Jean Walker

I have just finished reading a book entitled "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" by E D Hirsch. It's about 4 years old and American, but the author's thesis is that the "new" education paradigm of concentration on skills, processes, and authentic learning instead of knowledge based subject teaching, because there is too much information for students to learn, is merely the ideas of the Romantic era of American education philosophy of the 1910s and 1920s "rebadged". I believe he puts forward a very plausible and well referenced case for why it is all wrong and contrary to what is really important in education. Has anybody else read it? If so, are there comments?

John Thanks for that link, it's very useful. I am going to Canberra next week as part of a national delegation to listen to the Opposition Leader's announcement of their alternative plan for funding private schools. It's a federal election year here, so things are hotting up politically.

I recently found a website, which I now have "mislaid" which set out the salaries for teachers in the US. I was quite appalled to see by how much the salaries varied from state to state - sometimes by as much as 20% for the same level job. Thank goodness for our strong union here! It is difficult to make realistic comparisons, but I can safely say that of the many teachers I know in Britain, most seem to be living at a similar level to corresponding teachers in Australia. It's difficult to talk about rent, mortgages, heating etc because it's all so variable eg my son in Qld has a negligible heating bill compared with me in Tasmania, and petrol is much cheaper there than here because of differing state taxes. However, houses here are very much cheaper, so it's quite complex, unless you do the "Big Mac" comparison!! - what does a BIg Mac cost in your country?

We too have a fairly complicated transfer system. Public schools are placed in 5 categories - easy to staff, to hard to staff, to very isolated. Teachers have to stay 6 years in first 3 categories, but only 3 years in others, before they can request a transfer. They MUST be given a transfer after 10 years if they want it. There are exceptions to this if people have real problems. Teachers are not easily sacked. Our one union, of which I am currently the President, is very strong, over 90% membership, and if teachers are threatened with dismisal, there must be a very good case before it can happen. Teachers have to be registered here before they can teach in either public or private schools, by a state registration board and they also hear cases of complaints against teachers. We have a problem at the moment with the Department of Education not making enough young teachers permanent after their first year, and we are losing them to other places, including the UK.

Absolutely spot on! My union here has been saying this for years. We have exactly the same problem here in Tasmania, except made worse by the fact that a) we have no govt funded EBD or PRU units whatsoever and we are about the size of Ireland we also mainstream many seriously and multiply physically disabled students who, in other countries, would be in a special school. This is partly because of the philosophy here and partly because of the sparse and flung out population which means there are no special schools near enough for some. This places huge strains on our teachers and TAs who in some cases have to perform complicated medical procedures on a daily basis as well as teach the other kids I've been doing a bit of trawling of the US system and there appears to be a backlash happening there from students who were mainstreamed, now young adults, who are threatening litigation on the grounds that they did not receive sufficient life skills training to maximise their potential. I am certainly going to run that line with our govt here because I think it's absolutely valid. Special schools provided so much more individual attention, specialist services and real understanding of the problems. The problem, of course, is money. It's very expensive to do this sort of thing well. I agree that special units on campus is a better way to go.

Australia has a similar situation - all public school teachers are hired by the government and can be moved between schools in accordance with a transfer policy which does not allow transfer further than 60kms from home. This system has good and bad points. Teachers become a permanent employee and do not have to apply to a particular school for a job, so hiring is fairer, because Principals do not do the hiring and firing. However, it is sometimes difficult to get out of a bad school, and after 6 years you can be moved for another 6 years and so on. When I taught in England it seemed to me that Heads had too much power in this regard, although they probably didn't think so!!

http://www.ogilvie.tased.edu.au/studact2004/leadership/ You might be interested to look at this website which was created by four glirls to whom I taught English last year. Their History teacher, a women who is a keen user of IT, got them started on it. They have just won a section of an international competition with it and are at this very moment somewhere in the UK for a week as part of their prize. I believe thay are to be interviewed by the BBC and I am pleased to report that they took my suggestion and are visiting Stratford and attending a performance of Macbeth (I did Romeo and Juliet with them last year). They are probably the four brightest students I have ever taught in 30 years, and there is one in particular who I wouldn't be at all surprised were she to pop up as Australia's first woman PM one day!! Anyway, I'm very proud of them On the subject of girls and computers, it was my observation that in this all-girls' high school, most of the girls tended to use computers for emailing, wordprocessing, desk top publishing, and finding info for their assignments. Very few of them used it as a tool for any other purpose.

