Vol. 3 No. 1
EDITORIAL
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN EDUCATION
Much has been said and written recently about "social justice and education". Governments in Victoria and South Australia adopted social justice "frameworks" in 1987 and 1988 respectively. The Commonwealth issued a document in 1988. Last year authorities in Victoria and Western Australia produced frameworks purporting to advance social justice in education. In Victoria, teachers who seek promotion need to demonstrate their commitment to the State Board of Education's social justice policy. In South Australia applicants for appointment to state schools are expected to demonstrate "an understanding of the implications of the Education Department of SA policies including equal opportunities and the SA Government's social justice strategy". In its annual report of November 1991, the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training stated its commitment to social justice. The Schools Council, which advises the National Board of Employment, Education and Training, finalised a report on Social Justice at the end of 1991.
What does social justice mean? Why has this concept received so much attention? And what, if anything, can schools contribute to its achievement?
"Social Justice" is a poorly defined but multi-purpose term. The question "What is Justice?" has been answered in varying ways since the beginnings of western civilization. Ancient Greece provided many competing definitions -- "The Will of the Gods"; "Paying one's debts"; "Helping one's friends and harming one's enemies"; "The interests of the stronger". Plato believed that justice prevailed when each social element did what it was most fitted to do, contributing its best to the common stock and receiving the best from the other social elements. In The Republic he described an educational system which might achieve this. Since the French Revolution, proponents of justice have emphasised equality of rights. This is a strongly political concept, which initially meant equal rights for individuals but has recently been extended to promote equality of groups. The terminology has changed and for a time the word "equity" was favoured (usually equality was meant). More recently "social justice" has come into fashion.
The concept of justice embodies two possibly disparate notions -- needs and deserts. Social justice tends to emphasise needs and ignore deserts.
Although all political parties are committed to the principle of social justice in education, Labor parties are particularly energetic in this. Non-Labor administrations in New South Wales, the ACT, the Northern Territory and Tasmania have made little effort to provide policy documents, though in practice they also implement policies designed to assist disadvantaged groups in the schools. The Churches, too, are strong on social justice. In Catholic schools, social justice often emerges as a strand in Religious Education.
But what does social justice mean for school practice? At the Commonwealth level, the Schools Council said in September 1991 that its "current social justice project addresses the issues of teaching, curriculum and assessment, adequate and appropriate resourcing, and schools/welfare links based on a set of social justice principles for schooling."
The Victorian social justice framework issued in February 1991 stated that "success in the curriculum should not be defined exclusively in academic terms". Students' satisfaction with their schooling and self-esteem were also important factors. The framework identified seven groups of students whose needs should be monitored -- females, Aborigines, students living in poverty, students from low social status families, immigrant Australians, and students with disabilities. It made no mention of the needs of students with above-average intelligence.
By contrast, the West Australian Social Justice in Education Policy and Guidelines, introduced in June 1991, asserted that the Ministry was committed to social justice in education "through the achievement of optimum educational outcomes for all students". According to the Acting Manager of the Social Justice Branch, "we are aiming for excellence in all groups of students. In the past the focus has been on the needs and inadequacies of special groups." The usual run of supposedly disadvantaged groups was presented -- Aborigines, girls, those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and so on. Guidelines for the use of bias-free language were included in the policy package. As the Acting Manager herself commented, the policy contained nothing radically new.
The social justice policies reflect the concerns of a pluralist society and its special interest groups. In such a society students gain identity by their membership of a group.
The social justice program carries implications not only for the content of the curriculum, but for methods of assessment and examining and for class organisation. Proponents of social justice in education want a curriculum which accommodates the interests of the special groups. They incline towards a system of assessment and examination that will not reveal inadequate performance by members of any one group, even if this means employing criteria other than academic merit. At the organisational level, social justice suggests mixed ability rather than academically streamed classes and integration of the handicapped in normal classes rather than teaching them in specialised classes or schools.
Yet many of the allegedly disadvantaged groups (girls, ethnics) have been doing quite well in our schools, at least as groups. Within groups, of course, individual students have not always achieved succcss. But those who have done well owe this as much -- or more -- to family support as to the school program. Achievement is often linked with an inclination towards an academically demanding curriculum, not a relaxed one or one catering for the individual whims of students. But one area of disability -- social-economic disadvantage and associated family weakness -- has long proved a difficult obstacle to educational improvement.
Apart from fostering social justice within the schools, "Social Justice in Education" can be interpreted to mean using the schools to spread social justice in society.
Back in 1984, Victoria's Ministerial Puper No.6 was fairly optimistic, despite an initial recognition that "schools alone cannot provide the answers". The Paper asserted that schools "can ensure that all young people receive an education which enables them to participate fully in society, to contribute to overcoming injustice and inequality, and to solve the problems of our society". But as a speaker at the Australian Curriculum Studies Association conference last July remarked, "issues of social justice are bigger than an education system can ever address. And when there is a fiscal crisis of the state, we get the kind of 'social justice' that we can afford." This might not even reach the old "equality of opportunity" levels.
In the late 20th century, the task of schools in advancing social justice has become harder. Specific teaching of values and fairness, that is, moral education, has always been a school responsibility, both by direct instruction through the curriculum (for instance in History or Literature) and through the daily running of the school (for instance, in school or class discipline). Children, especially primary school children, value fairness, and firm discipline will usually be accepted if it is clearly fair. Many children, coming from broken homes, abused or neglected by parents, subject to peer group pressures, have no chance of experiencing justice, except in the school room and assembly hall.
A difficulty arises from the pluralist character of our society. The interests of the special interest groups are often not compatible. Universities set aside up to 10 per cent of places for disadvantaged students, who are admitted with entrance scores lower than the norm. Is this equality of opportunity? Clearly no. Yet it is done under the rubric of "social justice". In the schools positive discrimination in favour of students from a disadvantaged racial group may strike children from other groups as unjust. A teacher may hesitate to apply the principles of justice in the classroom because of feared repercussions from militant feminists, ethnic activists, or irate parents.
Schools can contribute something to social justice by providing a quality, liberal, academic education for everyone -- for the less academically able at a more modest level and with a strong practical and vocational bent. But social justice is predominantly a political objective, resting heavily on non-school social forces. Schools cannot produce social or political reconstruction. To divert excessive resources to this could accentuate our already too widespread educational confusion.
Social Justice: a question of meaning
John Cain, then-Premier of Victoria, in Social Justice in Education, No. 6, 1989.
F.A. Hayek, The Weasel Word "Social". |
Disarray on the Left Radical educationists are by no means agreed on the meaning of social justice in education, nor on the role of schools in achieving this. Education Links, "the radical education dossier" based in Sydney, devoted its Winter 1989 issue to social justice. The opening sentence of the Editorial reveals uncertainty. "Coming to grips with the disturbing and perplexing connections between schooling and social inequality has proved an elusive task for teachers, researchers and policy makers alike". The contributors to this special issue are eight academics from Deakin University and one from Sydney. Colin Henry criticises the Victorian Ministry of Education's commerce framework for "its bias in favour of business and commercial concerns, and its neglect of social justice and equity issues". Jill Blackmore denounces "corporate management" in education for neglecting specific groups, such as women: social justice, she believes, is sacrificed to efficiency. Yet without efficiency there will be nothing left over for social justice programs. A two-page spread on "A Socially Just Curriculum" directs its fire at vocationally-oriented courses and argues, perhaps surprisingly, that "in the transition to a socially just curriculum we need to go back to the competitive academic curriculum subjects and claim them for our core". Lindsay Fitzclarence attacks policies favouring vocational skills and neglecting "classic, liberal, notions of education". Similarly, Peter Watson wants education to shift from the demands of the workplace to critical reflection on changes in work and society. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Left assisted the collapse of liberal humanist education. Now, faced with a new vocationalism, some of them have had second thoughts. Michael Singh warns that standardized testing harms disadvantaged groups and hinders "democratic participation in pursuit of social justice goals." Fazal Rizvi ("Reconceptualising Multiculturalism") believes that the old policy of maintaining ethnic traditions held back equality of opportunity. "Multicultural education must focus on actual instances of injustice and how they can be set right." Jane Kenway finds much to discontent her in the education of girls, and Helen Modra sees no point in "oppressing" students for bad grammar or vague writing. Education shouid pay more attention to feelings, to recovering "congruence through education which pays attention to cosmic wisdom and to reconnection with each other and with the earth." The Social Justice issue of Education Links encompasses many apparently incompatible ideas. Is there not an inherent tension between advancing social justice by restoring the competitive curriculum and insisting that grammar and literary quality are oppressive? Is there not a contradiction between relating social justice to social groups, while still giving attention to equality among individuals? Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are competing principles. A utilitarian education, we are told, is bad when it aims to improve vocational opportunities, but good when it has social reconstruction as its goal. Lindsay Fitzclarence criticises the policies of "political leaders and bureaucratic chieftains," but acknowledges that "the Left, as we have known it, has been increasingly incorporated into the very orthodoxy of the State". Thus the irony that today it is the progressive educational establishment which resists change. |
JUSTICE FOR ALL
This article takes up two issues raised in our editorial on social justice. It looks in some depth at both the nature of justice and the role of justice in schools.
During the past decade, the concept of social justice has been much in the news in Australia. Invariably, it has been discussed in a political context. Public figures in many walks of life -- government ministers, novelists, clergymen -- have lamented the suffering of economically and culturally oppressed groups. Not surprisingly, therefore, educationists have taken up the banner. Although they have referred to matters directly related to teaching and learning -- e.g. the need for promoting self-esteem in all pupils -- their primary focus has been on political disadvantage. Especially, they have pressed for schooling strategies designed to combat feelings of powerlessness in Aborigines, girls and migrants.
Thus far, however, education policy-makers responsible for social justice "frames" have not accounted for our past failures to achieve the goals now being stipulated. Nor have they explained how past failures might be rectified. Underlying their support of social justice platforms is a deep confusion about their pertinent educational dimensions, and a consequent blankness or arbitrariness about the specific role of schools in promoting them.
WHAT IS JUSTICE?
The first major source of confusion in policy statements about social justice in schools is conceptual. Justice by its nature is social, since its terrain is our treatment of one another. Equality, resting on a belief in the dignity, worth, and brotherhood of all human beings, is both its most enduring form and the chief end to which it is directed. Discussion therefore needs to focus, first of all, on the place of justice in the broad field of ethics; its component parts, particularly as they relate to schooling; and the educational significance of these components.
For over two thousand years our most eminent moral philosophers have agreed that justice is the most important of the natural virtues. Plato considered it so basic to the orderly working of society that he devoted most of his efforts in The Republic to an examination of its nature. Aristotle called it the most excellent virtue, more glorious than the star of evening or dawn. St Augustine pronounced it the central virtue of the cardinal virtues, reflecting our love of God and our neighbours. (1) St Thomas Aquinas, agreeing with Augustine, added that it is the virtue which directs us in relation to other people, creating social harmony.
Elaborating on this definition of justice in a lengthy discussion in the Summa Theologica, and in the process covering such basic areas of social concern as education, domestic life, and the law, Aquinas says that justice involves:
- the equitable distribution of goods and services;
- helping the needy by giving them what is not theirs but ours;
- preventing others from being undermined;
- soundness in estimating or judging actions and events;
- rectifying our injuries to others.
This conception of what is just and fair is as pertinent to education today as it was in the 13th century.
JUSTICE IN SCHOOLS
Material Equality and Help to the Needy
At the material level, there has long been an appropriate focus in Australia on the just provision of resources (especially, quality teachers) for all schools, and on serving well those in disadvantaged rural or urban areas. For decades we have tried to ensure equal instructional provision in every locality by requiring beginning teachers in public schools to teach wherever the State sends them.
Because of the difficulties now rife in city schools, however -- i.e. major discipline problems, emotional turmoil caused by family breakdown and unemployment, widespread addiction to drugs, alcohol, TV, junk food, and R-rated videos -- shortages of good urban teachers are a major worry throughout the country. It is widely recognised that private schools currently enjoy an instructional advantage over state schools because of their freedom to employ the teachers of their choice and to use existing (often very good) material resources to create a distinctive school ethos.
In an effort to redress this built-in imbalance and create greater justice for all, state ministries have instituted policies designed to encourage top staff to return to government schools -- e.g. in New South Wales, giving hiring power to public school heads and promotional and financial opportunities to leading, or star, teachers. At the same time, they have tried to give greater financial support to private schools with special programs for pupils with long histories of school failure. Whether these initiatives will work, nobody yet knows.
Injuries to Pupils
At the deep level affecting pupils' self-esteem and their consequent capacity to lead decent and fulfilling lives, the need for equitable and full provision for all children is pressing. Despite attempts by some of the states to confront the broad issue of values in schools, and to specify the values which must be purveyed, no guidance on how to inculcate personal, educational, and civic virtues (e.g. justice and equality) has been offered. Not by accident, therefore, miscarriages of justice in schools, on the playground and in the classroom, are an everyday occurrence.
The root cause of the most harmful injustices suffered by all pupils at every level of education is wrong judgment: judgment which is blind to reality, and which proceeds, not from benevolence or right reason, but from uncontrolled passion -- e.g. fear, envy, anger, impatience, rashness, or bitterness. The more usual fruits of wrong judgment experienced by students young or old, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, are:
- being treated suspiciously, or having one's goodness doubted, on scanty evidence;
- having one's thoughts and feelings misconstrued and misrepresented;
- being ignored, neglected, underestimated, patronised, or by-passed;
- being taunted, mocked, humiliated, branded, and physically molested;
- becoming the subject of tale-bearing, backbiting, or malicious gossip;
- being slandered: i.e. being falsely accused or denounced over issues affecting one's future, without being given the right of reply.
In themselves, all of these everyday products of blind, arbitrary misjudgment damage children. What increases and cements the damage are the additional, equally common, miscarriages of justice which follow from them. Frequently, both adults and children who judge others wrongly and treat them badly in consequence, deny their errors and refuse to behave differently. The victims of misjudgment who report their suffering to adults in a position to do something about it are disregarded, brushed off, or given a very hard time for speaking up; and the harmful behaviour responsible for their unhappy situation is allowed to continue. This engenders a cycle of injury which is very hard to break.
Affirmative Teaching
One of the distinguishing marks of educators who quietly promote justice, but who rarely if ever proclaim their allegiance to it, is considerateness. Their ordinary, everyday behaviour with the people in their charge -- especially, their responsiveness to others' needs and aspirations -- attests to their awareness of the reaches of the human need for suitable acknowledgment. As a matter of course, just teachers reward effort and punish offences; they make individual pupils feel important and esteemed; they listen to their comments and observe their actions carefully; and they remember lots and lots of things about them. Unjust ones (immortalised by Dickens) make students feel nullified, as if they were ciphers that barely exist.
Usually, teachers who are just to children are also just to their colleagues. They create a climate in which others, feeling affirmed, freely express their best qualities. Their behaviour protects personal dignity and honour and prohibits insults and disrespect. It has a proper, balanced regard for individual and group rights, and will tolerate no large or habitual disruptions to the social order. It fosters the development of confidence, generosity, a sense of responsibility, and what James McAuley called a "will" for truth "broad as day". Its cornerstone is reason, the basis of all serious inquiry and the most reliable guarantee of educational soundness.
Children who regularly receive just treatment in school come to value and respect both the institution responsible for that treatment and the activities in which the institution is engaged. Those who are regularly denied just treatment, and who habitually suffer wrong judgment, become cynical and disaffected, hostile to school and to educational activity more generally. Many suffer such grave damage to their self-esteem and to their innocence -- especially, their trust in others -- that they never fully recover their equilibrium or their capacity to grow and develop intellectually, imaginatively, morally, and spiritually.
