Page 1916 - Week 07 - Thursday, 31 May 1990
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age increased by a year and a half on average - a year and a half in just seven days. Those children were taught how to study correctly.
Let us look at the principle of education in the ACT. There is far too little practical application required in our system. I think that to try to teach someone mathematics or geography or science or chemistry as a subject does not make a great deal of sense. Why are these things not taught from an application point of view, a practical point of view? Why are we not teaching children from the viewpoint of applying something? If you want to teach them mathematics, why not teach them to build something and then they will realise that you need to be able to measure, you need to be able to understand multiplication and so on, with a practical viewpoint.
If you want to teach them a language, why not teach them its practical application? If they were to travel overseas to go to motor races or to look at environmental concerns or any one of a million other things, they would like to be able to talk to people when they got there. Then we could work back from that viewpoint to give them the motivation for learning. I think most people here understand that few of those who go through the education system have a genuine motivation for all the subjects that they learn.
On the question of important things that are taught - or not taught - at school, I find it absolutely incredible that people do not know about the Australian Constitution. Yet that is something that is absolutely vital to just about everything that happens in Australia. It is not only children who do not know about the Constitution. You would be very hard pressed to find any child in Canberra who could tell you what the Constitution is. If you found anybody who knew anything about the word "Constitution", that person would probably describe it as "an Act". Indeed, the Constitution is not an Act. The Constitution Act is part of the Constitution, but there is a great deal more. It includes the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights of 1688, the writ of habeas corpus, common law and a number of other things.
Mrs Grassby: And the first one did not include Western Australia.
MR STEVENSON: Western Australia - in retrospect, perhaps quite wisely - decided not to join the Federation of Australian colonies at the time of the Constitution and it was not until some time later that it did. Later still, Western Australia tried to get out of it again, interestingly enough. Who would know that? Where is that taught at school? Where are these absolutely vital points of our Constitution taught? As I said, not even adults know about it, and I dare say some people in this Assembly refer to the Constitution Act incorrectly as being the Constitution. In dealing with young people, I find that many of them could be described as being semiliterate. I
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