The State of Australian Education [offtopic from physics debate]

[lzxnl]

My mum didn't do calculus in high school.

And upping the education in Australia...unfortunately doesn't quite work. The poorer communities won't be able to keep up at all, and the government is loathe to introduce a tiered education system, which would actually benefit society because then, academically gifted people could be recognised for their ability. Equality doesn't always mean fairness.

[MJRomeo81]

Well I recall my teacher explaining to students how to read an analogue clock in grade 6...

[nokainvincible]

Australia really needs to up the education, to decrease the amount of "lads" you see going around.

I think that's more to do with western society and values rather than education that you receive. I know a fair amount of people who are incredibly smart yet still have the "lad" mentality. That's not to say that an increase in the quality of education won't reduce the number of "ringaz" rats but personally I don't believe that's the core issue.

[Professor Polonsky]

Click me!

Just going to leave this here.

It comes down to one thing - there is no need to make the maths curriculum harder. Perhaps at the primary level, so the transition to secondary schooling is smoother. But the level of secondary mathematics education in Australia is about the same as in the rest of the world, and is more than sufficient for our purposes.

I totally agree with increasing the level of education in Victoria/Australia though, I know as a fact a lot US high schools study specialist math's level of calculus when they're around 15-16 years old... And this is just your 'average' math, it's nothing regarded more highly than other maths like spesh is in VCE.

Factually wrong

I personally find it ridiculous that texts such as A Christmas Carol (which my school actually studied in year 7...), is available on the VCE English exam text list and I'm sure if other countries heard of our curiculum, they'd laugh at us as well.

We're at about the same level as most Western countries

(Like our current broadband speeds... South Korea's internet speeds are 14+ Mbit/sec on average... Our average internet speed after the NBN will only be 12Mbit/sec... And this will cost us and take us billions of dollars and well over 5-6 years... By then South Korea's internet speeds will have increased again...)

Wrong and irrelevant

[psyxwar]

Click me!

Just going to leave this here.

It comes down to one thing - there is no need to make the maths curriculum harder. Perhaps at the primary level, so the transition to secondary schooling is smoother. But the level of secondary mathematics education in Australia is about the same as in the rest of the world.
Factually wrong
We're at about the same level as most Western countries
Wrong and irrelevant

Not sure about math, but I know we're pretty behind in the sciences

[Eugenet17]

I totally agree with increasing the level of education in Victoria/Australia though, I know as a fact a lot US high schools study specialist math's level of calculus when they're around 15-16 years old... And this is just your 'average' math, it's nothing regarded more highly than other maths like spesh is in VCE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Calculus

Course outline for AP Calculus in the US on here, not a huge difference from what we have here.

[lzxnl]

Why do we need to be on the same level as other Western countries? I have been informed by students from Singapore that they do our equivalent of first-year university physics in year 10 there and I'm not surprised. Our physics course could offer so much more for its students.

[thushan]

Why do we need to be on the same level as other Western countries? I have been informed by students from Singapore that they do our equivalent of first-year university physics in year 10 there and I'm not surprised. Our physics course could offer so much more for its students.

So what?

I think the only reason to make the curriculum harder is so there is a smoother transition into uni level science. However, this is something that is up to VCAA in consultation with the universities.

Just because Singapore has XYZ doesn't mean we should too. Remember that (for example) Singapore has PSLEs (primary school leaving exams) too, which is practically a cut-throat competitive exam to get into the good Singaporean schools. Suicides are common - amongst frigging 11-12 year olds - although not often talked about (this is anecdotal though).

[Professor Polonsky]

Not at all a huge difference. AP Calculus is also optional (just like maths here, you could say) and not a prerequisite for anything as far as I know. It's also pretty much as advanced as maths education in the US gets.

