The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Review Authority is failing the national interest test

It's not just subject matter that is the problem. The change in teaching methods, particularly in English, where phonics and direct instruction are not accepted as the basis for teaching reading and writing; and in Mathematics, where problem-solving is prioritised over number facts; will do nothing to cure the up to four-year deficits in the education of our students against our competitors in South-East Asia.

What underlies this is the idea that humans are naturally perfect, and it is social institutions, amongst which schools are counted, that make us imperfect. Essentially, the idea is that if you take the restrictions away, children will naturally learn. But if that were the case, we wouldn't need schools at all, because children, being natural learners would pick it up as they went.

But of course, they won't. That's why we have compulsory schooling in the first place. Most children do need to be disciplined, and trained. They also need to be inspired, and they need people who can show them how to understand the concepts they can't quite grasp. The desire to learn may be universal, but lessons make a huge difference as do mentors. The completely self-constructed human being doesn't exist.

It's a pretty simple concept really, familiar to anyone who has, for example, played sport. Take Ash Barty's phenomenal performance from Saturday night. Even a player like her, at the most elite level, has a team, including coaches. Barty has oodles of confidence, but she's not so over-confident that she thinks she can do it all herself (like a Nick Kyrgios). Every day of her life she practices to internalise physical movements so that they become instinctive; so muscles know what to do without being consciously instructed. She may play some very innovative shots, but they are built on a very strong foundation of unconscious responses.

But the need for education and training, along with repetition, something which is so obvious in most arenas of life, somehow isn't required for the most difficult discipline of all – thinking. At least for Australia's educators.

Perhaps the thing of paramount importance is culture. The success of Western culture seems to be so taken for granted by educators that, just as humans never thought about gravity until Isaac Newton's discovery, we just accept the goodies are there, no matter what we do, or how poorly we think.

Yet the current moment is the most exceptional in human history, and the reason for that sits firmly in the European tradition, and in our case, more specifically, the British one.

Yet, the understanding of European, and in particular British, culture is marginalised in the curriculum, most glaringly in English Literature. This culture permeates our legal, political, social, moral and ethical structures. Without understanding it you can't understand them.

These curricula are producing cultural orphans – people who do not know where they have come from, and as a consequence, no idea where they are going.

While you can do maths without culture, you can't do life. The bowdlerised version of a curriculum that is now on offer from the federal government reveals an education establishment that has lost touch with the purpose of education, proper methods for teaching, and have no clue as to how one might answer the most fundamental of questions "What is life about?".

How we can recover is not obvious, but a first step must be to reject not just the new draft curriculum, but the old one as well. Radical solutions are going to be required to drive the Philistines out of the temples of learning. It's not going to be easy, and should have been attempted decades ago.