An outsider's inside view of school, its needs, and the Prime Minister's call for chaplains and A-to-E gradings

WE'RE gathered around a table in the high school library, the small group of volunteer tutors who help out once a week, and we're sharing sandwiches and a cuppa. As I join the conversation, I 'm also thinking about some of the kids we've helped – or tried to help – over the past few years. What will become of them?

One lad, three years older than his classmates, needed help with most subjects. I chat to establish rapport.

He couldn't see the need for literacy. I pointed to the library shelves behind me,. “Literacy gets you involved in things. Take Henry Lawson there, he tells us a lot about how we were. Fell apart because he was a dreadful alcoholic, but it's still stuff people should read.”

“I know about alcoholism,” my student said. “My parents were alcoholics, and drug addicts too.”

I probe gently, and he's ready to open up. He was brought up in a loving home – his grandparents' home. But both his grandparents had died in the last few months. Now he shared love with only one person in the world. His girlfriend, and she was in hospital. He was missing school to visit her.

Later, I suggest to our supervisor that our student is intelligent, with good self-awareness and a lot of potential, and ask whether there's a program which could meet his needs. Next week, she tells me she's given him tests and confirmed my view. But the boy has dropped out.

One day I think I see him in the street, but when I pull over and run back, he's gone.

I wonder whether a one-day-a-week school chaplain would have got on the case in time. I'm disturbed it took a volunteer to discover this lad's plight.

Under a $90 million program unveiled by Prime Minister John Howard, it seems this school will be offered $20,000 a year to hire a chaplain. With on-costs, that may pay for one day a week.

It's likely good chaplains will benefit students, although better funded school counselling might achieve more.

And I worry why our leaders want chaplains. Are they opening a first tiny chink ahead of an assault on secular public education?Australia's founding fathers were determined this new nation would be spared the sectarian schisms of the Old World. That's why they wrote this into the Australian Constitution:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

The founding fathers were also determined to keep Australia's government schools secular.

Those guys got it right. If you scan Australia's history, the most astonishing tale is the development of tolerance between people from widely differing races, cultures and religions in such short time, usually after only a generation or two. We still have our setbacks – failures like the Cronulla race riots and the criminal retaliation which followed, or those few Islamic parents who see no fault in sons who befriend girls on the beach, then rape them.

But look back and see how far we've come. Cronulla was bad, but not nearly as bad as the Kalgoorlie riots on the stinking hot Australia Day weekend of 1934, when drunken mobs of patriotic Aussies burned hotels, shops and homes – anything that belonged to Italians or Slavs – and killed two people as they did so.

At our soccer – oops, football – matches, police stand by to stop bottle-throwing between yobbos of Croatian and Serbian descent. But back in the old country, in recent memory, peace-keeping forces struggled to stop some of their cousins carrying out genocidal “ethnic cleansing” involving murder and rape.

As calls continue for the deportation of Sheik al Hilaly, it's instructive to recall that in 1918 a mass demonstration in Melbourne called for the deportation of Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix after he refused to doff his biretta for the National Anthem during the St Patrick's Day parade.

A secular state, with secular government schools isn't a path to a godless state, although it may make religious recruiters work harder. The secular state should strengthen religious freedom and tolerance.

I went through an excellent state school system in Western Australia – correspondence at our kitchen table out in the wheatbelt, then Leedy Bubs, Leederville Primary, Perth Boys' High and Kent St High. How good was it?

Well, it may help to say that Governor-General Michael Jeffery (who probably was born in the same room as me, way outback in the Wiluna hospital) is another Kent St old boy. And my wife is a Kent St old girl.

Although some kindly people came to teach us “scripture” in primary school, we managed to get through our school years without benefit of chaplain. Were we deprived?

I am somewhat bemused by some of the leaders who see a need to improve the moral values of the nation. For myself, I would be ashamed if I or any of my offspring used lies or scratched up xenophobia to achieve our ends, or abandoned a human being, however despicable, to inhumane treatment by a foreign power for a full five years without any legal process.

One can only assume our leader observes some Christian doctrine of “lesser evil”, where lies are justified if they keep you in power to attack greater evils like political correctness.

