Education policy

The Labor policy on education is one of the most misdirected piles of crap I have heard in a while.

Here's my ideas regarding education policy.

Broadband, laptops and other bits of techno-gee-whizz do nothing to educate people. Nothing.

I have been using on-line education tools for years. I learnt how to configure Cisco equipment by doing computer based training. I have read endless manuals on line. Some of them have been good, but all have suffered from the same problem - boredom. Teachers can be boring, but most educational content is more boring than sitting through a meeting of the Democratic Alliance of Teachers Special Needs Education Supplement Assistant Writers Punctuation workshop.

If you want to have a good education system, you need to develop the best education content in the world. Buying laptops is easy. Hell, I went down to Officeworks and bought two without batting an eyelid recently. It's also attention grabbing.

But a laptop without good educational content is as useful as an X-Box with no games to play on it.

Laptops have to be imported. Developing educational content is something that can be exported, and requires a high level of skills. Just the kind of thing that you need a talented workforce for.

I also don't get why the Feds have such a big interest in education policy. Doesn't that belong to the states?

And you don't need highspeed broadband to get an education. Kids used to get distance education via a fairly low bandwidth system - the old pedal radio!

In the end, the only thing that will make you better at something like calculus is practicing solving equations with a pen and a stack of paper. It's that simple.

PS - my new laptop has not made me a better writer. The type of content that I provide for this blog has not been improved by new hardware, or even by loading Vista. Good content only requires good "wetware" - that grey thing between your ears.

PPS - computers in schools equal electronic fingerpainting.