Thought you might be interested in our union website (which displays me in much the same photo as here!!!) I've been reading interesting things about the NUT conference on the TES staffroom chat site. It's such a pity that you don't have one joint union as we do here. www.aeutas.org.au/

Thank you for all that information - much appreciated! Re funding in Australia - it is a very complex formula, which makes it easy for both sides to argue the toss, but basically, private schools here are graded. They get this grading by assessing the average income of the catchment area from which each student comes. This attracts to the student a certain amount of federal funding depending on the size of that income. The anomoly is that not all students attending elite private schools come from rich areas. eg a wealthy pastoralist living in the middle of a depressed rural area will be classified as if his income is the average income of that area and that student then attracts a larger amount of money than the student who may coincidentally live in a very wealthy suburb, but is not personally wealthy. On top of this, private schools may charge whatever fees they decide, also have bequests, gifts, grants, and more capacity to raise money through fund-raising activities. They also receive between 20 and 25% of their funds from the state. The result of all this is that private schools have a 40 to 44% greater spending capacity than state schools. Another example is that special needs students in govt schools receive $115 per head for their needs while in private schools they receive over $500 each, yet public schools educate 80% of these students. It has just occurred to me that trying to explain this for you has made me even more aware of the obscenity of this system, yet our federal govt argues black and blue that they do not discriminate against govt schools. We now have 30% of students in private schools and I agree with the previous argument - if this is allowed to expand, we are in danger of having public education destroyed and in reality having no choice at all. Hope this makes sense - it is a very nonsensical funding method!!

Hi Guiseppa Thank you for replying. I am interested in getting an idea of the curriculum and methodologies used in secondary schools in other parts of the world. I've had some interesting messages from JP about France. Perhaps you could tell me a little about Italy. Has your curriculum changed much in recent years? Are there any plans to change it in the near future?

I'm well aware that young women are heavily involved in the kind of forums you mention - having taught in a very large all-girls' school which had good PC access, I know they are very involved in IT communication. My question was why aren't more women educators of a "mature age" actively involved in this particular forum. Knowing that younger women are elsewhere doesn't answer that question.

Anne I have been reading some interesting stuff from America about the reactions of now adult disabled people to their schooling under the full inclusion policy. In some states, as here, it has been the policy over the last decade to mainstream as many disabled students as is humanly possible. These include kids with multiple physical disabilities, IQs of 55, medical problems which need medication etc. Apparently, some of these students are now in their 20s and starting to speak out and sometimes sue, for having not received the life training skills that they believe they would have received in a special school. They claim that the concentration was on academic curriculum, or a watered down version of it, and not the skills that would maximise their life potential. I find this all quite fascinating, as our teachers here have been saying the same thing for years, but totally ignored and in fact, castigated for daring to say so. Now, it looks as if our sp ed depts will need to look carefully at whether inclusion has gone too far before they get sued. I have just read a report on Finnish education which proudly says that they are fully inclusionist in their policies, but goes on to say that they "only" have 2% in special schools. Here we have ONLY 0.7% and only 3 special schools left out of about 7 0r 8 a few years ago. Question: where should the cut off be for inclusion?

Graham In case others don't know it, Dale Spender is an Australian and a bit of an institution here. Some years ago she used to be a regular speaker at our women's union conferences. One year I had to pick her up at the airport and she didn't have time to go her hotel before speaking, so brought her suitcase with her. During her talk she suddenly remembered that she needed some papers from her case. She opened it in front of the audience, to reveal a beautiful array of purple and mauve underwear. At the gasp of surprise from those close by, she explained that she only ever wears purple, the suffragette's colour, underwear as her own personal gesture to womens' lib!! Thought you might like that little story!!!! I have to say that I haven't read her most recent books, but I was getting a bit wary of her ideas a few years ago when she was advocating some pretty way out ideas about technology being the magic answer to education. I hope she's mellowed a bit since then.

Tony, thanks for the link to the girls and technology paper. I have passed it on to the IT teacher in the all girls' school I used to teach in. John, re men dominating the written communication fields - there's a whole argument you've omitted about why men were the first written communicators and how women were deliberately kept out of the field by the power of economics, and control due to biological imperatives. I'm sure you know it, but it needs to be noted. If the Brontes had been born even 50 years earlier, their father may have successfully prevented them from publishing by threatening poverty and social disgrace. Even now, I suspect there a lot of men who feel more comfortable about women writing novels , than philosophy or history. Pehaps it's the technology side of IT communication that puts off some women. Nothing much to go wrong with a pencil or even a biro, but computers play up, you need to learn quite a lot of technical stuff to maximise their use, they crash, they need technical support. I find that many men see this as a bit of a challenge, while women see it as an aggravating annoyance. Will that change with future generations?

PS Can anyone on the forum put me in contact with someone who has a handle on what the global edcational trends are at the moment?

