What will it be like in the twenty-first century? How much will we advance? Who will be our leaders?

We are building the twenty-first century right now. What we do now will have an impact on our way of life for decades to come. The way we treat our new generation, our educators and our fellow countrymen and women will have a significant impact. If we have a desire to breed a significant feudal style class structure which will lead to civil unrest then we need to degrade our education system. We need to denigrate and underpay our teachers and lecturers and encourage the belief that education has no real value. This will encourage those who berate and abuse teachers and anyone involved in the service of others and lead to a dramatic reduction in the number and quality of entrants into the teaching service.

This need not necessarily be a bad thing. After all who needs all this learning anyway? Do we really need the plebeians in our society to be able to read and write fluently? They got along in the dark ages quite well when education was only permitted for the "elite" - Clerics and Gentry. Serfs don't really need such skills. It is easier to keep them in their place if they are not educated. They are more easily swayed by propaganda if it is spoken or graphically illustrated rather than written down as text. In written form it is too easy to scrutinise and propaganda does not stand up to close scrutiny.

So let us all rejoice that our far sighted politicians have finally decided to lead us into the "Brave new world". A world where the educated elite are gentrified and the uneducated masses are kept in their place. We need a servant or slave class in our society to do the boring and tedious tasks, to wait on us and provide amusement. Who better to perform those roles than the uneducated masses.

So let us continue to underpay and abuse the teaching profession until we have absolutely no teachers left. It will then take but two generations without education to achieve our goal of a pool of uneducated second class citizens who will be willing to sell themselves into serfdom to escape the worst aspects of poverty - then it is on to Utopia!

Long live the "Brave New World"!

The English Language Literacy Assessment or ELLA test is given to students in Years 7 and 8 in all schools. It is intended as a diagnostic test from which teachers can prepare teaching and remedial programs for the students that sit the test. Some parts of the test are marked by computer and others by trained teaches. The parts marked by teaches tend to be a little subjective even given the strict criteria. There are often arguments between the markers and tests that are double marked sometimes get quite different marks from the two markers. This does not detract from their usefullness as a diagnostic tool, but it does not provide a good comparison of student literacy. It is not intended to do so.

This makes the comments made by both the media and pseudo-educationists such as the Minister for Education both illadvised improper. It is also unfortunate that the political masters of the education system in NSW (Australia) have decided to use the results of this (mostly multiple choice) test of literacy for staffing purposes. A school's Support Teacher allocation for one year is based on the previous year's ELLA results.

The ELLA test is a three (3) hour examination and so forces Year 7 students (12 year olds) to maintain a great deal of concentration for a very long time. Most adults would have trouble sitting a three (3) hour examination and one would expect their concentration span to be much longer than that of 12 year old children! It would probably provide more accurate diagnostic information if it were spread over a couple of days, but this would require a great deal more organisation.

I am neither defending nor attacking the education system, simply pointing out the ignorance that surrounds it.

In addition to my points about the ELLA test, there are several ethical problems associated with this type of testing. It is proposed to set up a series of pseudo-literacy tests in schools starting at year 3. These tests are already done in the form of basic skills tests and are used for diagnostic purposes. This is not a problem, but the government proposes to release the results of these tests to the media. This will produce misleading articles by well intentioned but uninformed journalists as well as malicious oportunists about such things as 8 year old failures and the inevitable excuses for the 8.6% unemployment being the fault of those who are unemployed - after all they were probably failures in primary school! What a crock. Unemployment is the fault of incompetent government. And the expectation that you can just vote out the incompetent is just plain wrong. You can only vote for the candidates put forward by the parties and if they only offer incompetent choices you are stuck. The common man does not have either the personal fortune or the major crime connections to run a political campaign. So keep an eye on the amount of data Big Brother publishes about your children. You will be surprised what he knows!

Have you ever wondered just what a teacher is worth?
In these days when we pay our chief executives salaries in the millions of dollars we pay our teachers a minimal wage. We feel justified in giving chief executives a wage rise of 22.5% (or about $750,000 per year) and complain that 6% (or about $2500 per year) is not defensible in this economic climate. Are we kidding ourselves?

For many years now we have followed the "god" of "economic rationalism" blindly. If we cannot see a direct benefit from something then it produces nothing. We can easily see the product of a carpenter or plumber. Factories have a product, but where is the product from education? We consider our teachers to be cheap baby sitters, and if they should have a stop-work meeting or, heaven forbid, a strike then we criticise them for not minding our children while we work. We say nothing about the educational effects of such action, just the baby sitting problems they cause. Well, if we consider them to be babysitters then let us pay them as babysitters.

We can easily work out their worth this way. Say $3 per hour per child they mind. Now we don't have to pay for meal breaks even though they must miss part of their meal break to supervise the children at play, so let's say 5 hours per day. The average class size is between 25 and 30 students (say 27). That is 3x5x27 = $405 per day. Now they only work 202 days per year so that works out at $405x202 = $81,810.00 per year not counting any holiday pay or entitlements. Oops! We only pay them 60% of this at present and expect them to educate our children as well - and yet this is the rate we pay 16 year old baby sitters.

So, we pay our teachers -people who train for four years (Bachelors degree + Graduate Diploma in Education) - about 60% of the amount we would have to pay a 16 year old - with no training - to babysit for us. Many teachers also have Masters Degrees and spend much of their "free time/holidays" upgrading their skills, programming and attempting to keep up with the huge volume of paperwork they are expected to complete.

What do teachers really produce?

*** EVERYTHING!!! ***

Have a look at the members of our society whose work improves our lifestyle (doctors, authors, musicians etc) or produce our country's wealth (manufacturers, scientists, mining engineers etc.) and ask yourself if they would be there if there were no Teachers, Lecturers, Tutors or Mentors. These dedicated people provide the foundation upon which our lifestyle is built. Without our teachers we would be living in the middle ages - most of us as serfs. Is that what we really want? If it is, we only have to continue on our present path of denegrating, underpaying and abusing them. If it is not then we should consider a realistic wage for the teaching profession before we run out of qualified and dedicated teachers.

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