Students are not Citizens – Australia’s New Educational Policy
Students are not Citizens – Australia’s New Educational Policy
This article was originally published in February 2020 with slight editorial modifications in the Echo here.
Last December the Education Council of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) adopted a new educational policy – the Alice Springs Education Declaration – in which reference to climate change and the inclusion of sustainability as a cross-curriculum priority were removed, and students were reconceived, no longer as citizens, but as apolitical ‘members of the community’. To understand the significance of this new policy it’s necessary to describe the history of its predecessors.