How great it is to see that Australian education is back on track with the new draft national curriculum. No more dumbing down for us! And if you want to find out more about the battle against dumbing down, you can go to the national curriculum website, and, erm, watch the instructional video on how to use the website. The video is 14 minutes long. Even better, check out the title:
An Introduction to Australian Curriculum
Before you start looking at the curriculum, please view the video below and click on the key questions to get further information on the Australian curriculum and how to use this website.
Last time I looked, the English language still used definite articles. Furthermore, “looking at” isn’t idiomatically correct, unless the whole thing has been rendered as an artist’s impression. And “further information about the national curriculum” would have eliminated the ambiguous meanings generated by use of the word “on”.
Indeed, the sentence as a whole is pretty awful, the “and” applying the verb phrase “get further information on” to a noun phrase — “the Australian curriculum” — and an adverbial clause “how to use this website”. It’s grammatical, but gives the distinct impression that part of the sentence is missing. A little too Hemingwayesque (“they had oysters and margaritas and a way to escape the world they knew forever and more margaritas and it was warm and it was good”) for actual information-giving.
Meanwhile, the sidebar is most informative
Key Questions:
- Why have an Australian Curriculum?
- What does the draft K-10 Australian Curriculum look like?
- What makes the Australian Curriculum a world-class curriculum?
- What are the Australian Curriculum development timelines?
- How to provide feedback on the draft K-10 Australian Curriculum?
Spot the error, anyone? Yes, the last “question” is an instruction, and should not have a question mark. Or it should be phrased another way, so that the heading does not have to be changed to “key questions and an instruction that begins with a word questions usually begin with”. Unless, of course, it is there as a piece of chorus dialogue (“how oh how shall we provide feedback?”), in which case quotation marks should be employed. Or to indicate rising inflection, a la Neighbours.
Finally, the fourth, and, in fact, last question currently invites the answer “they’re the sequences of deadlines we set for development of the Australian Curriculum”, and should be changed to “What are the development timelines for the Australian Curriculum?” No, you should not use “What are the Australian Curriculum’s development timelines?” as it is a false possessive, but the fact that it even looks possible demonstrates how unhelpfully ambiguous is the question as written. What’s that? Who said “rack off, everyone knows what it means”?* That’s a slippery slope, with ebonics at the end. Report to Justine Ferrari, for 197 mortgage-paying new articles on how deconstruction has ruined finger-painting.
Hilarious. A gang of Queenslanders are reconstructing the Australian education system. For those with two PhDs, the website offers an opportunity to “read the video transcript” instead. Apart from that whole thing going very well is.
*Yes, the question mark should be outside the quotes. Unless it’s rising inflection a la Neighbours. Sorry, a la Neighbours?
That is so Guy Rundle; Strunk and White and read all over.
The last “question” is in fact a statement of how to access the answers to any questions. It all seemed pretty readable to me. I understand grammar is to be taught in the new curriculum and presumably syntax too. I like the reference to Hemingway.
Dexterous subbing, Guy, but come on, we’re all post-postmodern here. If the intro had fronted up the way you like we’d have to blame the monkey who wrote Shakespeare or shouldn’t I say, Shake’s amanuensis monkey.
Marcus L’Estrange writes re item 14 from Guy Rundle: ‘Our new curriculum’, 4/3/2010.
Many good points but we should ask that if teachers are now having to be retrained to teach the basics what were they to teach until now? Answer? Edubable. Secondly why does Julia Gillard have to make these major changes?
To me Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd are the Gorbachovs of Australia when it comes to the education revolution. Gorbachov acted bravely to try and rid the then USSR of Stalinism. Now Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, via the My School web site and the national curriculum are trying to rid Australian education of the Educational Left and their Edubable automatic promotion, equality of outcomes nonsense.
The changes are a crucial start we have to have in order to break the current logjam between the extra expenditure in education over the years but the relative declining student results. As John Brumby once noted:
“Typically, the kids who are being failed by failing schools are Labor kids in Labor areas”.
The whole reason the AEU and others are taking their position is that they are horrified of Australians finding out the results of their support of Edubable. Edubable is the doctrine on education formulated by the Educational Left (EL) in the Universities, the AEU and the Socialist Left in the ALP. Its key policy is encapsulated in the ‘equality of outcomes’ nonsense which says in effect that everyone should get their VCE and by the way don’t worry too much if students cannot read or write to anywhere near the VCE level. All will be well in the EL heaven. Students can then attend remedial courses at universities (a huge growth industry) and / or undertake Mickey Mouse ‘degrees’ in order to keep the youth unemployment figures artificially low and the huge education industry in comfortable existence.
Isn’t it strange that nearly all schools claim a 90% – 93% VCE success rate but massive differences occur between schools re their VCE TER Entry scores? Talk about handing out VCE passes like confetti. School based assessment is too often not worth the paper it is written on with subject ‘passes’ too often handed out like confetti at a wedding.
Julia Gillard is a member of the Socialist Left faction of the ALP. A faction that is neither Socialist nor Left and is / was a protégé of Joan Kirner or Mother Russia, the High Priestess of the EL. Consequently it is surprising that she has taken her current stand but then she has seen the ‘light on the hill’ and, unlike the crocodile tears from the AEU, is one of the few heavyweights now really interested in working class children’s educational prospects. Ben Chifley would be proud.
Finally, we must have a Royal Commission into why the ALP Labor Unity faction were allowed to give the ALP Socialist Left faction control of education department’s in return for Labor Unity running Treasury, Finance Departments and the Office of Premier. Liberal Governments never really cared that much about state education and argued amongst themselves that the best way to destroy state education was to let the Educational Left do it and what a ‘magnificent’ job they did.
It’s everywhere. I got this in an email from ABC Reading Eggs, an internet based interactive reading programme my youngest child uses:
“The Reading Eggs lessons are designed to be played more than once. All children benefit from repeating lessons as it reinforces learning and builds automaticity(instant recall). We recommend that young learners repeat each lesson at least three times for maximum benefit.”
Even the spell checker on this site gives “automaticity” the wavy red underline!