in this relativistic knowledge frame, to bother with carefully structured and scaffolded instruction routines that delight my students? Why bother testing their progress in core knowledge? Creative and strong instruction is a waste of effort if we are simply facilitating constructing our own worlds.
Likewise, it is those same ‘Woke’ beliefs that will stop me wanting to seek out meaningful artistic, political, scientific, technological, creative, and historical events from the past, even though it is those moments that have given us our freedoms of today. Why bother with such moments when, again, we are simply forging our own versions of safetyism (as per Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind)?
So, once again, this increased educational funding is predictable in its failure. It is not driven by progressives. It is driven by philosophically materialistic socialists who believe they have secret powerful knowledge that enables them to continue to control ‘the narrative’ of what is good and true, appearing to be noble, but who in fact undermine the knowledge and character of our children.
This battle of ideas is not new. In 1942, CSL Lewis wrote an apologetic against sentimentalist teaching modes. The book that prompted his The Abolition of Man was a 1939 textbook called The Control of Language: A critical approach to reading and writing. Might it surprise us to learn that this relativistic and ungrounded text was written by two Australians (as explained in Fiona Mueller’s wonderful essay, From Education to Enstupidation: Teaching English language and literature in Australia)?
Perhaps it is good to leave this commentary of concern with the words of the master wordsmith himself:
The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is not infallible protection against a soft head. [Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 13]
Which leader will help us invite soft hearts and strong minds through our education systems?
