The politics of "progressive" education.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: The Australian electorate across the political spectrum is virtually unanimous about the importance of education, most obviously primary and secondary schooling. This is largely driven not so much by philosophical considerations, or the realisation of the increasing importance of education in modern society and the modern economy, but by the perennial desire of parents to equip their children for success.

Education-related issues have thus unsurprisingly been a feature of political debate since before Federation, but until relatively recently they revolved almost entirely around funding. While funding has by no means disappeared from consideration, it has certainly lost some of its sectarian and class bite, Latham's "hit list" of 2004 notwithstanding. What is new is a fundamental controversy concerning content, ideology, mode of delivery and assessment provoked by the gradual adoption of the "progressive" model by the state education bureaucracies and politicians. It appears that the Howard government is going to do its best to reverse this trend; indeed a minor counter-revolution against "progressive" education can be observed throughout the West.

Ironically, although "progressive" education is associated with the Left, the post-Soviet states are not facing this problem because they inherited a basically sound, if slightly old-fashioned system. I still remember my own brush with primary education in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1940-41 as a ten- and eleven-year-old. We did suffer one hour of crude Bolshevik indoctrination per week (which we ignored and parodied), but we also had solid arithmetic, interesting general science, compulsory PT, ancient history, geography and four languages--Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and German--all with formal grammar. Try that on our eleven-year-olds! Indeed, the scourge of "progressive" education is confined to the affluent West because most poor countries are just emerging from the ancient notion of schooling amounting to memorising rather than understanding.

In Australia, the counter-attack has been led by the Australian and Quadrant, but to be effective, action has to succeed at the political level, which requires a realistic appreciation of what parents and hence voters consider important and an understanding of what "progressive" education involves beyond "indoctrination not education" as embodied in Gramscian subversion and relativistic Derridian insanity. It is not that these ideological aspects (for a brief summary see Kevin Donnelly in the Australian of October 20 and 21-22) are unimportant: they are central to the understanding of the problem and are a major, though not sole, source of the remaining ills of the system. However, I would argue that parents are more sensitive to lack of content, decline in discipline, soft assessment and what one might term the tyranny of relevance.

The decline of formal content is clearly related to postmodern relativism (if there is no objective knowledge, what is the point of teaching it?) but the government should attack not the ideological feet of clay, but the all too obvious practical consequences. Children are increasingly unable to locate themselves in time through lack of exposure to history, or in space due to deficiency in geography, or in the physical universe due to ignorance of science. Most leave school essentially innumerate, forcing universities to run bridging courses. Many are poor communicators in writing and unable to marshal an argument verbally.

At one end of the spectrum, you get some PhD candidates who have difficulty describing their work, and I am talking here about Chemistry, ...