PISA results revealed Queensland's primary school kids are lagging behind most of the other states and Australia as a whole is continuing on it's downwards trajectory despite a lot of Federal money going into various iterations of Gonski and Naplan. Thus it was widely discussed in the media today and on an ABC radio program I listened to this afternoon. I must inject at this point that as a baby boomer am I totally over being labelled as the lucky but greedy generation by current day millennials. We paid high interest rates for our first house (not houses), budgeted so that one of us could stay at home until the kids started school, had one car and worked bloody hard. So I listened to a lady decrying the PISA results today. Her husband and good self are both "health professionals" who have houses to pay for. They leave home with their 2 kids by 7am and don't get home until 6pm. And she wondered how could they be expected to help with any homework or reading, get dinner..... Well she did have a solution. Her kids attend after school care and she has suggested that they provide a homework club. Her one problem was that she wasn't sure any of the carers would be academically up to the job. Well bug..r me. Adding more insult she said that she didn't have the luxury of staying at home as did the boomer generation. We also didn't have 4 WDS, investment houses or go on overseas holidays. It's time for todays parents to embrace ultimate responsibility for their children's education. I really do question how they thought having kids was going to work.
