A loose Australian Canon.(education )

"BY THE WATERS of Babylon we sat down and wept." Yes, and I've got a pretty good idea of how they felt. Any civilised person today seated beside the Derrida-desert of what used to be our system of secondary education can only suffer the same sense of desolation.

In a few weeks, Australia's schools will disgorge their annual draft of young people who are supposed to have been educated. A high proportion will be semi-literate: crippled by a vocabulary that is barely rudimentary; unable to spell; unable to construct even a paragraph of clear English. Not all of them, but all too many will merit Winston Churchill's famous words of faint praise: that the Honourable Member could certainly create useful literary works, such as: "Gentlemen--adjust your dress before leaving".

This opinion does not rest merely upon report, but also on a body of first-hand experience. For the fifteen years up to 2004, part of my day job was to interview and to assist each year about 1000 young people. Most were in their early twenties, and approaching the point of entry to their chosen profession. My position was a humble one, but I was happily committed to it; I enjoyed especially the opportunity it gave an elderly man to maintain daily touch with each successive annual accretion to the "rising generation".

It was, mostly, a rewarding experience. True, there were a few total no-hopers, a few unmistakable bad eggs waiting to hatch out into early professional life. But my impression of young Australians, including (perhaps even especially) the children of migrants, gave comfort and assurance for the future. I found (again for the most part) candour, enthusiasm, decency and innate intelligence. There seemed every hope that by their own efforts they would be able to throw off the millstones which had been hung round their necks at the brink of adult life, and be able to swim after all. That millstone was their education: mean, cramped, wrong, slanted, narrow, visionless. Those young people, like Jesus in the garden, had been betrayed thrice.

First, by their own parents. These, by the exercise of a little guts and gumption at state election times, could have shown that any candidate, of whatever party, was a dead parliamentary duck if they connived in the degradation of our schools.

The state governments were the second betrayers, as all of them, by degrees, handed over control of the education system to those who were employed by it--the teachers.

The trinity of traitors was led by the teachers. Themselves narrowly educated and amazingly ignorant, they and their unions pursued naked self-interest with all the delicacy and restraint we had associated with wharf labourers and builders. Strikes and threats of strikes, tricks such as refusals to mark exam papers--any tactics would do, and to hell with the harm it may do their students. This poisonous dispensation is now of long standing. For example, in Victoria, Labor premier John Cain and Liberal premier Henry Bolte were of one mind in their contempt for school teachers. "They won't go on strike just now--the holidays are coming up," said Cain. "They can march up and down till they're footsore. I haven't got a doorstep low enough for them to sit on," said Bolte.