There's no doubt that education standards are falling - we need to act

As noted by the Monash academic Mark Peel, in a submission to the national inquiry into history teaching: “Indeed, their sense of the world’s history is often based upon intense moments and fragments … The 20th century is largely composed of snatches, moments that rarely gel into a longer narrative”.

By focusing on "process" instead of "content" and by dumbing down academic subjects to make them immediately attractive and accessible, the end result is that many students leave school culturally illiterate, unable to write a properly structured essay and with a misplaced sense of their own academic worth.

The end result of a flawed, ideologically driven education system is that standards have fallen. Not only do we now have literacy tests where students with faulty grammar, spelling and punctuation are not corrected, but academics complain about the quality of first-year students.

A federally funded project entitled Changes in Academic Work concluded that about half the academics interviewed agreed that standards of first-year students had declined over time. Students are particularly criticised because of “inadequate skills in English or other basic skills”.

No wonder it is now commonplace for universities to offer remedial courses in language skills and for academics to water down the quality of first-year courses; especially in maths, physics, chemistry and science.

Those with a vested interest in controlling Australian education, such as the Australian Education Union, left-wing academics and sympathetic governments, either argue that all is well or that the remedy for an ailing system is more money.

Ignored is the evidence that increased spending, by itself, does little to raise standards. The most effective way to improve educational performance is to benchmark Australian curriculum against international best practice and to ensure that what happens in the classroom is based on sound research.