Like many Speccie readers I was shocked by the public expressions of anti-Semitism which blighted the closing months of 2024. For me, the nadir of this scourge was the appearance in December of graffiti on the walls of one of Sydney’s wealthiest inner-city suburbs which urged local residents to ‘KILL ISRAIEL’. Twenty years ago, police investigating such an outrage would not have entertained the possibility that the perpetrators might be alumni of any of the many private schools located within walking distance from the crime scene. But that was a time when the nation as a whole was ranked sixth in the OECD school-leaver literacy rankings, and when Year 12 students at even the lowliest state schools in the poorest post codes were expected to able to count to five without using their fingers, and to express themselves without the aid of emojis. Today we cling desperately to the 17th rung of the same ladder, somewhere between Kazakhstan and Burundi, and even parents prepared to fork out forty or fifty thousand dollars a years in school fees cannot be sure that their sons and daughters will leave those schools knowing how to spell the name of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy – let alone knowing that inanimate, insensate objects like landmasses cannot be deprived of life.

So the publication, one week earlier, of the results of the latest NAPLAN research project must have been a source of cautious optimism for many Australian conservatives. The bottom line of these research findings is that the small number of Catholic schools which have been trialling so-called ‘explicit teaching’ methods over the last couple of years have produced consistently spectacular results. Not only have their 2024 Year 12 students outperformed those of preceding years in key subjects by whatever a country mile is in kilometres, but the teachers in these schools have also reported huge improvements in attention levels and classroom discipline. Far from being a modern innovation, explicit teaching is based on very old educational principles, most of which would be familiar to older Speccie readers, and all of which were adopted with the now revolutionary aim of making young Australians productive and resourceful rather than inclusive and entitled.

It is to be hoped, then, that all state and federal bodies who claim to be concerned about Australia’s plummeting educational standards will take a leaf out of the Catholic schools’ book and encourage schools of all denominations and income levels to incorporate explicit teaching methods into their curriculae. But we must not stop with rote learning. If inculcation methods developed in the classrooms of English public schools in the 19th century have proven so effective, why should Australian schools not also look at reviving other, extra-curricular traditions of that period and provenance? Of course, creating time and space for such initiatives will mean sacrificing or at least mothballing some less well-proven subjects and practices. Instead of beginning the day with a welcome to or acknowledgement of country, for example, students will be expected to start the day by singing the national anthem and swearing allegiance to the flag. Smoking ceremonies will now be banned, unless they take place behind the bike sheds, in which case they will incur penalties ranging from slaps on the back of the legs to cuffs on the side of the head. More serious breaches of school rules will result in girls being ‘given a serious talking to’ and boys being birched or, if they repeatedly infringe, flogged.

All students will be expected to participate in a daily 5km run – a key component of a nationwide program to a) make Australia perform better on the rugby field, and b) combat the shame of our ‘swollen generation’. Boys who fail to complete the course in 30 minutes will be expected to perform 50 push-ups or stand naked on the cricket oval all lunchtime. Girls who fail to complete it in an hour will be made to lie on a chaise-longue and be fanned by their classmates. Students who identify as gender binary will be expected to run the course twice.

I take this opportunity to wish every one of them – and every Speccie reader – a happy, healthy, hopeful and humorous New Year.