How great it is to see that Australian education is back on track with the new draft national curriculum. No more dumbing down for us! And if you want to find out more about the battle against dumbing down, you can go to the national curriculum website, and, erm, watch the instructional video on how to use the website. The video is 14 minutes long. Even better, check out the title:

An Introduction to Australian Curriculum

Before you start looking at the curriculum, please view the video below and click on the key questions to get further information on the Australian curriculum and how to use this website.

Last time I looked, the English language still used definite articles. Furthermore, “looking at” isn’t idiomatically correct, unless the whole thing has been rendered as an artist’s impression. And “further information about the national curriculum” would have eliminated the ambiguous meanings generated by use of the word “on”.

Indeed,  the sentence as a whole is pretty awful, the “and” applying the verb phrase “get further information on” to a noun phrase — “the Australian curriculum”  — and an adverbial clause “how to use this website”. It’s grammatical, but gives the distinct impression that part of the sentence is missing. A little too Hemingwayesque (“they had oysters and margaritas and a way to escape the world they knew forever and more margaritas and it was warm and it was good”) for actual information-giving.

Meanwhile, the sidebar is most informative

Key Questions:

Spot the error, anyone? Yes, the last “question” is an instruction, and should not have a question mark. Or it should be phrased another way, so that the heading does not have to be changed to “key questions and an instruction that begins with a word questions usually begin with”. Unless, of course, it is there as a piece of chorus dialogue (“how oh how shall we provide feedback?”), in which case quotation marks should be employed. Or to indicate rising inflection, a la Neighbours.

Finally, the fourth, and, in fact, last question currently invites the answer “they’re the sequences of deadlines we set for development of the Australian Curriculum”, and should be changed to “What are the development timelines for the Australian Curriculum?” No, you should not use “What are the Australian Curriculum’s development timelines?” as it is a false possessive, but the fact that it even looks possible demonstrates how unhelpfully ambiguous is the question as written. What’s that? Who said “rack off, everyone knows what it means”?* That’s a slippery slope, with ebonics at the end. Report to Justine Ferrari, for 197 mortgage-paying new articles on how deconstruction has ruined finger-painting.

Hilarious. A gang of Queenslanders are reconstructing the Australian education system. For those with two PhDs, the website offers an opportunity to “read the video transcript” instead. Apart from that whole thing going very well is.

*Yes, the question mark should be outside the quotes. Unless it’s rising inflection a la Neighbours. Sorry, a la Neighbours?