In huge numbers the victims of habitual, arbitrary and blind misjudgment at the hands of their fellow pupils and their teachers reject any or all activity that reminds them of school -- notably, rcading and writing; and so their power to think and feel is permanently diminished. Typically, at home and at work, they then proceed to perpetrate the injustices which they themselves have suffered.
CONCLUSION
It is woefully inadequate for our State Ministries to concentrate their energies on producing "social justice" frames which highlight group oppression, and which do not confront the individual -- and ultimately, therefore, the mass -- suffering caused by what Blake termed "mind-forged manacles".
It is also a major error to focus attention on three oppressed groups. (2) Not only does this practice suggest, wrongly, that Aborigines, migrants, and girls are more educationally disadvantaged than others (e.g. learning-disabled boys or the children of the poor, whatever their racial and ethnic backgrounds); but it implies that the disadvantages suffered by each are comparable in kind and scale. Such imprecision is particularly offensive if one bears in mind the magnitude of the suffering of Aboriginal children for generations and the recent, exceptional academic success of Year 12 girls and migrants, especially Asian ones.
What enlightened educators can and must do for groups and individuals who have suffered, and are continuing to suffer, shameful affronts to their dignity is (1) try to see that the most grievous injuries sustained by them are not repeated, and (2) provide sensitive and, where required, special pastoral and instructional care for those whose histories have been disfigured by habitually wrongful judgment.
If all of us truly want our children to participate fully in the achievements of humankind, to undertake work which serves others and is therefore a source of pride, to value the accomplishments of their forbears, and to preserve and renew what is culturally precious, we cannot afford to countenance as we have thus far done the single, most potent source of stunted human development.
This means that a key priority for schools and teacher training programs should be solid instruction on the subject of justice itself. There is a wealth of suitable material on the subject, beginning with fairytales, fables, bible stories, myths and legends, and including discursive as well as imaginative literature for older readers. All we need is the will to design a curriculum which complements our most enlightened behaviour with children in formal and informal school settings, and which makes explicit what is normally implicit in our most considerate handling of them.
ENDNOTES
1. The four cardinal virtues, which are organically related, are justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. They are secondary in importance only to the theological (supernatural) virtues of faith, hope and love.
2. Although State frameworks on social justice name more than three groups requiring special attention, public rhetoric on the subject regularly concentrates on Aborigines, girls and migrants. So does a great deal of educational research.
LETTERS
EXPERIMENTS WITH SCIENCE
Dear Editor,
The Monitor article on the Wessex science project (Spring 1991) echoes the ill-fated attempt to arouse Science in Victorian schools from its moribund condition some 20 years ago. "Collaborative" ventures in the field of Australian education have come and gone over the years. The legacies of these exciting developments remain -- disenchantment, disillusion and cynicism among teachers, and confusion for parents.
In the last 20 years or so teachers have been bombarded with "new art", "new science", "new music", "new English", "new maths" and "new social studies" to such a degree that new is now old-hat. In fact, the shock of the new has dissipated teachers' goodwill so much that it is now difficult to convince them that new is necessarily good or that change is as good as a bout of long service leave.
The Wessex Project bears all the hallmarks of the Victorian experiment. The same blithe spirit is abroad, taking for granted teacher eagerness and student hunger for scientific knowledge, skills and understanding. The same intention to "change the way in which students are taught and improve the quality of education by considering the needs of individual students and encouraging everyone enrolled in the course to take more active responsibility for their own learning" is enunciated. What is not enunciated is just how "the way in which students are taught" is to be changed.
The method used in Victoria in the 1960s was two days in-service training, TV sessions, and a brief introduction to the Nuffield scheme. Nuffield Science proved too expensive for most schools, and it is typical of the enthusiasts that this vital aspect was so airily dismissed.
The variety of some 3,000 Victorian schools -- primary schools, area schools, consolidated schools, one-teacher schools, special schools, high schools -- plus the great variety of ethnic languages in many schools proved to bc an insurmountable stumbling block to the sudden call for scientific advancement. Teachers as a body were simply not prepared for the demands on time and resources which, to most of them, was an unwelcome bolt from indeterminate sources. The Wessex Project may be confined to a smaller and more select group than the Nuffield scheme, but whether science is contained in modules, complementary cores, or supplementary courses, the ultimate arbitrators of the "new" concepts are the teachers.
Here in Australia politicians (who don't have to teach) are making noises about a "clever" country. Members of a "Commission for the Future" are scaring young people with scientific (?) predictions concerning a desolate future peopled with too many unwanteds.
It is therefore encouraging to learn that the Wessex Project is engaged in a conscious linking of two apparently disparate disciplines -- Science and the Humanities. Perhaps this could be the beginning of attempts to distinguish between culture and instruction, between values and fact. One vital component in the process is the teacher. The Victorian experiment fell down for a number of reasons. Among these could be listed:
- poor preparation of teachers;
- the enthusiastic promotion of concepts without an appreciation of problems associated with clarifying these concepts to a large and varied clientele, e.g. school size, distances, resources, environment of schools;
- inadequate facilities. A familiar case, but one which all too often is quite legitimate, especially when only considered after the happening;
- The promotion of "open" classrooms and, hot on the heels of this aberration, the promulgation of equity -- of outcomes, access, etc;
- the view of the teacher as a facilitator -- confusing to many.
If the Wessex Project succeeds in re-establishing the means by which we are taught to control the machines we make, then we would seem to be responding to the needs of the future, Alvin Toffler (in Future Shock) dismissed "mass education" as "the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needs." Does this comment apply to the present moves to target courses where politicians see development in the future -- industry, technology, computer technology, bio-technology, hospitality and community services?
Should the Wessex Project fulfil its promises, we may yet see a reconciliation between the Humanities and Science. Let's hope so!
Neil Dewan
Patterson Lakes, Vic.
RURAL SCHOOLS
Dear Editor,
I am deeply concerned at the implied criticism of the standard of teaching in all country schools which was contained in the letter written by "Catholic Mother" of Wagga Wagga (Letters, Education Monitor, Autumn 1991).
After a rather long criticism of one particular school (unnamed), "Catholic Mother" stated: "I moved my daughter in 1988. Because of our poor perception of rural teaching we (sadly) declined the offer of a scholarship at an expensive Uniting Church country boarding college." Instead, she was sent to an expensive school in Sydney.
The scholarship offer could only have come from The Scots School, Albury, or Kinross Wolaroi School because these are the only Uniting Church schools in country NSW. I have no idea which school made the offer because "Catholic Mother" withheld her name.
The point is that this lady, perhaps unintentionally, has condemned the quality of "rural teaching" and you have given credence to the criticism by publishing this part of her letter.
I cannot speak for Scots, Albury, but on behalf of Kinross Wolaroi and all teachers in country schools, I feel I must object to the criticism. By whatever standard one likes to measure "success", Kinross Wolaroi has helped its students achieve outstanding results in external competitions and examinations.
In Science, which was the main thrust of "Catholic Mother's" letter, Kinross Wolaroi has just received 102 awards in the 1991 Australian Schools' Science Competition, which means that nearly 70 per cent of entrants were placed in the top 30 per cent of the State and 31 per cent were placed in the top 10 per cent.
In English, in last year's School Certificate, 36 per cent of Kinross Wolaroi students gained Grade A's, placing them in the top 10 per cent of the State. In the Australian Mathematics Competition, 202 awards were won including 66 at distinction level; while in the prestigious International Latin examination, set by the American Classical League and contested by over 80,000 students world-wide, Kinross Wolaroi students received two gold medals, four silver medals and 25 certificates.
In the 1990 Higher School Certificate, Kinross Wolaroi had two students in the top 500 in the State and 31 mentions in the Western Region Order of Merit list (top 10 in each course) including eight firsts.
This lists only a few of the School's achievements, but serves to illustrate that both the dedication and teaching standards displayed in this "rural teaching" setting are the equal of any which will be found anywhere.
Kinross Wolaroi is not alone in providing the highest possible standard of teaching to its students. There are many country schools -- independent, Catholic systemic and Government -- who have outstanding teachers. Whether it be in the city or the country, the teachers' (and therefore the school's) success will depend on its philosophy. If a school believes that every boy and girl should strive to achieve to the highest level of his or her potential ability, and attempts to put that belief into practice, then the students will attain goals they did not believe were possible.
For "Catholic Mother" and, by association, Education Monitor, to imply that "rural teaching" everywhere is sub-standard does a grave injustice to a very large number of dedicated, highly-professional and exceptionally talented teachers.
A.E.S. Anderson
Principal
Kinross Wolaroi School, NSW.
Education Monitor assures Mr Anderson that it does not infer from our correspondent's criticism of one rural Catholic girls' high school that all rural teaching is substandard -- Editor.
NEW ZEALAND POLYTECHNICS
Dear Editor,
I would like to correct one error in my article, "The Disorganisation of New Zealand's Polytechnics" (Education Monitor, Winter 1991). The date of the Manual and Technical Instruction Act was 1895, not 1885. It was almost certainly the fruit of A.D. Riley's Report of 1888, which drew to public and government attention the need for the recognition and funding of technical schools. Incidentally, this virtually saved the Technical Classes Association in Dunedin, which was very near to failing as its predecessors had done.
Stuart C. Scott
Dunedin, New Zealand.
FINN AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
THE FINN REPORT calls for more vocational education in an increasingly practical world. The present economic crisis has encouraged an examination of the capacity of Australia's schools and post-school systems to deliver highly-trained, employable entrants into the workforce. The "Standards Debate" has thrown up much anecdotal evidence suggesting that many school-leavers cannot read, write, count or present themselves with any confidence or proficiency to employers.
Immediately after the release of the Finn Report in August 1991, the then-Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins, expressed his support and commended the Review to State ministers. Industry has welcomed its recommendations as, too, has the ACTU. Many States have already initiated changes in the direction advocated by Finn.
The Finn Report sees itself as part of "an extraordinary avalanche of policy development and implementation triggered by the joint impacts of rapidly increasing school retention, and labour market and workplace reform" (p.11). Its opening sentences proclaim a new educational philosophy.
Both individual and industry needs are leading towards a convergence of general and vocational education. There is an increasing realisation internationally that the most successful forms of work organisation are those which encourage people to be multi-skilled, creative and adaptable. At the same time schools are broadening their programs and curriculums to offer greater access to vocational education for the increasing proportion of young people staying on at the end of compulsory schooling (p. ix).
In Australia this process has been going on for some time. But it involves some sectors of education more than others, and some States more than others. Between 1983 and 1990, overall participation in education and training by the 15-19 year-old cohort rose from 56.9 per cent to 66.7 per cent, but participation in TAFE and training remained constant at about 11 per cent (p.15). Transfer from school to TAFE varies among the States. In Victoria, between 1989 and 1990, only nine per cent of school-leavers left from Year 10 and only 14 per cent of these continued with some further education or training. By contrast, in New South Wales one-quarter of Year 10 students left school, with 51 per cent entering TAFE or training (p.22).
The Finn Report, Young People's Participation in Post-Compulsory Education and Training: Report of the Australian Education Council Review Committee, was presented in July 1991. The Committee, appointed by the Australian Education Council (the Australian Ministers for Education), was chaired by the Managing Director of IBM. The Report's 50 recommendations embody five major thrusts:
The Australian Education Council and the Ministers of Vocational Employment, Education and Training have set up a committee under Mr Eric Mayer, Chairman of the Business/Higher Education Round Table and former Chief Executive Officer of National Mutual, to explore the concept of key competencies included in the Finn Report. Four sub-committees have been formed, covering language and communication, mathematics, other areas of competence, and strategic issues. The Committee is assisted by a secretariat of nine. It is to report in July 1992. In March came the Carmichael Report, prepared by the Employment and Skills Formation Council, proposing an Australian Vocational Certificate Training System under which young workers would combine work with unpaid study leave. Skills tests would be introduced. The Report advocates the establishment of Senior Colleges. |
GENERAL OR VOCATIONAL?
The Finn Report argues that the Anglo-Saxon tradition and its apprenticeship model sees vocational and general education as separate. But other countries manage to combine elements of vocational training and general education in their total curriculum (p.5). Schools should become more concerned with employability and a broad vocational education, while TAFE should recognise that "initial, vocational courses must be increasingly concerned with competencies which are more general than those which, for example, characterised the traditional craft-based apprenticeships" (p.6).
In fact, the contrast between liberal and technical education goes back to Ancient Greece, though over the centuries the concept of liberal education has waxed and waned. In Australia it has been in decline for some years; nonetheless, its eclipse would be a matter of some moment.
The extent to which education should be vocational is a point of contention among business people, as among educationists. In a joint paper to the Finn Committee the Australian Bankers' Association, Australian Chamber of Commerce, Australian Chamber of Manufacturers, Australian Mining Industry Council, Business Council of Australia, and the Confederation of Australian Industry emphasise the value of a broad, general education:
... the principal role of schools should be to provide students not so much with narrow, occupation-specific skills but rather with:
- strong levels of competence in literacy and numeracy;
- analytical thinking and problem-solving abilities;
- creative and expressive talents; and
- personal qualities of responsibility, initiative, creativity, adaptability, co-operativeness and self-confidence (p.116).
The Finn Report recommends that school systems:
- integrate the Key Competency Profiles as appropriate across the curriculum;
- strengthen the "hands on", practical dimension of their curriculum;
- give more explicit emphasis to the relevance of mainstream curriculum to the world of work; and
- where appropriate, and particularly in specific vocational courses, adopt an outcome/competency-based approach to curriculum, teaching and assessment (pp.75-76).
The Finn Report attempts to resolve the tension between vocational and general education by recommending a general education which focuses on processes and skills, rather than content. The old liberal curriculum was content-oriented; the new curriculum implied in the Finn Report's six Key Competencies is a mental training, process-oriented generalism. Chapter 4 elaborates "Curriculum Principles and Key Competencies". For instance, listed under Language and Communication are speaking, listening, reading, writing, and accessing and using information. Under Problem-solving are analysis, critical thinking, decision-making, creative thinking, and skill transfer to new contexts. A number of comments can be made. First, many of these are "motherhood" principles and competencies. Who could object to critical or creative thinking? Secondly, mastery of knowledge is specifically mentioned only under Cultural Understanding (understanding and knowledge of Australia's historical, geographical and political context), though it is implied in Language and Mathematics. Thirdly, the schools can validly claim that they have had many of these objectives for at least two decades. Finally, does the average adolescent who has been at school for 10 years really need another two years of problem-solving?
The Report overlooks the fact that a traditional, content-based curriculum, well taught, imparts skills and mental training as a matter of course. Education has aims other than preparing young people for the work-force. And many traditional "academic" subjects also teach vocational skills.
NEW STUDENTS, NEW SCHOOLS?
The Finn Report suggests that its national targets can be "distilled into a single summary target that, by the year 2001, 95 per cent of 19 year-olds should have completed Year 12 or an initial post-school qualification or be participating in education or training" (p. x). This does not mean that 95 per cent of students should proceed to Year 12. But a large proportion will. Bearing in mind that the present participation rate to Year 12 is 60 per cent, this new objective implies considerable changes in schools and in the selection and training of teachers.
The assumption that increasing retention rates require more vocational courses and a larger TAFE sector is probably correct -- though it is quite wrong to make a high retention rate the aim of education. After all, the crucial issue is not how long young people spend at school, but what they are taught and how effectively. Could it be that the high retention rate is also designed to conceal unemployment?
