The new curriculum micro-managers

Why should liberals of any stripe be troubled by what is taught in schools, when parental choice and the free operation of the market, they would have us believe, will result in the best-quality outcome all round? If parents are happy for their daughters to attempt a marxist, feminist or racial interpretation of Othello, and are willing to pay thousands of dollars a year for the privilege, why should any true liberal quibble over it?

Methinks that behind the rhetoric of choice in education lies a deep suspicion on the part of conservatives that parents, teachers and students, left to their own devices, will not make the right (sic) choices. So they advocate centralisation of the curriculum at a federal level, from which lofty heights they can tell us what "choices" are available to us. Of course, conservatives are not alone in a desire to monopolise the curriculum. Militant secularists are quite apoplectic at the suggestion of any spiritual or pastoral guidance in schools, and many ideological leftists would sooner gnaw off their own arms than allow a local business to sponsor their swimming carnival, and so on.

What we are all missing in this debate (teachers included) is that an outcomes-based curriculum gives teachers the opportunity to exercise the one thing they have been seeking acknowledgement for all these years: professional judgment. An outcomes-based curriculum says to teachers, in effect, "Here is where your students need to get to. Your job is to apply your professional judgment and experience to the findings of the academy, and collegiate input, to make it happen." Such curricula aim to give teachers, parents and students the freedom they need to operate in the best interests of the learner.

So those who yearn for a syllabus packed full of prescribed content should at least do away with any pretence that they support choice in education. Likewise, those who advocate choice must accept that some schools will choose content of which they disapprove. That is why there are different schools meeting the needs of different students in different communities.

But then, other people's choices are always the hardest to accept, aren't they?