Despite the additional billions invested over the last 30 years, countless educational enquiries and reports, several national reform agreements, and the introduction of national literacy and numeracy tests at years 3, 5, 7, and 9 plus a national curriculum, education standards continue to go down the gurgler.

Australia’s ranking in international PISA and TIMSS tests have continued to fall. The NAPLAN results have either flat-lined or gone backwards and generations of students are leaving after 12 years of schooling illiterate, innumerate, and culturally, emotionally, and morally impoverished.

As to why, look no further than the furphies and fads bedevilling teachers and schools spread by subject associations, education ministers, bureaucracies, teacher training academics, and numerous carpetbaggers paid to infect schools with the latest unproven innovations and fads.

One of the most damaging furphies is that schools must be used to indoctrinate students with radical, neo-Marxist-inspired ideology regarding the impending climate apocalypse, gender and sexual fluidity, and the belief Australian society and Western Civilisation are racist, sexist, transphobic, and guilty of white supremacy.

The primary aim of education is to introduce students to Western Civilisation’s best-validated knowledge and artistic, scientific, and intellectual achievements – yet this is ignored. Students, in order to be productive citizens and lead fulfilling and enriching lives, must be culturally literate and independent, rational thinkers.

A second furphy, and equally destructive, is the argument put by the Marxist Paulo Freire that traditional teaching is guilty of imposing a banking concept where students are empty vessels waiting to be deposited with useless knowledge.

Since the late 1970s, instead of being masters of their subject in charge of the classroom, teachers have been told to prioritise student-centred learning (rebadged as student-agency) and ensure the curriculum is immediately contemporary, relevant, and issues-based. Forget essential knowledge and edutainment rules.

Instead of being facilitators and guides by the side, it is often ignored that teachers know more than students and it is their responsibility to ensure there is a disciplined classroom and they decide what is taught.

Getting rid of rote learning where students memorise times tables, poems, and important historical events is the third mistake based on the furphy also championed by Freire that such an approach leads to parroting useless information and stopping students from being creative.

Again, wrong. All the research into how the brain works and what constitutes the most effective way to educate young minds stresses how vital it is to memorise essential facts, dates, content, and new knowledge.

What students learn has to be recalled automatically to ensure enough brain power is available to be creative and to master difficult knowledge and concepts. Repetition and rote learning are important and explain why those taught years ago can easily do mental arithmetic without a calculator.

Associated with Freire’s banking concept is the argument knowledge is secondary to inquiry-based learning. For over 30 years, instead of teaching the essential knowledge on which the subject disciplines are based, the focus has been on generic competencies and processes.

The NSW Teachers Federation and Woke activists opposed to governments funding Catholic and independent schools push the furphy non-government schools get too much money, made worse because they only serve wealthy, privileged communities.

The facts prove otherwise. While government schools are fully funded by state, territory and commonwealth governments Catholic and independent schools, many low-fee paying serving less affluent communities, have their funding reduced by what is described as parents’ capacity to pay.

Non-government schools serving wealthy communities only receive a small percentage of the funding provided while government schools, even those serving wealthy, privileged parents, get the full amount. On average non-government schools receive about $13,000 per student while a student in a government school receives just under $21,000.

Because of the financial sacrifice non-government school parents make taxpayers and governments save billions each and every year as fewer students are enrolled in government schools.

While more successful overseas schools focus on what is proven to work in the classroom, including teacher-directed learning, memorisation, teaching essential knowledge, and setting high expectations with tests and exams where some students fail, Australia has done the opposite.

The good news is that the tide is turning and common sense and sanity are on the way back. In NSW the government has ditched open classrooms, banned mobile phones, and decided schools must focus on teaching essential knowledge.

In Victoria, those in charge of the Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools recently announced explicit, teacher-directed learning was the way of the future and schools should teach reading by ditching the faddish whole language approach and replacing it with phonics and phonemic awareness.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute.

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