I can't claim to be an expert on all countries' education systems, but I know a few (United States, Canada, UK, Italy, Israel) and I can tell you that we really are not massively behind any of those countries or anything like that. The most advanced one out of that list in terms of maths/science is the UK, but their system is actually quite similar to ours with the main difference being having to do fewer subjects, and hence you can go more in-depth with each subject.

Northern European education seems to be quite advanced, but also has a (relatively) much lower rate of completion in many countries (with many leaving school at the end of Year 9/10).


But again, the real question as Thushan said is what we need here in Australia. I think compelling evidence is needed before we dramatically increase the level of our natural science education.

[vox nihili]

Suicides are common - amongst frigging 11-12 year olds - although not often talked about (this is anecdotal though).

I think you've touched on a really, really important point here, Thushan. Does a seemingly "smarter" education system, a higher level of achievement in that system, necessarily mean a better group of students? People are certainly capable of incredible things if pushed to do them, but pushing has some very serious consequences. In an ethical sense, we should want to prevent these consequences and make sure our kids are as happy as possible. Though, nothing matters to government until it's about economics, so I'll make that point too. If students are massively pressured to succeed, they won't have the emotional intelligence or a robust set of skills, social in particular, to function in an environment. Furthermore, assuming that the pressure placed on these students has a detrimental effect, productivity would also be reduced because of the mental issues that accompany that kind of pressure.

Essentially, saying that the curriculum needs to be made hard full stop is very short sighted. It may mean higher academic achievement, but it removes a lot of diversity in terms of skills by marginalising students who find school difficult and it also has dangerous consequences, as Thushan mentioned, in terms of mental health.

[lzxnl]

However, just because we make primary school a bit more productive does not mean we will ruin the lives of children. I personally think that primary school could teach kids a lot more. My year five class was still doing multiplication. I think that is a tad slow.

[Lasercookie]

I disagree with a lot of what's been said in this thread, and in other posts that have recently cropped up around the forum. I most definitely disagree with the idea that we should be pushing content from higher year levels down, but there is something a bit off with the pace of Year 7 to 10, for sure. I don't disagree with the idea that high school education is quite lacking, and I think if we could fix that then the pace of Year 7 to 10 (with some new content introduced) is probably fine without having to introduce calculus earlier.

This is something that I've been thinking about a lot and I think I've settled on the idea that mathematics education does not need to be compulsory. To answer the kind of question that gets asked about maths in school a lot, "when are we ever going to use this?", I think my answer to that would be: for the majority of people, you're not, for most people the actual content that you learn is useless. I'd take up the view that maths should be taught for the same reason why we bother teaching English, history, art and so on.

The proposed Australian Curriculum subject "Essential Maths" is most definitely worthless - surely if you need to learn that content for a job, you can pick it up as you travel along with life. For the students that do VCE Further Maths only, I'm not convinced that they're gaining much from it. Sure it teaches a bit of statistics and statistics is important to know, but I don't think it teaches it well. A proper statistics course would be nice, but I'm not sure if that imply that calculus would be required (probably). For the students that do Methods, Specialist and then go on to do more maths, there's also something a bit lacking there.

To answer the kind of question like "why do we bother teaching maths?" I'd lean towards the ability to deal with abstract concepts, as well as logic and reasoning are what you learn from it. This means that I'd like to see proofs, at least to some level, be emphasised in the teaching. At younger year levels stuff like picture proofs and other simple to understand reasons for why a formula might work would be excellent. I think this would dispel the notion that mathematics is just the memorisation of "a lot of crazy formulas". I think proofs would also allow you to bring in very brief discussions about the history of mathematics quite naturally, and firmly set in the idea that mathematics is an evolving discipline that's changed over time. That'd also hopefully bring in a little bit of appreciation for the fact that the concepts that you learn in maths sometimes took centuries to develop.

I don't mean to say that maths education should be completely rigorous i.e. you probably don't need to teach epsilon-delta stuff in Year 11, but there's a lot to be gained from just really honing in on the intuition behind things. A little understanding of what proofs are would make the transition from high school maths to university maths a lot easier too. 

