Category: Main Story

The Missed Opportunity of Gonski 2.0

May 1, 2018 | by | 0 Comments
The Gonski 2.0 report is a missed opportunity which doubles down on what has caused declining achievement standards in Australian education. On Monday morning in Australia, the much-anticipated Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools was released to the public. More commonly referred to as Gonski 2.0, the second iteration of the report on education […] Read more

A Critical Examination of Calls for a ’21st-Century Education’

March 12, 2018 | by | 0 Comments
Education reformers often argue the need for ’21st-century education.’ Do their calls for an education revolution stand up to scrutiny? The issue of education reform is ever-present when the topic of education is mentioned. It is often argued that the current school system, and by extension school curricula, are outdated and not fit for the […] Read more

Is Australia’s Literacy Education Failing Its Children?

February 20, 2018 | by | 2 Comments
Despite ever-increasing investment in education, Australia’s literacy rates are not improving and are falling behind those of other nations. Why is this so? The gradual decline in literacy standards in Australian schools has garnered much attention in recent years. Despite standardised testing in the form of NAPLAN as well as ever-increasing sums of money being […] Read more

The Academic Roots of Post-Truth Society

January 4, 2018 | by | 0 Comments
(This is an expanded version of an opening statement given by Helen Pluckrose on the 28th October 2017 at the Battle of Ideas festival hosted by The Institute of Ideas and supported by Conatus News). Postmodernism bears significant responsibility for the post-truth society, perhaps even more than we realise. Post-truth is not simply lying. It’s […] Read more

A Plea for a Return to a More Humane Understanding of the Humanities

June 15, 2017 | by | 3 Comments
Politicisation I’ve often heard people argue a moral case for the inclusion of gender theory, ‘critical race’ theory and other forms of theory influenced by postmodern streams of thought on college syllabuses for the humanities. If you are sceptical about such theories, I am sometimes told, you must be sexist, racist or transphobic. This is […] Read more