Here in Australia we do not have inspections, nor SATS, and we have a brand new curriculum which in fact isn't a curriculum as such, but a framework of values and principles and outcomes, which students have to reach, but teachers can choose how best to reach them. In my state this is currently causing a great deal of angst for teachers who are finding it extremely difficult to let go of a structured, content based curriculum which told them what to teach. Now they have to decide for themselves what content will best achieve the set outcomes. We have been told by our gurus here that we are in the forefront of world change, that "the eyes of the world are upon us" as one of them told me the other day. I don't know if this is true, but it's certainly making for interesting times here. Our union members just passed a whole raft of motions opposing the assessment and reporting process which is being currently thrust upon them and many secondary teachers are strongly opposed to the concepts of scrapping discrete subjects, and not reporting on subject matter at all, but on such concepts as being "Arts Literate" and "Enquiring Thinkers" instead. But, eventually, will our kids be better educated than yours? And what will be the next "big picture" for education gurus who have to make their money out of some type of reform? I doubt it. If you can find a copy of last month's Phi Beta Kappan, read the article about the fallacy of systems change being effective. (Can't think of the actual title at the moment, but will tell you later)which says that all research point to the fact that wholesale system reform achieves very little. What does achieve it, is giving groups of practitioners the time to develop changes which they see as beneficial. And it means real teachers in real schools - not lip service to consultation and then top down reform. I subscribe to the TES staffroom chatline and it is certainly true that there are a great many more stressed, bitter, and fed-up teachers in Britain than I suspect is the case here - as yet, anyway!! Their biggest complaint is not the NC and SATS - it's bad behaviour, lack of desire to learn, inclusion that has gone too far, and parental stupidity. It seems to me that systems everywhere are trying to address those problem with solutions that can't possibly cure them.

Thanks, JP Does anyone know about the way private schools are funded in the US and Britain? Do they get any assistance from governments? Does anyone believe in the voucher system of education? Why? Why not?

According to what I have read, Australia has probably the biggest private school sector in the world - in many other countries it's only about 5-10% Many believe that our present right-wing federal govt is vastly overspending on private schools, especially the capital city, elite ones which already charge huge fees, and therefore driving a wedge between public and private which will ultimately destroy what was once a top class public system. Does the govt in France help to pay for the private schools?

OK. Here we go. Should all governments provide a public education system? Is it a good thing to have a private system as well? If so, should it be funded by governments? In Australia 30% of students go to private schools which are heavily funded by both state and federal governments. Some private schools get so much money from a combination of govt and private money and fees that they hardly know what to spend it on, while the state system is starved of necessary funds - this is at present causing such debate in Australia that the polls have it as No 2 issue for the forthcoming federal election, after terrorism. Thoughts, please?

And perhaps it's also a generational thing. Last year I was at an all girls' high school and I had trouble getting them off the chatlines and email. They were all very much into the email shorthand which, I think, a lot of older women find difficult to accept. And when you think about text messaging, young women are into it as much if not more than men. For myself, I am more interested in the philosophy of education and in comparative curriculum and methodology than in political and historical debate. That may also be because I currently am not teaching, and when I was, it wasn't those subjects. I guess that reflects the more personal and human elements of education that women find more interesting to discuss. As part of my new job as President of our state teachers' union, I have been asked to give a talk to a newly formed Fabian Society here in a few weeks, the subject being the value of Public Education. How about that for a topic to start with? It will certainly be useful to my preparation, anyway!!

Thanks, JP - good point!! Thank for your reply, John I 've just realised that I posted my original message on the wrong thread. Is it possible for you to move it to the educational debates which is where I meant it to be? Probably a good example of women lacking IT skills. I think you're right in all regards. I belong to another forum where it is always the women who get most upset about disagreements - some of us do tend to take those things more seriously than men. Women rely a lot on vocal tone, body language etc to get their meaning over and get hurt more easily if they are misunderstood, I think. However, I would still love to hear from more of the women who are registered on this site. As Freud so famously said, "What DO women want?"

At a quick count it seems there are about twice as many men registered on this site as women. And in real terms, far more regular male posters. Is this because men are more IT-centric or because the discussions do not interest women? The Kennedy pages are interesting but almost entirely male posters. What do women want to discuss? I'd be interested to know.

Thanks for that link, John. Teachers here in Australia are also deep into Thinking Skills and I will advertise this site in our union publication.

I also wanted to ask: how do these units fit into the Baccalaureate exanms, and how much time per week do you give to them?

Thank you for that explanation. It was very useful to me because here we are arguing with our education department about how to assess and report on these units. They want us to do very complicated assessments, using calibrated criteria, rubrics, comparative graphs and so on. Teachers are very concerned about ti and it's refreshing to hear that France is doing it in such a straightforward way.