'faddish' School Courses Blamed On Politicians

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday October 2, 1997

By HONEY WEBB

A leading education consultant has hit back at calls by the Federal Minister for Education, Dr Kemp, to abandon "faddish" courses, saying successive Federal governments were to blame for overloaded curriculums.

Speaking at the National Conference of Primary Principals yesterday, Dr Barry Dwyer said many curriculums were "bursting at the seams".

Dr Kemp opened the conference on Wednesday with a speech which called on principals to clear "faddish" courses from their curriculums to make way for a greater emphasis on literacy.

Last month the minister threatened to withhold Commonwealth funding from schools that failed to improve their literacy results, after research found more than a quarter of children in Year 3 failed to meet new literacy standards.

Mr Dwyer, an independent education consultant, saidDr Kemp had "replaced the carrot with a rod to make schools serve political interests".

"Dr Kemp was on about power - the power of Federal agencies to control what happens in your classroom so that you'll best serve the economic policies of the country," he said.

Australian teachers and principals were experiencing a growing sense of powerlessness in the face of changing policies made on the whims of politicians who were "firing from the hip".

A spokesman for Dr Kemp said the minister totally rejected any claim that the Howard Government had been responsible for overcrowding school curriculums. "This Federal Government has made no additions to the curriculum of the first three years of primary school," he said.

Mr Dwyer said the Government's efforts to centralise curriculums was not bad in itself but it put a huge strain on teachers which needed to be recognised by the Commonwealth.

To prune curriculums back in primary schools, Mr Dwyer said principals had to take a close look at where each new suggestion of "what schools should teach" had come from.

Teachers and parents had been largely unheard in the clamour to remake schooling while governments, pressure groups, bureaucracies and industry had come to influence the classroom.

In the past 18 months, Mr Dwyer had gathered news clippings calling for schools to teach everything from entrepreneurial skills for kindergarten to magpie education and Greek and Latin for third grade. He said the view seemed to be that every social ill had its remedy in a special program in schools.

"It's vitally important for teachers to at least be able to name all of this, to make some sense of it and not be intimidated by it."

He called on teachers and principals to clarify their teaching philosophies and identify what had to be done in the classroom or risk having their schools shaped by somebody else's vision.

PAGE 19: Politics before pupils.