Given that The ALP is focussing so much on School Education I think a good question to consider is:
what is the purpose of a school?
(1) On the one hand there there is the "Respectful Relationships Education" program from Victoria.
It's emphasis is on Engineering Society.
"The resulting resource,
Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence, written by Dr Debbie Ollis, takes into account the key findings around effective violence-prevention strategies in schools proposed in the above report. It provides teaching and learning activities planned around key themes of gender, power, violence and respect for Years 8, 9 and 10 as well as advice around a whole-school approach to violence prevention.
A new Unit 3: Gender, power and media is now available for Year 10 students. This unit builds on the material covered in two other units, Unit 1: Gender, respect and relationships (for Year 8 students) and Unit 2: The power connection (for Year 9 students). It follows on from topics already covered on gender, power and building respectful relationships.
Unit 3 has a strong emphasis on building media and health literacy and is designed to explore earlier topics around sexualisation, media and gender in more depth."
(2) On the other the Traditional View of the School:
It's aim is to bolster the values of the traditional home.
"Durkheim proposed that educational reforms reflect the general cultural context and illustrate the way in which the school attends to emerging needs that are not yet institutionalized in political society as a whole. This attempts an explanation of how the subjects of study which constitute the ‘content’ of education at any given time give rise to ‘categories of thought’ which thus inform the development of a society’s collective representations.
Modern society has been based increasingly on industrialization of areas of life influenced by the division of labour. The result is an increased differentiation in social roles and the specialization of social functions; part of the concern which comes with this adaptation to narrowing sets of circumstance is the risk that ‘social solidarity’ will disintegrate into the stratification of society through emergent caste systems. Certainly we seem to be witnessing this in terms of widening disparity of wealth and quality of life, and also in terms of agency.
