From Sydney Morning Herald February 1, 2009
In February 2009 at a high-powered panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Rupert Murdoch said the American public schooling system had failed its students and the greatest challenge to ensure US competitiveness in world markets was the investment in human capital.
"This is the greatest test for President Obama because this will be a great confrontation with the teachers' union . . . they are a very, very rich union and a number one contributor to the Democratic Party," he said.
"The President must have the courage and the strength to take on the teachers and win . . . if the United States is going to continue to lead the world over the next 30 or 40 years, education must be the way."
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Where Obama has largely ignored Murdoch's advice it seems that Julia Gillard has accepted it with glee. "Take on the teachers and win", Murdoch's mantra, now appears to be Australian government policy.
Politicians educated in schools where teachers had a say in curriculum and testing, now want full control themselves. Without training as educators they eagerly espouse the latest fad from the US or Britain, fads that are pushed by the media, and pushed hardest of all by the Murdoch empire, an empire dedicated to propaganda and profit not education.
The simple fact remains that where teachers have no say in education there can be no education.
1 comment:
This article sums up the situation in a nut shell. Except that in Australia the teachers unions do not donate to any political party - so the parties are free to attack teachers and education without any fear of losing financial support. I do not know what makes Julia Gillard the part-time Education Minister, think that she has greater insights into what is needed in education that the massed wisdom of the education practitioners and most of the Australian University Education fraternity. She is being badly advised and would be doing much more for education in Australia if she sacked those advisers and replaced them with people who know and understand the Australian education systems.
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