......and ask if they can guarantee your child wont be being taught by people who have only completed a 6 to 8 week (learning to pass your skills onto kids) course, whilst completing a lazy substitute associate teaching diploma online if Gillard and the greens win this pro-republican election.



Both private and public schools will be effected, as the rate of pay becomes less negotiable with an emerging influx of not-quite-teachers applying for teaching positions.

Thus the standard of teaching and education will drop even further than it already has with Gillards school building and lap-top failings.

i

Mellie, making the teaching profession more accessible to every able personis a good thing. However, a short course qualification is not the way to go about it. We should just get rid of degree requirements for teachers altogether and replace them with comprehensive, grueling aptitude tests (specialized for the type of teacher). A few of my friends, including myself, never went to college nor completed high school, and yet, are certainly more than capable of teaching. Certification and degree whoring is unfair and punishes independent learners and disciplined autodidacts. A qualification test can be constructed in such a way that it will produce a high predictive validity for teacher performance (higher than degrees and work experience put together, easily) and will open up job opportunities to everybody with the talent and knowledge to be a teacher; not just those that a scrap of paper saying that they "can".

Nationally accredited professional aptitude tests threaten to render the entire tertiary education industry almost entirely irrelevant. They would also completely overthrow employer usage of "prestige" colleges as proxies for discipline and cognitive ability. It would be a real educational revolution. Not to mention the fact that it would allow our brightest and most promising minds to totally circumvent the clutches of the leftist drones that lord over academia. Private enterprises would spring up left and right offering brief (relative to bachelor degrees) courses. What is learnt in them would be picked up in properly constructed, discriminating aptitutde tests, and this would open up the professions to everybody sufficiently capable of performing well in these professions; without needing them to spend years, partially at the taxpayers expense, in universities.

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How much is that? Most of the teachers in my school weren't worth more than $24,000 a year.

Quality of schooling is a lot less important than you think.

It amazes me how all you people turn every issue around into a Labor/Liberal mudslinging match. There's a world of discussion beyond the superficial differences of the two heads of the Hydra of the main parties.

We need to work towards raising the calibre of all helping professions, if we truly do want to see an "education revolution" as something more than a slogan.


Finland, according a major international survey, has the best educational system in the world, why cant we follow their model?

This oppose to following Obamas?

aikmann4 wrote on Aug 18^th, 2010 at 2:12pm:



8 weeks is not enough time to learn how to pass your skills onto others, particularly distractable kids who provide a challenge for even the more experienced teachers.

Gillard is offering a short term solution to a long term problem, we should be gradually improving, not revolutionising over night.



Imagine all those grubs looking for their fast- ticket into the profession?...

8 weeks is better than waiting 4 years...and with the wages & conditions being so bad, this and sure to get allot worse.... hey...  there has to be some sort of incentive afterall?

....  Yes, I'm sure they will have plenty of candidates jumping at the chance.

Ultimately, if you were a peddo, you might re-think going to uni for 4 years just to work with kids, but if given the option of testing the waters after just 8 weeks, and a crim-check then hey.....

I'm sure Denis Ferguson types will jump at the chance to revolutionise their 'own' professions.

At the expense of our kids, and the teaching profession itself.

If we want better teachers, we need to pay them more so we hold onto the good ones, not treat it like a maccas job.