I won’t name names, but for many years the local football was on a years-long losing streak. Their response was to repeatedly sack coaches after a season while keeping the same roster of players. When I raised this over a beer or two, a friend responded, “Cos it’s easier to sack one bloke than to sack 12”.
This brings us to Australia’s education results. They’ve been steadily slipping for decades, across the board of reading, maths and science. This is confirmed both by international rankings like PISA and the national score, NAPLAN.
The problem can’t be money: Australia spends more every year on education. Yet, results fall almost in tandem.
Australian teachers are also comparatively highly paid. Australian teachers are paid above the OECD for both starting wages and with 15 years’ experience. They’re paid well above countries like Finland and New Zealand, both of whom beat us for results.
Just blame it on video games, then.
Online gaming is ruining teenage boys’ reading skills, education leaders have warned, as soaring screen time produces the poorest literacy results in 14 years.
“Education leaders”?
Pasi Sahlberg, the co-author of Growing Up Digital Australia, an ongoing study of children’s online usage for the Gonski Institute at the University of NSW.
Ah, yes — the Gonski Institute, who advocated for pouring more and more money into the system. Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.
“What’s happened in the last 10 years is that boys have gone more into gaming,’’ Professor Sahlberg said. “The girls are more into social media so they communicate and write and read a little bit more.’’
Yet, he also says:
Professor Sahlberg said many children were “learning to write on a smartphone’’.
“They create their own (spelling) rules and grammar and don’t learn to enjoy reading for fun.’’
So, are they learning to read and write because of social media, or is learning to write on a smartphone destroying their literacy?
But there’s an important factor in his own statement which he completely overlooks: enjoy reading for fun.
For years, critics have pointed out that the curriculum, and especially the set texts, have become more and more feminised. Certainly, my own sons brought up to be readers and one now an aspiring writer, hated the books they were forced to read in school. They’re the sort of books which steam the knickers of school librarians and the Boomer women who run the education bureaucracy but bore the pants off boys.
Especially when the boys can spot a mile off an agenda being forced down their throats.
Consider the texts recommended by the Australian curriculum: Swallow the Air, an Aboriginal feminist whingeathon; The Secret River, you guessed it — white man bad; The Legacy: An elder’s vision of our sustainable future by David Suzuki — ‘nuff said. Then there’s pseudo-historical taradiddle like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Rachel Perkins’ First Australians.
To be fair, some state reading lists have started adding recommendations that would more appeal to boys — but, in the end, it’s the 90% of female teachers who set the class texts. Guess which ones they choose.
The latest NAPLAN data shows that boys’ reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation have worsened since the tests began in 2008, while writing ability has flatlined.
This year, nearly one in seven boys in year 9 failed to meet the minimum standard for reading – double the failure rate for girls, and much higher than the failure rate of one in 18 boys in 2008.
In grammar and punctuation, 17.5 per cent of year 9 boys failed the test this year, compared with 13.5 per cent in 2008.
One in five teenage boys failed the writing test – double the rate for girls.
But the education bureaucrats will do anything to protect their little feminist empires, so shift the blame onto any convenient scapegoat. Once it was comic books, then it was television, and now it’s video games. (Interestingly, my youngest acquired an astonishingly in-depth knowledge of and interest in periods like the Italian Rennaissance by playing Assassin’s Creed.)
The reading results for year 9 boys aged 14 and 15 are the worst since NAPLAN tests began in 2008 – the year Apple introduced its smartphone to Australia.
Yet, PISA data has been falling for at least a decade before the smartphone. Sounds like a false correlation, then.
Australian Primary Principals Association president Malcolm Elliott praised the ban on smartphones as “a sensible solution’’, so that teachers and students were not “constantly disrupted and interrupted’’ in class.
The Australian
That much, I agree with.
But that is no remedy for the continuing failure to tackle the failures of the curriculum and the gross gender imbalance in the education industry.
But running a broom through the education system would threaten an entire feminist empire. Easier to blame video games instead.