The Report states: "Years 11 and 12 must be made a meaningful and relevant experience for a broader, more heterogeneous student population, amongst whom there is a proportion who are disenchanted with formal education" (p.115). The two questionable and remarkably subjective terms "meaningful" and "relevant" might include entertainment or social education. But the Finn Report opts for the vocational emphasis, something which has far-reaching consequences for the schools' curriculum.
The convergence of general and vocational education which the Finn Report discerns is not happening in all the nation's schools, certainly not in all the private schools, nor in some academic state schools. Not all schools will embrace the new doctrine. Nor is uniformity desirable. The Report raises the possibility of a single national school certificate at the completion of Year 12 (p.109). But students are a diverse population. Surely the greater range of students suggests the need for a greater range of courses, certificates, and even schools. We need various types of specialised senior secondary schools (technical, academic, language, community, etc.), though with a common core curriculum.
Indeed, the Report raises the possibility of separate senior schools located on TAFE and higher education campuses (p.126).
Other Vocational Initiatives Many of the States are taking initiatives which parallel those of the Finn Report. In Victoria, a "Taskforce on Pathways into Education and Training" has emphasised the role of TAFE and private training colleges in the education of school-leavers. Chaired by Ivan Deveson, Chairman of the Victorian State Training Board, the committee released a discussion paper in early February suggesting that up to 50 per cent of Year 11 and 12 students be streamed into an education with more vocational subjects, work-based training in school years, and courses run in co-operation with TAFE. Western Australia is well-advanced in trialling vocational programs in secondary schools. This flows on from a Schools-TAFE Post-Compulsory Education Taskforce established in 1990. Eight "pathways" have been introduced in broad career areas: applied sciences, art design, health and community services, hospitality and tourism, the performing arts, primary industry and natural resource management, and technology and design. New South Wales is planning to introduce an "Industry Studies" subject as a Board-approved HSC two-unit course in 1993. This is likely to be in addition to other Approved Studies courses which currently provide Schools/TAFE and Schools/Industry links. |
SCHOOL/T.A.F.E. LINKAGES
The Report, under the heading "Implications for Curriculum Development", addresses the problem of collaboration between schools and institutions providing vocational training.
The overriding implication for curriculum development is the imperative for much greater collaboration and co-ordination across the school and TAFE/training sectors. The current lack of effective collaboration and co-ordination is evident at all levels ... The current limited communication across sectors manifests itself in misunderstandings, divergent definitions and concepts, wastefully mismatched courses and, all too often, sectoral recriminations rather than collaboration (p.73).
These statements are far too general. Many schools have excellent communication and co-ordination with the TAFE and training sectors. Highly successful schools/TAFE/industry programs are operating in New South Wales.
Unhappily, TAFE colleges have significant image problems, shown in the public perception of the quality of their courses. They inherited these from the earlier technical colleges. TAFE is not the immediate preference for a large number of school-leavers. Matters have been made slightly worse by the amalgamation of colleges of advanced education and universities, which has encouraged the quite erroneous belief that university is achievable and appropriate for all.
The Finn Report says: "The higher education presence is critical but the balance should reflect the increasing significance for a very large number of senior school students of the TAFE/training sector" (p.73). The problem is to change students' attitudes to TAFE and training. It is to be hoped that this will not be achieved by making TAFE colleges more like the new universities.
ASSESSMENT AND EXAMINATIONS
It is an old dictum that "he who examines, controls". The Finn Report recognises that "school assessment issues stir more passion and professional debate than any other area of education in Australia" (p.65). It believes that the debate is sometimes reduced to two falsely opposed options -- assessment by the classroom teacher and external testing -- but that a changed climate makes the demand for accountability irresistible. The Committee favours assessment and explicit reporting in all six Key Competencies. Language and Mathematics in particular underpin all other achievement. Existing Year 10 and 12 credentials are inadequate. The future form of assessment the Committee leaves to the States, but they should be nationally comparable and developed into a national standards framework. Priority should be given to developing profiles for Language/literacy and Mathematics/numeracy. While there should be regular classroom-based assessment, the Report recommends that "Some form of external, objective test should form a part of the assessment process ... in at least the Language and Communication, Mathematics, and Problem-Solving areas" (p.70). Thus the balance has tilted against the teachers' unions, most of which favour school-based assessmcnt, and towards the business community, which favours external assessment, although the Committee came out against business representations for a national test in Language and Mathematics.
FINDING THE RESOURCES: TEACHERS, MONEY
As the Report says: "The successful implementation of these changes is dependent on the capacity and willingness of teachers in both sectors (school and TAFE) to deliver them" (p. xi). Two crucial questions come to mind in contemplating the vast expansion envisaged by the Year 2001 -- Where will an adequate supply of good teachers be found? Is it possible to find sufficient teachers with appropriate vocational skills? The questions are unanswerable; the Report suggests other bodies which might tackle the problem (pp.78-79).
The final chapter, "Resource Implications", is also insecure. It presents "a range of different scenarios for post-compulsory education and training" (p.165). Assumptions have to be made about retention rates and the likely distribution of the additional students between state and non-state schools. Nor is it possible to say clearly who will provide the finance. Extra expenditure to meet the projected targets is estimated at between $1.1 and $1.5 billion per year -- one-third in schools, one-fifth in higher education, one-third in TAFE and 15 per cent in Austudy. Finn sees four sources -- individuals who pay fees, industry, entrepreneurial activity by institutions (e.g. sale of education overseas), and the public purse, both State and Commonwealth (p.181).
In view of the current inability of governments and economists to forecast economic developments over the next decade, the funding of the new post-compulsory education and training remains obscure.
CONCLUSION
As suggested above, vital to the implementation of a new curriculum is assessment and testing. The relative success of education reform in England and New South Wales owes much to an insistence on some form of external testing. The Commonwealth's national curriculum has not bitten this particular bullet. The success of the Finn proposals will hinge to a considerable degree on the same issue.
Methods of assessment will play a part in determining whether the currently fashionable emphasis on skills reduces emphasis on content, on mastery of knowledge. This is a potent danger, particularly in subjects not externally tested.
Another related danger is that of technical courses becoming overly theoretical. If TAFE colleges become like the new universities and if their work becomes too theoretical, they will fail to deliver the type of trained work-force intended.
If the new curriculum is located primarily in state schools, we may see a division between these and the private schools which decide that their role is to prepare adolescents for what were once called the liberal professions.
The December 1991 report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, Skills Training for the 21st Century, draws attention to a much-neglected way of improving the effectiveness of Australian education. Accepting that TAFE must address the inadequate literacy and numeracy skills currently evident in many young trainees and apprentices, the Committee reiterates its belief that greater resources should be provided for the carly years of primary school. "Early intervention is far more cost-effective and would enable TAFE to re-direct lts resources to skill enhancement elsewhere."
Above all, how is 95 per cent of the age cohort to be induced to undertake vocational training? The answer is provided in the March 1992 Carmichael Report -- young people are to be pushed in this direction by linking their welfare payments to participation in the syslem.
THE VICTORIAN READERS:
COMMONSENSE IN A COMMON HERITAGE
FIRST, an explanation: doubtless unnecessary for those who live in Victoria, but quite possibly required for inhabitants of other States and Territories. Between 1928 and 1930 the Victorian Education Department issued eight reading-books -- one for each grade of primary school, as primary schools were then constituted. All eight books remained on the Department's core curriculum until the 1950s. The fifth and sixth books were kept in use longer than the others; but in the late 1960s they too fell into desuetude, to make way for education-as-titillation. In 1986, however, the Cain Government authorised paperback reissues of all eight books: to the great joy of several thousand Victorians, who were delighted to see them in print again, and who were only too glad to buy such affectionately-remembered highlights of their school days. These several thousand buyers, by the way, did not include myself. Until a few weeks ago, I had neither heard of nor seen The Victorian Readers. I am not a Victorian; I am a New South Welshman, one whose alleged formal education took place in Sydney, at government schools, during the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, when I rejoice in these books, I cannot very well be charged with indulging in some sort of senile nostalgia-kick.
Right from the First Book's opening page, it is clear that the anonymous compilers of the series knew what they were about. On that opening page there is actually a verse with double-rhymes: "I can hop. I can run. I can stop. It is fun ..." One would be hard-pressed to think of a better means for reinforcing the aural qualities, as well as the definitions, of words than by such a verse. A seldom-mentioned casualty of modern educational methods is the total divorce which these methods effect between the sound and the sense of literature (even of doggerel-literature). The divorce's results are all too familiar not just to full-time teachers, but to literary editors and to anyone else whose work involves dealings with the young. Students can, and do, now matriculate without ever having heard a poem -- let alone a metrical poem -- read aloud. What possible merit can such a student's evaluation of poetry possess, when his ear is never trained to distinguish the metre of a Wordsworth sonnet from the metre (if any) of a Sylvia Plath outburst? How can he hope to tell what free verse is, if he has never been shown the features that free verse is free from? With The Victorian Readers, these problems did not arise. From the very beginning, the child's rhythmic sense is sharpened; without cultivating this sense, one can no more write decent prose than one can write decent verse. As for the First Book's own prose, it is equally well suited to its purpose. It readily permits (often it demands) oral reading, as in the following sentences from Lesson 14: "He has a pet pup; it is a pug. The pup tugs at Len's cap. The pup will get the cap off the mat." Try uttering those three sentences in the adenoidal mumble which so many schools have been recently encouraging (under the delusion that such speech patterns are an appropriate "celebration" of "working-class culture")!
REMARKABLE CULTURAL LITERACY
When it comes to what is now called cultural literacy, The Victorian Readers prove no less remarkable. As early as the Second Book, students are actually given genuine Elizabethan meat to chew on: Thomas Ravenscroft's "By the moon we sport and play,/With the night begins our day." (And what better method than this song to inform children that the word "sport" can mean other things than gawping at football matches on the box?) A few pages earlier we have some lines by Christina Rossetti. How many students in 1991 have even heard of Christina Rossetti, or are aware that Swinburne (quoted in the frontispiece to the Third Book) is rather more than the name of a Melbourne technical college? Early in the Third Book we get a poem, The Naughty Boy, by Keats. Not only is it a painless introduction to the master; it might also, by its choice of subject, have persuaded one or two children to refrain from precipitously leaving home. The pleasures of the reading imagination, pleasures which hi-tech invariably impoverishes, are praised (also in the Third Book) by Robert Louis Stevenson:
So, when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-Books.
Somehow, "At my dear land of flight-simulating Nintendo games" doesn't carry quite the same promise. But then, the range of imaginative work which The Victorian Readers manage to include -- even at early stages -- is a marvel. Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin: all are represented here, along with plenty of admirable writers from England's second division. Being myself a product of schools where any literature with less immediate relevance than a Mick Jagger lyric was considered disgustingly élitist, I can only wish that I had been taught about the major English literary league (as were The Victorian Readers' users) while I was still a child. If one is not introduced to great writing then, one never really makes up for the loss in adulthood, however frantically and autodidactically one tries.
HIGH AUSTRALIAN CONTENT
To forestall any parochial commentators who are tempted to dismiss The Victorian Readers for undue obeisance to Britain, it is worth emphasising that departmental rules required no less than a quarter of these books to consist of Australian material. In a 1992 publication such rules would merely fill one with premonitory horror, but the general artistic level of the 1920s ensured that even lesser Australian authorial lights were still fairly dazzling. For my part, I am especially glad to have discovered a certain George Essex Evans: responsible for, among other poems, The Nation Builders.
We are but the hands of the Builder Who toileth and frameth afar;
System, and order, and sequence; sun, and planet, and star;
Faint sparks of a Mighty Genius, a breath of the Oversoul;
Who shapes the thought of the workers wherever His worlds may roll ...
Imitation Kipling this may be, Masonic images and all: yet who in his right mind would not far rather study Dransfield? (Genuine Kipling, pleasingly, is also included in several of the Readers. So are translations of Homer, Cervantes, Voltaire, Schiller, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Alphonse Daudet: what price accusations of "Anglocentrism"?)
Another modish complaint -- that every white Australian loathed and despised Aborigines until the Word was made Gough, and dwelt among us -- is shown by The Victorian Readers to be equally baseless. In an anonymous short story from the Fourth Book, Lost in The Bush, the heroes are all Aboriginal trackers. But no doubt their bravery, like the mine-tinkit-they-fit dialogue which they are assigned, would now elicit stentorian cries of "paternalism" and "tokenism". (Three guesses as to what our race-relations industry would make of a tale in the Second Book, called Wig, Wog and Black Peter.)
Similarly, J.A. Froude's tribute to the Elizabethans who defeated the Armada -- a tribute quoted in the Eighth Book -- would now be universally denounced as "the Whig view of history". (Not that trendies have the faintest idca about what "the Whig view of history" is. They merely remember being unctuously assured by lecturers that it was something pretty reprehensible: connected with capitalism, the work-ethic, the nation-state and other nasties.) Apparently Englishmen of 1588 should simply have invited Philip II in with open arms. Tell that to the Portuguese, or the Neapolitans, or the Dutch, or the despised Spanish merchant class, or any others who had practical experience of Philip II's rule. It presupposes no tendresse towards Elizabeth I to realise that an England under her charge was a much safer place -- not least for the average Catholic -- than an England which had surrendered its entire sovereignty to Philip would have been. This being so, why would schools in a British-founded society begrudge praise to Drake and his fellows for their valour? Certainly The Victorian Readers do not, nor should they. Indeed, given the EC's tireless Britain-bashing, national sovereignty is now a more urgent issue and a more endangered right than ever.
A FINE PRESENT FOR SCHOOL PUPILS
The most interesting question, to my mind, which The Victorian Readers raise is this: exactly why did the Cain Government allow them to be reissued, since they were bound to inspire the most odious comparisons between educational standards then and educational standards today? I do not know, but I think I can guess; I hope I am wrong. The Victorian Readers were reissued, I imagine, to propitiate the Great God Historicism. We are being invited to have a good hearty snigger at them, and hence at the period from which they come. Think of it: an era so benighted that it had no taxpayer-funded child-care centres. No state-owned radio and TV stations for fomenting ethnic hatred. No bureaucracies to protect the status of women, whales, or rainforests. No tertiary courses in graffiti or rap-music. Such an age is bound to excite a certain disbelieving curiosity in the minds of those too young to have known it: how better to appease this curiosity than by trotting out The Victorian Readers, so that we can all be thankful for living in more Caring and Enlightened times? If I have misinterpreted the government's motives for making The Victorian Readers available again, that government has only itself to blame, given its policies on every other social issue. In any case, there can be no better present for an Australian primary-school pupil than The Victorian Readers. They will give pleasure and stimulate minds long after the leering schadenfreude of Roald Dahl and S.E. Hinton has ceased, even among teachers, to have any but pathological interest.
"So they say ..."
School Education News (Sydney), * * *
Sydney Morning Herald, |
STATES' SURVEY
NEW SOUTH WALES
The Schools Renewal Program is now into its third year. All state schools have a one-year School Renewal Management plan. All schools are participating in "global budgeting" and the control over their own resources which this provides will be extended in 1992 to include short-term ancillary relief funding, annual requisitioning, computer education, and school maintenance. Local selection of teachers for transfer started this year.
