Education revolutions, left, right and centre.(Education)

EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTIONS are highly fashionable. So anxious are the major parties to present themselves as radical innovators that we seem to face the prospect of a "permanent revolution". The May Commonwealth budget, which marked the de facto opening of the 2007 federal election campaign, was used by both major parties as an opportunity to proclaim their educational intentions. John Howard announced a $9 billion pro- gram for education: $5 billion for universities, $3.5 billion for schools. Benefits for primary and secondary education included vouchers for outside-school tuition for children with literacy and numeracy problems; a cash bonus for schools which made significant improvements in literacy and numeracy; funding for teacher summer schools; and money to improve teacher training.

In an earlier foray, Howard had launched a scheme for twenty-five (later, twenty-eight) Commonwealth-funded Australian Technical Colleges to attract more young people into trade training in Years 11 and 12. The first five colleges opened in 2006; by July 2007, twenty-one were operating. Other initiatives included the "history summit" in August 2006, seeking to encourage a narrative approach to Australian history in schools, and a three-year $90 million national program to support school chaplaincies.

In his budget speech-in-reply Kevin Rudd outlined the latest plank in his "education revolution" for which he had already pledged $1.9 billion on measures ranging from early childhood to tertiary and adult education. The latest component, a "Trades in Schools" program costing $2:5 billion over ten years, would establish training centres in schools to encourage non-academic students to stay on and learn a trade. Year 12 retention rates would rise; so would the nation's prosperity. Rudd promised to re-introduce Commonwealth funding of Asian languages and studies in schools, abolished in 2002, to "help with future export opportunities" and foster "Asia-literate Australians".

What about liberal education? asked the head teacher of science at Gosford High School in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. He feared that federal funding of already prosperous independent schools was "cementing two-tier education in Australia". Public schools would be turned into training centres for trades-people. "What happened to the ideal of a liberal education for all our young people?" Gosford High, it might be noted, was a selective academic high school.

Others claimed Howard was attempting to put the clock back. Writing in the Age, Dale Spender claimed Howard was an "avowed education traditionalist", locked into the 1950s. He wanted English lessons to teach grammar and asserted that history was history, geography was geography, "not place and space". Spender warned Howard that since the 1950s an "information revolution" had changed children, education, and learning and literacy: "The adventurous, independent learners of the digital age are a very different breed from the children who 60 years ago sat quietly in their ordered rows, worked from their books and relied upon their teachers for information." For digital students the screen, not the page, comes first. Far from being "passive recipients of existing knowledge", they have learnt by doing, by trial and error, by problem solving. "It is not the right answer that they want; it is the right question they are after." Liberal education certainly did not form part of Spender's amalgam of neo-progressive (learning by doing, problem solving) and "critical", deteriorated neo-Marxist theory (not the right answer but the right question).

We should assess these alleged changes in teaching/ learning methods and the curriculum in the context of four major education revolutions over the last hundred years. All four were heralded by their protagonists as expressions of "democracy-in-education". They can also be seen as liberal, progressive, radical, conservative, or a combination of these categories. What remains of those upheavals today?

AN EDUCATION-FOCUSED CENTURY