Last week, Federal, State and Territory Education Ministers endorsed the new Australian Curriculum for English, mathematics, science and history up to Year 10. Achievement standards are to be 'validated and adjusted' by October 2011, with the Curriculum 'substantially implemented' by 2013.
The process has stirred passionate debate among educators, academics and politicians. The education ministers' endorsement is not without dissent, with Verity Firth (NSW) and Liz Constable (Western Australia) articulating reservations about the Curriculum in its current form. The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority has received over 26,000 submissions which mostly argue that it is 'overcrowded.'
The school curriculum is a highly contested area of education and has always been. Everybody has an opinion on what should be taught and how much of it should be covered. The opinion varies according to conceptions of the purpose of schooling.
To put it simplistically, there are two broad camps. The first camp prioritises post-school employability and national competitiveness in a global economy. It is concerned with both fundamental and high-order skills in areas such as reading, writing, problem-solving and the use of technology. These primarily involve English, mathematics and science.
The second camp favours a holistic, liberal and formative approach to education. It gives weight to subjects that develop a sense of identity, community and citizenship such as visual arts, drama, music, religious education and history.
In the end, the ideal lies in the confluence of both. After all, it is not enough to be literate and numerate if one has no sense of justice. Nor is it enough to be creative if one is unable to articulate the choices made in creating. More importantly, an enlightened society upholds that its young people are more than just future workers; they are human beings first.
Unfortunately, it is easier to generate data for the knowledge and skills that we expect of future workers. This leads to inordinate attention being paid to literacy and numeracy, and partly explains why NAPLAN and MySchool have taken hostage of the discourse on education. While no one disagrees that being able to read, write and calculate is important, there is nothing visionary about data-gathering.
This is at the heart of the failure in the Rudd-Gillard 'education revolution'. It does not inspire. Even supporters of a national curriculum have been disappointed that, rather than presenting a coherent picture of the ideal 21st century citizen, it mostly prescribes an inordinate, unwieldy volume of knowledge for young people