The decline in education is not just an Australian phenomenon. It’s a contagion right throughout the Western world and it’s deliberate. Education is just another institution to be marched though in the best Gramci tradition
This cut and paste from American Thinker gives the essence “…There is no question that American public schools have been dumbed down. The government’s own report in 1983, “A Nation At Risk,” said the schools are so bad that they might well be a clever subversive trick by an unfriendly foreign power.
It’s a fact that our secondary schools have been dumbed down for a long time. Our Education Establishment has done a bang-up job of undermining traditional education and imposing so-called progressive education on our schools. (I say “so-called” because progressive usually devolves to regressive and/or repressive.)
In practice, dumbing down means that today’s high school graduates possess less information and fewer skills than was the case 25 or 50 years ago. They have lower scores on their SATs. They can’t write as well, think as well, or study as well. They can’t perform academically as well as kids did decades ago.
One immediate result should be no surprise: a great percentage of incoming college students need remedial training, more than half of them at community colleges.
But the bad news is just starting. There are other damages that may be even more costly. Millions of unprepared students will exert downward pressure on every aspect of college life. This is already happening.
Colleges will have a dire choice. Maintain their traditional standards, in which case they would have to flunk out a great percentage of the students and lose all that government funding. Or steadily degrade their standards to accommodate the low quality of incoming freshmen.
Progressives see education as a tool for social and cultural change. Let me reduce this to the bleak reality. If a lot of students have politically correct opinions about global warming and transsexuals, progressives consider this outcome successful, even if students learn little else.
Predictably, liberal educators will want to extend social engineering into every aspect of college life, just as they have managed to do in kindergarten through high school. Social engineering, it seems, is the polite term for academic stupefying.
“Inclusion” ends up meaning exclusion. Nobody will be able to think or speak critically about this trade-off because such discussion will not be allowed. Colleges will have more taboos, censorship, speech codes, and safe spaces. Finally, demanding higher standards and better education will be considered unreasonable, if not outright racist and elitist. You may not be legally permitted to ask for higher standards.
This country’s Education Establishment soldiers have created 40 million functional illiterates. I think they’re proud of it. I think they’d be happy to spread the blight.
Here is a safe prediction: colleges will spread enlightenment down to K-12, or K-12 will spread decay and decline upward into the Ivory Tower. The country’s academic life will rise or fall as one. At the moment, it’s falling….”
READ ON….