The Schools Renewal Program rests heavily on the operation of school councils. New South Wales, unlike Victoria and South Australia, has no tradition of school councils. At the beginning of 1989 only four of these existed. By the end of 1990 there were 117. In November 1990 the Minister relaxed the guidelines, allowing school communities to structure their councils as they wished, provided each council had more parent/community members than staff members. The President cannot be a member of the school staff; students can now be members. By March 1991 the number of school councils had risen to 145 -- 108 in primary schools, 25 in secondary, nine in central schools, and three in Special Schools. By the end of the year the total had increased to over 400.
School councils are accountable to the Assistant Director-General (Region) through the Cluster Director. The Principal remains accountable for school finances under the Public Finance and Audit Act.
Since the late 1980, enrolments in Classics at the University of Sydney have grown steadily. A major reason for this, classicists suggest, is that companies like IBM are more interested in hiring bright people than in taking on graduates who have studied ostensibly "relevant" subjects (e.g. Computing) but failed to develop flexible, first-class minds. Apparently, more and more employers are seeking graduates whose thinking is clear and orderly, and whose capacity to work through problems has been well-developed. Because the study of Classics encourages an analytical approach to a broad range of subjects -- Literature, History, Science, Philosophy, and Art -- Classics graduates can come to grips with cultural and social complexity. Having studied the values and perceptions of the ancients, and uncovered their underlying assumptions, they are better equipped to handle present-day values, perceptions, assumptions and meanings.
NORTHERN TERRITORY
The Northern Territory is one of the last state school systems to commit itself to devolution. In November 1991, the NT Department of Education issued a Standard Devolution Package: A Practical Guide to Education Decision-Making for School Councils. The Education Act is to be amended to increase the powers of School Councils, which consist of 19 persons representing parents, teachers, students (in secondary schools) and, as an option, members of the community. The powers of school councils are presently being revised, but they can determine the use of government money allocated to schools, give advice regarding employment of teachers, and employ non-teaching staff. Councils cannot investigate complaints about principals or teachers, nor instruct teachers regarding professional duties. Moreover, the Minister still receives advice from the NT Board of Studies and the Education Advisory Council.
How well will devolution work, in view of the sparse population of the Territory and the persistence of a practical pioneering spirit? In the 1970s the Commonwealth Department of Education encouraged progressive education and open area learning in Territory schools. But after the Northern Territory assumed responsibility for state education in July 1979 attempts were made to raise standards. The 1980 Australia-wide literacy and numeracy tests for 10 and 14 year-olds sounded the alarm. To raise standards and counter the habit of sending students south for quality education, the Government in the early 1980s introduced a new curriculum for primary schools and Years 7-10, issued an "Education for Gifted Children" policy, and established school councils.
As in the rest of Australia, the secondary school retention rate started to rise in 1983. From the beginning of 1986 secondary schools were restructured into junior highs (Years 8-10) and senior colleges (Years 11 and 12). Junior highs started to experiment. Innovations included a school-based curriculum "unitised" in packages of 10 weeks and based on "vertical" groupings of students -- vertical pastoral-care groups, "democratic participatory" decision-making -- and criterion-based student assessment. Despite a Department of Education warning to schools in 1986 not to expect additional financial or other support for such changes, this model spread. By 1991 about six out of 11 junior high schods in Darwin and Alice Springs used at least some of the new approach. Education in the Territory seems to be encountering the contradictory pressures of traditional academic policies favoured by many politicians and modern experimental approaches favoured by many teachers.
VICTORIA
In recent months the Government has made several significant concessions to the critics of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board (VCAB), the body responsible for implementing the VCE, has promised to consider raising the proportion of external assessment in VCE English from 25 per cent to 50 per cent. English is compulsory for all VCE students. VCAB has also undertaken a review of Mathematics. This follows surveys showing a decline in standards among Melbourne and Monash University students who had taken VCE Maths.
In addition, Australian Studies has been made non-compulsory. Formerly, all VCE students had to complete the first two units -- equivalent to one year -- of Australian Studies. One reason why the critics wanted to see Australian Studies become optional was that, as a compulsory subject, it would have pushed aside valuable subjects, such as History and Foreign Languages. The Minister for Education announced his decision to drop the compulsory requirement at the end of last year. It may have been the right decision, but it was made too late for many schools which had already invested considerable time and resources into developing Australian Studies courses.
Despite these reforms, there remain considerable problems with the VCE. Several of the Study Designs are poorly constructed and focus on the processes of learning rather than the content. There is still an undue emphasis on internal assessment. Moreover, the attempt to construct a single certificate which will meet the requirements of an increasingly large and diverse population of students is misguided. Other more specific problems emerged on the release of the 1991 VCE results. The fact that some students could obtain an Anderson score of 150 out of a possible 410 and still receive their Certificate was perceived as indicating the lowering of standards which critics say will follow the VCE's full introduction this year.
These and other challenges confront the new Education Minister, Mr Pope, the fifth Minister in six years. VCAB has a similar record, having had five Chairmen since its foundation in July 1986. This rate of turnover could be interpreted as reflecting the instability of the whole VCE enterprise.
TASMANIA
A relatively unpublicised fact about the new Tasmanian Certificate of Education is that 12 of its 38 syllabuses were initially rejected by the University of Tasmania as unsuitable for university entrance. Among the rejected syllabuses was English Literature. According to critics of this syllabus, a cosmetic re-write of the unacceptable document was rushed through the University admissions policy committee in response to pressure from the recently amalgamated branch institution, Tasmanian State Institute of Technology. This re-written syllabus, critics report, is so lacking in rigour that well-respected schools, such as Scotch-Oakburn College in Launceston, are unwilling to teach it. Among the more striking weaknesses of the new Literature course, senior English heads report, is its failure to recommend specific texts for study. Schools are therefore free to teach Judy Blume rather than Jane Austen; and some are doing just that -- even though it is widely recognised by serious educators that time spent on lightweight material is time wasted.
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
It is not usually necessary to go in search of critics of South Australian education. Not only has the Institute of Teachers frequently lamented the awful government- and bureaucracy-inspired stresses and strains that make the job of teaching so difficult; the Education Department too has readily cited the problems of bias and disadvantage within its own schools whenever it wishes to assure us that it is working hard to improve things.
South Australians have become used to ignoring such messages: but in February this year the pupils themselves, on The Advertiser's education page, added their voices. For Melanie (of Bellevue Heights), 1992 promises "similar large unwieldy classes, children uninterested in learning ... and teachers harboring falling morale." For Rebecca (of Mt Pleasant), everything depends on "how well the Education Department continues to improve standards". Perhaps these are signs of genuine popular concern of a kind that has been slow to surface through many years of costly and uncertain educational experimentation.
Teachers' morale is undoubtedly low. Budgetary pressures, partly due to the generous teachers' pay increase of late 1990, mean that staffing responses to over-crowded classes are miserly and delayed. A large number of advisory and administrative staff were suddenly "abolished" by the Government Administrative Review of late 1991 and many of these people left the system or searched within it in some disenchantment for a job commensurate with their expertise.
The four-year reign of Dr K. Boston as Director-General has been characterised by new initiatives and administrative uncertainties. Its legacy is said to be a "new culture", dawning as Dr Boston leaves for New South Wales and bigger things. In the new culture, schools manage their own budgets, though who has prepared them to do this satisfactorily is unclear. Many experienced teachers see their careers disappearing into the unknown and fear the ascendancy of existing pressure groups and "new culture" careerists. They anticipate a world divided between the managers and the managed, in which educative activity has an uncertain place.
Now, with the Bannon Government depending upon independent members for its survival, it is reported that there is support for an Opposition plan for a select committee to inquire into the provision of primary and secondary education by the Education Department: "to analyse education constructively and in a bipartisan way and to come up with a viable solution." Politicians of neither party deserve praise for their educational judgments in recent years. It will be of interest to see whether, should this select committee become active, the new-found power of the independent members will result in an inquiry into education that is properly independent of the interest groups that have enjoyed education as their playground in South Australia for too many years.
CALCULATIONS
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS TEACHING SALARIES
PRIMARY SCHOOLS (Blue numerals)
SECONDARY SCHOOLS (Green numerals)
| Expenditure on teaching staff salaries 1989/90 $'000 | Teaching staff (full-time effective) 1990 | Average mean teaching salaries $ | |
| NSW | 734,789 809,317 | 22,267 23,352 | 32,999 34,657 |
| Vic | 675,042 745,417 | 18,420 21,530 | 36,647 34,622 |
| Qld | 413,289 347,228 | 13,597 10,842 | 30,396 32,026 |
| SA | 262,310 221,153 | 7,389 6,214 | 35,500 35,589 |
| WA | 243,700 203,177 | 7,535 6,101 | 32,342 33,302 |
| Tas | 76,978 84,275 | 2,196 2,350 | 35,054 35,862 |
| NT | 39,730 28,068 | 1,248 738 | 31,835 38,033 |
| ACT | 46,257 57,lO1 | 1,185 1,513 | 39,035 37,740 |
| Aust | 2,492,095 2,495,736 | 73,837 72,640 | 33,751 34,358 |
Source: Statistical Annex: National Report on Schooling in Australia 1990,
Australian Education Council, 1991.
School leavers continuing into higher education
| Year | Persons | Annual growth rate (%) |
| 1979 (a) | 40,800 | |
| 1980 (a) | 39,500 | -3.2 |
| 1981 (a) | 38,600 | -2.3 |
| 1982 (a) | 37,700 | -2.3 |
| 1983 (a) | 38,500 | 2.1 |
| 1984 | 42,000 | 9.1 |
| 1985 | 45,800 | 9.0 |
| 1986 | 49,100 | 7.2 |
| 1987 (b) | 52,100 | 6.1 |
| 1988 | 59,900 | 15.0 |
| 1989 | 66,900 | 11.8 |
| 1990 | 71,700 | 7.1 |
(a) These figures include some estimates, to ensure that the coverage in terns of institutions is the same for all years.
(b) Figures for 1987 are all estimates, as a significant number of institutions did not provide the relevant data in that year's statistical return to the Department.
Source: Department of Employment, Education and Training.
THE TOP TEN IN WHO'S WHO
| School | State | No. of former students appearing in Who's Who |
| Scotch College | Vic | 247 |
| Melbourne Grammar | Vic | 222 |
| Melbourne Boys' High | Vic | 209 |
| Geelong Grammar | Vic | 178 |
| St Peter's College | SA | 173 |
| Sydney Boys' High | NSW | 169 |
| Wesley College | Vic | 142 |
| SCEGS (Shore) | NSW | 138 |
| Fort Street | NSW | 132 |
| North Sydney Boys' | NSW | 127 |
Source: J. McCalman, M. Peel, Who Went Where in Who's Who 1988,
University of Melbourne, 1992.
A BEACON FOR TEACHING:
HOUSTON'S ALTERNATIVE CERTIFICATION PROGRAM
Discontent with established systems of teacher training at universities and colleges of education has been widespread. In England, most of the training will now be given in schools. In America, numerous programs have been devised to improve teacher selection procedures and bring teacher preparation closer to classroom realities. In the following article, Susan Moore discusses one such program.
LAST OCTOBER, with the principal of the Launceston Preparatory School, Mrs Jan Couper, the principal of Redfield College in Sydney, Frank Monagle, and his wife, Virginia, I went to Houston to find out more about its Alternative Certification Program for teachers, and to learn how to interview candidates for selection into the program.
Two years before we travelled to the United States, I was told that the best reforms in teacher education were being introduced in Texas. A year later, altogether different sources produced identical findings. Their reliability was confirmed last June when the person responsible for the most far-ranging and successful teacher training reforms in America, Professor Martin Haberman of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spoke in Sydney at an Institute of Public Affairs conference about the origins, nature, and scope of his alternative certification program.
In America, 30 states now offer Alternative Certification Programs (ACP). Houston's is widely regarded as the best one. Not only has the teacher selection instrument which has attracted the most attention in the United States, the copyrighted Haberman Interview, been implemented successfully there since 1985; but the largest ACP operation in the country, organised by the Houston Independent School District (HISD), has its base in the heart of the city. Besides recruiting talented trainee teachers and placing them in one-year paid internships in tough urban schools, selecting their supervisors, organising their coursework, doing follow-up research on their teaching performances, and training many of them (and their colleagues) to give selection interviews, HISD introduces educators from around the world to every aspect of its program.
HISD is in charge of 200,000 children, 38.1 per cent of whom are black and 44.9 per cent Hispanic. It has a school superintendent (Dr ~ r k ~ket ruzieior)e sponsible for 239 public schools, all of them urban and most of them disadvantaged, and a large and diverse professional staff which works closely with teachers and children. Despite powerful opposition by teachers and their unions in the mid 1980s' a small group of reformers, led by General Superintendent Dr Billy Reagan and, soon afterwards, Dr Delia Stafford, set up an alternative teacher training course suitable for these schools and for similar ones in other urban areas around the country.
The course designed by Dr Stafford and her associates has worked so well from its inception that 20 per cent of Houston's teachers are now chaosing it. Last year 1,200 students, many of them of mature age, applied for 200 new ACP places. This year there will be room for 500 -- the largest teacher education operation in the State. People connected with traditional teacher education, instead of opposing the program and its graduates as they did initially, are now involved in its implementation. At the state and national levels, the directors of the Houston program meet regularly with other ACP directors to share ideas about alternative teacher education and to improve teacher education as a whole.
In order to attract into teaching adults whose life experience has given them values, skills, and attitudes which promise success in the most difficult urban schools, HISD encourages graduates without traditional credentials in education, but with appropriate academic and personal qualifications, to complete its course without sacrificing large amounts of time or money in the process. Provided that their undergraduate grade point average is 2.5 or above (out of a possible 4.0), that they pass tests in mathematics, reading, and writing required by the State, and that their scores on the Haberman selection interview are sufficiently high, they are admitted to the program. Very few drop out or fail; and most make teaching a permanent career choice.
Before they begin their internships, students are given six intensive wccks of pre-assignment training, including observation periods in schools complemented by obligatory written work on what has been observed. While they are teaching full-time they complete a year's coursework, one day a week, at the HISD regional centre. Covering topics designed to prepare them for standard school tasks required outside as well as within the classroom -- for example, parental conferences -- the coursework gives them survival skills rarely provided in traditional teacher education programs.
In the classes we observed in Houston, all of us were struck by the ease with which every ACP graduate asked questions about challenging subjects, responded to answers, explained concepts which led to further exploration, and involved the more difficult students -- who were very much in evidence -- in quiet reflection.
Our impression was that these teachers were capable to begin with and well trained in the essential aspects of sound classroom instruction and management. None had major discipline problems -- we inferred, because the children were handled with such thoughtfulness and respect, and given such imaginative work to do, that they liked being in school. Five years earlier, we were told, before the advent of ACP and the close involvement of HISD with a number of new and capable school principals (two of whom \ke met), children very like them were uncontrollable.
None of us witnessed on-the-job supervision of ACP interns because there wasn't time: we were in Houston during a period of state-wide basic skills testing. Nevertheless, we learned from ACP graduates and program directors that supervisory work is undertaken in multiple layers by rigorously selected star teachers or mentors, school heads, teaching specialists and consultants, and district representatives working with each intern. Basic to the program's philosophy is the belief that training must issue in a continuing, collaborative process of renewal and growth.
