Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop was wrong to retreat from her accusation that state education departments were forcing Mao-like ideologies upon students. It's true that bureaucrats aren't advocating mass murder, as did the Chinese dictator, but Bishop's essential point was correct.
For decades, school curriculums have been manipulated to serve a particular world view.
This is a world view that regards morals as relative, and that refuses to acknowledge that Shakespeare is better literature than a comic book. Indeed it is a view that doesn't believe that literature, music, fine art, or any other product of Western civilisation can be judged as "better" than anything else. That's why in English classes, students are seldom required to read books any more. They can watch television and play computer games instead.
The reason used to justify this approach to teaching is the claim that education has been the instrument of class, gender, and race oppression. It is a doctrine that advocates radical solutions.
The evidence of what Bishop is talking about is not hard to find. Her now famous claim about secondary students being required to undertake a Marxist deconstruction of Hamlet is just one example of a phenomenon. Another is "outcomes-based education", a model of learning being implemented by the Western Australian Government that doesn't attempt to impart knowledge to students; it merely aims to teach students how to learn.
The minister should be supported in her desire to improve the quality of education and she has raised some valid issues. However, her proposed solution -- a national curriculum -- is completely the wrong way to fix the problem.
Giving control to a single authority, in this case the Commonwealth Department of Education, over what's studied by Australia's 3 million school students is a disaster waiting to happen. It is a power that will inevitably be abused.
For as long as Julie Bishop remains Education Minister there might not be anything to worry about. And there might not be any cause for concern if it could be guaranteed that every federal education minister into the future, Liberal or Labor, exercised their responsibilities sensibly. But the problem is that there is no such guarantee in politics.
The whole point of a federal system, and of dividing power between different levels of government is to dilute that power and limit the reach of government. Having each state and territory administering its own curriculums might be expensive and inefficient. But arguments based on expense and inefficiency have their limits.
Newspapers might be cheaper if there was only one media outlet in the country, but in free societies citizens are happy to pay the price for choice and diversity.
The claim that Australia as a country of 20 million people is too small to have eight different education systems is similarly flawed. If we really believed that a student in Melbourne should be taught the same science course as a student in Brisbane, then in theory there's no reason Australian students shouldn't get the same science curriculum as students in New Zealand.
Attempts to centralise the curriculum ignore one of the key advantages of a federal system. A mistake made by one state government affects only the people unlucky enough to be living in that state. Exactly that principle applies to education.
If Joan Kirner, instead of being Victorian education minister 20 years ago had been federal education minister, Australia could have had the national equivalent of the Victorian Certificate of Education. Around the country, competitive examinations would have been abolished and competitive grading eliminated. Only students in Victoria suffered from the excesses contained in the VCE. Bob Carr, the New South Wales premier of the time, promised that he would not repeat Victoria's mistakes.
Ultimately, the VCE was made less bad, and one of the things that drove the Victorian Labor government and then the Kennett government to improve the certificate was the fact that it was noticeably inferior to that of New South Wales.
There's no certainty that a Canberra-controlled curriculum would be any improvement on what the states now offer.
Curriculums are always the product of consultation and compromise, and often the lowest common denominator prevails.
At the state level, this can be controlled and managed and sometimes products of quality are produced.
If the curriculum was written at the national level, it would be a process eight times more complicated than now, and with eight times as many compromises.
Some of the biggest administrative blunders of recent years have been made by the Federal Government. It wasn't a state government department that accidentally deported Vivian Alvarez Solon. Or mistakenly locked up Cornelia Rau. Or failed to notice that the Australian Wheat Board was paying bribes to the Saddam Hussein.
Throughout the history of Federation there's not much evidence that Commonwealth bureaucrats do their job any better than their state counterparts. They might have more money to spend, but that's about it. Because something is run by Canberra doesn't make it superior to the state alternative. And federal politicians don't have a monopoly on wisdom either.
There's no easy answer to the best way to improve the standard of what is taught in our schools and if Julie Bishop has started a debate about curriculums, that's a good thing. But it would be a bad thing if, at the end of that debate, Australia finished up with a single, national curriculum.
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