Australian Politics Forum - WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system

juliar

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #90 - Aug 23^rd, 2020 at 6:51pm

Frank, BH listens to the WOKE Socialists but doesn't really understand what he is hearing.

His reasoning ability is pretty limited and that is why he can't argue his way out of a wet paper bag. But instead he resorts to silly circular arguing tactics often used by Greeny types. He is technically and scientifically agnostic and wouldn't know a timing chain from a spark plug.

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juliar

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #91 - Aug 24^th, 2020 at 10:45am

The WOKE Socialists are ruining young Australian's lives with their sick depraved rubbish.

Uni administrators: masters of their own ruin!
AMM 15.08.20.

Janet Albrechtsen’s insightful article makes two things about our universities abundantly clear and that is, the swamp must be drained and the other is that it will never happen until management is also changed. After all, it is on their watch that their current predicament has occurred indicating a paucity of vision—hardly a good example of higher learning?

It was entirely sensible that the Morrison government called for a report into the state of academic freedom in Australian universities. The report by former High Court chief justice Robert French found that free speech and academic freedom needed greater protection, and it set down a recommended model code. It is fair enough that there is a further report into how universities are implementing French’s recommendations.

But can we please have a guarantee that there will not be a report into a report of a report?

Australia’s universities should be penalised for crimping intellectual freedom
Source: Janet Albrechtsen, News Corp

What comes next? Events since the French report suggest that universities cannot be trusted to improve the intellectual health of our universities. The recalcitrance of vice-chancellors is on the record. Their lobby group, Universities Australia, worked hard to ignore the French report after it was handed to the Education Minister in April last year. Maybe the VCs counted on the Morrison government being tossed out at the federal election last May.

They may try to whitewash, and wriggle out of, this latest review too. But they will have to dupe, or woo, Sally Walker, the former Deakin University vice-chancellor. Appointed by Dan Tehan, Walker has a stronger record of fostering academic freedom than all the VCs of Australia’s biggest universities combined.

When she was VC of Deakin University, law professor Mirko Bagaric and Deakin law lecturer Julie Clarke wrote a controversial article in 2005 for an American law journal advocating the use of torture in some circumstances. After an extract ran in The Age, the two academics were pilloried by fellow academics, refugee advocates and politicians ranging from then foreign minister Alexander Downer to Greens MPs.

Walker could have done the usual VC schtick: duck for cover and mutter that the controversial views don’t represent the values of the university. Instead, Walker stared down critics and delivered a crystal-clear defence of academic freedom.
“Professor Bagaric, as an academic staff member, is entitled to express his opinions as are those members of academic staff who disagree with him,” Walker said in a written statement.

“After all, the ability to freely and publicly raise these issues and debate them are hallmarks of a free and open democratic society and the defining characteristics of a progressive university.”

Walker, who also set about fixing the finances at Deakin, seems perfectly positioned to make tough calls that are not popular. It might help that Walker is not part of the VC bubble that surrounds the Group of Eight universities. Though she was acting VC at the University of Melbourne for a period before joining Deakin, Walker will surely know that academic freedom has gone from bad to worse at universities that should be setting the gold standard in how to promote a robust learning environment.

That said, transforming the intellectual health of our universities is not for the faint-hearted. The starting point for Walker is that the most beautifully drafted code of academic freedom is meaningless unless it is implemented. In simple terms, academic freedom must be measured against evidence, not model codes.

Evidence such as the disgraceful behaviour of administrators at the University of NSW earlier this month. Human Rights Watch Australian director Elaine Pearson, who is also an adjunct law lecturer at UNSW, was interviewed by the university’s media department. Pearson called for a UN special envoy to be appointed to monitor human rights in Hong Kong in light of new national security laws. The interviewed was published on the UNSW website and linked in a UNSW tweet.

Her comments upset the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times and a small, vocal group of Chinese students who claimed that Pearson’s views were hurtful. Rather than uphold the Western tradition of intellectual diversity, UNSW sided with a communist regime. The university pulled the article and the tweet. UNSW tweeted: “The opinions expressed by our academic do not always represent the views of UNSW. We have a long & values relationship with Greater China going back 60 years.”

A public uproar about the university’s cowardice forced UNSW administrators to reinstate the content, but on other platforms.

