Peter Freebody advisor on the national English curriculum is completely wrong when he says we shouldn't be looking back to a golden age of literacy when everyone could read. He says look at the over sixties and see that most cannot read and write. What absolute rubbish. The baby boomer generation is this golden generation that could read and just as importantly - add up. Few over sixties cannot competently write a letter and this is what they were taught to do. Unfortunately, the current generation is not taught to do such mundane things. They are taught to do "an in depth analysis of modern literacy as it relates to the widespread phenomena of the Internet" or some such gobbledygook which is foisted upon them by so-called experts in academia.
It is university educated advisors that have ruined prospects for a literate society. Get back to basics and start teaching rote again, because that is where the mistake is being made - the absence of rote learning. Ask a youngster today to reel off the arithmetic tables and he/she cannot do it. Children don't learn to add up correctly by messing around with pieces of wood of different colors and lengths. Teaching children to sort things into sets will not get them anywhere in real life.
Another thing Mr Freebody goes on about is lack of access to education, but children from all social strata can find a school to go to. It is the methods used that are wrong. For example, teaching trigonometry at high school is putting something in the curriculum that should not be there. This belongs at college level and above.
The problem is in making schools too academic. Teach children how to do arithmetic not mathematics. When you build a table you don't need maths. You must measure and cut to length. That is arithmetic. Three levels of mathematics are offered at high school when most pupils have not mastered arithmetic. You cannot run until you can walk. All schooling must return to English, Arithmetic and History and these must be compulsory. Concentrate on these three and leave the rest for college and university.
Curriculum, curriculum, we must change the curriculum - that is all you hear decade after decade. Too much change has sorely damaged Western education systems. Peter Freebody's statistics are wrong. He says people have never been more literate. Just ask an employer and he will tell you how literate! People cannot add up a list of numbers correctly, nor read written instructions. It went down hill when calculators were allowed into schools. It is like saying give all Australian children a computer and they won't need books. What rubbish. The Internet is no good for doing assignments because everything is brought down to a page, a paragraph, a sentence then a word. Go to Encyclopedia Britannica and look up "Australian History". A paragraph gives the whole history of a nation. Search for "Ned Kelly" and all the sites give the same paragraph.
