teaching and learning

I dont agree with much of John Roskam’s reasoning in his AGE article today, A Single Curriculum is Not the Answer, and especially some bs statements such as:

That’s why in English classes, students are seldom required to read books any more. They can watch television and play computer games instead.

I wonder when was the last time Mr Roskam was inside an English classroom?

Another is “outcomes-based education”, a model of learning being implemented by the Western Australian Government
that doesn’t attempt to impart knowledge to students; it merely aims to teach students how to learn.

Which made me think is John Roskam a min-me Kevin Donnelly? You know the Kevin Donnelly headlines:

Geography has lost perspective: poltiical correctness has hijacked another core school subject
The Literacy and Numeracy Crisis in our Classrooms
Fads no substitute for teaching
Whole language diehards needs facts in single syllables

You know the kind, everything is a crisis.

And I didn’t agree with this from Roskam:

If Joan Kirner, instead of being Victorian education minister 20 years ago had been federal education minister, Australia could have had the national equivalent of the Victorian Certificate of Education. Around the country, competitive examinations would have been abolished and competitive grading eliminated.

Except, earth to Roskam, the VCE didn’t abolish exams or the ‘competitive’ grading system that the Roskam would no doubt like to see down in kindergarten as well.

But I DID agree with his conclusion; that we don’t want a single curriculum fits all and this statement:

The claim that Australia as a country of 20 million people is too small to have eight different education systems is similarly flawed. If we really believed that a student in Melbourne should be taught the same science course as a student in Brisbane, then in theory there’s no reason Australian students shouldn’t get the same science curriculum as students in New Zealand.