Rupert Murdoch on education for the disadvantaged

Rupert Murdoch’s Radio National Boyer Lecture on schooling (November 23) is both alarming and inspiring.

It is alarming that Murdoch forecasts the future to be so extremely competitive. "Fortune favours the smart" and there is no room for those who do not earn it. Rather than life getting better for our children, it will be more stressful. But inspiring is Murdoch’s insistence that “a solid education is the one hope for rising in society and leveling the playing field. If we have any real sense of fairness, we owe (to all) children school systems that hold them to high standards.”

Schools must focus on making achievement both desirable and possible in literacy and basic maths, through hard work, which also results in “good work habits, the judgment that comes from experience, a sense of creativity, a curiosity about the world, and the ability to think for oneself”. Hard work and sacrifice are children’s tickets to greater rewards.

Being practical about his ideals, Rupert supports two inspiring schools in disadvantaged areas, Shuang Wen Public School, for young Chinese-Americans, and a public school for Afro-American boys, designed to help - indeed, to push them - to rise out of poverty. However, the intensity of work required in these schools is alarming, from early morning to six at night and then some.

Mr Murdoch has got where he has through being practical, a man who never dealt out a new pencil until the old stub was returned. To discuss education in his terms must be about practicalities - the pencil stubs. Generalities are more dignified to talk about, but they need to be spelled out for action. The most common question teachers asked me as a school psychologist was always “I know the theory - but how do I put it into practice?” What are the practicalities in Australia, of taking on Rupert’s inspiration while reducing the alarms associated with it?

There may be alarm at the emphasis on testing, which is reaching plague proportions in America. There are even commercial tests for parents to apply at home. There are booklets for teachers to record 90 items about every child in the class once a week. Surely notes made as needed are sufficient to help teachers follow progress and needs? Testing so that teachers know what needs teaching is one thing, and audit of annual progress is another, but constant assessment grinds noses to wheels, and arouses the other extreme of rejecting all tests.

The assessment boom arises out of panic. Murdoch criticises the present schooling in Australia, Britain and particularly the United States, as a disgrace. “Despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less - especially those who are most vulnerable in our society.” He has a case.

Education revolutions are being seen in money language, with insufficient eye on how much may be misdirected. It used to be assumed that children were little jugs to fill up with knowledge. Today they are little jugs to fill up from costly resources and to bombard with information overload. Teachers who have their confidence shaken turn, in America particularly, to commercial literacy programs, which can cost up to US$250,000 a package.

Good teachers can select what their class needs, but others may go step-by-step-by step, dragging their class behind them. The need for constant novelty is costly; and can also mean a teacher never has any curriculum safely under her belt, to teach with ease and more skill each year, updating and adapting it to students as needed. Instead, she is always struggling with the new.

Activities and group discussions proliferate, so that some children lose the main track. Computers are fine - but will they be used for ever more entertaining trivialities and dead-end skills?

Class size? Could some things be better taught to one or two students, some to 20, 50, 500, or even 1 million online?

Morale struggles when schools are grotty, but even a palace can be quickly vandalised if the human factors are overlooked.

Murdoch’s “show schools” are inspirational in how they deal with the psychological handicaps that hold back poor children. One of them is named the Eagle Academy for Young Men. This is the opposite of the well-intentioned but infantilising lumping of disadvantaged teenagers with children as “kids”. There must be other ways to address them, that express rather than betray their potential and goals as young adults.

His New York schools promote the value of staying at school for future work success. One of the greatest disadvantages of being disadvantaged is the firm belief held by many students and parents that education will get them nowhere, with anecdotal evidence to prove it. They may be left with gambling or crime as their only perceived routes to social mobility. Every school should publicise its former students who are achieving and the local heroes in fields other than just sport.

Book reading and projects should include the contributions to the world made by those who have started from behind and overcome failures. The bright students who currently must pretend to be dumb to avoid persecution can be made assets of value and honour for the rest of their class. Parents will flock to enrol their children in local schools that they can see are giving real hope. And where there is strong parental support, there is more chance of the alienated being swung around, to join in rather than to disrupt.

Inspiring is Rupert Murdoch’s emphasis on high expectations for all. It is alarming if businesses support primary schools in ways that promote their own commercial interests. Not every teacher realises they may be teaching a future Prime Minister. I remember giving a class a literacy lesson aimed deliberately at three non-reading ten-year-olds. Where were the boys? In a corner playing with fiddlesticks. Why not in the class? “They’re hopeless,” said the teacher.

Alarming is the question of what happens to those children whose intelligence can be raised so far but no further, through genetic or other physical limitations. What of the growing number of children born with fetal alcohol syndrome or other drug addictions, unnecessarily brain-damaged? To have successful schools for all, society must become more successful itself, laying out alternatives to teenagers to avoid the self-harm that goes down to the next generation, and to give status and fair reward to hard and useful work at every level of ability.

Inspiring is Murdoch’s awareness of community and school linkages, particularly in encouraging disinterested business support to primary schools. Children in disadvantaged schools especially need awareness of the possibilities and goals out in the real world, not in escapes. The “fun” class activities designed to keep them under control may be counterproductive for many, because what’s the use of coming to school just to muck around?

Where are the illustrated adult books and magazines for browsing in classrooms from kindergarten up, showing engineering, technology, science, arts, history, DIY and society, to give an advance idea of the advantages of schooling that can open up such wider possibilities for them?

What mentoring is possible for children who lack real life goal models other than sports stars and celebrities? Organisations like the Smith Family are already showing how much is being done and could be done to help provide such mentors, who could include correspondents at an anonymous distance, and with online self-help aids, as well as their direct projects to encourage and assist children’s learning, and ensure they can have school materials, excursions and uniforms like their classmates.

Murdoch makes the important point that in Australia the greatest educational disadvantage is not in inner-city slums, but in rural areas and outer suburbs. So much more can be done here, by higher pay and the best teachers; by developing innovations in multimedia and online distance deliveries of aid for learning; and by brief student and teacher school exchanges to widen horizons.

In his Boyer lectures, Murdoch promotes constant progress in communications technology. His News Ltd drastically changed traditional printing methods, which he saw as not having changed much since Gutenberg’s Bible. Just as backwards remains the still more ancient communications technology of the English writing system. Its unnecessary difficulties as a barrier to literacy are a global oppression for all the disadvantaged whom Murdoch seeks to help. Advances in other areas of communications technology now make it feasible to reduce the unnecessary difficulties in spelling, based on research in cognitive psychology and on knowledge of reforms in other modern languages that topple long-held assumptions.

The very last people who might consider spelling reform were thought to be the conservative Académie Française, but the Académie has recently taken a dramatic lead, explicitly for the sake of wider French literacy.

To really help to level the playing field for the disadvantaged, the Murdoch media could itself take a lead with another sort of “Wapping”, to make fractious English spelling obey its own rules more closely, for learners at least, and let the public experience trials of the possible benefits of such improvements.

We have so many old pencil stubs to exchange for new pencils.