Introduction

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Recruitment and Training of Teachers
   • ATTRACTING BETTER TEACHERS
   • THE STRUCTURE OF PRE-SERVICE PROGRAMS
   • METHODOLOGY IN TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMS
   • ALTERNATIVE ROUTES INTO TEACHING
2. Curriculum:  Essential Knowledge
   • A CORE CURRICULUM
   • CULTURAL LITERACY
   • TECHNOLOGY AND CIVILISATION
   • PROCESS VERSUS CONTENT
   • THE TYRANNY OF RELEVANCE
   • THE POLITICISATION OF SCHOOL COURSES
3. Assessment:  Equity and Accountability
   • BASIC SKILLS TESTS
   • GENERAL KNOWLEDGE TESTING
   • EXAMINATIONS IN CORE SUBJECTS
   • NEW ASSESSMENT PROCEDURES IN VICTORIA:  THE VCE
4. School Structures:  Devolution and Diversity
   • CHANGES IN MANAGEMENT
   • SCHOOL CHOICE
   • GREATER FLEXIBILITY FOR TEACHERS AND PUPILS
   • PROGRAMS FOR THE POST-COMPULSORY YEARS

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INTRODUCTION

THE quality of Australian schooling concerns us.  Although dozens of documents on such key matters as the recruitment and training of teachers, the curriculum, assessment, and school management have been produced by national and State bodies, major problems in each area remain.  That is why we have written this report.  It is time real, not cosmetic, solutions to long-standing educational worries were offered to Australians in a language which neither obscures nor evades their underlying causes.

Educational research on adult literacy has shown that a large number of adults -- 68 per cent in a sample recently tested -- cannot handle ideas or arguments at the level of a standard newspaper editorial. ⁽¹⁾  Employers complain that high school graduates lack higher order thinking skills, flexibility, discipline, numeracy, and the ability to communicate satisfactorily in speech and writing. ⁽²⁾  Parental dissatisfaction with the public school system has caused a steady drift to private schools. ⁽³⁾  To avoid immediate unemployment, more students are staying on in school after Year 10, but without adequate motivation or interest in available programs.

A failure to solve problems like these springs from a basic confusion of aims.  Believing schools to be vehicles for transforming society, reformers have altered school programs in inappropriately programmatic ways.  Focusing on short-term instrumental goals, they have organised a curriculum around current political and social issues and rigidly defined vocational or "life" skills instead of concentrating on the acquisition of essential knowledge, a concept which is elaborated in Chapter 2.

If the ultimate goal of schooling is to help all people to become educated, then schools must expose pupils to the large world of learning and provide clear guidelines for exploring it.  So that children are equipped to be responsible citizens and capable workers, and so that they can lead decent and fulfilling lives, they need to be given a general -- i.e. liberal -- education which will sharpen their minds, motivate them to engage actively in learning, and help them to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Our aim is to facilitate liberal learning for all pupils by presenting a broad overview of our school situation, indicating the essential issues requiring attention, and suggesting immediate remedies for large, unresolved problems.  A great deal of research buttresses our arguments.  But instead of providing an exhaustive account of Australian educational needs, we describe key areas which require thorough scrutiny.

In each chapter we refer to events occurring in every Australian State and in overseas countries.  Debate about education policy in Australia has often been insular:  there is a lack of awareness of major developments overseas from which we might learn.  As a result of the international conferences, our discussions with educational reformers and policy-makers here and abroad, and our subscriptions to Australian and overseas journals and magazines, our awareness of the global context in which a report on Australian education belongs is acute.  Whenever developments abroad have seemed directly pertinent or useful to the Australian situation, we have said so.

MAJOR CULTURAL WORRIES IN THE 1990s

Exciting developments are taking place in schools throughout the world.  Pupils are acquiring knowledge undreamt of when their parents were in school.  At the same time, however, there is widespread discontent about levels of cultural literacy in English-speaking countries.  Like their peers in North America, the UK, and New Zealand, Australian children engage in sport, watch television and videos, listen to rock music, and play computer or arcade games in their spare time.  For many, reading is not a first or regular choice.

Partly because of the great expansion of information during the past half-century, the experience of rapid social change, the weakening of traditional forms of authority, and the preoccupation of the media with the present, children have been encouraged to feel that approaches to the future should be divorced from a knowledge of the past.  The experience of earlier periods in human history has come to be seen as irrelevant to young people and their teachers, as our chapter on curriculum explains.

