Enjoyable Canings5

ACES was explicitly and deliberately set up to fight what its members saw as a decline in educational standards caused and fostered by the incessant and unquestioning promotion of supposedly ‘progressive educational ideas’ throughout Australia’s education system. Ideas like getting rid of competitive examinations, eliminating any type of ability grouping, and shutting down selective schools (the equivalent that existed in some Australian states of the British grammar schools that were once much more common than they are today). I won’t go into all the details, but we were basically educational conservatives and traditionalists who wanted to preserve what we saw as important features of education in the face of an increasing onslaught and attack by trendy left-wing academics and educational theorists whose ideas were being presented in teachers colleges as if they were proven fact, rather than radical theories and which were being forced on schools and teachers who didn’t want anything to do with them.