Gosh! Five months already? How time flies when you're having fun. Educational fun. Funducation. I hope you've enjoyed these posts as much as I've enjoyed writing them - it has been a strange but rewarding little venture to write about a topic area I previously had almost zero investment in. I've clarified my outlook on a lot of things, actually gotten up to speed with university and school politics, started to understand the private/public divide and still think that the amount students get from Centrelink is a goddamn joke. But as a valedictory tour, here's a quick overview of what I think will be the five most pressing/overly discussed issues to affect the education system in Australia over the next few years. In no particular order.
1. Public v Private
After a few decades of unchecked growth in the sector and the public funding it receives, it feels as if this is finally coming back up for serious discussion again. And just in time as well - private school enrolment rates are fast climbing into the forty percent bracket, and
as I've argued that seems like a surefire recipe for entrenched class divisions in an otherwise reasonably egalitarian society. There's a review of funding arrangements due to be handed down in the not too distant future, with the expectation that this will identify some pretty rampant funding misallocation throughout the private sector. While it's probably unlikely that any Australian Government for the foreseeable future would have the wherewithal to actually strip all public funding from the private sector – religious groups, for one, would go absolutely fucking nuts – I think we can expect to see an overall diminishment of the money being sent to private schools, which will be both electorally popular and just a good thing to do.
2. Religion in schools
One of the most controversial features in last month's budget was the announcement that the Government was going to expand John Howard's much – and perhaps a little unfairly – maligned school chaplaincy scheme to the tune of $222 million. This in an otherwise austere budget that thrived on its fiscal restraint. While many of the arguments flung at the school chaplaincy program do scream of blind anti-religious fervour, I do think there's something to be said for ensuring that the people placed in these positions have some sort of minimum qualification/capacity to counsel children. And that a mere faith in God, no matter how strong, may not be that qualification. Of course, the move is blind pandering to the religious vote, who often seem to have a disproportionate amount of sway when it comes to matters of social policy, but I think more broadly the idea of having non-teachers embedded in schools in a supra-educational role has something to be said for it. And most of the school chaplains in place do appear to be doing good, non-evangelical work. Perhaps we're just worried that if we removed the religious component we wouldn't be able to find enough secular minded folk to fill the gaps... Also of concern,
Victoria's goddamn stupid compulsory religious education laws. Oh, and those
NSW laws that allow students to be expelled from religious schools for being gay. Seriously, what a crock.
3. The expansion of the number of university places
Happening next year, this is, in all likelihood, the biggest reformation of our tertiary education system since the introduction of HECS. I wrote about it in a very exploratory fashion last week and don't pretend to know what the outcome of it all will be, but while the idea that providing 40% of the population with a university degree is laudable, I do wonder if perhaps this will accelerate some already prevalent trends in our higher education i.e. the drift toward vocational education, the assumption of role of technical college and the diminution of the scale, breadth and intellectual rigour attached to both vocational and non-vocational subjects.
4. The rise of the Melbourne Model
There's still plenty who believe that the Melboure Model is a passing phase that's unlikely to be adopted in any broad fashion, but I'm inclined to see the emergence of a more US style of higher education as almost an inevitability now that university places are being expanded with such fervour. The logic being that as more and more places offer more and more of the same vocational degree, the institutions currently enjoying a degree of prestige due to their elite status will be pushed to make the degrees they do offer ever more prestigious and unobtainable, and styling themselves in an Ivy League mould will be a pretty surefire way of ensuring that this occurs.
5. NAPLAN, MySchool, teacher bonuses and the National Curriculum
Perhaps a bit of a broad "I'm running out of space in the top 5" collection of issues, but I'd argue they all come together under the banner of trying to make school in Australia a singular experience. For better or,
I'd argue worse, the NAPLAN tests are here and look as if they could be for a while. A pretty patchy measure of personal achievement and the skills of teachers, it is nonetheless, thanks to MySchool, becoming the benchmark by which we assess schools, and, in the wake of last month's budget, teachers. I've written before about the reasons
why we should pay our teachers an extraordinary amount more (and put a whole lot more into their education as well), but the move to
use NAPLAN results as a scale for rewarding high achieving teachers is admirable, in that it might give teachers more money, yet still a little misguided in that it provides yet another mechanism for judging and harrying teachers and misses the point of the actual malaise: the fact that teachers aren't paid well enough in general to universally attract the sort of people that we really want as our teachers. The national curriculum is a bit of a side issue in all of this - well is in so much as I haven't looked into it quite enough to venture broad opinion - but it seems like this will undoubtedly be a point of major contention as it rolls out over the next few years, and may well become a new repository for Howard-era 'culture wars'. Because nationalising a history curriculum is going to piss off a lot of people.
And that's it. Done. Education is over. School's out. Scram. NTeach is gonna go drink a quadruple whiskey and then dance on a school desk until the school decides to fire him for peeing into one of the lockers. Enjoy your summer!