Preparing Teachers for the Classroom Preparing teachers for the reality of the classroom should be the job of good teachers in the classrooms of good schools. Schools should strive to attract outstanding graduates in the various subject areas and employ them as probationary teachers. Their instruction should be closely supervised by experienced skilled teachers. There is no need for higher education institutions to offer special teacher preparation and development courses. They should provide firm and rich undergraduate and postgraduate discipline studies (e.g. English, Maths) to ensure that probationers begin with real subject mastery and that experienced teachers can extend their subject knowledge appropriately. - Dr Bentard Mageean, School of Education, Flinders University. |
SUPPORT AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Support networks for trainees are considered an essential feature of the ACP training program in Houston and in other urban centres. As well as working with their many supervisors, interns have regular contact with other interns and with recent graduates of the ACP in their own and neighbouring schools. Through such active organisations as the Texas Education Agency in Austin and the Texas Alternative Certification Association, interns, teachers, mentors, administrators, regional specialists, and higher education faculty share perspectives and develop wider, more efficient cross-country links.
At every state and at every level of training, accountability is encouraged. ACP outcome data such as results for the Examination for the Certification of Educators in Texas and intern scores on the Texas Teacher Appraisal System are carefully monitored to ensure that a high performance standard is maintained.
To protect all inlcrns, the requirements agreed upon by ACP leaders in particular regions are compared with those set by state credentialing bodies and university teacher education programs so that every aspect of relevant professional development is suitably covered. Additional checks of program quality are provided at national conferences, supported by the US Department of Education, where experts in teacher education and Alternative Teacher Certification such as Dr Emily Feistritzer of the National Center for Education Information in Washington, DC, or Professor Haberman himself, present overviews of the entire field.
One of the reasons ACP works so well in Texas (and in other States) is that it functions outside the incentive system which drives traditional teacher education. To get on, and to improve their poor public image, traditional, tenured teacher educators pursue activities (e.g. involvement in professional organisations, publication in education journals) which may or may not improve their teaching. Since they are not rewarded for teaching excellence, many serve as poor teaching models for their students. The demands of "research" prevent them from wanting close personal ties with schools; and a background in education, rather than the major disciplines, makes their research base increasingly specialised and narrow.
In alternative certification programs, in contrast, instructors must respond to immediate and felt needs, updating and revising what they do so that it suits existing school conditions. To keep their jobs as recruiters, interviewers, mentors, or consultants, they have to plan programs for trainees and supervise interns on the job in ways that are clearly useful. Such research as they undertake must be regarded as important and pertinent to teaching and learning in existing schools. But they don't have the worry of having constantly to apply or re-apply for grants, since one funding system can cover all the work they do. The better they are at their jobs, the more immediate and encouraging are their rewards.
Since the employment arrangements for staff involved in alternative certification programs can vary greatly, there are flexible program options for ACP instructors which constitute an additional job incentive. Those who supervise interns in school and design some or all of their coursework can be employed jointly by universities and school districts, or separately by either, with varying degrees of responsibility and temporal commitment. As well as offering financial benefits, involvement in ACP training can provide leadership opportunities and forms of personal satisfaction for star teachers unavailable in conventional teacher training programs.
Of the impressive fruits of ACP witnessed by all of us who travelled to Texas, the most striking was the enthusiasm exhibited by every graduate who spoke to us. Despite the volume of work demanded, and the reserves of energy required of them, person after person commented on the joys of being a teacher and working in alternative certification. Those of mature age who had left more lucrative but spiritually vapid careers assured us that the salary cuts they had sustained, though a burden, were bearable. This assurance was, of course, no plea for unchanged pay conditions but, rather, a statement about the immeasurable rewards available to teachers in very tough schools who know what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Although the range of on-the-job benefits available to ACP graduates must strike anyone who evaluates schools in Houston, it is obvious to seasoned educators that the feature of the program most responsible for its success is the Haberman selection interview. Since there is wide agreement among professionals that nothing is more conducive to educational excellence than the quality of a school staff, the importance of a reliable method of selecting teachers cannot be overemphasised.
Undoubtedly, good training is as essential in teacher education as good working conditions are to full-time teachers. But unless adults with appropriate attitudes, values, and habits are chosen for training programs in the most difficult schools, all the instruction in the world will be counter-productive. The great virtue of the Haberman interview is that for almost 30 years it has reliably predicted success and failure in jobs too tough for over half the products of traditional training programs to remain in.
For decades, teacher educators around the world have known that there are scores of graduates with passing grades, decent personal motives, and worthy professional aspirations who cannot function well in very demanding classroom settings. Yet our usual means of selection have not weeded out such graduates or refused them admission into teacher training; and in traditional training programs very few have been failed.
Yes: a reasonably high standard of academic performance is a necessary qualification for a beginning teacher. Yes: at least one satisfactorily completed period of introductory classroom work is desirable. Yes: answers to the questions usually asked of aspiring teachers in conventional interviews -- e.g. Why do you want to be a teacher? In what areas do you expect to make the strongest contribution? Which of your personal qualities will aid you most? -- reveal something about the personality and aims of teaching candidates. And yes: we need teachers whose academic capacities, initial classroom efforts, personal qualities, and professional goals are, or appear to be, respectable.
But the conventional selection criteria upon which teacher education has relied from the beginning, namely, passing grades, nicely expressed sentiments in interviews about broad professional aspirations, and passable performances during teaching practice in agreeable suburban schools, have almost no predictive teaching value. Neither do conventional, exhaustive summaries of agreeable personal traits (e.g. humour, enthusiasm, creativity, warmth) or desirable behaviours in aspiring teachers (Wisconsin lists 227!) compiled during the last three decades by educational psychologists who have wanted both to account for and promote teaching success.
Although for many years teacher educators -- particularly those with training in psychology -- have listed the features of personality and the behaviours which characterise effective teachers, their lists have not been effectively translated into educational programs. One obvious reason for this is that these same educators have not explained, or tried to explain, whether prospective teachers should possess most or all of the desirable traits and behaviours before they begin their training; whether the traits and behaviours (all or some) should be taught as part of the training -- and if so, how, and in what proportions; and whether any, all, or some should be required of all graduating trainees.
A second reason why lists of desirable traits and behaviours for teachers have not been used to develop workable training programs is that the lists are too unwieldy to be used; and, over the years, very few educators at any level have attempted to classify their contents in useful ways or pare them down to their essentials.
Sociologists, however, looking at the world of work (not simply the world of teaching), Izave made suggestions about how lists of desirable vocational traits and behaviours can be reduced in size and translated into workable terms. They have done this by focusing upon a middle way between personality-based and behavioural approaches to the concept of professional success.
Research undertaken by Robert K. Merton in the late 1940s showed that predictions of professional success based (at one extreme) on approaches which identify basic personality traits and (at the other extreme) on the situational demands of the job as it is practised in a specific setting or institution are equally unhelpful. It is not possible, Merton sensibly pointed out, to generalise from personality dimensions about how individuals will behave across the broad range of situations they may encounter at work; and because there are so many possible behaviours, it is useless to try to specify the ones most appropriate to a given situation.
What every professional needs in order to negotiate between the extremes of "personality traits" and "situational demands" and to arrive at a workable, golden mean, Merton's research made clear, is a relatively short list of mid-range funciions -- i.e. chunks, clusters, or groups of behaviours -- which manifest desirable personal traits and lead to success on the job. Martin Haberman, whose undergraduate major was sociology, read Merton at Brooklyn College and capitalised on his findings by deciding in 1958 to develop a mid-range function list for school teachers.
Over a three-year period, analysing thc work of 124 New York City student teachers, Haberman devised a list of eight essential mid-range teaching functions -- behaviours we in Australia would now call "key competencies". They are: organisational ability, stamina, creativity, skill in personal relations, planning, discipline, teaming, and self-analysis. Comparing the classroom performances of 18 students identified by experienced teachers as "stars" with the performances of 14 students classified as "failures" by principals, teachers, and college supervisors, he was able to isolate the behaviours, and the traits and attitudes implicit in them, responsible for their disparate teaching results.
THE START OF THE HABERMAN INTERVIEW
In 1962 Martin Haberman began to refine this naming-of-competencies process, translating facts about mid-range functions into questions suitable for identifying key competencies in teacher selection interviews. His object was to develop a means of selecting teachers which would reduce the failure rate of beginning teachers in their first three years (50 per cent), identify teachers likely to be successful in urban environments, and prevent children and youth from being the actual selectors of teachers in the most difficult schools.
Between 1962 and 1965, Martin Haberman developed initiatives which led to the establishment of an internship program at the University of Wisconsin, similar internships at other major universities (called Master of Arts in Teaching programs), and a National Teacher Corps. Using 108 Milwaukee interns, he and his colleagues refined his interview questions so that they would more accurately cover mid-range functions which distinguish between outstanding teachers and failures; and they estabiished evaluation procedures for the interview by checking their initial predictions against interns' actual performances.
The evaluation procedure devised at the University of Wisconsin in 1%2-65, which was used solely for research rather than for teacher selection purposes, compared original interview ratings with actual performance ratings.
| Category | Interviews | Performance |
| Stars | 17 | 19 |
| High | 43 | 51 |
| Average | 36 | 25 |
| Failures | 12 | 13 |
| Total | 108 | 108 |
Their operational definition of an interview error was as follows:
- Assessing as a category other than Failure an individual who fails.
- Assessing any individual as a Failure who achieves a higher level in practice.
- Misplacing a candidate by more than one category. This means that assessing a person as a Star who was in practice High would not be considered an error. Assessing him as a Star if he was in practice Average would be an error, and vice-versa.
Using this operational definition, Haberman and his colleagues made three interview errors on the first 108 candidates interviewed.
Beginning in 1966, the Haberman Selection Interview was used to select college graduates for the Milwaukee Intern Teaching Program. When the program ended in 1973, about 1,500 interns had completed the interview and the program. Interviews were always conducted by one faculty member from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and one representative of the Milwaukee Public Schools, usually a central office supervisor. Several classroom teachers who acted as co-operating teachers were also trained to conduct interviews. In 11 years, there were five Directors who used different individuals to conduct the selection interviews. In every year there was less than a three per cent error between prediction and performance.
Subsequently, the copyrighted interview was released for use in selecting university graduates without teacher training as beginning urban teachers, or as full-time interns for Alternative Certification Programs in major American cities. At present, the interview is widely used for both these purposes. Since a corollary of interview use is interview evaluation, Haberman- trained people around the country are keeping records of the teaching performances of people interviewed.
So far, around the United States, the interview's predictive usefulness has been extremely high: close to 100 per cent accurate. In other words, for three decades marked by large changes in American culture and schooling, the value of the interview has been constant. Selectors trained to conduct it have been able to place teachers in urban classrooms, confident about what will emerge in them. Almost without exception, individuals with high interview scores have been successful urban teachers.
For reasons of confidentiality, Martin Haberman has not been able to publish his interview questions or discuss their nature fully except with persons trained to give it. He has, however, said publicly that since the early 1960s his original list of essential mid-range functions has been modified so that (1) its terms are clearer, and (2) the questions used to reveal key competencies in the persons interviewed have acquired greater precision. He has also repeatedly stated, with regret, that the mid-range functions most critical to the success of urban teachers, namely, organisational skills and stamina, cannot be assessed in an interview. Nobody has been able to devise questions suitable for measuring either of these key mid-range functions.
To date, the people we have interviewed in Australia as a means of assessing the Haberman interview's probable usefulness here -- i.e. policy-makers, teachers, academics, school heads, administrators, aspiring teachers -- have been struck by its intelligence and practicality. Unlike conventional interviews, the Haberman selection interview does not encourage prospective or actual teachers to formulate worthy educational platitudes about schooling or their own aims and abilities, and to stop there. Instead, it reveals their willingness to seek answers to never-ending educational problems, and thus, their underlying commitment to teaching and learning.
Spontaneously and unavoidably, the people we have interviewed here in Australia, like those we interviewed or saw being interviewed in America, have disclosed aspects of their nature directly pertinent to classroom performance. This is because, like it or not, the questions have forced their hand on real instructional issues. Many have concluded their time with us by taking up some of the issues raised by the questions, and asking for our own views about them. Everyone has understood and agreed with the principles underlying each question. And there has been complete concurrence about the importance of the mid-range functions (or key competencies) covered.
IMPLICATIONS FOR AUSTRALIA
Just as Martin Haberman and his colleagues were unwilling to use the interview as a teaching selection instrument until it had been trialled at the University of Wisconsin, so we who went to Houston have been practising and refining our interviewing techniques, making sure that they are suited to Australian teachers. Ideally, we would like the interview to play the same role here that it has played in America so that alternative certification programs like Houston's can be started in Australia. That would require full-scale interview training for school heads, leading teachers, and administrators, conducted by Haberman-trained people, and the development of alternative, school-based training courses using star teachers as mentors.
Support is growing in Australia for a substantially different concept of teacher education based on internships. If three-tiered ACPs anchored in (1) the Haberman selection interview, (2) year-long, paid internships, and (3) a year's concurrent coursework emulating the best features of the Houston model were started in this country with the help of people working within traditional teacher education, as they were in Wisconsin and Texas, our prospects would be bright indeed.
EDUCATIONAL NOTEBOOK
A symposium on "Practising Post-modernism", held at the University of Newcastle last November, had some highly esoteric sessions. Here is the summary of the paper on Nietzsche's Physio-Semiology of Morals and the Political Economy of the Body: "The body has recently emerged as a site of increased interest in recent studies concerned with the topics of power, the law, and the constitutive role of signifying practices. In his paper, Joseph Pugliese wishes to draw attention to Nietzschean genealogy and what he terms his "physio-semiology" of morals as method useful in disclosing the relations of power inscribed in particular sociocultural configurations within which the body is articulated and made available as an object of knowledge. He focuses, in addition, on the manner in which the corporeal figure in the Nietzschean text serves not only to interrogate and debunk the Cartesian disjunctive dialectic between mind and body, but also to delineate the often literal manner in which the body politic intextuates itself dermographically on the epidermis of the subject. Joseph Pugliese teaches English at the University of Newcastle ..."
Presumably Mr Pugliese teaches Creative Writing. Alternatively, he may be a lecturer in Remedial English who has become contaminated by the thought-processes of his students. Or maybe the whole thing is a satire on post-modernism. I attended his paper, to see if it was intended as a parody. It was not. In fact, translated into plain English it would have been quite impressive. The truth is, you can't satirise post-modernism! Much of modern literary theory is, in itself, a vast, unconscious satire.
The next session was Let's DO the Time Warp Again: Performance and Post-modernity, offered by Jane Goodall of the Drama Department. Her summary opens: "How do we contest our own becoming in a warped timescape across which its trajectory is always already fuelled by late capitalist panic?" I suspect this sort of overheated vocabulary is a prime example of "late capitalist panic"! Gore Vidal, the American writer, recently wrote that the people who dominate university literary departments have no feeling for books and so have replaced them by literary theory. America is ahead of Australia in this respect, and other forces operate, such as peer pressure and the unpreparedness of students for literature. But Vidal's dictum has some truth.
A new bandwagon is on the move. The current issue of Education and Society, published in Melbourne, with a guest editor from America, is dedicated to "Post-modernism, Post-colonialism and Pedagogy". Guess what? It includes an article from Meredith College, USA, with the title "Skinned Alive: Towards a Post-modern Pedagogy of the Body".
Visiting thc University of Wollongong, I perused a noticeboard providing information about the September examinations. Four first-year English examinations were scheduled -- Romantics and Victorians, Major 20th Century Writers, 18th Century Literature, and (of course) Critical Practice and Theory. One item of "additional material" was allowed in the examination room -- a dictionary. Now surely English students are the LEAST likely to need a dictionary in examinations! Anyone enrolling in English should be able to spell. Yet come to think of it, maybe the dictionaries are needed for Critical Practice and Theory -- for meaning rather than spelling.
