Letter to the Editor of the Examiner, published Wed February 18 2015. Full text.
TEACHING degrees are an easy option.
You can get into them with the lowest school leaving scores, and they are made up from course work (aka Googlecopy) and modules (aka “do the easiest”).
Years ago people did not need a degree to teach, but the school leaving levels were of a much higher standard then, so most student teachers had a better subject understanding than they do now.
Some teachers did have degrees, so socialist doctrine meant that everyone should have one and then everybody would be equal.
The courses now are generally a mixture of political correctness and feminist propaganda.
You would have to work very hard to fail a subject because Deans of Education are very sensitive to having full Faculty numbers because of funding implications.
Also nobody wants to fail a student because of the hours of wasted time explaining or justifying the decision to teams of counsellors and other do-gooders with important titles.
It is not fair to blame the universities for low standards because they cannot offend the government or their funding will be cut.
You would think that conservative politics would do more to stop the rot, but they are more concerned with making money, and if something works on a computer model, then it works (for a while anyway).
Also most politicians send their children to private schools if they can.
The same “equality” madness has gone into the (mainly trades) areas with competence based training, where somebody may be “not yet competent” until he dies of old age.
But nobody ever fails.
— C. HAYWARD, St Helens.
My reply to the Editor
C Hayward of St Helens (Letters, February 18) presents a mess of assumptions, judgements and biases in his assessment of teacher education standards.
I have taught for over twenty years in several Tasmanian schools, and for five years I lectured in the field of Literacy Education at the University of Tasmania’s Faculty of Education.
Teaching is a considerably complex profession. It frequently comes under attack from those who almost certainly have spent little or no time in a modern classroom.
Education should not, as C Hayward seems to suggest, be delivered to the lowest common denominator; concepts of differentiation can be applied in classrooms to ensure that as many students as possible have a fighting chance of some success.
Expanding networks of factors, many of them beyond a teacher’s control, inform how students are able to participate in their education, and the ongoing excellent work of teachers is not enhanced by a shopping list of grievances with little basis in reality.
C Hindrum
Launceston
But there’s more to it than that …
I can assure C Hayward that in five years of lecturing in teacher education, I do not recall seeing, hearing or delivering any ‘feminist propaganda’. I will also be heartily relieved if someone can explain what ‘Googlecopy’ is.
Is C Hayward making a sweeping accusation of plagiarism? Sadly most of the claims made in the above letter won’t stand much scrutiny.
I have also failed quite a few students in my time; personally, I have a difficult time condoning poor literacy, especially in adults and even more especially in adults who intend to enter the teaching profession, and I’m never afraid to say so.
However, the reasons why literacy is “poor” are complex, and arguments on the issue are not served by blinkered conservative armchair commentary delivered from the safe seclusion of the east coast.
At the same time, I am quite aware that some debates regarding education—around literacy education in particular—have become deeply ideological, and arguably the benefit of this to education generally has not been a positive one.
I am referring mainly to ongoing lines in the sand drawn between the Phonics camp and the Whole Language camp. Teaching children to read and write is and should remain at the absolute heart of our education system, along with teaching number sense and mental calculation skills. (Disclaimer: I am not a Maths teacher.)
There are valid arguments for the use of Phonics-based methods (especially in very young students) and Whole Language methods. Phonics establishes the relationship between letters and the sound they make, which forms the basis of spelling knowledge (along with knowledge regarding word origins).
Whole language establishes semantic knowledge, looking at words in their context for correct usage—and therefore provides the basis of a student’s vocabulary. Phonics provides the bones, Whole Language puts the flesh on them; both are important. Excluding one of them is likely to lead to a knowledge deficit.
Hayward’s claim that socialist doctrines of equality meant that everyone should get a teaching degree is ridiculous to the point of hilarity (as is the tired old chestnut about feminist propaganda).
Not everyone is suited to teaching—it’s demanding and stressful and exhausting. It is, nonetheless, a profession, and those who feel called to it should be appropriately qualified. A piece of paper won’t necessarily make everyone who gets one a good teacher, however. I have often claimed that I learned more about the job during my first posting (1993, Parklands High School, Burnie) than I did in four years of University, but then I was never much of an academic, much to my parents’ dismay.