Read on and sigh

https://morningmail.org/119881-2/

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juliar

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #92 - Aug 25^th, 2020 at 9:18am

The FABIAN Socialists starting with that dope Whitlam and continued with gusto by the appalling Gillard the Witch from Wales have long cherished the notion of dumbing down Australians so they would be easy to fool and con to get them to vote for the idiotic WOKE Socialism rubbish.

Today the mental rot extends all the way to the universities.

The effective dumbing down of a generation
AMM 25.08.20.

Once-upon-a-time school students were taught how to think. Today they are taught what to think.

This is why society has so many dimwits in every sphere, especially in our institutes of learning—including, as we are fast learning—politics!

Timing is everything, and so it is with the onset of COVID-19 and the culmination of the long march through the institutions.

This march has taken a while, led by the universities veering to the left and inculcating students on the full agenda of woke topics – the evils of capitalism, colonialism, racism, women’s rights, inequality, diversity, multi-culturalism, globalism, intersec-tionality, climate change etc.

This season’s bumper crop from Left’s Long March
Source: Judith Sloan, News Corp

It’s not just humanities and law students who’ve been subject to this politically correct thinking. Courses ranging from medicine to science, from engineering to business include large dollops of woke material, strange as this might seem.
As graduates fanned out into the public service and teaching, the pace of the march quickened – any workers holding different views from the full woke complement were effectively silenced lest their careers be endangered.

At a time when we need our public institutions at the top of their game and for people to have confidence in them, their activities and the expressed opinions of their leaders too often work against their original objectives.

Rather than perform their roles quietly and efficiently, most taxpayer-funded institutions are off on self-directed frolics based on the on-trend progressive fads.

Look at Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Dr Brett Sutton. As COVID-19 struck, he was busy putting the finishing touches on a paper about climate change and public hospitals. As the virus spread, his deputy, Dr Annaliese Van Diemen, using Twitter, likened COVID-19 to the arrival of Captain James Cook. (Perhaps she meant Governor Arthur Phillip – history is not one of her strengths.)

Generally, chief health officers positions – often political appointments – were never taken seriously by the medical profession. While public health can be a fairly dreary pursuit, with preventive measures necessary but sometimes costly, it is a crucial activity for the public sector.

But lured by trendy and worthy-sounding alternative endeavours, state health departments ended up underinvesting in public health and pandemic preparation, with Victoria leading the pack of neglectful bureaucrats. Now we are expected to hang on their every word and the punitive directions they issue almost daily.

Of course, the long march through the institutions doesn’t end with state health departments. There is nary a part of the state or federal public services not infected by the rise of politically correct thinking and distracted from the pursuit of the rightful objectives.

Take the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. A glance at its top-heavy organisational structure is terrifying. There is the Sustainability and Climate Change branch and the Human Rights and Social Inclusion branch. We even have an Ambassador for Gender Equality and, of course, a Gender Equality Branch. Evidently, people smuggling and human trafficking also need their own ambassador.

Most people would be able to remove about two-thirds of the activities of DFAT and conclude the country would be better off saving the cost of those highly paid officials as well as discarding all that pointless meddling.

It’s hardly necessary to mention the Australian Human Rights Commission here. What started off as a modest venture to offer some remediation for tightly defined violations of human rights – the states already had their own machinery – it has ended up as a vehicle for grandstanding presidents and commissioners pursuing personal agendas.

Then there is the ABC which is wall-to-wall woke with the possible exception of regional radio.

The Bureau of Meteorology should be a dull agency undertaking the useful task of predicting the weather, short-term and slightly longer-term. There were jokes about the inaccuracy of its forecasts but most people held BOM to be reasonably trustworthy.

Climate change has completely altered its activities. The agency regularly makes grand statements about this day or month or year being the hottest on record without revealing the true adjustments it makes to these claims. The BOM wants to be a player in the climate change debate, underpinning its demand for more resources.

Even organisations that should be regarded as undertaking boring, utilitarian roles have lost the plot. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority – doing a very bad job regulating superannuation – insists climate change be taken into account by the companies it regulates.

Read on to learn how dangerous these WOKE Socialists really are

[url]https://morningmail.org/the-effective-dumbing-down-of-a-generation/#more-1

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Frank

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #93 - Dec 7^th, 2024 at 1:24pm

Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson has blamed the “appalling” teachers’ union for Australia’s falling literacy standards, and blasted it for blocking reforms to help First Nations children read and write.

Noel Pearson blasts teachers’ union for ‘appalling’ ban on explicit instruction

Mr Pearson said the Australian Education Union “could not be more against the interests of children’’.

“They are oblivious, or completely blind, to the evidence about what’s effective in education, and the teaching of reading particularly,’’ he told The Weekend Australian.

“It’s just tragic. Teacher unions used to be the champions of explicit instruction, but today they’re the complete opposite.

“They’re the major reason why we haven’t made much progress in Australia and we’ve been sliding down the international rankings for 30 years straight.’’

The AEU, which flew 250 drones in a light show over Sydney Harbour last week to highlight its campaign for extra funding for public schools, refused to comment on Friday.

He said it was “just appalling’’ that the AEU had directed its members to boycott reforms outlined in the Albanese government’s national schools agreement – including small-group tutoring, phonics-based reading instruction, a year 1 numeracy test and explicit teaching methods.

He said disadvantaged students benefit from direct instruction – an old-school teaching method involving clear step-by-step explanations, repetition and student practice, which was abandoned in the 1980s for the fads of “student-directed learning’’ and whole-word recognition.

Mr Pearson said many First Nations children living in remote areas can’t speak English when they start school.

“The phonemes (sounds) of English are foreign to their ancestral languages,’’ he said. “They haven’t grown up in houses where English is spoken, where books are in the house. “There’s a language challenge for remote kids so explicit instruction in the phonemes of English is probably the most beneficial thing I’ve seen.’’

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/noel-pearson-blasts-teachers-union-for-a...

“The best way to close the gap is to never let the gap open up in the beginning. "

AEU prez:

https://x.com/AEUfederal/status/1857208606938268017

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« Last Edit: Dec 7^th, 2024 at 1:34pm by Frank »

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Frank

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #94 - Jan 1^st, 2025 at 12:09pm

In the dying days of 2024, “social justice” now means that Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are issued with trigger warnings at the University of Exeter.

There are references to “sexual violence, rape and infant mortality”, undergraduates are counselled. Students who feel upset are advised to “leave the classroom and contact wellbeing” if they are distressed. Wellbeing? What fresh hell?

The truth is that trigger warnings – a lazy idea, largely imported from American campuses – are an embarrassing offshoot of the therapising of everyday life.

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Frank

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #95 - Feb 16^th, 2025 at 9:42am

Universities are meant to educate, not indoctrinate

Radical activists are cloaking themselves in “academic freedom” so they can tap taxpayers for a paid platform for their “anti-colonial” polemics.

Abdel-Fattah showed off her self-professed contempt for some of the basic tenets of academic research in her speech to a controversial symposium staged by the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane last month. In a closed-door address to QUT’s National Symposium on Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action, she railed against “white supremacists and pseudo-intellectuals” in a “totally rotten” academia, boasted how she “bends the rules” and revealed that she had refused an ARC requirement to hold a conference.

Instead, in an eyebrow-raising exercise she later crowed was her “best work”, the doctor of philosophy asked women to send her protest slogans and chants that were printed on coloured paper, cut into pieces and put into jars. As she gleefully told her audience, it was just like “being in primary school”.

Provocatively, Abdel-Fattah spelled out how she censored other academics who disagreed with her views. “I refuse to cite anybody who has remained silent over Gaza, no matter how authoritative and big they are in their respective fields,” she said. “If they have remained silent, they are not scholars to me, they are not thinkers, they are deficient human beings. I will not participate in validating them.”

Imagine if medical scientists took the same approach to their research. Could a cancer researcher collect quips from chemotherapy patients and place them in a jar tied with a pretty ribbon? What if a scientist investigating the safest engineering standards for building bridges chose to veto the findings of every engineer who refused to sign a Gaza petition?

Randa Abdel-Fattah @RandaAFattah
Future Fellow in Sociology researching Arab & Muslim social justice movements, Islamophobia, war on terror. Multi-award winning author of 12 books | Lawyer.
https://x.com/RandaAFattah/highlights

Sociology, eh?? 🤡🤡

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Frank

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #96 - Feb 16^th, 2025 at 9:47am

Alas, Abdel-Fattah is hardly the only academic to celebrate publicly the murderous regime of Hamas, which the Australian government has classified as a terrorist organisation. QUT invited Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak, in her capacity as a PhD student at Monash University, to its anti-racism symposium, which she used as a platform to spout her hatred of Israel. Guest speakers were asked to talk about an “anti-racist practice you’ve been involved in that’s innovative or exciting or inspiring”. As a former Islamic school teacher, now working as a teaching assistant at Monash, Sammak might have discussed ways to promote multicultural understanding and respect between students.

