Where Rudd's "Education Revolution" will take us

At last, after weeks of fretting over lack of information throughout the election campaign, I begin to see the substance of what Rudd promised with his promotional mantra of plans for an "educational revolution".

Last weekend, The Weekend Australian reported that "In a new super-ministry, Ms Gillard will be in charge of policy on childhood development, schools, universities, skills and training, workforce participation and employee rights." Thus the deputy prime minister has the portfolios of industrial relations (as would have been expected, given her previous role as shadow minister for industrial relations) and also education. Predictably, in this article, the main concern expressed over this was the enormous workload involved in combining these two important areas of oversight. Of course, everyone thinks their particular area deserves, or even requires, more concentrated focus within a smaller portfolio. I think these views somewhat short-sighted. Indeed, I think they miss the point completely.

This same article described Rudd's justification for his decision thusly: "Mr Rudd strongly supported Ms Gillard's appointment, saying Labor's plan was to bring preparation for work "under a single roof". He described Ms Gillard's super-ministry as a modern approach, combining the entire agenda of education, skills and training, participation at work and workplace relations." It appears that the crux of Rudd's so-called "education revolution" is to demote the myriad goals and aims of education to "preparation for work", that is, vocational training.

Gillard's comments (later reported in The Australian) supported the need to integrate some Australian history into a national curriculum, as Howard had done previously. She also maintained the popular, but in my opinion, limited, view of the supreme importance of the three Rs. Gillard "reiterated that Labor would focus very strongly on the basic skills of maths, reading and writing in the development of the curriculum." Surely education should be aimed at producing more than the most basic of all academic skills? (I am not sure that the Liberals ever aimed for anything too much above these basics, either, and that is perhaps why they seemed to be losing the educational war to the socialist left in the past decade of the infamous OBE.)

At this point, I would like to introduce a contrast. My next two quotes are taken from Dorothy Sayers' paper read at Oxford University in 1947, The Lost Tools of Learning. Sayers proposed a "progressive retrogression" to a classical model for education in the tools of the trivium, (Latin) grammar, formal logic and rhetoric. She said of her hypothetical students, "one cannot begin a good thing too early... We will therefore "catch 'em young," requiring only of our pupils that they shall be able to read, write and cipher [ie, perform basic arithmetical calculations]." Sayers' expected that, although her students would be young, they would already be competent in the basic skills. In Sayers' opinion, these skills were not the end point of a school education, they were, rather, the pre-requisites of this education!

If Sayers did not see these basic skills as the end point of education, what did she propose as an alternative? The concluding sentence of her paper tells us. "For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain." Some would argue that it is too early to criticise, but I fear that the first steps of Rudd's "education revolution", towards a model of education that limits itself to concentrating on the basics and preparing people for nothing other than a life of serfdom ("participation in work"), will eventually be revealed to have been in vain.