Whatever happened to peace education? At the Wollongong History of Education conference the national co-ordinator of the Australian Peace Education and Research Association speculated on the reluctance of key peace educators to contribute autobiographical chapters to two recent books. In one case, only eight out of 20 people accepted her invitation. She attributed this reticence to the "marginalisation" of peace education by Education Departments and the drying up of government funds for peace education. Why would an academic or professional teacher complicate hislher career (she asked) by "coming out" as a peace educator? I can suggest two other reasons for the quiescence of peace education -- it has been absorbed into the green, environmentalist movement; and the collapse of communism in East Europe (and perhaps the Gulf War) has greatly diminished threats to peace.
In 1991 I became a tutor for the University of the Third Age. The U3A is a new adult education movement for retired persons over the age of 55 which is achieving considerable success. An international University of the Third Age conference meets in Cambridge, England, later this year. I took a class for six sessions on feudal civilisation and another in the second semester on ancient Greece and Rome. An important feature of the U3A is that tutors are not paid. This keeps expenses down and encourages dedication on the part of tutors. They are usually in the same age group as their students. Administrators, too, are volunteers. Courses are flexible and may range from two weeks to six. The majority of students, as is traditional in Australian adult education, are women.
Why has the U3A been so successful? One reason is that adult education and university courses are now quite expensive. A year's enrolment in the U3A costs only $15 or $20. Another reason may be that changes in the academic character of many higher education courses make it hard for those educated before, say, 1967 to comprehend them. A third reason is, I suspect, that mature-age students are put off by the limited background knowledge and lack of intellectual commitment of many young undergraduates. Too many of these are over-schooled and under-educated.
WILL THE WHEEL TURN FULL CIRCLE?
PEOPLE ask me do I think standards have fallen during the 26 years I have been teaching in primary schools. If I answer "Yes", I suppose I would have to take part of the blame. And then you might ask me why it has happened.
Basic skills have been getting much public discussion recently. And if employers, teachers and parents all obviously want similar goals, why are such diverse directions being taken to reach them?.
While fencing in the remote hills near Barraba in northern New South Wales, our party was surprised to see some hunters appear in their four-wheel drive. "How do we get back to Tamworth from here?" enquired the shooters. Our boss, the grazier, put down some wire, scratched his head, and answered: "Well, that's difficult. If I was going to Tamworth I wouldn't start from here."
I get the same feeling lately when I hear educational theories expounded. Many theories start at thc wrong place.
Several years ago while packing to leave Waratah Boys' Primary School for the new buildings up the street, a teacher unearthed, in a forgotten hallway cupboard, a class set of Year 6 Composition books. The books were from the 1960s. Teachers in the staffroom marvelled at the high standard cf stories and their presentation. Why aren't we collecting such sets of books now? How were they taught to produce such vocabulary and creative stories? Did those teachers have different goals and equipment from us?
SYLLABUSES
In those days, teachers were issued with a "blue book", a primary school syllabus, which clearly stated grade content and expectations of standards to be reached. The last time it was issued was 1963. It is interesting to note that in 1989 the Federal Minister for Education launched the idea of an Australian core curriculum. The NSW Department of School Education is also again issuing syllabuses. Will the wheel really turn full circle?
No clear explanation was given for the withdrawal of the blue syllabus.-~ctl assroom levels we heard a criticism that it did not cater for school differences. An example quoted at the time was about a boy at Tibooburra who could not understand a story he was reading because it mentioned lawn and grass. But city children have to learn about barren inland towns, so why shouldn't a country child be taught that coastal towns have lawns? Why scrap a whole program because it doesn't rain in Tibooburra?
After teaching for a quarter of a century I do not find it difficult tc accept the idea that an average student can be visualised for each grade. Now the government is telling us, through the Basic Skills Test, that there are definite measuring standards for Years 3 and 6. The basic skills being tested are in Mathematics and English. But the new syllabuses and the new tests do not seem to harmonise.
MATHEMATICS
The new 1988 Mathematics syllabus abandoned the system of setting out grade expectations and introduced a new system of arranging the material in modules. It provided no clear indication which modules should be covered in each grade (Year). Certainly, any good teacher knows that a child should understand each level before moving on to the next. But then came the experts who drew up the Basic Skills Tcst. They had to decide the appropriate modules which should have been mastered by Year 6. How did they decide what an average Year 6 child should know? And what level of achievement in Mathematics does the high school assume in pupils who have ended Year 6? One module requires that children be able to name knots tied in ropes. Is such knowledge necessary for progression into high school?
The 1988 syllabus also introduced "hands-on" Mathematics. But if the Commonwealth and the States design a new Mathematics, what happens to "hands-on" Maths? Hands-on Maths is a good idea -- but it needs new equipment, organisation, iind plenty of time. Will it therefore go the same way as cuisinaire rods? They came in during the early 1%0s, just when the old syllabus went out. My teachers' college lecturer at the time said they were good for bonfires. She preferred counting with stones and sticks, which were cheaper. No doubt someone made money selling cuisinaire equipment. But now the rods are gone from the schools. They were of some use, particularly for slow learners and for teaching fractions. But the teacher needed to be well-trained in their use, and most were not. Textbooks are now appearing for hands-on Maths. Probably some writers will benefit financially. Children will not, because the pace is slow and the expected standards are not high. Even more than cuisinaire, Hands-On Maths needs much material, money, and adequate storage arrangements.
In the early 1960s most classes were streamed. Today most classes are parallel classes. One reason why the new Maths causes problems for teachers is that the differences in ability in a class make Maths harder to teach The principle of "stage, not age" is supposed to meet this problem; but group teaching is harder than class teaching. This sort of problem is less obvious in teaching English.
ENGLISH
Brian Cambourne of Wollongong University has provided in his textbooks, Read On and Write 0n, a popular and widely-used approach to the Whole Language Method. Of course, the integrated, Whole Language method which he presents is not really new. Many of his "strategies" have bcen used for years under different names, but he successfully links them all into a meaningful whole. As a supervisor, I find that teachers use the strategies well, but are unclear about appropriate levels of achievement. For example, many teachers present young children with the model of a book written by an adult. Such a model can be too difficult for the average child. The author is a professional with special talents and is writing with the use of modern equipment, such as a word processor, which makes rewriting easy, and he has ample time. Such a model cannot be emulated by a child with a pencil in a classroom and with limited time. No wonder many children ramble on in their written work.
Cambourne's guide for a story-writing lesson is to bring topical ideas from the child's experiences, demonstrate a class learning "focus", move into actual conferencing and writing time before concluding with sharing of ideas.
These are marvellous strategies. But the teachers in the 1960s classrooms had short, clear "focus" expectations. Year 4 pupils in Term 1 were expected to write sentences, beginning with "when" phrases, ending with "where" phrases, while containing vivid adjectives (e.g. "In the morning the children went to play by the flooding creek"). The skills were demonstrated systematically, leaving children to experiment and modify them. When required, a child had a whole range of skills upon which to draw.
IN WHAT DIRECTION?
This new idea of treating things as a process of a whole has even spread to sport. Recently I failed a soccer coaching course because I thought the methods of instruction were back-to-front. They took a whole game situation, halted at an error, analysed it, drew up training situations to rectify the error, and then returned to the game. To me this seemed a waste of time, efficiency, and effort. The basic skills of soccer have been known for decades. What is needed is a basic framework to link the taught skills into a common game plan. This approach has given me great success at a national level. Why should I change it?
Will this "whole process" method spread to instruction in other fields? "Here is a car, lass, drive it and 1'11 teach you by your experiences." "Son, wire up this circuit and we'll learn if it works."
Why change the good points of the 1960s? A balance between a teacher with clear skills expectations with children permitted creative freedom will bring excellence. If we make the "focus" points of the "whole language" approach into clear grade expectations, the new strategies will obtain good results. We should develop expectations and standards for an "average" child. This would allow teachers to use their imagination and creativity to instruct children who are above or below these levels. Teachers would be secure in having common direction, parents would have clear expectations, and employers would know the level of achievement reached by those they intend to employ.
Will a core curriculum exist when I reach retiring age? Will thcre be expectations of basic content and grade expectations established for basic content in each grade? Will the circle have turned completely?
If so, the way to Tamworth will be clear enough for us all.
AROUND THE WORLD
JAPANESE PRIMARY SCHOOLS
Despite the publicity given to Japanese education in recent years, many basic facts about primary schooling are not known in the West. For instance, since the late 1940s, there has been a required core curriculum of Japanese, social studies, maths, science, arts and crafts, music, home-making and physical education. In addition, teachers develop pupils' personal and social skills, and they inculcate such moral virtues as responsibility, thoughtfulness, and balance. Classes are large (up to 4 3 , but children may remain with the same teacher for two or three years or work in sub-groups called hans so that group feeling grows. Teachers are reasonably well-paid; they receive tenure early, but often rotate among schools; over 50 per cent are women; they are used to working together in preparing and presenting lessons; and their preferred method of teaching is dialogue and frequent interaction with pupils. In general, children like school, and are encouraged to do well by their mothers, who are very involved in their progress.
Harold Howe, "Japanese Elementary School Education", The Elementary School Journal, September 1991.
HISTORY REWRITTEN
According to a study carried out by an independent research group in Texas, there are over 5,000 egregious errors in school books used around the United States and published by such reputable firms as MacmillanMcGraw Hill, News Corporation, and Houghton Mifflin. Among the "facts" presented in history texts are these: that Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo; General Douglas MacArthur led the anti-communist witchhunts of the 1950s; US President Harry Truman dropped an atom bomb on Korea to end World War 11; Sputnik was a Soviet nuclear-armed missile; 53,000 Americans (not 126,000) were killed in the Great War; and John F. Kennedy was assassinated during Richard Nixon's presidency.
The Guardian, reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Febnrary 1992.
SEXISM WORRIES IN FINLAND
In Finland, people have expressed increasing concern about the "feminisation" of education; i.e. the lack of role models for boys in schools, the fact that girls are more interested in higher education, and the alleged inability of women teachers to meet the social and emotional needs of boys. When a recent quota stipulating that 40 per cent of entrants to teacher training institutions must be male was removed, the proportion of female students rose from 60 to 80 per cent -- a major reason for national panic.
According to research done by sociologist Tuula Gordon at the University of Helsinki, this concern is misguided, since it is boys who are still favoured in Finland. It is easier, she says, for boys to adjust to the transition from school to work or college; and it is boys who dominate prestigious subjects in schools and in the gender-segregated labour market.
To date, it would seem, gender arguments in the country remain unresolved.
The Times Educational Supplement, 17 January 1992.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN FORMER EAST GERMANY
Since the beginning of the 1991/92 school year religious instruction has been included as a school subject in all five of the new German States, formerly part of Communist East Germany. Many politicians and churchmen believe that after 40 years of Communist rule a "decline in values" and "lack of orientation" has created a need for basic ethical education. The Education Minister in the state of Brandenburg wants to introduce a new compulsory subject, 0rganisation of Life, Ethics and Religion (which would include topics such as peace education and environmental education). Church authorities fear that former teachers of civics with a Marxist orientation may force their way intd this subject. In order to overcome the shortage of teachers of religion, plans are underway for new faculties at universities and teacher training institutions. Jena has become the first university to offer religious education as a training subject.
"Education and Science", Bonn, No. 718, 1991.
READING STANDARDS DECLINE IN BRITAIN
A new study published by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has confirmed evidence of a national decline in reading standards between 1987 and 1991. For the first time, indications are that the decline may be concentrated more heavily in working-class and deprived areas than in suburban and rural schools. Of the 15 schools where scores fell, seven were in inner-city areas of industrial regions. But researchers have stressed that the sample is too small to draw firm conclusions about class background and reading scores. On the vexed subject of teaching methods, NFER staff could find no significant associarions between teaching methods used and pupils' reading performance. Nevertheless, they have said that "the current dearth of reading schemes with a systematic phonics component has made it difficult for teachers to provide structured instruction in phonics." Although colleges arc teaching a mix of approaches to reading, many recent teachers' college graduates interviewed by NFER have had little or no teaching about phonics.
The Times Educational Supplement, 14 February 1992.
THE BATTLE OVER ENGLAND'S NATIONAL CURRICULUM
THE 1988 EDUCATION REFORM ACT was a milestone in English and Welsh educational history, not least because it highlighted serious shortcomings in the State system. (Scotland and Northern Ireland are not covered by the Act but are generally taking similar paths.) Though in many ways the Act has been a great success, its implementation has produced a series of bitter conflicts, which still continue.
For the last 30 years, the "progressive" Left has been engaged in a "long march" through our institutions. By the mid 1980s, many of the student radicals of the 1960s had become teachers, teacher-trainers, school advisers, inspectors and exam board chiefs. Those working in educational establishments were given clear messages that open opposition to "progressive" child-centred education would preclude promotion and might result in dismissal.
During the late 1980s, however, thanks largely to publicity generated by a few courageous teachers and academics, plus the efforts of the national (though not the educational) press, a growing concern among parents and employers led to a realisation that something drastic needed to be done, if educational standards and freedom were to be preserved. Thus the reform of state education became a major platform on which the Conservative Government successfully sought re-election in 1987. The Education Reform Act was the political outcome.
The Act included four key changes for schools. Three of these were intended to enhance freedom and choice.
- Local Management of Schools (LMS) devolved financial power from Local Education Authorities (LEAs) by forcing them to pass on a major proportion of each school's budget directly to the school to be administered by the head and governors. As a large proportion of school funding was also determined by the numbers of pupils a school could attract, LMS provided a major incentive for schools to provide what parents wanted.
- The Open Enrolment sections of the Act compelled LEAs to allow popular schools to enrol pupils up to their maximum capacity or "standard number". Each school's "standard number" is based on the numbers on roll in 1979 -- the peak year for our school population.
- Perhaps most radical of all, the Act allowed state schools to opt out of LEA control and be funded directly by central government. Known as grant-maintained status, this option has been highly successful, though most schools choosing it have been forced to wage fierce political campaigns to win the necessary majorities in parental ballots. Even this difficulty, however, has not prevented almost 2,000 schools from taking active steps in pursuit of this option.
- The fourth tenet of the Act, on which I shall dwell, was slightly contradictory in its philosophy. For several good reasons, such as wresting control of the curriculun~o f many schools from the "progressives", it was designed to reduce rather than enhance freedom -- for the first time ever, schools would have a legally enforceable national curriculum.
DEFINING THE CURRICULUM
Parliament provided that the curriculum consist of 10 subjects: English, Maths, Science, History, Geography, a modern foreign language, Technology, Music, Art and Physical Education. Though not part of the (secular) National Curriculum, the Act also stated that every school should have a daily Act of Worship and provide religious education. These should be "mainly or wholly of a Christian character," but with provision for followers of other faiths to preserve the integrity of their own religions in separate worship or religious education, if they so wished.
In addition, the law specified two new supervisory bodies to control the national curriculum and its testing, which would take place at ages seven, 11, 14 and 16 (Key Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4). The National Curriculum Council (KC) and the School Examinations and Assessment council (SEAC) would each have 15 members. SEAC would also control all public examinations.
Though the Reform Act was warmly welcomed by parents, employers and the public, the state educational establishment was at first universally hostile. It was therefore noticeable when, within a short time, even the "progressives" became supportive -- though only of the National Curriculum. This alone should have set red lights flashing in the corridors of power! For it was already becoming clear that the old-guard educational establishment had realised that, with the help of its allies in the Department of Education and Science and elsewhere, it could take over the NCC and SEAC committees and use the Act to enforce legally a "progressive" curriculum in every school in the country.
