Tim Badrick thinks public education in Australian too many chiefs and not enough Indians and airs his suspicions about the real reason the Government wants NAPLAN testing.
I thought long and hard before writing this, because as I am not a parent and haven’t got any children who go to school, I may seem a bit underqualified to talk about the public education system in Australia.
Nevertheless, it is my own personal belief that there are too many Chiefs and not enough Indians running our schools at an administration level. That means that most children at public schools are not getting the objectively simple education they need to teach them the basics of maths and English. Instead, they get all the impractical and excessively intellectual syllabuses, which shouldn’t be heaped upon any student until they at least get to high school.
From an observation – and not experience – point of view, I believe the public school system in Australia has been taken over at an administration level by an amalgam of some of the most left-wing sleeper fraternities outside the trade union movement. Assuming the various teachers unions outside Queensland are tarred with the same brush as the Queensland Teachers Union, an organisation which I am familiar with, then it’s no wonder that the present Y-Generation of children and up-and-coming teenagers in our public schools are already preaching the virtues of Marxism and the Labor Party a lot of the time by the time they leave school and head to university.
The QTU is so unobjective, it’s a wonder that any conservatively minded parent in Queensland would knowingly send their child to a public school in the first place if they understood just how manipulated the school curriculums are in the name of promoting closet communism at a community level. I’m assuming there is very little difference between the QTU and its interstate equivalents.
The National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), which was implemented in 2008, is the most definitive and glaring example of political interference in our public education system, despite it being dressed up by the federal government as a well-meaning and apolitical initiative to improve the literacy and numeracy skills of Australian children. According to what a well-seasoned principal in a Queensland private school recently suggested was going on behind closed doors as to maintaining the confidentiality of NAPLAN data and not allowing it to become accessible to bureaucrats with a political agenda, I’d have to say that Gillard and her leftist bureaucratic shadows in the education system have to convince a few people, including me, that every single exam, every single essay, in fact everything that school children are being accessed on, isn’t been screened by a bunch of unelected Big Brothers loyal to the Labor Party when no one is watching as a means of identifying the voting habits of their parents and the potential future voting habits of the children themselves once they become adults.
That’s the kind of meddling in people’s private affairs which you would have expected in an eastern bloc country before the fall of the Berlin Wall, not in 21st century Australia. Paul Thompson, principal of Kimberley College in Logan City, Queensland, is one of the few ‘rebels’ in the education system who doesn’t mind locking horns with the commo powers that be that rule the entire public education system in Queensland and even influence the decision makers in many left-of-centre private schools. His school, a private one itself, has been audited a conspicuous amount of times for no reason by the Department of Education because of his outspoken views against the establishment. On top of Thompson's wish list is the abolition of NAPLAN, which he rightfully infers is a massive politically motivated 'invasion of privacy' and a 'half-baked scheme' which is not helping one iota to address the growing problem of illiteracy and innumeracy in school aged children.
I agree wholeheartedly with Thompson.Let’s can NAPLAN and instead of having Gillard’s snoops looking over everything Australian school children put down on paper, let’s set a classroom limit of 20 students for every teacher, both in private and public schools. Let's get back to some no-nonsense one-on-one straightforward education. What the public education system needs across Australia are pro-active agitators like Paul Thompson and not teachers unions who preach their propaganda from only one political textbook.
