Can You Teach Old Governments New Tricks?

Dale Spender may wish so, but perhaps isn’t holding out too much hope.

Some people may remember that Dale Spender was a presenter at the 2003 Diocesan Focus on Learning Conference.  Last week she contributed her thoughts on federal political education policies and their relevance to the 21st Century world our schools need to prepare children for.  I was alerted to this Sydney Morning Herald article by the Diocesan Library blog, Edlib.

As we approach a federal election this year, the party leaders are talking about “vision” and “the future”.  We as educators need to pay attention to and critique the education policies to see how visionary they really are.

As learned professionals we need to make informed and objective choices.  ABC’s Stateline on Saturday reported on the NSW State Government’s disagreement with recently announced Federal Government policy.  While the Iemma Government is opposed to performance pay for teachers, it also sought to criticise levels of Federal funding for government schools vs. non-government schools (always a touchy subject for those in Catholic Education, but not one for discussing in this forum – I’ll use a personal space to express my personal opinion), presenting the data in a way supportive of their own perspective.  “There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies, and…”

For those people interested in learning more about the education policies in the lead-up to the federal election, below are links to the policies of the two major parties:

• Australian Labor Party
• The Liberal Party of Australia doesn’t have a dedicated policies page yet for the current election, but read the news on the home page and in the archive for the latest policy announcements