The National Curriculum: A Critique

Hon Christopher Pyne MP

Launch of Monograph on Western Civilisation

The National Curriculum: A Critique

Institute of Public Affairs

Monday 31^st January 2011

(Salutations)

The current iteration of the national curriculum began when my federal colleague and former Education Minister, Julie Bishop, called for the introduction of a national curriculum in 2006 and began the process to implement one.

The Howard Government pursued this course for a number of reasons - including the duplication inherent in our current system, the difficulties caused to the tens of thousands of students who shift states every year, but most of all because of the perceived alarming decline in standards and educational achievement in our schools.

We were concerned that in children in some states were being left behind as their Government's educational bureaucracies were not delivering the same quality of education as in some other states. And more importantly we in the Coalition were concerned that all students in Australia had access to a curriculum of the highest quality - one that would see our high school graduates able to achieve their full potential with the strong foundation that the best education can deliver.

While there is ample commentary and anecdotal evidence of the impact that the eight state and territory curricula have had on education in Australia, the results from the 2010 OECD programme for international assessment (PISA) shows in an empirical way how Australia has gone backwards in both literacy and numeracy.

From 2000 to 2009, according to the PISA results, Australia has fallen behind other countries in reading and mathematics, including our regional neighbours. In fact, out of 38 countries Australia was one of only four that saw a decline in reading performance, while the rest improved or stayed the same.

However, the development of a national curriculum for history, English, science and maths has been beset with difficulty from the start of the Rudd Government when it was entrusted to Julia Gillard to implement.

The current Prime Minister cites the development of a national curriculum as one of her key economic reforms in Government, never mind that she left it in a shambles and unable to begin its pilot on schedule in January 2011. Full implementation - set to commence next year - has now been further delayed by Australia's education Ministers.

Concern about the national curriculum has united most of the education sector. It has achieved the unlikely outcome of uniting the Australian Education Union with the representatives of Independent Schools - so at least it has achieved something unique.

This chorus of complaints includes criticism that the curriculum is highly prescriptive and will strangle diversity and flexibility, that it is bogged down with too much content and is highly bureaucratic in nature.

It has been described variously by education experts as 'over-crowded, incoherent and lacking depth', 'a step backwards', 'inferior', 'lacking quality and clarity' and as being 'unclear and not ready to teach'. It lacks the flexibility necessary for innovative new programs and pedagogies to be able to succeed, while in some areas it has been criticised for demanding too little of students - particularly in the sciences.

The curriculum drafting body, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, has received 26,000 submissions highlighting areas of concern about the draft curriculum.

Its rigidity is outlined in a recent letter to Minister Garrett from the Australian Curriculum Coalition, which consists of 13 peak bodies ranging from the Australian Education Union, the Australian College of Educators right through to the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia.

They argue that the curriculum lacks a clearly stated direction with no over-arching framework, saying:

"There is no clear statement about the issues that a national curriculum is designed to address, apart from the problem of mobile students... There is a need for an overarching framework for the curriculum to provide clarity about the conceptual model underpinning it".

They go on and explain that the curriculum is overcrowded

"As they stand, the documents will lead to serious overcrowding of the curriculum. The documents include too much lower order content to be learnt at the expense of higher order skills and conceptual understanding, leading to a degree of risk to teaching quality and the chances of effective student learning".

Overcrowding will result in schools having limited flexibility to teach in a way that is in accord with their own ethos and values, and this potentiality has very serious ramifications. In its attempt to include a stultifying sameness in curriculum ACARA runs the risk of introducing a smothering sameness in teaching methods and style.

Within the curriculum there must be scope to maintain a diverse range of teaching styles and methods that give parents and students choice. Why would the Australian Government create a curriculum that lessened the availability of styles of schooling like Montessori, Steiner, Reggio Emilia, selective state public schools, agricultural schools or even the style of schooling that exists at a school like Geelong Grammar or Jesuit schools?

For example, I am told that the necessary teaching hours for the first four subjects severely limit the amount of time which may be spent on other areas like Creative Arts, leaving less time for schools with a particular distinctive ethos to pursue their area of excellence.

It does not provide enough scope that recognises the diversity of students, including gifted and talented students, those with special needs, or for students who have English as a second language.

Mary Lou Carter, Secretary of the Carers Alliance argues that the curriculum fails to recognise students with special needs, writing:

"Surely the national curriculum is too important to be thrown together in haste with some arbitrary deadline in mind".

The Australian Council of the Deans of Science are alarmed that school science teachers don't have the expertise to teach the new curriculum, adding to existing apprehension that for some students the science documents are so difficult as to potentially discourage a proportion of students away from this area in the future.

Similarly the NSW Board of Studies raised serious concerns about the curriculum's achievement standards, suggesting that NSW won't even implement some aspects of it at all.

As a potential Australian Minister for Education, I have to address the question of how we might navigate this mess to arrive at an outcome we can all support with confidence.

The starting point for a national curriculum has to be that it improves upon each of the eight state based curricula - some of which have been roundly criticised for many years, in fact for decades by some commentators, as being mediocre, too focused on skills at the expense of knowledge and failing to generate excellence among Australia's school students.

One has to ask the question - would we bother to invest in a national curriculum if it doesn't meet that test? The answer to that in my opinion is no. As Education Minister, I would not sign up to a national curriculum that does nothing to improve upon what already exists. A national curriculum is not an end in itself - it is only worth doing if it is going to improve educational standards. It is not worth doing if it simply embeds under a national umbrella the failures that have been identified over many years at the state and territory level.

The IPA-Mannkal monograph addresses that threshold question, in particular with respect to the proposed national history curriculum.

