Phil Bachmann's Page

I visited a local school open day yesterday and the ten year olds who showed me around seemed to know a lot of facts but I wondered whether they knew much about how things worked.

Edward de Bono often says that school kids should be taught how the corner shop works - but it seems very unlikely that this school would ever teach this. For example, at that school the five year olds learnt how to read from a computer connected to a website. But children taught to think would ask qu

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The Australian government released some statistics on how school were performing in teaching reading and writing. They called it the "My School Website".

This website (www.myschool.edu.au) allows you to look at those stats. Now there's another MySchool website with a very similar address www.myschool.com.au, which allows people to discuss those statistics.

But the second site is not

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The Aussie Govt has decided to have the world's best education system, and had its minions release a draft document explaining what the new curriculum will look like.

It's available at http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au. Has anyone seen it? (You need to create an account to be allowed access.)

Yes "Thinking Skills" is there, but it's listed as a "General Skill" that teachers have been asked to apply to thei

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All Cars is a Melbourne based chauffeured car business that wanted to provide a job despatch service which would offload surplus work between themselves and other operators.

They tried many different systems over the years: trunk radio, SMS, paging services and email. They tried for more than five years.

Some of these schemes meandered along like a car with three flat tires, while others went straight over a cliff.

Always there were perfectly reasonable explanations as to why things went wron… Continue

I started doing some videos to suggest the possibility that the (Australian) government should be doing more to encourage "thinking" as part of the curriculum.

But the more I thought about it, and explored the issue, and looked at what people were doing already, the more futile it seemed.

Maybe it could be done, I know that EdB often cites the example of Venezuela, but it seems unrealistic to expect politicians in Western democracies to foist something unfamiliar onto a self-righteous public.… Continue