Page 4248 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 20 November 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Humphries was serious, as he was, about closing up to 25 schools. It was clear so early that there was no planning in this. Let me show you how this has been demonstrated since.
Mr Humphries did not take the time to understand the system. We have a system that is not like systems in the rest of Australia; it is a very different system. It has been planned, as the ACT has been planned, to be very different. It is a failure, I think, on the part of many people that they see education purely in the way that they were educated themselves. I do not know whether that was the fault with Mr Humphries - it may have been but he did not take the time to understand the philosophy behind our system. The philosophy is there. It is clearly expressed. There is a vast amount of written work on the philosophy of education in the ACT. A part of that philosophy is the fact that the neighbourhood primary school is the building block - that much used term - of the suburb. It is a very important part of it. But that was not known by Mr Humphries when he embarked on this course.
Another significant factor that either was not known or was ignored was the fact that this system was to be one of community participation. That point has been expressed so often if you read back to the early philosophy. Indeed, I spent a time in the then Schools Authority as an officer charged with encouraging community participation. I do not think any system anywhere else had such an officer. Not only that, but the whole system grew out of the community.
If someone had read a little on this, or sought a briefing on it, they would have discovered that the dissatisfaction with the New South Wales system in the 1960s and early 1970s had aroused such a community response that the community demanded a better system, and a system in which the community had active participation. Yet the Minister determined that out of the air he could announce massive changes, with a restructuring of the system - I think those are the words that have been used somewhere - and he could do so without consulting with the community. No wonder the planning fell from disaster to disaster. He simply did not know the system; or, if he did, he ignored it. It would have been quite a feat to have come to grips with the system in three months, although I think the opportunity was there in a period before the election.
So the Minister and this Government rushed to act on, I believe, politically philosophical grounds. It sounded good. It sounded like good, dry Liberal stuff; and so this course was embarked upon. Of course, the Rally enthusiastically followed suit. Its members were drawn into this planning debacle. We have seen it all year now, from early in March to the end of the year. We have seen how this incompetence, or this ignorance, has drawn us into a very negative debate right through the year - a debate in which the schools have not been promoted; indeed, they have probably gone backwards.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .