Heckling Literacy

Would someone please tell me, when was Australia's golden age of literacy and numeracy? According to the mythology, standards are falling. Falling from where? Was the golden age back in the 1950s, when all I had to read at school was Fay and Don, Betty and Bill, Seaside Stories and The School Magazine?...

...Did the federal Minister for Education have a poor kindergarten teacher who failed to read the story of Henny Penny? Apparently so, otherwise she would not be running around like a chook crying that the literacy and numeracy sky is falling.

I'm not sure which recent press release from various state or federal education ministers or shadow ministers or opposition leaders or whoever the author is responding to. There's the current debate on merit pay for teachers, and who determines the parameters of "merit". There's the not-so-recent (but recently picked up by the media) trend towards single-sex classes in particular subjects within co-ed/comprehensive high schools. (More about this comment about boys in a single-sex English class [my nephew is in such a class] at a later date: The school invested in two different sets of books and flexible teaching methods. The boys chose mainly non-fiction, sport and autobiographies, not novels. They also studied some different themes, swapping the unit of romance in the parallel girls' class for one on war literature. Hmmm... anyone nervous about gender sterotyping being reinforced, rather than challenged, in these classes?)

Whatever the inspiration for Mr Gregory's (I'm wondering if this is he) Heckler, he's got a good solid point. Australia consistently rates amongst the top 3 or so countries in the world for teenage literacy and numerancy, and statistics for the country as a whole have us at 95-100% literacy overall, despite significant problems within the Indigenous community. (Yeah, I know—not much in the way of links. Reliable web-based stats are hard to come by.) But as state and federal elections loom, let's be educated (pardon the pun) about the real issues, and not be side-tracked and misinformed by knee-jerk campaigns mounted by pollies who Do Not Know (or care!) Whereof They Speak.

Off me soapbox, for the moment.