Australian schools are becoming too ‘kumbaya’ with progressive, new-age fads

news.com.au ^ | 20th June 2015 | TAYLOR AUERBACH & BRUCE McDOUGALL

[naturalman1975]

THE two chairs of the government’s 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 Donnelly’s 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.

.....

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 don’t 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.

“They’re 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.

[naturalman1975]

I understand why they use the term 'kumbaya' in the way they do, but it annoys me. "Kum ba yah" is a profoundly Christian song, and it's appropriation by the Hippie ideology in a way that strips away its historical links to Christianity is something I dislike. When we sang it on camps I attended as a kid in the 1960s, we still understood it to be a Christian spiritual and to which God it was addressed.

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.

[Lurker]

It’s not kumbaya. It’s child abuse.

L

[Fiji Hill]

“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...”

[Fiji Hill]

wishy-washy ideals like “child-guided learning” and “collaborative negotiated goal-setting” are overtaking the traditional model of teachers imparting knowledge.

This has been going on for decades in this country, with baleful results, as the following books illustrate:

• And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education by Mortimer Adler (Chicago: Regnery, 1949)

• Quackery in the Public Schools by Albert Lynd (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953)

• Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in our Public Schools by Albert Bestor (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1953)

• So Little for the Mind by Hilda Neatby (Toronto, Canada: Clarke, Irwin, 1953)

• Schools Without Scholars by John Keats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)