The first two individual subject reports, Mathematics for Ages 5-16 and Scieltce for Ages 5-16, were published in August 1988, just one month after the Reform Act had been passed. These were soon followed by E~tglislfl or Ages 5-11 and E~lglislft or Ages 5-16, the last being little more than an extension to cover the full National Curriculum age group.
There was immediate concern that the English reports failed to stress either the early learning of the alphabet or the use of phonics in learning to read. Both English reports simply assumed that all children could or would eventually read, despite growing fears that "whole word" methods of teaching reading were reducing standards of literacy.
Grammar could be taught implicitly but not explicitly. "There should be no return to old-fashioned grammar teaching," stated Englislt for Ages 5-16, and "in the past, children have had to learn the names of the parts of speech, without their purpose being evident." The English Committee's general approach to literature was that all literature was equally valid. "Literary tradition", "our literary heritage", and lists of "great works" were derided, though "children should know about the processes by which meanings are conveyed, and about the ways in which print and other media carry values."
Despite an expensive trip to Japan, where they noted that the most technologically advanced nation in the world forbade the use of calculators in schools, members of the Maths Committee failed to endorse the learning of tables and encouraged the use of calculators.
To its credit, this Committee specified some content and rejected the idea of "multicultural maths". But one of its most distinguished and respected members, Professor Sig Prais, resigned before the report was published, dismayed that an opportunity to raise standards for all ability levels was being squandered.
The History Reports, too, provoked widespread press coverage. Content was suggested, including British history; and themes and concepts such as authority, apartheid, imperialism, revolution, socialism and the changing role of women. Selection, however, was left to the teachers. And the overall emphasis was on skills, such as the ability to empathise with historical personalities, or to interpret evidence and detect bias.
Knowledge was downgraded and specifically absent from the attainment targets: "once historical knowledge is contained in the attainment targets the content becomes very difficult to alter, and perspectives may fail to reflect changing views of history", the History Committee's Final Report asserted.
Though there had been intense public debate between proponents of skills-based "new history" and more traditional content and knowledge history, the final report stated: "We have no wish to take sides in these debates ... the distinction between traditional and new forms of history has almost certainly been exaggerated." Perhaps the History Report did not take sides, but its recommendations followed the "new history" philosophy.
It was therefore considered a great, though far from conclusive, victory when knowledge was finally included as part of the attainment targets.
All these reports, which were produced by subject committees under the guidance of the National Curriculum Council and Her Majesty's Inspectors (HMI), and those which followed, fell far short of requirements. Rather than concentrating on the coizteizt and knowledge inherent in the subjects as Parliament intended, the Committees had emphasised the child-centred educational process.
The continuing struggle by the Secretary of State for Education, supported by the Prime Minister, against the "progressive" educational establishment is recorded in the following news items. The Education Minister decided not to publish a major report on "Language and National Curriculum". The London Daily Telegraph reports (28 June 1991): Poetry is as likely to be found on the shop front of a hairdresser as in any of the great works of literature, according to a E20 million study of how English should be taught in the national curriculum. The 500-page document, which the Government funded but has refused to publish, says the idea that literary and non-literary languages are different needs to be "deconstructed". The Education Minister denounced the use of integrated subjects and projects in favour of individual subjects. According to Tlre Times, 4 November 1991: Project-based teaching in primary schools is to be ended by Kenneth Clarke, the Education Secretary. He wants to see a return to traditional methods where children aged from seven to eleven ate taught individual subjects ... Mr Clarke said that the present method of teaching mathematics, English, science, geography and history in one topic, such as a project on the Tower of London, failed to cover the separate subjects adequately and did not stretch children. On 30 October 1991, The Airstralia~z reported new radical reforms in England, including the privatisation of the inspectorate, new appointments to the headship of the School Examinations and Assessment Council, and reform of the General Certificate of Secondary Education to allow 16 year-olds to take vocational qualifications.
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THE N.C.C. MOUNTS ITS OWN POLICY
Meanwhile, the National Curriculum Council had grown from a small body of 15 members to a massive interfering bureaucracy. Its 1988-89 Annual Report listed over 400 committee members, staff and associates, largely drawn from the "progressive" establishment. A new office block was under construction and the Council's annual budget was already f10 million a year.
Moreover, rather than concentrating on the 10 subjects specified by the Reform Act, the NCC was also introducing its own "whole" curriculum, based on a tiny sub-section of the Act saying that the curriculum should be "balanced and broadly based" and should promote "the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils." The "whole" curriculum was the means by which the National Curriculum Council aimed to change the attitudes, beliefs and values of up-and-coming generations.
The "whole" curriculum was supported by glossy NCC Guidance Documents on non-statutory "themes" such as Health Education, Careers Education, Environmental Education, Education for Citizenship, and Education for Economic and Industrial Understanding. All the "themes" are biased towards socialist collectivism.
The Careers Guidance, for example, suggests role-play based on "health and safety hazards, harassment, discrimination and industrial action." Pupils are encouraged to "record the age, ethnicity, regional accent and physicaVmenta1 handicap represented in work roles ..." Nowhere is there any mention of the attributes and qualifications likely to be useful to an employer.
"All citizens can and~must be equal," suggests the Guidance on Citizenship. Areas to be covered include "international causes, how family life has changed, separation, divorce, domestic problems, single-parent families and the benefits and disadvantages of leaving home." Distinguishing between right and wrong is "not always straightforward" and "moral codes change over time." Health Education urges pupils to "be aware that feeling positive about sexuality and sexual activity is important in relationships."
Though Parliament had specified that all pupils should be tested at each key stage, the Whole Curriculum Guidance says on its first page: "In due course, it is likely that schools will throw all the attainment targets in a heap on the floor and reassemble them in a way which provides for them the very basis of a whole curriculum."
This was not all. Thousands of classrooms teachers had been demoralised by the sheer weight of documentation.
And in Australia? "One gets the impression ... that the real issues of national curriculum are still sleeping, and that current initiatives are more attempts to bypass them than to address them. Whether they can be successfully bypassed in the long term, however, is the fascinating political question that will keep national curriculum watchers intrigued in the coming years. There are some indications of a growing impatience on the part of at least some of the ministers with what they perceive as bureaucratic evasion of the issue. Historically in such situations the bureaucracies have usually won out, particularly when, as in this case, they have shown a united front; but one senses also, in the current context, a new determination on the part of the ministers to reassert their position as the arbiters of policy." Kevin Piper of the Australian Council for Educational Research, |
STANDARD ASSESSMENT TASKS
As the struggle over the History Attainment Tasks shows, the method of assessment can greatly influence the character of the curriculum. When the reports of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing were released (December 1987 and March 1988) teachers feared the SATs would take too long to administer and progressives feared they would encourage competition and neglect the individual child. When trials were conducted in 1990, the teachers found they did, indeed, take up too much time, but that the administrators had devised a style of assessment based on the principles of progressive education.
In 1991, the first national pilot testing of seven year-olds took place. Under the control of the School Examinations and Assessment Council, these Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) have cost an estimated £60 million to produce and administer.
As a result of the "progressive" establishment's antipathy to testing, the SATs were activity-based, child-centred and subjective. They could not be given to a whole class at the same time, but had to be administered to groups of four children. Meanwhile, the remainder of the class was expected to engage in "other activities ... in a self-reliant way." Testing a class of 30 children was reported to be taking nearly half the term.
The Government became alarmed that assessment was becoming a bureaucratic nightmare, in some respects lowering, rather than raising, standards. In July 1991, the ChairmanIChief Executive of the Schools Examinations and Assessment Council both resigned. A Government advisor predicted that short written pencil and paper tests would replace the original SEAC approach, retaining some scope for teacher assessment and practical work.
The pilot tests of 1990 and 1991 will be followed this year by the first national tests. These will have more pencil and paper work, will be given to the whole class instead of to groups of four to six pupils, and will last about a week instead of five or six weeks. These tests, being conducted between March and July, have considerably reduced the amount of practical work.
Despite their shortcomings, the pilot tests provided important information. When results from the 1991 participating schools were collated, it was found that in English 28 per cent of seven year-olds were below Level 2, i.e. were unable to read a passage aloud accurately and answer simple questions about the story. In Mathematics 27 per cent were below Level 2, which measured achievement in (i) number, and algebra and measures, and (ii) shape and data handling. According to the Srlrtday Times of 27 October, about a third could not count up to 100 and 44 per cent could not do simple sums such as five plus four.
Design and Technology Texts for the National Curriculum John Eggleston, Editor of Design aud Technology Teaclli~lga nd Professor of Education at the University of Warwick, argues that problems in implementing course frameworks in Desip and Technology which have been called "innovative, creative, imaginative, relevant, and even enterprising" are a function of shocking publishing practices in the UK. Although there are honourable exceptions, Professor Eggleston says, the vast majority of texts produced by all the major publishers encourage pupils to do almost no work. Typically, their style is unashamedly pop culture, and they "teach" children how to become consumers, asking them to study the appeal of Coke ads, fashion clothing, music charts, film and television programs, and even activities such as "How to design a happening". As a result, 30 years of work done by researchers whose aim was to produce a new generation of adults able to understand and experience "the intellectual, emotional and practical demands of design, manufacture and commerce" is in jeopardy. The Times Educational Supplement, |
GROUNDS FOR OPTIMISM
However, there are considerable grounds for optimism. A robust new Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Clarke QC, appointed new chairmen and some new members to the NCC and SEAC. Both Kenneth Clarke and Britain's Prime Minister, John Major, have made strong statements about a return to the three Rs and simplified, pencil and paper, testing. A new three-man inquiry into primary education has been given less than three months to report on research evidence which is already available, but has hitherto been ignored by the establishment. Teacher training is to be overhauled.
All this, coupled with the impact of a number of items in the national press and research such as that by Professor Alexander's team from Leeds University into the 1985-89 "Needs Program" in Leeds primary schools, has encouraged a changed climate of opinion. LEAs'and HMI have been threatened with extinction: a new Education (Schools) Bill to privatise HMI and encourage lay (non-educationist) members of school inspection teams is currently passing through Parliament.
Perhaps most important for exasperated parents, another general election has been called for this April. Education is high on the agendas of all the political parties. If elected, Labour has promised to undo many of the recent reforms, particularly those allowing more freedom to schools. Both Labour and the minority Liberal Democrats are likely to revive the grip of the "progressives" by giving power back to LEAS and the State. By contrast, the Conservatives are promising to strengthen and "fine tune" their reforms. If they are to win a fourth term and be wholly successful with their education policies, they must never again underestimate their opponents in the educational establishment.
THE POLITICS OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
Following the publication in our last issue of articles by Michael Degenhardt and Alan Barcan on educational research in Australia, the Editor invited a number of educationists to discuss briefly the issues they raised, such as: What, if anything, is wrong with educational research in Australia? By what criteria should we assess the worth of educational research? Is too much money being spent on such research? On what sorts of topics should educational research focus? Are Australian researchers neglecting important topics? Here are responses from Dr Geoffrey Partington of the Flinders University of South Australia, Associate Professor Clive Whitehead of the University of Western Australia, and Associate Professor Bill Warren of the University of Newcastle.
GEOFIEY PARTINGTON
HERE is very little from which I dissent in the articles T o n educational research by Degenhardt and Barcan, except that I don't share the latter's optimism that by 1988 "neo-Marxism had almost collapsed." One neo-Marxist, Dr Kevin Harris of the University of New South Wales, writes:
since all things educational are political, all science is political, and all research is political ... Knowledge statements are not the object of knowledge; they are theory laden socio-historically determined constructs about the objects ... there cannot be apolitical knowledge about anything, nor can there be apolitical production, selection and transmission of knowledge ... all research, in the sense of practical activity within social-historical contexts (which would necessarily include scientific research) is political ... there is thus simply no argument about the political nature of educational research ... (1)
Dr Harris exemplifies the Paradox of the Liar, since he seems to have no doubts about the truth status of his own claims, also uttered in a socio-historical context. As this approach currently dominates academic philosophy, sociology and history of education in Australia today, one must sympathise with teachers and empirical researchers who find little sense or guidance in much contemporary educational theory.
Yet Harris is right that political and ideological influences may determine what sorts of educational research are funded, or even allowed to take place, although he is wrong in considering this to be necessary and inevitabie. Much of the most valuable empirical research in education in the past sought to relate curriculum, syllabus or pedagogy to student achievement. Solid findings in these matters are by their nature often difficult to establish, partly because of problems in identifylng distinct types of method or content, but the main obstacles at the present time are often ideological rather than methodological. The controversies following on Neville Bennett's 1976 Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress, Michael Rutter et al's 1979 Fifteen Thoirsand Hours: Secondary Scliools arid tlteir Effects on Children, and James S. Coleman's 1981 High School Achievement were all notable for the strainingat gnats and swallowing of camels by critics of findings which cast doubts on their own ideological positions.
At least Bennett, Rutter and Coleman had access to relevant data in Britain or the United States about student achievement, whereas in recent years in Australia it has probably been easier to gain reliable evidence about military bases than about educational standards. The pretexts for this obscurantism include claims that it is unfair to compare individuals or groups whose background circumstances are different, or even very similar, that there are adverse effects on the self-esteem of students revealed as under-achieving, that supposed educational standards are only subjective or arbitrary, and that assessing some types of knowledge or skill must lead to the neglect of other educational aims. (2)
Deliberately contrived lack of adequate evidence enables ideological partisanship to run riot on a range of key educational questions, such as the relative importance of heredity and circumstances on character and attainment. It is "politically correct", but factually unsubstantiated, to claim, for example, that homosexuality and Aboriginal consciousness are inherent constituents of personality which it would be a violation of human rights to tamper with, but that intelligence and special aptitudes are mainly, or even entirely, determined by environmental factors. Similarly, it is "politically correct" to claim that research has established that exposure to sexist pronouns and Thomas the Tank Engine undermines female self-confidence, and that reading Biggles or Hucklebeny Finn unleashes vicious racialism, but that exposure to alternative sexual lifestyles or pornography has little or no effect on children and young people, whose human right is to have access to the full range of choices and possibilities.
Teachers and educational administrators usually know little about educational research and most of that they get wrong. The best known research seems to be that of Rosenthal nd Jacobsen's Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968), in which teachers were told that one of two classes consisted of highly gifted, the other of average and below average children, and that high teacher expectat ion of the class labelled "gifted" actually led rapidly to its achieving at a significantly higher level than the other. Many attempts to replicate this experiment have failed, whilst the morality of providing teachers with false information about their students has been questioned. But it is still widely believed that Pygmalion in the Classroom discredited intelligence testing, as did the supposed exposure of Sir Cyril Burt as a fraud and faker. Yet Burt's work on correlations in intellectual achievement between twins has been confirmed several times over, whilst recent investigations have vindicated his reputation as an honest and distinguished scholar. Contrary to what might be expected, many teachers who believe in Rosenthal and Jacobsen's claims fail to make high demands on their students, but instead adopt the "Good boy, Leroy" approach: the idea that blanket praise for students' work is likely to lead to higher achievement.
Widely known also is the concept of the "Hawthorn Effect": the capacity of changes in routine to produce short-term improvements in morale and productivity, improvements which, alas, almost as often fade quickly away. Yet this knowledge has not prevented major educational changes being introduced on the basis of Hawthorn Effects. Indeed, massive changes have been made in Australian education without even a Hawthorn Effect to underpin them. Such changes include the adoption of Open Plan teaching, despite the research evidence that this system is highly unsuitable for introverted children, although possibly beneficial for the highly extroverted, and the adoption of mixed ability teaching, extending recently to many groups of children with mental or physical handicaps. The feminist campaigns during the 1970s to abolish single-sex schools and since the mid 1980s to bring them back again were equally lacking in solid evidence that significant educational differences resulted either way, but in each case there was a determination to proclaim that existing arrangements discriminated unfairly against girls.