Hell no. Her idea of an exciting and inspiring anti-racist activity was the October 7 Hamas terror attacks, which she described as a “mass uprising”. “If we’re talking about an example of anti-racist practice, I would say that that was an attempt from the people of Gaza to liberate themselves,” she told the QUT audience. “It’s not Hamas holding the people of Gaza captive, it’s the people of Gaza who Hamas is representative of who decided to break out of the siege of Gaza, the prison, the concentration camp of Gaza.” Where is the research-based factual evidence for her assertion? Did she survey the innocent children of Gaza, who dodge bombs and face death daily because the Hamas monsters controlling their country provoked a war with Israel?

Gaza and the West Bank haven’t held a democratic election in about 19 years, and Sammak told her audience she had never set foot in Gaza.

The immigration system must be reviewd and severely tightened.

"The federal Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights reported on Wednesday that it had witnessed “brazen incidents of anti-Semitism go without consequence or leadership by some of our university vice-chancellors”. These million-dollar boffins must take responsibility for setting – and enforcing – clear boundaries for rigorous and respectful academic research, behaviour and debate. The purpose of universities is research and education – not polemics and indoctrination."

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freediver

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #97 - Feb 16^th, 2025 at 9:57am

juliar wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2020 at 7:42pm:

The FABIAN Socialists starting mainly with that drongo Whitlam and continued by Juliar Gillard the Witch from Wales have long cherished the idea of dumbing down Australia by replacing essential subjects at school with useless Greeny indoctrination propaganda.

‘State governments have lost control of schools’: Mark Latham
22/07/2020

NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham says state governments have "lost control" of what's happening in schools.

“The evidence presented by Miranda Devine in the Daily Telegraph shows Catholic education systems are losing control of what’s in their schools,” he said.

Public and private schools have “massive issues about woke, left-wing, irrelevant and dangerous content”.

Mr Latham told Sky News host Chris Smith a left-wing agenda was being pushed in classrooms, through teacher professional development programs, and in a top-down manner through entire schools.

The state One Nation leader brought into focus the climate science presented to school children which he said was one-sided and failed to present the views of dissenting scientists or relevant economic arguments against emissions-reduction and the cost of renewable energy.

“If you teach this rubbish, you end up with rubbish results”.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6173983569001

"failed to present the views of dissenting scientists"

Every "dissenting scientist" is unique in his quackery. There is no coherent alternative view to present. And I am not sure what place economics has in the science classroom. The cost of addressing climate change is irrelevant to the facts.

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Grappler Truth Teller

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #98 - Feb 16^th, 2025 at 10:21am

freediver wrote on Feb 16^th, 2025 at 9:57am:

juliar wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2020 at 7:42pm:

The FABIAN Socialists starting mainly with that drongo Whitlam and continued by Juliar Gillard the Witch from Wales have long cherished the idea of dumbing down Australia by replacing essential subjects at school with useless Greeny indoctrination propaganda.

‘State governments have lost control of schools’: Mark Latham
22/07/2020

NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham says state governments have "lost control" of what's happening in schools.

“The evidence presented by Miranda Devine in the Daily Telegraph shows Catholic education systems are losing control of what’s in their schools,” he said.

Public and private schools have “massive issues about woke, left-wing, irrelevant and dangerous content”.

Mr Latham told Sky News host Chris Smith a left-wing agenda was being pushed in classrooms, through teacher professional development programs, and in a top-down manner through entire schools.

The state One Nation leader brought into focus the climate science presented to school children which he said was one-sided and failed to present the views of dissenting scientists or relevant economic arguments against emissions-reduction and the cost of renewable energy.

“If you teach this rubbish, you end up with rubbish results”.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6173983569001

"failed to present the views of dissenting scientists"

Every "dissenting scientist" is unique in his quackery. There is no coherent alternative view to present. And I am not sure what place economics has in the science classroom. The cost of addressing climate change is irrelevant to the facts.

The facts being? And based on which form of witch doctor quackery are these ones?

You should have stopped at 'there is no coherent view to present' and remained honest, professor, since neither 'side' holds a coherent view upheld by ongoing Science and actual events. Polar Bears are not masquerading as drop bears off the tops of icebergs...

