Final Day: Our Submission to ACARA

A reminder, today is the last day to make a submission to ACARA’s review of the draft mathematics curriculum. And, a further reminder, you can directly email your submission to ACARA via the yellow box half-way down this page.

Below is our submission to ACARA.

Dear ACARA,

The following is my submission, on ACARA’s draft revisions as part of ACARA’s review of the Australian Mathematics Curriculum.

My position is that ACARA should halt the review. Or withdraw it. Or whatever. Call the process whatever you like, but, please, ACARA should stop. ACARA must stop.

I am not going to argue for the existence of what I believe are the systemic flaws in the draft revisions. You will have had many such, very weighty, submissions, in writing and in person, and you would either treat these submissions with proper and respectful consideration or you would not. A further submission along these lines from me will add no perceivable weight.

What I will argue is that ACARA must stop, because ACARA does not have mathematicians, or at least sufficiently many mathematicians, even remotely on board with ACARA’s proposed revisions. One may argue how this state of affairs has come about, but one cannot argue with the simple fact: ACARA does not have sufficient backing from the community of Australian mathematicians.

Mathematicians’ voices are, of course, not the only voices that need to be heard. Mathematicians are not the rulers here. But mathematicians’ voices are key, and cannot be ignored. Mathematicians are, in the language of the review’s Terms of Reference, the subject matter experts. Any plan to implement a new mathematics curriculum, particularly a radically new mathematics curriculum, without the solid support of the subject matter experts is doomed to failure, or to absurdity, or to both.

Please listen to reality, and please stop the review process.

Kind Regards, Dr. Marty Ross