Author: KENNETH WILTSHIRE
Publisher: News Ltd
Publication: The Australian, Wed 2 Jun 2010
UNDER the new national schools curriculum students studying English as a Second Language will apparently study more literature than those studying Essential English.
The bulk of our students will encounter only a smattering of literature texts in something described as ''functional English'', while the true enjoyment of reading literature will be the preserve of just an elite few. This is hardly in line with true educational principles or Australia's egalitarian foundations.
It simply reveals how Barry McGaw, chairman of the curriculum developers, and his misguided team have botched such an important exercise. Every other civilised nation in the world ensures its future generations have the opportunity to study and appreciate the nation's key prose, poetry and drama. Literature as taught through text is the central feature of a nation's culture and enlightenment, as well as its knowledge and awareness.
Australia will now be the only developed country which places little importance on literature in the education of its young.
After an interminable waiting time, it has now become clear that these curriculum developers have been mugged as they conducted their task. They have dumbed down the English curriculum as they have been progressively captured by a number of forces.
They have fallen prey to the propaganda of the Left that literature is too hard for most students to understand, whereas the fact is that any good teacher can instill a love of all literature in all students no matter what their social background or capacity. Throughout history the study of literature has been a key element of social progression for young people who might otherwise have been trapped in the travails of their socio-economic circumstances.
The curriculum talks of analysing and dissecting authors' motives in literature, with little mention of enjoying, appreciating, and learning from literature: its vocabulary, flow, style, characterisation, and richness of language and expression. The authors have clearly fallen prey to the loony nihilistic deconstructionists.
They also make the dangerous and erroneous assertion that film, digital, and video modalities are equal to the written text, and so McGaw and his colleagues have surrendered to the current cohort of teachers and their union bosses, most of whom have never read a good novel themselves and would rather push a button or click a mouse than turn a page.
They have no appreciation of the significance and richness of literature text and the proper means of teaching it. It is not possible to curl up in bed with a good modem. Film makers are never true to the literature which they plunder, manipulate, and exploit.
How does the Rudd government square all of this with its controversial decision earlier this year to act contrary to the findings of the Productivity Commission on the importation of books? The government says it acted to protect the interests of Australian authors but what is the point if no schoolchildren will be reading them? All our Australian authors churning out all those books for a population incapable of reading and enjoying them.
There is also an extremely dangerous indication in these documents that in English, and other subjects of the proposed national curriculum, state governments will be able to determine assessment methods. Thus there will be no truly ''national'' curriculum and we are headed for continued lack of uniformity and consistency in school education systems across Australia. Another Rudd government promise broken.
The blame game will continue and any families moving interstate will face all the strangling complexities on their children's education which they suffer at the moment. McGaw has certainly been mugged by vested interests in state Labor governments.
As recently revealed in The Australian the nation's history scholars are already demolishing the curriculum development process for its lack of balance, despite all the promises from McGaw after his release of the earlier, biased, original discussion papers which he commissioned from so-called ''experts''.
The so-called national schools curriculum is shaping up as another Rudd-Gillard policy bungle and waste of public money, morphing into a broken election promise. The only solution seems to be to start again and cobble together the best of the NSW and Victorian curriculums as an interim measure, while a proper professional process is established. This issue is far more important than mining, taxation, infrastructure, emissions, or any of the matters that dominate our daily lives: the whole wellbeing of our youth is at stake; in other words the future of our nation.
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Kenneth Wiltshire of the University of Queensland Business School, has recently served a six-year term as Australia's representative on the executive board of UNESCO, was special adviser to the Australian National Training Authority, and chaired the review of the Queensland school curriculum.
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