You live by your morality, Prime Minister. I'll stick to mine.

Calm down, you grumpy old bastard. You've still to tell about some of the other kids you've tried to help. Like the young fellow who seemed quite scatterbrained. He was supposed to study the Vietnam war, and nobody could get him up to speed. I didn't do any better.

But next week was startling. He knew his material. I called over the superviser. She too was surprised. What happened? It seems the Vietnam vets in our region – making up for their abandonment by governments and the RSL – run a travelling museum called the Nambus. Our student had gone through it, and the vets had succeeded where his teacher (and I) failed.

I polish up his approach to the looming assignment, and note it has to be submitted on CD as a Powerpoint presentation. Do you know Powerpoint? Of course, he said. But he failed. No computer at home, and he had no idea about Powerpoint. He had no hope.

Hammering away over the school year, we achieved a lot. My student became much more confident, while I pulled out all stops with emotive presentations on history, civics and reconciliation. Next year, I hope he can build on it. If he's there next year.

There was another kid, fighting back after going to the brink of expulsion. I didn't have him for long, but we made some progress. Not enough, sadly, to stop his misspelling almost every second word.

On our last session for the year, I'm preparing both lads for a final assessment. I've got them going well with a practice paper, until the final question carrying most of the marks. Something like, Show examples and explain the usage of colloquial language, rhetorical questions and first and third person speech.

I look at them. Blank faces. They've never heard the terms.

These are the kids who will go home with report cards marked E when the latest prime ministerial diktat takes effect, requiring all students to be marked A to E right through their school years. Perhaps these gradings will induce parents and students to lift their game, but my experience with under-achieving kids suggests the regular demoralisation will undermine any gains we make.

Almost all teachers oppose the grading system, but the Prime Minister isn't listening. As with his steadfast denial of global warming for a decade, he knows, whatever people with experience and expertise in the field might say. And as he explained in Vietnam the other day, even if he's wrong he's never going to admit it.*

And for the PM, what would teachers know? They're just assembly line workers in the education industry, and should do what they're told. Besides, they're mostly Trotskyites and union members – how dare they claim to be professionals?

But teachers can't get off scot-free. Several times I point out students have been given assignment sheets headed with words like “Japan and it's trade with Australia”.

To help students critique a website, I'm given a sheet which asks students: “Are their enough navigation bars?”, and the misspelling is repeated five times in a bullet-point list.

I'm given an old essay which scored top marks, so I can show my student how it's done. It begins: “The 1967 referendum gave Aborigines the vote.” Untrue, as this shows.

I give my student the facts about the '67 referendum, and try to give it meaning by fitting it into a timeline of Aborigines' fight for equality. I hope an accurate presentation will not cost him marks.

When I was a schoolboy, we had very little homework. Most of our formal learning was in the classroom. Today, much of students' work is done in assignments, and students seem to be expected to research and write them at home.

I think this has two undesirable effects. First, and most obviously, it disadvantages students from poor families, or big families crowded into small homes. To do well now, students need a private space to work at home, and they need a computer with internet access, preferably broadband.

Less obviously, the brighter kids may also be worse off when their out-of-school hours are crowded with assignments. They may achieve academic distinction, but their swotting may leave little time for the more general reading needed to achieve a wider cultural literacy.

It also seems to me that students of different abilities should be put into different streams, so the slower kids are not always struggling to keep up.

* At least, that's what I think he said. These are his words, according to an article by Mike Carlton (who, admittedly, is no admirer of Howard) in the Sydney Morning Herald of November 25-26:

I supported our involvement [in the Vietnam war] at the time and I don't intend to recant that. I believe that in public life you are accountable for the decisions that you take. I mean, I didn't hold any position of authority then but I supported the reasons for Australia's involvement and nothing has altered my view that at the time on the assessments that were made then I took that view and I took that view properly and I don't intend to indulge this preoccupation that many have in recanting everything that they supported when they were in positions of authority. I think in public life you take a position and I think particularly of the positions I've taken in the time I've been Prime Minister. I have to live with the consequences of those both now and into the future. And if I ever develop reservations, well I hope I would have the grace to keep them to myself because I think you take a position and you've got to live by that and be judged by it, and that's my position.