Just When You Thought All You Needed to Worry About Were Extremist Muslim Terrorists, the Education Minister has Found Reds in Bed With Our Sub-Tertiary Students. (October 6, 2006)

    There's no doubt about it -- it's a disgrace -- there are subversives manipulating school curricula seducing our young -- and the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, at the behest of Prime Minister, John Howard, is gonna demolish their germinating seeds root and branch, don't you worry about that.

The Prime Minister looking increasingly like a Neocon in the mould of Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld has detailed off Ms Bishop to rattle the cages of the state departments of education because their syllabuses are not cast in a right thinking manner.

I'm reminded of a fellow student who, many years ago in our high school geometry class, got up on his desk just after the teacher had gone through a complex proof and shouting, "Don't believe her, it's a capitalist lie!" Even the teacher laughed... she must have been a closet Communist, we all must have been subverted.

In her address to the Australian History Teachers Association today, Ms Bishop told them that her history summit found that, "The study of Australian history should be sequentially planned through primary and secondary schooling and should be a distinct subject in Years 9 and 10. This would be an essential and required core part of all students’ learning experience to prepare them for the 21^st century."

Perfectly reasonable

She then proceeded to tell them, "The new frontier of educational reform in Australia is about teacher quality and curriculum... Recent research, both in Australia and overseas, concludes that the critical factor in determining a students’ achievement at school is the quality of the teacher... I strongly believe that we need to start giving teachers performance-based pay, and we need to develop a nationally consistent and rigorous system of compulsory professional development... In addition to improving the quality of teachers, we also need to improve the quality of what is actually taught. There is widespread community concern about the content of curriculum being developed by State government education authorities... I am convinced of the need for the Commonwealth to take a leadership role in a fight for a back-to-basics approach across curriculum – not wrest control of curriculum – but working to ensure that we have consistently high standards across the country... And students should not be forced to interpret Shakespeare from a feminist or Marxist perspective. They should bring their own interpretations and values to these works of literature. History and geography classes should not be allowed to slide into political science courses by another name... My comments are not directed at teachers. Our teachers are a precious national resource. Rather, I am critical of the social engineers working away in State government education authorities... Ideologues who have hijacked school curriculum and are experimenting with the education of our young people from a comfortable position of unaccountability, safe within education bureaucracies.

"We need to take school curriculum (sic) out of the hands of ideologues in the State and Territory education bureaucracies and give it to say a national board of studies, comprising the sensible centre of educators – with representatives of our States and Territories, bringing to the table the very best examples of all that the States have to offer... Is it necessary for each State to develop a single curriculum? Do we need to have a physics curriculum developed for Queensland, and another, almost identical physics curriculum for Western Australia?.. Think of the duplication, the waste of resources. The States and Territories collectively spend more than $180 million every year in just running their boards of studies and curriculum councils – each developing curriculum documents, and in many cases, developing if not entirely the same, then very similar curriculum (sic)."

The quotes above are taken from the text of Ms Bishop's speech as it was published on the DEST website. Those present during her address report she had toned down her rhetoric, perhaps because of the media reaction, who had been given advanced copies, that morning. The DEST released text omits the reference to Chairman Mao present in the original release to the media.

It's a worrisome point that the hard push to centralism is a mark of totalitarian regimes and to point to "ideologues who have hijacked school curriculum" while she is being directed by a driven ideologue of a Prime Minister is disingenuous. And it ought to give pause when the minister tells us, "we need to develop a nationally consistent and rigorous system of compulsory professional development." Just what does she as the servant of John Howard mean by that? It does have the odour of a Federal Department of Education under the thumb of its Cabinet masters dictating just what will be "consistent and rigorous".

It's worth recalling  Harold Shapiro, the emeritus president of Princeton University, in commenting on  Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education made the point, "[Ms Washburn] offers a set of recommendations that generally increase the authority of the federal government or other third parties. With the exception of a proposal aimed at strengthening conflict-of-interest regulations, I find these unpersuasive and, in many cases, a little naïve."

In Ms Bishop's case it isn't naiveté that prompts her to offer "a set of recommendations that generally increase the authority of the federal government."