OnLine Opinion

Graham Cooke
Australia's monolingual culture is at risk of being unable to compete in a globalised 21st century.

Phil Rennie
Given the explosion in university student numbers and the high cost to us all, surely its time to re-evaluate the benefit to society.

Stuart Collins
It is clearly pointless advertising the attraction of careers in the building trades if the pathway to those careers is too difficult or onerous. The building and construction industry is one of the mainstays of the Australian economy, worth almost $70 billion a year and keeping more than 350,000 in work.

Kirsten Storry
What is worse: that children can't read or write at grade level, or that other people know?

Stephen Law
In both Australia and my native UK faith schools are booming as a direct result of government policy. These schools are popular. British parents have been known to fake religious commitment to get their child into the right school.

Mercurius Goldstein
Would you describe somebody who exits a burning building as exercising a "choice" to leave?

Jane Caro
In the US, 90 per cent of students attend public schools; the government provides no funding to private schools because the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the separation of church and state

Chris Berg
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is arguing that Google is responsible for the content of the advertisements that accompany its search results, and that it is not sufficiently obvious that they are ads.

Danny Kingsley
Changes to the way academics will be assessed and funded are a hot topic in learned circles, with the Research Quality Framework (RQF) looming next year if the Government retains office in the upcoming federal election. Unfortunately this new system will be a lost opportunity for opening up access to research results in Australia.

Jeff Schubert
Gregory Melleuish, in last week’s Australian, “Bishop's lesson full of political ideology”, highlights two important issues. The first is that there is more to the history of Australians than the history of Australia because many do not have white English speaking ancestors.

Kirsten Storry
If you have flown with Qantas recently, you may have seen the documentary Bush School made in 2004 about the Warrego primary school outside Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It is the inspiring story of how the school principal and administrator, Colin and Sandra Baker, together with the local elders, got the Indigenous children of the nearby Mungalawurru community to attend school every day, achieve the national literacy and numeracy benchmarks, and love learning.

Stuart Cunningham
Readers of The Courier-Mail and viewers and listeners to local TV and radio could be excused for being concerned, not only over QUT's regard for academic freedom and the humanities but also confused about how these matters are connected.

Scott Prasser
Last week the vice-chancellors of Australia's eight leading universities proposed a more deregulated higher education system, meant to be more responsive to changing circumstances than the present arrangements involving more than 30 institutions of different sizes and roles.

Zelda Bailey
The Humanist Society of Queensland (HSQ) has for many years been trying to get the Department of Education to allow the society to provide a secular Humanist program for its members’ children during the period for Religious Instruction (RI)in state schools.

Hawraa Alsaai
When Hawraa Alsaai, her parents and her little sister arrived in Australia seeking asylum in mid-2002, the family was traumatised after leaving Iraq. They were among the 200 passengers on the infamous “children overboard” boat, the Siev IV. The family was subsequently detained on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. At the age of 13, Hawraa enrolled at Footscray City College and began to learn English for the first time.

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