Julie Bishop and Stephen Smith debate education
Posted in Aussie interest, Education, Jim Belshaw, Kevin Rudd, Politics with tags culture wars, Julie Bishop on February 28, 2007 by ninglunI saw the “head to head” on The 7.30 Report and can’t blame the public for being confused. I’ll need to review the transcript when it appears later to see if anything substantial was actually said, because my feeling at the moment is very little was.
Much of the debate concerned matters of university financing. I am not competent to talk about that. I defer to Jim Belshaw on that one. It did strike me though that the picture Stephen Smith painted of the expansion of quality university education in China and India presents a far greater challenge than either politician conceded.
It would appear that whoever wins we get a national curriculum. Curiously, the USA does not have one and is unlikely ever to have one. Australia is already and always has been far more centralised in education at school level than either the USA or the UK. (If the USA did have a national curriculum the Creationist/Intelligent Design issue could be even more fascinating.) In recent years the USA has evolved a series of National Standards, and there is much controversy over how effective that has been. In Language Arts (or English) the National Council of Teachers of English (a professional body, not a union) has been a staunch defender of essential values in that area.
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I have just been browsing in an old collection of essays on the teaching of writing: Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching (Boynton/Cook 1982) by Donald M Murray, and the title of this entry reflects one of those essays. I note that Don Murray (right) died last year after a distinguished career in teaching and journalism — he was a Boston Globe columnist. See 










