A few ideas on how to arrest our freefalling education system

Then there are the people who design the curriculums. A recent study by Learning First (pdf) found that:

… the Australian science curriculum in the first nine years of schooling:

Contains about half the science content of the average of other curriculums

Lacks breadth of learning: it covers 44 science topics compared to an average of 74 topics in other systems

Lacks depth of learning: just five science topics are covered in depth compared to an average of 22 topics covered in depth in other systems.

That's just the start of it. The National Curriculum also mandates that sustainability, Indigenous, and Asian themes be taught across all subject areas.

So you might have a young poorly trained English teacher, struggling to cope with teaching Jane Austen and wondering how they are going to slip climate change into the conversation, an area about which they know even less.

Do not be afraid to discipline students

For classroom teachers, discipline is also a big problem.

This is the era of rights-proliferation, without any corresponding growth in responsibilities.

You can't discipline children as you used to, and many of the children have behavioural issues, as we've seen an explosion of ADHD and autism.

Teachers might be able to cope if parents were their allies, but too often the parents are trying to be best friends with their children so the teacher becomes the enemy of both.

This is accentuated by a reliance on teaching styles that emphasise child-directed learning, rather than the old-fashioned, but effective, teacher-directed learning using direct instruction. Under the first approach, the teacher is supposed to guide, rather than teach, and allow the child to discover things for themselves.

I'm all for Socratic thinking, but you need a developed thinking apparatus before you can do it, and you need someone with experience and a broad-view of the subject area who understands what skills you need to become an autonomous learner.

Direct instruction assumes that the child needs to be taught and shown, and then allowed to practice, the work checked, then rinse and repeat until the skill is mastered.

Smaller is not necessarily better for class sizes

Class sizes are also a part of the problem. And I'm not going where you might think. Research shows that the greatest impact on students is teacher quality, not class size. Smaller classes dictate that you need more teachers, but the more teachers you have, the lower the average ability. Larger classes mean fewer teachers, higher productivity, and an opportunity to budget for better teacher salaries, thus conferring higher status on teachers. This also requires better classroom behaviour, and doesn't suit child-directed learning, requiring a different teaching style, and thus producing a virtuous feedback cycle of better teaching and methods.