Page 4753 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 13 December 2005
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that is changing more rapidly than at any time in the past. A range of teaching methods and a diverse curriculum are clearly desirable, and with the particular case of language teaching the question is not one of either/or but of working out an appropriate combination. We do not have either phonics or whole-of-language teaching, but a judicious balance of the two. Similarly, you seek to implement a range of teaching practices that amalgamate the best of several approaches available.
But there obviously is something to be said for practices that have served us fairly well over the past couple of thousand years. It is a simple fact that competence in mathematics, for instance, requires a certain amount of rote learning. The same is true for acquiring a second or a third language—and coming to grips with history and science is sometimes, quite simply, hard, just as training to become a professional athlete or a racing driver is hard. Nor can it be made easier by an addiction to new technology. Certainly this is where today’s adolescents are at, to use the preferred argot of the education department. They are more familiar with TV, video, computers, films, magazines and video clips, but facility with keyboards and mobile phones is not quite the same as intellectual aptitude. Ms Gallagher has insisted that students have access to the very latest technology and that their very thoughts can be transmitted on broadband—yet to what effect?
There has been a similar cargo cult in the United Kingdom—this mentality of Tony Blair, who seems to think that plonking a child in front of a computer will somehow magically make them intelligent. It is a pity that only last week an official report of the UK Institute of Education concluded that, despite massive expenditure, there had been little definitive evidence that it contributed to raising educational achievement. Without a grounding in literacy and numeracy, not to mention the broader arts and sciences, students will use computers more or less as toys—or, to put it in terms with which Ms Gallagher and her senior bureaucrats would be comfortable, where they are at is where they will jolly well stay, particularly if they are allowed to co-construct their own lessons.
This is a potential tragedy for the whole community. The people who will lose out are not the educationalists or the department executives, nor the minister, nor for that matter the people who can vote with their feet and take their children to non-government schools. The ones who will lose out are students in government schools, who will be guinea pigs in this entirely reprehensible exercise in academic self-indulgence. The real irony is that, while the ACT government is embracing new fads and new theories, other Labor governments across the country have begun to realise that their educational fads have been a complete disaster. It is high time that Ms Gallagher took note of her Labor counterparts, who are now ashamed of what has happened in their states, took a leaf out of their practices, consulted with parents, and decided to take a new future, to consolidate what we have which is good in the ACT education system and ensure that it does not go backwards.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (4.08): I thank Mrs Dunne for raising this matter, because it provides yet another opportunity for the government to celebrate the important work that we are undertaking in renewing the curriculum on offer to ACT students.
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