Donnelly is The Australian’s main weapon in the campaign it has been running for several years on literacy education. His beliefs about curriculum reform are endorsed by other in-house journalists, editors and even by senior political writer Paul Kelly. Dissenting views are occasionally published, but most often as letters to the editor. Donnelly is presented to the public as the guru on all matters related to literacy education, while anyone with a different perspective is dismissed as part of the ‘loony left’.

One of those rare dissenting pieces was published in the March 2007 issue of The Australian Literary Review. In a long article, Stuart Macintyre devoted the first half to Donnelly’s Liberal Party connections and his dubious reputation as an education expert, and the second half to Dumbing Down, which Macintyre dismissed as ‘a book of slipshod argument, poor scholarship and meretricious presentation’. On the following Saturday, Donnelly was given half a page in the Weekend Australian to respond to Macintyre’s ‘so-called review’ of his book. He accused Macintyre of prejudices, inaccuracies and of not having read his explanation of outcomes-based education.

In his new book, Donnelly encapsulates the lament of conservatives in education. He argues that by concentrating on process instead of content, and because of the ‘dumbing down’ of academic subjects to make them seem attractive and accessible, many students leave school culturally illiterate. He holds responsible a flawed, ideologically driven education system in which standards have fallen. However, when it comes to providing evidence for his accusations, Donnelly is on shaky ground.

Much of Dumbing Down focuses on outcomes-based education. It is difficult to know just what Donnelly means by the term as he uses it to represent all that he seeks to discredit in education: ‘fads’ such as whole language, fuzzy maths and history that produces students with a fragmented and superficial knowledge of the past. Although Donnelly is correct when he says that by the mid-1990s outcomes-based education had taken hold in Australia, he misleads readers when he claims that the American Spady model, which derives from Mastery Learning, has prevailed. The attention to outcomes also emerged from the growing emphasis on accountability and performance indicators. Systems and teachers found themselves in the difficult situation of having to respond to dual objectives that were always strange bedfellows: extending educational opportunities to the many disadvantaged groups of students across the nation, while also meeting the requirements of the economy and the business world.

Less than a decade since its introduction, there has been a retreat from the outcomes model. Teachers complained about the crowded curriculum. Donnelly documents this retreat in his book, yet continues to decry the ill effects of the approach. What Dumbing Down reveals is that Donnelly is a writer in need of a new topic. Outcomes-based education has already had its day. A more valuable direction would be to think about effective ways to prepare the nation’s children to face the inevitably complex demands of their post-school lives.

Dumbing Down is a repository for Donnelly’s familiar targets: edubabble, political correctness, postmodernism, whole language and critical literacy. He offers the same evidence to support his claims about falling literacy standards: the results of a national literacy test conducted under David Kemp’s reign as minister of education that has been widely discredited; a survey of students at the Australian Defence Force Academy, which he uses to generalise about the literacy capabilities of all beginning Australian university students; Australian students’ indisputably excellent results in the international PISA tests, which he tries to discredit by suggesting that the students would have failed if they had been penalised for their grammar and punctuation mistakes.

Donnelly wants to turn the clock back. His hope is to restore a traditional approach to the teaching of English that means reinstating the canon and removing the texts of popular culture. This is not possible. When we read Shakespeare today, we see the plays through twenty-first century eyes; we can’t deny that there have been developments in the world of ideas. There have been huge changes due to science, but also due to feminism, indigenous rights and social justice. The impact of these ideas cannot be ignored. