Commissioned by the Liberal Party thinktank, the Menzies Research Centre, this book has as its subject the ‘crisis’ in education. It opens with an endorsement by Malcolm Turnbull and closes with a Glossary of Edubabble, the entries of which include: progressive education, fuzzy maths, political correctness, black armband, whole language and phonics. If Turnbull’s enthusiastic foreword and the title of the glossary are not enough to suggest the conservative politics of the book, the cover is a dead give-away. The words Why Our Schools Are Failing are written as if in chalk on a blackboard, wistfully signifying a time in the past when teachers stood at the front of the class and transmitted knowledge in a neat cursive script using a dependable technology.
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