In response to the prevailing passion for relevance, thinkers in all the academic disciplines have agreed that students need a broad cultural and historical perspective.  Overseas, Michael Oakeshott (philosophy), Hannah Arendt (history), Michael Polanyi (chemistry), Edward Shils (sociology), and Northrop Frye (literature) have recommended, for all pupils, a thorough grounding in the Liberal Arts.  Yet all too often prospective teachers do not encounter their views;  hence, children never do either.

In Australia there are also educators -- many of them not immediately responsible for teacher training or school program development -- who have decried the absence in our schools of educational programs and practices which promote sound and lasting intellectual and moral values.  Like the authors of the influential American report, A Nation At Risk (1983), they have stressed the importance of self-discipline and hard work in the pursuit of excellence, and they have lamented the slackness apparent in many areas of education.

BARRIERS TO REFORM

Excellence in Australian schools has been frustrated by bureaucracy and centrally-imposed uniformity, a theme developed in Chapter 4.  Schools need to be flexible and autonomous enough to respond sympathetically to the diverse talents, aspirations and needs of pupils, staff and the surrounding community.  With this in mind, our final chapter surveys innovative developments in school organisation both in Australia and overseas.

A further barrier to educational improvement in Australia has been the role of anti-intellectual political reformers in a position to influence the daily lives of schools.  In the name of greater equity, freedom and relevance, they have altered the curriculum in ways which have promoted a levelling down instead of the increased opportunity sought. ⁽⁴⁾  For years, the proponents of equal outcomes for all students, anti-élitism, and courses of study focused on the here and now have enjoyed such a stranglehold on school programs that voices calling for sound and broad achievement have been unable to effect significant change.

Education has not escaped the pervasive influence of special interest groups whose focus has not been on educational quality.  Curriculum changes have been initiated by lobbyists pursuing narrow goals.  Powerful teachers' unions have prevented any comparative data about school performance from being released;  and they have blocked the flexibility in awards and conditions which would allow better rewards and incentives for good teachers.  Succumbing to the demands of interest groups, governments have invested ever increasing amounts of money into education without evidence of resulting improvements in quality. ⁽⁵⁾

In school classes, among the more striking effects of policies imposed for ideological, rather than educational, reasons are an emphasis on unguided library "research" on current issues;  a focus on "doing one's own thing", and on the "process" of learning, no matter what is "done" or "learned";  a belief that values need to be "clarified", not examined in specific historical contexts;  and the conviction that all pupils need to know is where to acquire information -- they don't actually have to possess it.  The idea that there is such a thing as essential knowledge has been dismissed, without argument or debate, as a form of élitism.

In late 1990, in an attempt to find out whether our average 14-year-olds have a passable knowledge of world geography, Australian history, civics, current events, mathematics, and the expressive arts, an educationist gave groups of them a test which was subsequently published in The Australian.  Fewer than 20 per cent could locate Belgium and Switzerland on a map of Europe or Taiwan on a map of the Pacific region, or identify the two men who immediately preceded Bob Hawke as Prime Minister of Australia, or name the professional areas (art, business, music, politics, sport, or writing) associated with Simon Crean, Arthur Streeton, or François Mitterrand.

These results reinforce those arising from a 1989 survey of knowledge about Australia, and conducted among a sample of Victorian government and non-government schools.  Only 48 per cent of respondents to that survey could locate Canberra on a map;  only 36 per cent could name three members of the Australian Government;  and only 25 per cent could identify the two houses in the Commonwealth Parliament.

More recently, a survey conducted in February this year to mark Ideas for Australia Week, organised by Donald Horne, found that only eight per cent of 200 first- and second-year university students could name an internationally acclaimed Australian scientist or list three countries surrounding Vietnam.  Twenty-five per cent could not identify the largest river system in their country, only one per cent could name three famous 19th-century Australian women, and few could think of well-known Australian painters besides Pro Hart (who appears on a popular television advertisement) or Ken Done.⁽⁶⁾

There can be debate about the particulars of tests like these, but the results suggest that there are large and significant areas of learning omitted from school programs.  Since inessential studies -- for example, "media" work on the success of television ads or soap operas -- are given prime time in many schools, pointed queries about our curriculum priorities are in order.

Why, parents are entitled to ask, do students know so little about such fundamentally important matters as the difference between democracies and dictatorships, and the effects of this difference on 20th century history and culture?  And why aren't children encouraged to read more diverse literature from infant school onwards?  How can they enter the work-force without a secure knowledge base?

