June newsletter
 
 

Budget and Curriculum Review

Dear ,

I normally send out a newsletter after the budget, but this time it was too depressing. If you want to know the details of the budget there are some good sites you can go to like this one, and this, or you can go to the budget papers themselves, but all you really need to know about the budget is that both sides of parliament appear to believe living within your means is only for others.

Modern Monetary Theory has infected the political class, even if they represent it as Keynesianism. But it isn’t. Keynes actually believed in balanced budgets over the full business cycle. MMT believes you can spend as much as you like as long as you borrow it in your own currency, because then you can never go broke because you can just print more money to pay it back. They also recommend taming the business cycle by manipulating taxation rates.

In fact, growth can never be created by the simple act of spending money, particularly if that money has just been conjured out of the ether by edict of the Reserve Bank. Real growth occurs when the average individual becomes richer, where richer means controlling and benefiting from more goods (whether capital or consumer). This can be engineered best by investment in activities that generate the greatest return, which is generally the province of the private sector.

When you spend money on welfare services, while they are a worthy consumer good in themselves, you do not increase collective wealth, you redistribute it. This may be necessary (although the NDIS is a golden albatross that Julia Gillard has hung around the neck of the Australian taxpayer whose only goal was to enrich her legacy), but should only ever be financed out of income. Debt should be reserved only for those things which can pay it back by offering a higher return than the rate of interest.

In the latest budget, despite the assertion that the economy is pretty much back where it was before the pandemic, the government has maintained expanded spending implemented during the pandemic in areas which do not offer an investment return.

But when both sides of politics, plus the electorate, are applauding this profligacy, we are going to have to wait until the downside starts to manifest, before we as a think tank will have much impact on these practices.

So let’s talk about something where we can make a difference – the Australian Curriculum. The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has released a draft revised version of the curriculum, and it is open to comments and submissions up until July 8, 2021. You can make a submission on their site by clicking here.

I have met with the federal education minister, and he is not happy with the outcome of the review, and so should welcome submissions critical of it. The way the board of ACARA is set up, his hands are to a certain extent tied, as its governing body is constituted by representatives of all the states and territories, as well as the Commonwealth. Inasmuch as educational faddism is identified with the Labor party, the faddists have a 5 to 4 advantage at the moment. That doesn’t mean they can ignore strong public opinion.

My problems with the review start with the old curriculum, and go deeper than the changes in the new curriculum.

One of my major issues is the intrusion of inappropriate ideologies into the school curriculum. I use the word “inappropriate”, because I think education should have a world view. It should be based on empirical intellectual inquiry and open discussion. It should teach values like the inherent worth and dignity of all people (otherwise you end up with argument from authority rather than empirical inquiry).

When we say we want education to be secular, the word doesn’t just mean that it shouldn’t entrench any religion, we mean that it should be evidence-based and materialistic, teaching facts and methods of rational analysis. That is not a neutral position, it is an ideological one, but it is an ideology that has served our culture well and which has contributed to it being the richest society ever, and I don’t just mean in a material sense.

There are a lot of ways that ideologies contrary to that notion of a secular, empirical education have invaded the education system, but two of the most obvious are the requirement to teach “sustainability” and “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures” across all subject areas.

Before getting to why they are ideological, these are actually subject areas in their own right. “Sustainability” appears to be most broadly ecology, and more narrowly climate “science”, conservation, or things like recycling. ATSI histories and culture is most properly anthropology.

So, just on a discipline basis they don’t belong in English, foreign languages, or mathematics, and teachers in these disciplines are not going to be qualified to teach them. Sustainability might have some place in geography, biology, chemistry and physics, at the margins, and ATSI might have some place in history or geography, but again, not throughout the curriculum, and again teachers are unlikely to be qualified.

One of the most significant complaints from teachers is that the curriculum is too crowded. Putting these unrelated issues into subject areas which are complex and difficult to learn on their own terms is not going to make the curriculum any less crowded.

There are a number of sites dedicated to providing resources for teaching sustainability and ATSI history and culture like https://sustainabilityinschools.edu.au/teaching-resources or https://www.coolaustralia.org/. When you look at their curriculum resources you realise how much time is being eaten-up in disciplines by material that is tangential at best to mastering the skills to master the subject.

When you look closer you will also see the ideological nature of the curriculum.

There is a lot of value in its own right in studying Aboriginal culture. This is a window back into human prehistory. Taught properly it should provide an insight into how far humanity has come, but also how much modern societies still share with stone age ones. It should also provide an insight into the conflict between European settlers and indigenous that continues to this day. As well as lessons as to what happens if you can’t secure your own borders.

But that could be taught in a couple of units spread over all the years of schooling. Afterall, World Wars I and II also provide us valuable insights, particularly useful at a time of rising Sino militarism, but it is only taught over a few units, and then only to those students studying  history.

And that isn’t what is being taught anyway. The materials don’t portray the totality of aboriginal life but provide a bowdlerised, sentimental, Rousseauvian version where later settlers are implicitly the villains. This is ideology, not history, or anthropology.

There could also be a lot of value in its own right to studying aspects of climate science. Certainly chemistry and physics classes could profitably include reference to radiation, wavelengths, optical thickness, absorption bands, phase change of water, to name just a few. But that is not how climate science is taught. Instead of being a science it is taught as a set of beliefs. And how could it be anything else if you are going to force, say, English teachers (most of whom are unlikely to have even basic physics) to incorporate it into their lessons?

So we get the incoherent Climate Strikes where children protest, often under direction from their teachers, that we need to do more about climate change, without any idea of how this might be achieved. They presumably never make the link that without technological innovation, which takes time, the only way to go carbon neutral immediately would be to live an aboriginal lifestyle, which would be quite literally murderous. The carrying capacity of Australia under modern Western management is currently 25 million, but under Aboriginal management it was never more than one million, and possibly much less. Only the top 4% would survive, if that.

Well, that might be partly an exaggeration. We might manage a few million more via 19th Century agricultural techniques without significant CO2 emissions, although it would be difficult to adjust to them, because you wouldn’t be able to dial-up explanatory YouTube videos for handy how-to advice.

But the death toll in either scenario would be catastrophic.

We’ll be putting a submission in, but I encourage you to submit your own. The more the better. The ACARA submission site is https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/consultation/.

Kind regards,


GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

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