An anomaly in the eduction process has been revealed in New South Wales
(Australia). Up until 1990, girls and boys average marks for Year 12
statewide exams (last year before uni) were pretty much within one per
cent of each other. In 1990 the deviation started, and by 1995 there was
an 8 per cent difference between girls and boys marks (girls averaging 54%
and boys 46%), with girls topping twice as many subjects as boys.
Given the information I've just cited, I'm sure that each of you can come
up with "plausible" theories as to why this has occurred - but we should
also admit that we have insufficient information to validate these
theories.
My concern is that the information I have cited above is the _sole_
information that is released to the public, but is then used as the basis
for whatever decisions the relevant bodies make (note: I'm not trying to
pick on the eduction system here, we have a federal election campaign
being conducted where the main aim seems to be say as little of
consequence as possible, and _all_ decision-making bodies are tending
towards the selective release and use of information under the protective
banner of "worlds best practice").
This problem of making decisions based on a selected set of revealed
information seems to be becoming rife in our society. For example, I
recently went on media awareness course which taught you how to respond to
questions from the media - the central trick appears to be to determine
what your stock one line answer should be, and repeat it over and over
regardless of the question.
Getting back to my first paragraph - it is all very well stating that the
problem with our education system is that it doesn't teach people to think
critically, however, we have built a society where the institutions of
power rely on people NOT thinking critically.
The underlying question here is - how do we instill critical thought into
a society where it is often in some people's best interests for the rest
of society not to exercise the power of critical thinking?
-- John O'Neill DSTO C3 Research Centre, Australia email: jao@itd.dsto.gov.au