Revolutionary change in education

Kevin Rudd’s “Revolution in Education” may require another revolution in education in order to succeed - a revolution in “how”. Rudd stresses that long term prosperity and productivity growth depend upon education being treated as investment in human capital. His “education revolution” is in “the quantum of our investment and in the quality of our education outcomes” in “learning, earning, creativity and innovation”. So his government will spend more in financial investment, with longer schooling and more training.

But innovation and enterprise is needed in education itself.

A revolution is a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving. Is a revolution needed in Australian educational methods? Yes. Look at the adults who come out the other end.

The top ranks that graduate from the Australian education system are informed and competent citizens, prepared for the challenges ahead. The middle are unable to fulfil their full potential. The lower ranks are a burden on our welfare, health and judicial systems. Two thirds of our “human capital” do not have satisfying lives. An education revolution is most needed for the masses at the bottom.

This lost “human capital” needs opportunities for self-help; visions of what may be possible; no more scandalously disrupted classrooms; a reduction in their formidable barriers to literacy; and simple but sweeping changes in common practices in childrearing and housing that confine children’s minds and bodies. Print literacy, in particular, needs the most revolutionary and innovatory attention, and receives it here.

Print literacy is a basic educational advantage, despite all that is being written (sic!) about its obsolescence. B.O.O.K.s are Bodies of Organised Knowledge, complemented but not replaced, by visuals and other multiliteracies. Everyone should have the right to free access to literacy, at any time, in any way that may help them, regardless of distance or disadvantages or ability to pay. Yet observation shows that most adults do not read accurately or thoughtfully.

All children without exception need to be given a flying start to literacy through lullabies sung to babies, adults talking with their babies even in public, story-telling, children’s radio programs to develop language and thinking in a way that television fails them, wonderful illustrated books such as Arthur Mee’s beautiful Children's Encyclopedia and learning through free play. Only the radio programs would be costly to get this cultural change percolating everywhere.

Let’s have free-to-air and publicised Open Primary School and Open Secondary school in prime-time, and Open University at midnight. The focus on formal schooling overlooks that most learning is done outside classrooms. Everyone, not only the thousands who miss out on inspiring classrooms, could enjoy online and apprenticeship opportunities for self-help in learning, and it would facilitate teachers in schools with documentaries using a diversity of brilliant teachers and wonderful classrooms (not just Horrordale High).

Opportunities should always be available for self-help in literacy and preventing and removing confusions. For example, an experimental and unique online half-hour cartoon video overview could be openly trialled, without present prejudice, and other versions produced for the range of different abilities and needs.

Any barriers will cause most difficulty for those already disadvantaged. Barriers made by common practices in beginners’ classrooms only need teachers’ awareness of them to be removable.

Learning to read easily should not require an above average endowment of auditory or visual rote memory plus an element of clever guessing - as are required by phonics and whole language methods respectively, because English spelling is so unnecessarily unpredictable.

Spelling is a tecnology for communication and should not remain a social screening test or a minefield to keep down those less privileged. Beginners at least could start without spelling traps. (Only 6 per cent of letters need to be droppd or changed - Revolutionary!) From a beginners’ sound-simbol dictionary key, consistent spelling principls can be bilt up. Experiments can be made with cribs in reading books and popular periodicals, “ritten in spelling without traps”. Teachers can lern mor about riting sistems and how thay change, to understand the sistem thay teach.

Knowledge

Easier literacy then makes more learning possible. The pursuit of knowledge must no longer be demeaned, as it often is, as merely collecting fragmented torrents of information. Primary school is the time for a foundation of knowledge with a structure in time (history) and space. Knowledge is still power. Creativity, philosophy, imagination, constructive and critical thinking, all these goodies, require the fertiliser of knowledge that comes from books, real-life experiences and practical skills, not only from computers and classrooms. While busily assessing academic progress, schools could encourage students of all abilities with Standards Certificates that list all achievements, rather like scouts’ badges.

Forgetting

Classroom lessons can be wasted if there is no attention given to help remember what is learnt. It has been suggested that everything the average person remembers from school can be written on two foolscap pages. A revolutionary change would be for students to keep a record of their key learning experiences to take with them, and continue as adults.

Curriculum of the environment

It will be revolutionary for all government schools to be beautiful and child-scale, with apprentice-style learning in multiple practical manual and mechanical skills, and with non-segregated community interaction. Children can learn early to value their individual differences, with social diversity as essential as biodiversity. Their own value is asserted as all schools teach the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The variety of students’ home backgrounds and family origins contributes to learning about world history and culture and about people who have been laughed at.

Another tremendous problem of disadvantaged students can be lack of what is labelled self-esteem. They fear being laughed at, and they see no prospects of achieving anything worth while. So comparative studies and learning about others' resilience boosts morale. Not only the advantaged need the chance to see ahead visible rewards of prizes, status and fair livelihoods.

What does the State do?

Beyond ladling out the money, government policies set guidelines and visions and spread knowledge of successful problem solving. A first major concern is to stop the single greatest disadvantage of underprivileged schools - disrupted classes - and second, to prevent educational segregation that breeds future social conflicts. “Multiculture” must be mutual sharing and fertilising.

“Revolution” means preparation for our future challenges and it requires learning from the past, not discarding it.