Educational principles, like moral values, cannot be established on the basis of empirical research, since they are essentially contestable. This is the greatest single justification for wide parental choice among different types of school. No serious holders of any of the main types of educational theory -- instrumental, liberal, child-centred, reconstructionist or salvationary -- will abandon their goals on the basis of consequentialist evidence, which is all that research can produce. Yet all sincere educators should be concerned to find out as thoroughly and objectively as possible whether particular policies actually advance their aims. The conspicuously compassionate, who constantly proclaim their desire to reduce educational disadvantages they attribute to girls, Aborigines, the working class and ethnic Australians, should support, rather than oppose and sabotage, research into whether recent and current educational policies have raised or depressed the educational standards of those they want to help.
1. Harris, K., "The Politics of Education Research" in Educational Research and Perspectives, December 1988.
2. Partington, G., What Do our Children Know? A Study of Educational Standards, Australian Institute for Public Policy, 1988.
3. Joynson, R.B., The Burt Affair, 1989; Fletcher, R., Science, Ideology and the Media, 1990.
CLIVE WHITEHEAD
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH in Australia is currently under scrutiny. In December 1991, the interim report of a review panel sponsored by the Australian Research Council was made available for comment. At a first glance the ARC Report appears to offer a logical way forward over the next decade -- the national educational research effort should be guided by a set of broadly-based priorities comprising learning; mathematics and science education; language and literacy; education, training and work; organisation of educational systems and institutions; assessment; and improving professional practice. Closer reading of the Report suggests a disturbingly strong bureaucratic emphasis -- more efficient organisation is believed to be the key to improvement. The Interim Report also seems to be based on an implicit faith that empirical research can provide the an,acrs to most of our contemporary educational problems. The strong emphasis placed on the structuring of educational research strikes at the heart of the liberal tradition in Australian universities and suggests a cosy "jobs and money for the favoured few" syndrome. It is important to acknowledge that educational research findings are frequently ambivalent, while any reputable educational historian can provide ample evidence to show that most major educational policy decisions are based on political rather than educational criteria.
The articles by Degenhardt and Barcan highlight the pronounced shift towards empirical or so-called scientific research in education in the past 25 years and convey the growing sense of unease felt by many leading academics about the current research scene. Their comments, like those of the Interim Report, raise several fundamental questions.
Why does a widespread unease about educational research exist in Australia today? (3overnment bureaucrats would probably claim that it is not providing clear policy directives based on sound scientific evidence. Unfortunately, social science research is notoriously difficult to conduct because of the impossibility of controlling many of the variables that influence outcomes. Equally significant is the fact that most aspects of education policy are concerned with value judgments which are not determined solely on the basis of empirical enquiry. For example, streaming of children by academic ability may or may not be justified on psychological, social, economic or political grounds. What ultimately counts is what Degenhardt refers to as "capacity for fine judgment" or "the ability to weigh a great range of diverse considerations both factual and evaluative, and to come to sound decisions on matters of practical moment that are too complex to be clearly settled by rules and principles alone."
The same reasoning applies to a subject like the school starting age. New Zealand has always allowed children to start school literally on their fifth birthday where Australian state education authorities have always argued that such an arrangement is impracticable. Such bureaucratic considerations take little or no account of when a child is "ready for school" in a psycho-social sense, and no amount of research is ever likely to provide convincing evidence for one right policy. Other equally important aspects of schooling like class sizes, the nature of teacher training, the age of transfer from primary to secondary schooling, when to introduce a second language, discipline, the assessment of students -- the list is endless -- fall into the same category.
Much current educational research is trivial or politically-motivated. Often studies simply repeat previous work. Seemingly endless studies of gender and the curriculum are a case in point. The quality of any academic research, whether it be in the social or physical sciences, is determined largely by the questions which motivate inquiry. The ARC sponsored Interim Report highlights so-called priority areas of research but there is no mention of what are considered to be the basic research questions that need to be addressed. For example, what is research supposed to reveal about "education, !raining and work"? Schools may be able to do something to make some youths more employable; but they have no control over the overall demand/supply situation in the job market and hence over the inflation of paper qualifications.
Much educational research is of a short-term nature for a variety of sound practical reasons, but it is longer-term research that is more likely to provide information needed to support major changes in education policy. Longitudinal research requires time, patience, and continuity of personnel, and arguably does not appeal to most academics who are caught up in an institutional "publish or perish" syndrome.
Assessing the Value of Research
By what criteria should educational research be assessed? Too often, educational research, especially that contracted by government agencies, consists of little more than data accumulation. More emphasis needs to be placed on distinguishing between research and scholarship -- unfortunately the two are not always synonymous. Scholarship involves insight, perception, fine judgment and usually long hours of solitary toil. In a world seemingly hooked on the cult of relevance and the "quick fuc" it is not surprising that many education researchers succumb to the temptation to make their studies topical, even sensational, and frequently draw questionable conclusions from their data. In many instances -- neo-Marxists and some sociologists are classic examples -- a theory is postulated and research consists of finding data to fit the theory. Any data that might refute the theory are discarded or played down. Educational research in Australia is also plagued by newspaper journalists eager for a story. The findings of educational research are rarely sensational but one could be excused for thinking otherwise, judged by newspaper reports.
Degenhardt commented on the vast resources currently being devoted to educational research for questionable returns. Is too much money being spent on educational research? When compared to the vast sums of public money spent annually on providing education in Australia, the answer is an emphatic no, but a strong case can be made for saying that much of the money could be spent more profitably if researchers were made more accountable for the outcomes of their research. A great deal of time and effort is expended on preparing applications for research funding, but there seems to be far less emphasis on the dissemination of the results of the research. The politics of research funding is also a matter of concern. Research into so-called disadvantaged groups or areas of vested interests frequently takes precedence over less topical issues.
Is it possible or even desirable to identify key areas for research? The ARC Interim Report has identified specific areas of concern. If these are accepted by funding agencies, they will shape future educational research. As broad guidelines they may be useful, but if they are rigidly interpreted they will deter good research in other areas. The determination of priority research areas is also prone to political interference. Ideally, researchers should enjoy the freedom to determine their own priorities. If issues are of major importance they will surely attract interest from researchers. As a general observation, academics work best on issues and subjects of their own choice rather than on those foisted on them by bureaucratic edict.
Barcan bemoaned the demise of what might be termed "foundations" research -- the broad philosophical/historical/con~parative background knowledge which once helped the empiricists keep their feet on the ground. The importance of this knowledge has not diminished with the passage of time. How might we determine desirable aims for national education? And how might they best be achieved? This fundamental issue is not amenable to empirical inquiry; but it is the lifeblood of rigorous philosophical discourse, which is largely absent from current educational debate in Australia. Or again, is mass education in the 1990s best approached through conventional schools or is thc whole educational structure an outmoded 19th-century legacy? One can but hope that the current concern amongst researchers in educational administration to determine what is an "effective" school will eventually be superseded by a more fundamental concern for mass education structures as a whole. President Bush currently has a Task Force looking into the structure of American education in the 21st century. Everything is under scrutiny including the conventional concept of a school. Perhaps these are the sorts of issues that we should be funding at the national level, rather than seemingly endless studies akin to why girls don't like mathematics.
BILL WARREN
DEGENHARDT, in his analysis and critique of the turn in research to an over reliance on empirical methods, draws attention to the need to return to questions of the "M1hy" of education. He and Barcan both make comnlents that might reasonably be referred to as "ideological" (Degenhardt accepts "judgmental"). Further, their articles appear in a journal that is a vehicle for conservative ideas in education.
Observation, conceptual and substantive analysis, questioning, critical enquiry, description in statistical terms, the drawing of inferences, the "location" of a piece of written work in its historical or ideological context, all of these activities are membcrs of that family of activities that constitutes research. We might more usefully refer to "research and scltolarsllip" to stress the breadth as well as the depth of this activity. But what is to be stressed is how critical enquiry is fundamental to true education, just as it is perhaps fundamental to what human beings are and do -- provided they are not stunted or restricted by an education that has lost its lzr~t1zatz dimensions.
This being so, what the Barcan and Degenhardt papers reveal is that it is a particular kiud of research that is suspect, Here, one might easily agree. As Barrow, for example, has noted in relation to research on teacher effectiveness, "we have ... a vast body of research that can be severely criticised item t,y item and that in sum is widely agreed to have produced little of significance."' Certainly the so-called social sciences -- in education at lcast -- have been slow to move away from reliance on the methods of the physical sciences. Koch was more forceful: a slavish reliance on the methods of the physical sciences in order to sustain the delusion that psychology was a science. This forcefi~lness is easily extended to education, not only because psychology remains the dominant underpinning of educational thought and practice (whether as indispensal,le ally or "mischievous" inhence). Again, psychology itself is still fairly described 1s "data without theory"; despite thousands of studies there is little by way of integration of that data within a sound theory of human heha\ ing. Rather, psychology as a discipline has become narrow and broken into specialities; where are the Freuds and Jurlgs, even the Aristotles, with their integrating and synthesiling abilities?
Yet, to attempt to rescrict research is to apply a 'orm of censorship. Rather, that very form of rcsearch hat is engaged in by Barcan and Degenhardt is the way forward in exposing the limilations of other forms of research. But this is to criticise particular forms of rcsearch (and scholarship), not reseiirch and scholarship per se. That criticism is well taken and the general empirical perspective that has dominated education is properly called in question. But to dismiss psychology, say, out of hand, is to "throw the baby out with the bath water" and to risk establishing but a different "approved" orthodoxy. The case of the Marxist perspective in education is illustrative. Prior to the 1970s it was all but impossible to have a paper accepted by mainstream theory journals in education if it was based in the perspective that Marxism provided. Then there was a phase in which Marxism was a major theoretical underpinning of thinking about education. Barcan now celebrates the "demise" of the Marxist perspective in education. Yet, can there be any doubt that Marx provided one of the most powerful theoretical perspectives for critical enquiry in education, as well as in many other disciplines?
Thus, one must agree with both Barcan and Degenhardt while feeling uneasy about what and why they say what they do; my reading of their papers, as this response shows, is full of "yes, buts" and "yets"! We must be precise about the concept of research as we preserve the activity and this is to some extent done by the two papers in review here. However, a distinction between calculative thinking and meditative thinking propounded by the 20th century German philosopher Heidegger, which is quite useful here, right expose social norms and forms that others do not want exposed. Calculative thinking characterises advanced technological society just as it infects research, focusing research on merely practical, technical problem-solving. Meditative thinking is not obsessed by the demands to be "practical" or useful. However, it becomes very difficult in social systems where everything is geared to directly instrumental goals. To critically examine research is to do research and to think meditatively. But to require that research provide a practical outcome or more directly address one's own particular interests, is to disclose the calculative perspective. This is not overcome by reference to "humanism", to "culture" or to "liberal education". In each case one mut ask "whose humanism?", "whose culture?", "whose concept of liberal education?"
Charting the course between these two perspectives is the problem Barcan and Degenhardt usefully illuminate; provided the reader does not lose sight of wider contexts in which we all write.
ENDNOTES
1. Darrow, R., "Teachcr Education and Research: The Place of Philosophy", Proceedings of the 4Oth Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, llinois, 1984, p.185.
2. Koch, S., "The Image of Man in Encountcr Groups", The American Scholar, 1973, 42, pp.636-652.
BOOK REVIEW
Education for What?
Edited by J.D. Frodsham
Published by Academy Press, 181 pages, GPO Box 1151, Canberra, ACT, 2601.
Price: $20.00 (inc. postage).
DIVERSITY THE KEY
THAT a crisis exists currently in Australian education, in particular amongst the humanities, cannot be doubted. But it is one thing to diagnose a condition, quite another to cure it. The eight papers in this volume address this crisis and recognise its seriousness; beyond this there is a wide divergence of opinion as to the appropriate cure.
Alan Barcan's useful paper sets the scene with a survey of the impact of progressive education since the 1960s. In the wake of this revolution arose that confusion about the role and aims of education which lies at the core of our present predicament.
Given the massive changes of the past 30 years, how is one to respond to the current situation? There is indeed a need to clarify the aims of education but, as the rest of the papers illustrate, there are a variety of aims which can be pursued, just as there are a number of responses to the crisis.
Brian Bullivant advocates a policy of pluralistic reconstruction as the solution to Australia's educational woes, a program which recalls the civic humanism of early 20th century educational reformer Peter Board. But, like Board, Bullivant is faced with the contradiction of launching a drive for civic responsibility through centralised bureaucratic means. One is startled to come across the phrase "ideological state apparatus"; it is indeed amazing the places in which the ghost of Althusser still walks.
At the other end of the spectrum Peter Hunt sees the solution to the crisis in tertiary education as the founding of small liberal colleges. These colleges would pursue a traditional curriculum, and Hunt particularly favours a "great books" course, Hunt is little concerned with the practicalities of setting up colleges and a Catholic Romanticism pervades the whole piece. There is much talk of Christopher Dawson, G.K. Chesterton and Jacques Maritain.
There is diversity in other matters. Discussing the humanities curriculum, J.D. Frodsham argues for both breadth and depth. He wants humanities students to be able to appreciate the major cultural trends, philosophy and history of science and technology of both Western and Far Eastern civilisations. At the same time Frodsharn advocates a more practical and vocational approach to the humanities, in particular in the area of computer literacy.
By way of contrast, D.L. Webster believes that the sharp decline in Victorian educational standards is a consequence of the attempt to create a more international world. He seems to think that enforced stupidity is the necessary prerequisite for such a world order.
Other contributions are by Don Moore on "The Wherewithal for Reform", Patrick 0'Flaherty on "The Family: A Positive Force in Education", and Professor Toshi Toyoda on "Education for Industrialisation in Japan".
The overall picture is both confusing and puzzling. Catholic traditionalists, humanists and advocates of national efficiency are all united in opposition to the forces which have led to the disastrous decline of recent years. This reflects, perhaps, the two most significant features of Australian education: a high proportion of students attending private schools and a public system characterised by centralised bureaucratic control. Hence the temptations of educational reformers are either to use the bureaucracy or to believe that an alternative can be built somewhere in the private sector.
The problem would seem to be as intractable as any facing Australia at the present time -- such as industry regulation in such areas as the waterfront and the centralised wage fixation system. It is difficult to enthuse over any solution predicated on a return to centralised control -- one has only to look at the disaster of Mr Dawkins's reform of higher education. Perhaps the time has come to recognise the diversity of Australia and to allow the education of the country the opportunity to follow the contours of the people it is meant to serve. Then we could have our liberal arts colleges, our polytechnics, our schools devoted to excellence in music, the arts or whatever.
It seems to me self-defeating to use the bureaucracy to impose civic responsibility or excellence. These are things which must arise from the schools and universities themselves as part of their ethos. Schools which failed to meet the grade would soon be rewarded with no students. This may sound hopelessly Utopian but there can be little doubt that it is the philistinism fostered by bureaucracy -- faith in techniques and mechanical solutions -- which is the source of much of our present predicament.
Genuine culture cannot be imposed on the populace using "ideological state apparatuses." In education, as in other aspects of our life, it is high time that Australians gave up the crutch of State paternalism.
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