The Australian: States rated on Year 12 excellence [September 24, 2005]
The Australian: States rated on Year 12 excellence [September 24, 2005]
STATES will have their Year 12 English, maths, physics and chemistry courses ranked in order of excellence in an attempt to stop “dumbed down” curriculums short-changing Australian students.
Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has confirmed plans to introduce a national report card for key subjects after being warned students in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia were being left behind in maths.
The benchmarks means parents will be able to compare results from state to state.
“I am concerned that standards are being dumbed down,” Dr Nelson said yesterday. “These rankings, if you like, will not be done by me. I expect the experts in mathematics and physics to tell me, and tell Australia, what is the highest standard in Australia down to the lowest.” …
He said he remained deeply concerned by warnings that up to one in three students was leaving the education system “essentially malfunctioning” in literacy.
Students were also increasingly studying films and television shows as “texts”, rather than books.
“All students need to be taught contemporary literacy, film and television, but we are in an environment where increasingly the kids are studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Big Brother instead of Jane Austen and Bronte,” he told The Weekend Australian. [This is a grotesque parody of what is being studied, as accurate as a Nazi cartoon of a Jew in my opinion, or as a Marxist caricature of a bloated capitalist. Nor does it bother with WHY someone might be examining "Big Brother", if they are; presumably to deconstruct it. -- N.]
Cardinal George Pell also warned this week that the trend to embrace “critical literacy” and abandon traditional English novels was an attempt to make students agents of social change and was placing too much focus on texts that normalised “moral and social disorder”….
What is this “critical literacy” and why do Dr Donnelly — sorry, Nelson — and George Pell hate it so much? Well, I do happen to know.
Literacy or literacies encompass at least four levels. Wells (1991), Hasan (1996) and Freebody and Luke (1990) come up with similar descriptions. In the case of Freebody and Luke these are:
1. Learning your role as a code breaker. This includes decoding skills, being able to process print.
2. Learning your role as a text participant. This enables the reader to access the network of meanings in a text, and may include access to necessary background or cultural knowledge. (In an interesting study of himself learning Cantonese, Sinclair Bell (1995) found this could include teaching and learning styles considered appropriate in the L1 and L2 cultural settings, indeed even cultural concepts of writing itself. Sinclair Bell found that an unexpected mismatch between himself and his teacher in this regard inhibited his learning of Cantonese, not only in this role but also in the role of code breaker.)
3. Learning your role as text user. Here the learner is enabled through classroom demonstrations and discussion to participate in a range of social situations beyond the everyday. These may include important gatekeeping situations such as the ability to read and interpret a literary text in the manner valued by the culture one is being inducted into, where that differs from the culture of the home. Much of the genre pedagogy is directed at this role.
4. Learning your role as text analyst. Here there is “an expanded notion of what has traditionally been called critical reading” (Freebody and Luke 1990:7). It corresponds fairly closely to Wells’s concept of “epistemic literacy” (Wells 1991:3-4) and to Hasan’s “reflection literacy” (Hasan 1996:32-36). Perhaps Hasan’s version is the most radical, proposing “a literacy that turns back upon the very systems that perpetuate the literacy teaching practices in a society”, an ability to deconstruct text in order to throw into relief its ideological antecedents, to perceive with clarity what the text is doing to you, a reading of resistance. (Such a person could not possibly support Pauline Hanson, or even Dr Kemp whose interventions in the literacy debate both before and after becoming a government minister have done much to fuel popular panic, but have been narrow in their concept of literacy and even downright devious in their interpretation of the available data. Paul Brock covers this well [1998:6-8].)
I wrote that in 1998; in 2005 Pauline Hanson is mainstream. The ideological warriors of the authoritarian Right, the non-liberal Liberals, hate us developing “an ability to deconstruct text in order to throw into relief its ideological antecedents, to perceive with clarity what the text is doing to you, a reading of resistance” because that enables you to see through their bullshit. So they are fighting it with every propagandistic and repressive tool at their disposal. They do not want us to be literate, not really; they want us to be malleable. The fact that such literacy equally enables us to penetrate left-wing bullshit seems to escape them.
It has absolutely nothing to do with (wait for the snarl-word) dumbing down, in fact quite the reverse.
**
Simon Wiesenthal died a few days ago, I notice…
Am I left wing? Am I a radical? Because I respect the critique offered in Niall Ferguson’s American Colossus, I have in fact shifted a degree or two to the right of where I was, but I have never been a real leftie, never. I do not want to live in a workers’ paradise like the old USSR, like Cuba, like North Korea. I never have, because from the 1950s I could see through that line of bullshit. I do not want to live in a Muslim theocracy. Neither do quite a lot of Muslims. I do not want to live under a braindead dictator like Robert Mugabe. I do not want to live in a country where the sins of part of a group are visited on the whole group. I do not want to give in to racism either.
What I do want is respect, tolerance, and a fair go for all. In other words, I want the Australia I have grown up in, love, and mourn for in its headlong descent into various kinds of regression, the Australia that once welcomed M, the person in this world who has done most for me, and which he loves in return.
And if I were teaching English in the future, I would want students to love Shakespeare and the great works of literature as much as I do, and nothing in the current syllabuses prevents that. I would also want them to realise language is, to quote linguist Dwight Bolinger, a loaded weapon.