Being required to actually tackle ideas more abstractly would probably mean that some content might be introduced earlier. It would also mean that the current pace could seem fine, since there would be much more meat to the curriculum than as it currently stands. I think what I am advocating would make the mathematics curriculum harder to teach and more demanding, for sure.

There's also the idea that mathematics can be beautiful, which from mathematics education in school isn't conveyed very well. I'd like to see the kind of concepts you see in those recreational/popular mathematics books (John Stillwell etc.) taught in younger year levels: some level of number theory, graph theory, game theory, the concept of infinity, simple fractals etc. You could work in some 20th century mathematics that way, and deal with a lot of fun, interesting problems (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg etc.).

My ideal version of Further Maths would be in that kind of vein, have people to deal with those fun kind of problems. You'd be able to rephrase the probability and statistics that's currently taught (and probably a bit more) to fit in well there, since there's a lot of various games and other fun stuff you can view through from the perspective of prob/stats. That would leave the people who don't really 'need' maths to gain some logic/reasoning skills, to perhaps enjoy it (perhaps I'm being a bit too idealistic or naive here). I think that kind of stuff also scales well for people who aren't so good at maths, to people who are quite good at maths - it gives both types of students a lot to think about.

Adjusting for whatever change in the maths content at younger year levels, the content of Methods/Spesh is probably fine once you start emphasising the reasoning behind things over drill computations. I think the introduction of technology in maths was to allow people to not get bogged down in the boring calculations and be able to do more interesting things, but for the most part I don't think that's actually happened.

I reckon articles written by people like Marty Ross (http://qedcat.com/ed-articles.html) or Keith Devlin are worth reading. It's probably easy to see how much my opinion is heavily influenced by them and similar writing that I've come across.

[b^3]

I agree with most of what laser has said. Part of the problem is that we don't cover everything the way it probably should be covered. For example, we don't really give a proper treatment of limits and a lot of the course is watered down from what it really could and should be. Looking back from second year uni maths now, VCE maths doesn't feel like maths. It feels more like learning a set way to doing things and repeating it over and over. That's not what real maths is (well to an extent that's what engineering maths is), we should be going through more proofs of what we're actually learning. If you go on to do maths at uni later on, you will need to be able to prove things, starting with certain results and draw conclusions based on these, rather than being told that 'this is a formula, this is why it works, use it', instead of 'this is where this formula comes from and how it connects with everything else'. VCE maths doesn't set you up for what maths actually is, although I guess it gives you a set of tools that leads you there.

I don't think we need to raise the content at primary school level, but in years 7-12 we should be doing maths more how maths should actually be approached. To be fair, what we covered in year 7 maths was a joke, I really don't think half our class learnt anything new that year. If we give a good grounding slightly earlier, then we'd be able to use proper maths in Physics and such. There's no way around it, Physics needs maths, you need maths to build models to base nearly everything off.

Going in circles slightly, but anyways.

There's also the idea that mathematics can be beautiful, which from mathematics education in school isn't conveyed very well. I'd like to see the kind of concepts you see in those recreational/popular mathematics books (John Stillwell etc.) taught in younger year levels: some level of number theory, graph theory, game theory, the concept of infinity, simple fractals etc. You could work in some 20th century mathematics that way, and deal with a lot of fun, interesting problems (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg etc.).

From memory there is a brief mention of that bridges problem on the first page of a chapter in the Essentials Further book. You don't do anything with it unfortunately, it's just there to read about.

I reckon articles written by people like Marty Ross (http://qedcat.com/ed-articles.html) or Keith Devlin are worth reading. It's probably easy to see how much my opinion is heavily influenced by them and similar writing that I've come across.

QEDCAT!
A good read (laser linked), for the better textbook that's out there - http://www.qedcat.com/cambridge_review.pdf

Off-topic but relevant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmuQ3eKaNhA