Pynes national curriculum review is a disaster with revelations at Senate estimates yesterday that the Coalition-linked figures chosen to lead the review had not been vetted by education experts. Pyne’s review was criticised at the outset by respected members of the education community as a political stunt, the process attracted yet more criticism for its appointment of 2 opinionated Liberal supporters as reviewers. Pyne has had to disown the corporal punishment views of reviewer Kevin Donnelly and then Sydney University’s Barry Spurr. Adding to the perception of Coalition bias, that same list suffers from an over-representation of the private school system (only 1 government school individual), no indigenous representative, no multicultural representative (standard for federal, state and territory reviews). It includes 3 academics, 2 (Greg Melleuish and Alex Robson) have close links with the Institute of Public Affairs, and a third (Tony Makin) attacked the Rudd/Swann handling of the GFC was launched by Mathias Cormann in September 2014. The language of the review is suffused with religiosity and support for the Cold War propaganda mantra of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Pyne announced that there would be a review of the national curriculum because he thought it contained leftist bias. Next he appointed a partisan inquiry team. Then came the Pyne-approved subject specialists, many of them chosen for published or an otherwise known predisposition to the Pyne/Donnelly/Wiltshire point of view but none apparently checked before they were signed on. In the review itself we get a document that eschews evidence-based analysis, has a strong religious bias and plumps largely for the conclusions that Pyne thought of first (leftist bias undetected though) and of its desire to have a curriculum suffused with Christianity.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 07:20:01 +0000
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