It’s what happens when the politicians bring ideology to education. I can’t imagine it happening in medicine or even law, where the independence of the judiciary and recognition of their expertise, is sacrosanct. Education is open slather.

The end result is that the national curriculum is coming and tied to funding. I’ve blogged often about my reservations here: that national: big, bloated and beauracratic is not necessarily better. That local solutions to local needs, especially student needs aren’t likely to be served by a ‘one size fits all’ policy, and that it’s bound to be heavily influenced by the politics of the day.

This view isn’t shared by the government, or even by many teachers I must admit. And, for all intents and purposes, the argument became academic this week.

One of the things that never seems to amaze me is when I talk to teachers and hear them talk about holding students to standards of behaviour and work that they would never hold themselves.

He argues that the young people we work with every day, are people. Sometimes they miss deadlines and sometimes they’re not feeling fantastic and that’s part of being human and growing up. It’s probably something we’ve all felt at times; a certain discomfort with the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attitude we sometimes see some teachers adopt.  A certain unease at the gap between what’s said and what’s exhibited by the teacher themselves.

I felt that unease again today, and I was reminded of Lehmann’s post again, when I was reading the AGE online and their lead article, Grads Fail on Emotional IQ on the supposed lack of emotional IQ that today’s graduates have and how, according to employers they lack empathy, collaborative skills and teamwork, apparently because they were ’soft’ or ’spoiled’

A national survey of some of the biggest public and private-sector employers shows that many bosses are concerned that graduate job seekers lack empathy, self-awareness and consideration for others.

This was the picture the AGE placed on its’ home page to illustrate the article. I suppose it is supposed to represent some kind of blank-stared zombie-like trance. Look, he’s listening to music!, how un-empathetic he must be, probably on one of those mp3 players, though I can’t for the life of me figure out what the flies mean, or what the lines in the mouth and coming down from the mouth are supposed to signify.

When you read the article you see that while graduates ‘fail’ the test, and ‘bosses bemoan Gen Y’s diminished values’ it’s actually ‘almost 20%’ of bosses who feel this way, or more positively, that 80% of bosses don’t fail there’s a problem with the values of graduates.

But where Lehmann’s comments connected with me was the hypocrisy in the attitude towards these Gen Ys the AGE loves to label (probably for it’s increasingly rarified non gen-Y audience).  Stunningly offensive graphic and deliberately misleading interpretation of the statistics aside, the bigger implied argument is that these bosses somehow have passed the ‘emotional IQ test’, that they themselves are empathetic, team-workers and unstintingly unselfish.

Perhaps now is not the ideal economic time to make those claims. With motor vehicle executives in the USA flying to Washington in their private jets to plead for public money to bail them out, with industry leaders paying themselves obscene amounts of money in bonuses when things are good, but taking no blame when things turn around, when major banks take advantage of the government banking guarantee to buy others banks and reduce competition, you have to wonder about the demonising of young people as ’spoiled’ or out of touch.

Last week it was literacy rates and bosses were ‘bemoaning’ the fact that graduates couldn’t fill in forms or put pieces of paper into alphabetical order. This week it’s emotional intelligence and empathy. These kids can’t take a trick according to ’some employers’ and I’ve got to say that the tawdry image of young people that the AGE thinks sells newspapers is not my experience of the students I work with every day. Furthermore, the media’s portrayal of young people is particularly one dimensional and likely to be less than helpful.

The thing  liked was the refreshing lack of politics to the discussion, thg good sense and, from a couple of speakers, the emphasis on hearing student voices in the debate. Would it were so.

Listen HERE

I’ve railed and wailed here about national curriculum before but Caroline Milburn’s article in the AGE today opens a new line; that methodology might also be part of this nationalist zeal. Summarising an ACER report the article says:

The major challenge in improving teaching lies not so much in identifying and describing quality teaching, but in developing structures and approaches that ensure widespread use of successful practices: to make best practice, common practice,” says the report, written for the BCA by senior researchers at ACER. The Rudd Government has signalled its intention to take an unprecedented role in influencing teaching methods. The first steps of a more interventionist approach in areas traditionally the preserve of education authorities and teacher training institutions were announced this year.

I like the response of literacy expert Dr Ilina Synder who writes:

The national curriculum initiative is an exciting opportunity to forge new directions and aspirations for school education, but she warns that teachers will resist it if it tells them what they should do in the classroom rather than setting out principles to inform the curriculum. Teachers will not welcome a heavy-handed approach that requires them to perform specific tasks without having control or input in the way they are conceived and evaluated. “Teachers expect to be accountable as professionals but they also expect acknowledgment of their professional knowledge and expertise,”

The debates moves on, but it’s currently only being had among politicians and academics. If teacher aren’t careful they’ll wake up to find that the debate is done and dusted and we’ll be told new ways of operating based on what looks good in Finland and what might get a politician re-elected in four years time.

The Australian reports:

KEVIN Rudd will demand states take tough action against failing schools, sacking principals and teachers and even closing sub-standard schools, as a condition of a multi-billion-dollar education fund to ensure all students have a good education.

The Prime Minister will seek agreement from the states to reveal the relative performance of their schools from next year, with individual school reports available to parents within three years that detail their child’s results as well as the school’s performance against a group of comparable schools.

Mr Rudd unveiled the latest stage in his education revolution at a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday, including extra funding to reward excellent teachers and attract the best and brightest graduates into teaching.
Read the full article from the AUSTRALIAN HERE