There may be an argument that suggests entry to teacher education courses is not rigorous enough; the ATAR score is not very high, etc etc. I note that Mr Christopher Pyne, that eminent socialist genius, has indicated that graduates of such courses should sit literacy and numeracy tests before being allowed into the classroom. He’s completely wrong, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. They should sit such tests when they apply to enter.
There are also good arguments to be made that we have to teach children how to learn: and that, by the time they start school at the age of five (for argument’s sake), kiddies should already have most of the skills they will need to succeed.
These include, but are not limited to, resilience, social skills, ethical knowledge and so on. Of course, these will develop, along with processes of literacy and numeracy, as children develop. This is, admittedly, a best case scenario—it assumes that students will be read to by their parents and that they will be spared learning disorders such as processing delays, dyslexia, autism and so on.
Finally, people do fail. I talk to my students a lot about character, and how character is formed. A lot of what happens in schools—and, later on, in the workplace perhaps—happens innately.
Considerable learning, perhaps some of the most important learning, takes place outside the classroom, when a report is disappointing or Little Freddy didn’t get voted in as a Prefect. (Yes, my school—a government school—still has them.)
Teachers are a soft target …
Teachers are, for whatever reason, a soft target. All the holidays! Hayward might like to share his/her profound and well-considered views with Jeremy Rockliff, along with queries such as:
1. If the Liberal Party is so concerned about retention beyond Year 10, why did it axe Guaranteeing Futures—the one program actively and successfully addressing this issue? Doing so has saved the government almost no money. The empire builders in the Department of Education strike again.
2. Why, when we apparently live in a state with 50% functional illiteracy*, are schools first in line for funding cuts and staff losses?
*Personally I’m very sceptical about this figure, but that’s a debate for another time.
Why should anyone give a rat’s about any of this? Because it’s high stakes stuff.
Tasmania can be the smart state, but only if we’re smart. If we’re serious about building a knowledge economy, let’s start taking more care of our schools and their armies of dedicated, inspiring, committed teachers—not less.
Useless right-wing sniping from a safe distance won’t achieve anything. Teachers are change agents. If you know any, find them and shake their hand. Buy them a beer.
And then let them get on with it.
All about Cameron Hindrum: When he’s not indoctrinating teenagers or being provocative on Facebook, Cameron Hindrum grows vegetables and arranges words into poems and novels and plays. He is also campaigning to have TISM represent Australia at Eurovision. Sign the petition here: https://www.change.org/p/the-australian-public-reform-the-band-tism-and-represent-australian-at-eurovision-2015
• Jack, in comments: Thanks Jean (#15) What Finland does prove is that education standards are not limited by population size, GDP, isolation of communities, harsh environments, difficult transport issues, prior economic reliance on rural industries, public funding, existence of ethnic diversity (Lapland, Swedish culture etc) etc. Many of these arguments are used to promote the idea that Australia can’t really be compared and it is impossible for us to attain similar success. Finland made the decision to give priority to education prior to entering the EU and boy, did they deliver. We were to be the ‘clever country’, remember that? The principle and most important difference is that Finland’s culture and state values education as one. The nation decided that their future was dependent upon it. To our north Asian countries are rapidly catching up to this model after being way behind. The smug Australian hare slumbers on the track as the Asian tortoise is about to pass it. While some nations walk the walk, we dog paddle with strategies for encultured differently abled persons who should be empowered, validated and valued to an inch of their lives as the English language is water boarded with weasel words. Its called managerialism. We have thousands of cooks in the kitchen, flogging each other with a different recipe books, but not one who’s able to fry an egg.
• Jean Walker, in Comments: Has anyone else read the two-page spread on Education in the Mercury this morning? Paragraphs from a variety of educators, politicians and business people who have been appointed “ambassadors of education”. Nothing really wrong with what most of them said but it’s all been said before but nothing changed. Why should it this time? What i said above in 7# was mainly in response to the original post and not the entire picture. Has it occurred to critics that many, many kids come out of our schools brilliantly educated, go on to tertiary education and do extremely well for themselves. I once taught at an all-girls high school where almost every girl left having reached or almost reached their potential. I’ve taught in schools in low-socio-economic areas where some amazing achievements with deprived kids were made. I would, however, acknowledge that not all those high achievers had the level of literacy skills that we, the older generation, would expect. This is considered heresy and blasphemous in the DoE but I have always stuck to my opinion that the main cause of our failures in education come down to these …