Unfortunately, the proposed history discipline is found wanting. It is not something that I would be prepared to accept as Education Minister. If elected at the next federal election, it would be my intention to initiate a review of at least the history discipline in the national curriculum to ensure that it achieves the all important goal of filling young minds with the knowledge of why Australia is like it is today. In other words, how did our society develop, from what well spring did we come and what are the foundations for our Western society that is the envy of so many around the world?

No history curriculum in Australia can honestly address these questions and impart knowledge in this subject without tracing the history of Western Civilisation. Yet that is exactly what the drafters of the history curriculum have attempted to do. The history curriculum is piecemeal, tangential and oblique. It covers aspects of our society's history without having to confess what the drafters must regard as an historical embarrassment - that we are who we are today because of our Western heritage. It is our Western heritage that gives us our belief in the rule of law, tolerance of religious and political minorities, embrace of many cultures within the Australian culture, our respect for individual rights as embodied in our Parliamentary democracy and the separation of powers between the Executive, Judiciary and the Parliament.

The history curriculum as drafted manages to avoid any reference to the English Bill of Rights or the English Civil War between the Parliament and the King! A passing reference to the Magna Carta finally made it into the December 8 draft of the history curriculum as an afterthought. Yet Australia would not be as we know it today without these events and movements in our history. The history curriculum all but ignores them rather like an embarrassing relative at Christmas Day lunch whom it was hoped couldn't make it this year but did.

In yet another example of the inadequacy of the history curriculum as drafted, an in depth study of the impact of Christianity, despite it being undeniably intertwined with the development of Western Civilisation for two thousand years, doesn't make it into the curriculum, as David Daintree writes in the monograph:

"the compilers of the draft curriculum have chosen the simplest strategy of all: deliberate, pointed, tendentious and outrageous silence."

Instead, the curriculum has been informed by three themes - indigenous culture, Australia's engagement with Asia and sustainability.

While all three are important, how did ACARA arrive at these themes being the most vital to inculcate students with a knowledge of Australian history? ACARA needs to explain how the development of Western Civilisation is less important to an understanding of who we are and why our society works in a particular way than sustainability, indigenous culture and engagement with Asia? Until they can convince me of that, why would I, as a potential Education Minister should the Coalition win the next election, adopt as the Australian history curriculum a document that is so flawed?

Chris Berg puts it well in the introduction to the monograph where he identifies the work of Phillipe Nemo in What is the West. Nemo has explained the five intellectual revolutions that have shaped Western Civilisation as being - the development of Ancient Greece through which the principles of the rule of law, equality, critical reasoning and the academy became part of Western culture; the rise of Ancient Rome which embodied the start of liberalism and the rights of the individual under the law, especially property rights; the role of Christianity in secular society through its elevation of the importance of human reason and logic; the changing nature of government in the second millennia which led to the state no longer being all powerful because the Church separated itself from the state and finally the age of liberal democracies in which we live today and through which the rights of the individual, democracy and tolerance of minorities has reached its apogee.

But, as Berg writes about these intellectual revolutions:

"they are all virtually absent from the national curriculum as it is currently conceived. What does it say about a culture which rejects its own foundations? What does it say about a history profession which fails to study them?"

There is another question I would add to that - what sort of Minister - or Prime Minister - would enthusiastically embrace such a curriculum that is so manifestly inadequate?

In continuing to champion this document, it is clear that the Minister has either not taken the trouble to study the drafts that he has signed up to, or the Minister is indifferent to the curriculum's content. Either way, he stands condemned.

We should be grateful that a combination of a few sensible State Ministers and characteristic ineptitude from the Australian Government ensured the curriculum was not in place in January 2011.

There is still time to address these many concerns. The most recent meeting of education and schools Minister's determined that the introduction of the curriculum be delayed until 2013.

Greg Melleuish points the way forward in his piece for the IPA-Mannkal monograph. He outlines the elements that would impart to students aspects of our shared "significant past" that, as he puts it:

"Australians should be aware (of) if they are to make a reasonable fist at understanding the world in which they live and thus be able to act as good citizens."

Briefly, those elements would encompass - "environmental factors that have shaped the past"; that "individuals matter" (for example, without Alexander the Great there would not have been a Hellenistic period); "the distinctive features of the traditions that have shaped the civilisation of which they are part"; and the particular history of Australia including, of course, the history of the indigenous people of Australia.

If we agree that a national curriculum is right for Australia at this time, then it is the responsibility of the Australian Government to ensure it is an improvement on the eight curricula we have now. To date, the Australian Government has failed to do so. Instead, it is engaged in a bureaucratic process of buck passing and duck shoving that will end with a mishmash of sludge as our new national curriculum with no Minister prepared to take responsibility for it. Its time Peter Garrett took responsibility and engaged with the actual content of the curriculum. Its time he stopped hiding behind anodyne briefs from his Department that appear to not address the key issue - does this curriculum reflect a true history of our society and our country? Having failed to take charge of the Environment portfolio, he has been given another chance in the Schools portfolio - so far, he has done nothing to imbue me with any confidence that he is capable of doing the job.

Some here might be aware that late last year Peter Garrett ducked the question of whether he agreed with comments made by an ACARA spokesman that controversy surrounds Australia's war memorials and that Gallipoli may have been unnecessarily glorified.

Worse than that, the Government continues to claim everything is going exactly according to plan. This refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem is most alarming.

At the end of last year Peter Garrett was trying to pretend he had achieved a great breakthrough with the states, gaining agreement to implement the curriculum, but does he really know what he is agreeing to implement? He could do worse than to read the IPA-Mannkal monograph, which I have great pleasure in launching today.