Detailing devils in Australian English curriculum

When she released the Australian Curriculum: English, 1-10 for public discussion on 1st March 2011, the Education Minister, Julia Gillard endorsed the use of c-a-t phonics as a method of teaching reading and then added: "As a nation we have to be able to reassure ourselves that we have got a high-quality curriculum being taught to every child in every school .. "

To say that prior to receiving any public feedback was exceedingly brave. Still it's not unfair to say that apart from some minor alarmist comments from the education unions about teacher retraining and an auto response from academics to the mention of phonics (which education academics despise), public criticism of the curriculum has, so far, been largely mute.

(The recent comments of the Education Minister, Christopher Pyne give some hope that the curriculum will be seriously reviewed by someone reasonable.)

The curriculum was the product of Professor Barry McGaw, an education scientist from Melbourne University, who is reported to have said: "Australia will have a world class curriculum and maybe even a world's best curriculum." As Prof. McGaw chaired the curriculum committee it is nothing less than expected.

The irony of his comment about the world's best curriculum, however, would not be lost on those who are familiar with the assumptions of the positivist methodology of the social sciences, the hallmark of which is the distinction it makes between facts and values. Facts are objective and provable. Values, on the other hand, that is, whether something is good or bad, ugly or beautiful, effective or ineffective, reasonable or unreasonable, just or unjust, are merely irrational, subjective tastes. Thus, while education science might claim to know the most efficient teaching methods, it can offer no judgement about what constitutes the best curriculum, whether in English or otherwise. Such judgements are value judgements, subjective, irrational preferences.

Membership of the Board of the curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), the body responsible for developing the draft curriculum was composed of men and women who are either education academics or, what is almost the same thing, bureaucrats who are responsible for State currricula that the National curriculum will replace. It will remain an enduring riddle why the people responsible for defective state curricula would be in charge of developing a new one. So perhaps someone should ask Ms Gillard that question.

To say that the drafters of the National curriculum have no particular literacy or even literary aim would be an understatement. The curriculum is concerned with the inculcation of appropriate opinions in young minds and makes no promises in respect of students' literacy achievements.

The curriculum states that it will introduce students to reading, writing and comprehension of what it calls increasingly complex and sophisticated texts, but it gives no indication of what it understands by complex and sophisticated texts. Texts, however, include the amorphous category called multimodal texts, which contains material such as cartoons, greeting cards, tween magazines and cook books, but not motor vehicle, cricket or football magazines. One might ask why a curriculum would include such vulgar material as suitable for children to read, as if they contribute to literacy when, in fact, they contribute to illiteracy. One could make the further criticism that even here, there is a biased choice in favour of vulgar material that appeals to girls but omits vulgar material relating to sporting activities that boys enjoy.

It is difficult to imagine a more contentious statement of principle than the following:

The study of English helps students to extend and deepen their relationships, to understand their identities and their place in a changing world, and to become citizens and workers who are ethical, thoughtful and informed.

It is not clear from the context in which it appears (and it has not been elsewhere explained) what exactly is meant by "[T]he study of English helps extend and deepen [students'] relationships". This assertion is so vague that it could very well mean introducing children to the idea that there are a variety of human relationships, with deepness and extension being the key components by which to judge whether they are ethical. There is no mention that what is currently viewed as natural might also be important to learn; particularly since the assertion of the preferability of extended and deep relationships is inconsistent with the assertion that this curriculum will help children become ethical citizens.

Further, it is almost perverse to assert that the study of English will help students "to understand their identities". Given that this curriculum applies only to Grade 10, when most students will be experiencing puberty, one can only speculate on what "identities" the curriculum will assist in understanding.

The promise by this curriculum that the study of English will help students … to become citizens and workers who are ethical, thoughtful and informed is another example of how this curriculum makes bold assertions that sound nice but are fraught with difficulties.

Why, for example, are workers specifically designated as being in need of an ethical and thoughtful education? How do the ethics of citizens, managers or the self employed differ from those of workers? And what thoughtful person would dare to say that their parents, brought up on state curricula, are uninformed, thoughtless or unethical?

It is a worthwhile task to make every citizen ethical. However, the reference to making "workers" ethical, thoughtful and informed seems to imply some sort of crypto-Marxist differentiation between workers and citizens and this in turn suggests that the drafting committee had specific texts and literature in mind that would achieve the desired result of ethical workers and citizens. What are those texts?

It is distinctly possible that the Committee believes that ethical, thoughtful and informed workers and citizens can be produced through the methodology of critical literacy, a methodology, already fashionable with English teachers and academics and which can be found in the draft curriculum. Critical literacy purports to teach students how to deconstruct texts critically in order to show how the author treats ethical issues such as feminism, multiculturalism, workers' rights capitalism, homosexuality, etc. It is common for this technique to be used to analyse Shakespeare from a feminist perspective by deconstructing Romeo and Juliet.

A group of Australian education scientists have praised critical literacy theory, justifying its political agenda as 'the promotion of a healthy democracy'. One has even gone so far as to link it to a longer term 'commitment to humane values and a sense of the ethical'; which seems to tie in nicely with the National curriculum: English.

The fallacy of the theory is self evident. Students would first need to deconstruct critical literacy theory to see the hidden socio-political agenda of the authors. Only then would they realise that they could never apply the theory objectively since it would carry the subjective bias of the author. This is precisely the criticism that the philosopher Friedrich Niezsche made of the study of history.

Obviously, academics will never allow school children to criticize their theories.

There are many, many issues in the curriculum which are causes for concern. The use of words like creativity and multiculturalism as bona fides ends for an English course, seem to miss the point of literacy and education in general. The focus on Asia to the exclusion of Australia's part in Western civilisation and the body of literature to which that leads is not just a poor choice. It is the height of thoughtlessness, if not ignorance. The curriculum even goes so far as to insist that the Dreamtime stories of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, their religious 'oral texts', be read. That assertion may be pregnant with contradiction but in contradistinction it is no where suggested that children read extracts from the King James Bible which has arguably had the same influence on the literature of English speaking peoples as Shakespeare.

There is, however, one glaring error. The release of the draft curriculum was accompanied by a request for criticism. The Board constrained the means by which criticism could be made, allowing only annotations to the text, as to preclude any criticism of the overall methodology of the document, of the assumptions that underpin it and of its general effect on the literacy of future students.

The National Curriculum: English is not a new curriculum this much is evident from a careful reading of the document itself. It is an attempt to redirect the education of children towards the collection of left wing opinions that have captured the Australian universities over the past fifty years.

ACARA has gone to great lengths to ensure that such criticism cannot become part of the official feed-back that they have called for. It says it wants your feedback, but it wants it inserted into an electronic copy of the draft curriculum alongside specific topics which are repeated many times, thus involving you in a very lengthy, time consuming process whereby the structure and content of the curriculum will remain unchanged and your criticisms will appear as margin notes to their document.

It does not seem to have occurred to ACARA that there might be criticisms which go to the fundamental assumptions of what is, in every respect, a vague, generalised document whose details (where the devil always lurks) are missing (although there are occasions when the devil does emerge from between the type).

Good teachers will continue to make the most of it; but in the long run it will be the children who will be denied their literacy and literacy is, after all, the first visible sign of civilization, of the conscious cultivation of human reason.