Simple discussion of the costs of various approaches is not 'economics' - it's just a side-note on the totality of the issue.

Anecdote:- I constantly say to the Eld Gel - when watching a 'storm' build up and come along - that when I was a kid they WERE so much bigger and meaner... and that's not just making it up etc... I recall clearly how you could watch those clouds swirling up and up and then crashing down with force ... and I KNOW I often walked to school and back in 100+ degree heat... those were the figures... nowadays it's a heat wave at 85 ... haven't seen a storm build like that in decades ...

I get the impression 'climate change' is not working..... not any more than it always has ... and volcanoes are spewing far more into the atmosphere than dear little old Australia... so what is behind this 'alternative energy' thrust, for real? Australia is not changing one iota of world input of gases etc... from ALL sources ....

I think we're going to end up with nuclear modern style.... even the greenies are opposing massive wind farm visual pollution across the Nullarbor..... it's a shot coon...

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“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
― John Adams

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freediver Gold Member Offline www.ozpolitic.com Posts: 49912 At my desk.	Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system Reply #99 - Feb 16^th, 2025 at 10:24am Quote: You should have stopped at 'there is no coherent view to present' and remained honest, professor, since neither 'side' holds a coherent view upheld by ongoing Science and actual events. Sure they do. Even you probably get it. You know what the greenhouse effect is, right?
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lee

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #100 - Feb 16^th, 2025 at 12:40pm

freediver wrote on Feb 16^th, 2025 at 9:57am:

Every "dissenting scientist" is unique in his quackery.

That is strange. The consensus has its fair share of "quacks". Even non-climate scientists. That is why there is a problem with science papers being verified.

freediver wrote on Feb 16^th, 2025 at 10:24am:

You know what the greenhouse effect is, right?

Yes it is a theory that actually hasn't been proved. Models are not proof. Wink

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Frank

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #101 - Apr 11^th, 2025 at 8:30am

Failed school leavers with Australian Tertiary Admission Rank scores as low as 39 are being recruited into teaching degrees, as universities lower the entry bar to enrol the poorest academic performers.

Fifteen universities have enrolled school leavers with ATAR scores below 60 – the lowest 20 per cent of students – sparking concerns from the federal government and opposition.

The University of Tasmania has offered a place in a primary school teaching degree to an applicant with a raw ATAR of 39.35 – a rank reflecting the bottom 4 per cent of high school results.

Universities are supposed to enforce an ATAR of 70 for entry to teaching degrees, but are using equity admission schemes to inflate entry scores with bonus ATAR points.

RMIT University enrolled a student in its Bachelor of Education (Primary) this year with an ATAR of 50.3 – and then bumped it up to 70.5 through “equity adjustments’’. Charles Darwin University allowed a raw ATAR of 52.7 for entry to its degree for teaching maths to high school students.

At Victoria University – where a Bachelor of Education was offered to a student with an ATAR of 50.4 – a spokeswoman said “we believe an ATAR is not a determinant of a person’s potential. The minimum ATAR for our Bachelor of Education (P-12) is 70 or equivalent following access and equity considerations,’’ she said.

So academic ability is 50, DEI adds 20 = 70! DEI IS where education standards go to die.
And they wonder why the prestige of school teaching has plummeted over th ed decades.

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Brian Ross Gold Member Offline Representative of me Posts: 43470	Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system Reply #102 - Apr 11^th, 2025 at 12:06pm Twilight Zone. Tsk, tsk, tsk...
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Grappler Truth Teller Gold Member Offline Australian Politics Posts: 86639 Always was always will be HOME Gender:	Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system Reply #103 - Apr 11^th, 2025 at 9:00pm Been doin' it all day, sir!! (that's a Rugby thing - ten seconds into the game and a penalty is given) ...
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lee

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Re: WOKE Socialists sabotaging the education system
Reply #104 - Apr 14^th, 2025 at 12:21pm

"Australian schools require an investment of one and a half billion dollars over the next decade and an overhaul of "faddish" teaching practice to reverse the nation's chronic maths failure, according to new research.

The Grattan Institute's Maths Guarantee report, released on Monday, builds on the last two years of NAPLAN results, which showed one third of Australian students have been failing to reach maths proficiency."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-14/maths-results-teacher-training-grattan-re...

Maths failure leads to all types of failures. Medical, engineering and many more.

But I guess we don't need maths in our new curriculum. All you have to do is put across on the right box. Roll Eyes

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