Posted on 06/22/2015 3:30:52 PM PDT by naturalman1975
THE two chairs of the governments review into the national curriculum fear our schools are becoming too kumbaya and overrun with progressive, new-age fads that are hurting our children.
Australia is sliding behind a number of countries in education standards including Singapore, South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong a development which Professor Ken Wiltshire and Doctor Kevin Donnellys report blames on the fact students have been handed autonomy in the classroom and that wishy-washy ideals like child-guided learning and collaborative negotiated goal-setting are overtaking the traditional model of teachers imparting knowledge.
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Professor Wiltshire said he was dismayed by some of the new-age teaching methods he uncovered during his review into the curriculum which left him with the view that Australian schools are letting our kids down. One example included revelations some students had been tasked with identifying the environmentally irresponsible passages in the works of 16th century playwright William Shakespeare.
The teacher should be up the front, not up the side. This is the problem, he said.
Kids lying on the floor and rolling around, I dont know what that teaches (and) they take a beautiful piece of literature and instead of enjoying it they take a marker out and start deconstructing it.
Theyre given a work by Shakespeare and told to use a brown marker to indicate the racist passages, a purple marker to indicate the sexist passages and a green marker to indicate the environmentally irresponsible passages.
Co-chairman Dr Kevin Donnelly said our schools suffered due to the fact that many teachers and administrators got their tertiary education during the flower power era.
Kumbaya hits it on the head, he said
I call it edutainment
teachers instead of teaching become guides by the side.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.dailytelegraph.com.au ...
On the broader point of the actual article, I agree with nearly all of it, and I thank God, I teach in a private school where we can avoid the worst of this and avoid inflicting it on our students.
It’s not kumbaya. It’s child abuse.
L
“Kumbaya” means “come by here” in Gullah, a dialect spoken by blacks in coastal South Carolina, and the song seems to date from the 1920’s. Several years ago, a TV ad featured some guys singing a sacrilegious version, “Kumbaya, my friends...”
This has been going on for decades in this country, with baleful results, as the following books illustrate:
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