Dear ,

On July 8 we made a submission to The Australian Curriculum Review Consultation. You can download it from here. We subsequently put out a media release about it.

The AIP submission to The Australian Curriculum Review Consultation makes a number of points including the following:

• Neither of the current nor proposed curricula fulfil the role of preparing good well-rounded citizens with basic academic and cultural knowledge, productive attitudes, and problem-solving skills.
• Both curricula tend to usurp the role of parents in providing children with moral and ethical direction, and that tendency is increasing.
• The cross-curricula priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Culture; Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia; and Sustainability are arbitrarily chosen, superfluous to most areas of study, and reinforce ideological, not educational, values.
• In particular the ATSI Histories and Culture takes up disproportionate space in already crowded curricula, imparts little useful knowledge, and leads to a treatment of, for example, Aboriginal writers, that is racist, characterising them with racial stereotypes.
• The change in teaching methods, particularly in English, where phonics and direct instruction are not accepted as the basis for teaching reading and writing; and in Mathematics, where problem solving is prioritised over number facts; will do nothing to cure the up to four year deficits in education of our students against our competitors in South-East Asia.
• Understanding of European, and in particular British, culture is marginalised in the curriculum, most glaringly in English Literature. Yet this culture permeates our legal, political, social, moral and ethical structures. These curricula are producing cultural orphans.

I have now received a response from the minister, Alan Tudge, to our submission and the media release, which you can read here, and a copy of a letter that he sent to the chair of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, which you can read here.

The letter is heartening in that it takes up a number of our themes. For example:

My expectation is that the revised draft that you present to Education Ministers will be significantly different to the present draft, taking into account these expectations, but also the feedback from our top mathematics associations, reading experts and historians, among others.
…
Instead, in many cases, your draft revised curriculum takes us backwards. Learning the times tables is the clearest example where it is being pushed back to Year Four from Year Three. In Singapore, it starts in Year Two
…
There is still too much emphasis on whole-language learning of reading and insufficient emphasis on phonics. Thirty years ago, determining the best way to teach reading may have been a legitimate debate, but it is not now.
…
My expectation is that evidence-based practices are embedded throughout the revised Australian Curriculum. Failure to do so would be supporting ideology over the future of our children.
…
Your draft, however, diminishes Australia's western, liberal, and democratic values.

I would encourage you to read the full letter to ACARA. I'm sure it will make you more comfortable than it made Mr Norm Hart, Acting Chair of that organisation.

It's moments like these that make being involved with a think tank that advocates for liberal and enlightenment values rewarding.

I urge you all to email the minister applauding his position. We need to ensure he keeps it up. His email address is alan.tudge.mp@aph.gov.au.

Regards,

Graham Young
Executive Director