PM canes ‘rubbish’ postmodern teaching | News | The Australian
Categories : News, Personal, Philosophy |
PM canes ‘rubbish’ postmodern teaching | News | The Australian
Just on my way home from work, but thought I’d make note on this interesting news piece with John Howard weighing in to some of the current debates on the “dumbing down” of education. I’m not fully up-to-speed on the issues involved but broadly from what I’ve heard this whole “Outcomes Based” education system is a major worry. Current pieces of pop-culture such as comic books, popular movies, music videos etc are studied along with (or more worringly, in place of) classic literature, questions in a physics exam ask students about the “ethics” of the problem and don’t test their actual understanding or ability in physics or maths. It’s a few years now since I was in high school but even then I thought our literature course had too much modern authors like Bruce Dawe and Randolph Stowe, and not enough classics (we did study a bit of Sophocles and Shakespeare but that was about it). I don’t know if Howard is right in claiming that this educational approach is a negative effect of more general post-modern thought - he may well be, but either way it’s a serious concern. It’ll never happen but I still think returning to a more “classical education” including classical history, literature, languages, philosophy etc like they had in the old days wouldn’t be a bad thing. I sure wish I was better educated in these things.
