While this thread about “essential” knowledge was mostly tongue in cheek, I reckon there’s a serious point to be made – in that a lot of knowledge that isn’t particularly difficult to grasp, and generally useful, is only acquired by a relatively small subset of people who study a topic at a tertiary level (be that at a university or at TAFE).
In the USA, spreading this knowledge around is, to some extent, performed by their generalist undergraduate tertiary education system – though I also get the sense that at least some of the first year of college education is filling in the gaps left by their mediocre high schools. The Melbourne Model of generalist degrees followed by (fee-paying, in large part) professional Masters courses also heads in this direction. But that leaves a vast pool of young people who choose vocational education, or choose to head straight into the workforce, whose generalist education stopped at Year 10 (in Victoria, at least), and as such may well have missed out on the fundamentals of statistics, for instance.
So how should this be remedied? Teach more in the earlier years of high school? I’m not sure students are sufficiently mature at that point; perhaps the teachers who read LP can comment, but from what I can recall the middle years of high school involve a fair bit of treading water. And cramming more into the final year curriculum of high school isn’t likely to achieve much either; increasing breadth of the year 12 curriculum would only seem possible at the cost of making the individual subjects even shallower.
Whatever happened to the vision thing?
George H. W. Bush was famously incapable of projecting what he termed “the vision thing” in his unsuccessful campaign for re-election in 1992, but at least he knew what he needed to, but couldn’t, do.
I noted the other day that Dennis Shanahan was something of a barometer for the current state of the ‘political narrative’. I should have remembered that an even better one, whose often indecipherable columns frequently seem to be pure stream of consciousness, is Malcolm Colless.
Writing today in The Australian, he seems to think he is delivering some sort of killer punch:
One thing that impressed me about Rudd on Q&A last night was that he quite rightly conveyed the message that the government, any government, can’t fix everything. That’s surely just truth, but Tony Jones response in the interchange on the alcopops tax and the drinking age showed the media reflex where the government is expected to have solved every problem yesterday in spades – “But then they’re just drinking something else”. As Rudd pointed out, the stats actually show a fall in alcohol consumption in younger demographics, but apparently that’s immaterial if a policy measure which has some impact doesn’t act as if it’s a magic wand?
What, exactly, is wrong with debating what sort of infrastructure, skills and services are needed for a growing population now? If you stop to think about it outside the drum beat of the political narrative, it’s a hard question to answer.
Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election, in part, because he could articulate a longer term vision. John Howard didn’t have one for even a single term, let alone one for the nation. What sort of Australia would Tony Abbott like to shape? We simply don’t know, if we were to go on his current public statements. His timescale is the eternal now, the cost of milk, today’s political opportunity, a soundbite from question time. Lost in the endless stream of applause for his being “pugilistic”, “authentic”, “interesting”, etc. is any debate about what he might actually do as Prime Minister, let alone any public debate on what are urgent questions which we must address as a nation.
Sure, Rudd can be criticised for raising expectations about a quick fix to the health system. But why are so many so critical when he actually does have to negotiate his way through a complex policy domain with multiple stakeholders? What would Tony Abbott’s “decisive” or “direct action” on health actually imply? Do any of the commentators even stop to think about what the answer might be?