They need our recognition and support. My view is that most educators cringe when each year the HSC, the culminating act of 12 years of education, is diminished before their eyes into an unedifying battle between public and private, boys and girls, Catholic systemic and independent, country and city, western suburbs and northern suburbs, selective and comprehensive, James Ruse and Sydney Grammar. We never saw education in those terms, but we have been powerless to combat these perceptions and to promote the broader and more generous view that lies deep within our professional beings. HSC results are important and we work like mad to help students do their best in those exams, but we have always known that there is more to academic success than an HSC and much more to education than academic success. Some of us work with students whose success is measured by their ability to write their names.
Students excel daily in a range of educational fields.
Caring for others is regarded as important and qualities of character are deeply valued. James Ruse may well, on any measure, be a great school, but achieving outstanding HSC results is not of itself sufficient to declare it the State's best. As a society we can't afford the debate about these vital questions to be trivialised by such low-level questions as which school was top of the class or fell from the HSC honour roll. In the absence of such bodies as the Commonwealth Schools Commission, the Curriculum Development Centre or even the State Education Commission, there is no formal forum in Australia for the education profession to make its voice heard with force. Nevertheless, we need a national debate, involving a cross-section of society, to define in depth what we believe about educational excellence and how to measure and report it.