EDUCATIONAL QUALITY:  SOME USEFUL POINTERS

The desire of ordinary Australians for educational quality and breadth cannot be ignored indefinitely.  It matters enormously whether teaching staffs honour such basic principles of school policy as:

• the impartial pursuit of truth;
• the transmission of knowledge of major human achievements;
• the conferring of a fundamental understanding of basic human rights and the responsibilities of citizenship;
• the fostering of individual talent;
• fair and objective assessment, including external testing and a willingness to distinguish clearly between competent, outstanding, and unsatisfactory student performance;
• the maintenance of order and discipline;
• the provision of career opportunities.

When these principles are violated under the influence of a political agenda, adults who care about educational accomplishment, and who value a balanced emphasis on knowledge for its own sake and knowledge that is socially useful, understandably question the size of the investment in the system.

Unfortunately, the loose trends of a quarter-century are unlikely to be reversed unless radical changes are made in teacher training.  Of the reforms recommended in this report, none are more important than those discussed in Chapter 1, "The Recruitment and Training of Teachers".  For upon wiser teacher selection and training practices, the success of all other basic change depends.

To restore the idea of essential learning, to make real the concept of cultural literacy, and to transmit lasting values, we must attract into teaching students of the highest calibre.  Almost everyone acknowledges that we are at present failing dismally to do this.  Teacher educators themselves are stating, more and more freely, that we won't lift our standards sufficiently unless the structure and content of teacher education programs, and selection procedures for prospective teachers, are significantly altered.

At present, the gap between what ordinary schools demand and the skills imparted in traditional teacher education programs is glaring.  Another major worry for people considering teaching as a vocation is the fact that on-the-job incentives, compared with those available in other professions -- e.g., salaries, leadership opportunities, support networks -- have been so paltry for so long.  In view of the resistance to serious study now so prevalent in schools everywhere, teachers need rewards commensurate with the mental, emotional, and physical strains certain to be theirs both in and out of class.

Almost all outstanding graduates of the best alternative teacher certification and in-service programs abroad announce that full-time teaching has brought them immeasurable rewards.  But in the schools in which they are trained and in which they settle into teaching, such graduates are given skills and support structures of striking quality.  In Australia there are no training opportunities for teachers remotely comparable to the best ones in Hamburg or Cologne, Houston or Milwaukee;  yet there need to be.

A FINAL WORD OF EXPLANATION

For the sake of manageability, our discussion of schooling has been divided into four interlocking chapters.  Each chapter covers an area of educational concern which we regard as critically important:  The Recruitment and Training of Teachers;  Curriculum;  Assessment;  and School Structures.  After describing large continuing educational issues in each area, and giving them a cultural context, we suggest manageable approaches to all of them.

We recognise that a major effort will be needed to institute these reforms, but we nonetheless believe that significant change can be effected.  On the basic principles which should guide education, there is probably more agreement in the community than on virtually any other area of public policy.  Whatever their ethnic, racial, political, or social differences, parents want their children to be literate and numerate, to possess a sound general knowledge, to understand their rights and obligations as citizens, and to have self-discipline and a positive attitude to work.  They want reliable information about their children's academic performance;  they want schools which are responsive to the particular educational needs and talents of their children;  and they want teachers they can trust and respect.  Now is the time for effecting reforms based on these concerns.

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ENDNOTES

1.  See Rosie Wickert, No Single Measure:  A Survey of Australian Adult Illiteracy, Sydney College of Advanced Education, 1986.

2.  See, for example, Education and Industry:  Developing a Partnership.  A Report on Employers' Views of the Victorian Education System, Employers' Education Consortium of Victoria, March 1989.  See also "A Business Perspective", Education Examined:  Curriculum and Assessment in the 1990s, Current Issues, 1990.

3.  Geoffrey Partington, "Why Parents are Choosing Independent Schools", Education Monitor, Autumn 1990.

4.  A representative example of the thinking of reformers of this stamp can be found in the speech "Vision for the Future" by the then-Minister for Education in Victoria, Joan Kirner, delivered at the Primary Principals' Conference at Mannix College on 29 November 1988.

5.  Between 1975/76 and 1988/89 in Victoria, expenditure per pupil increased from $3,388 to $4,372 (29 per cent in real terms).  The ACER Report, Literacy and Numeracy in Victorian Schools:  1988 found that, in general, minimum standards of literacy and numeracy among Victorian 10-year-olds and 14-year-olds had not improved between 1975 and 1988.

6.  Results of this survey were discussed in The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 1992.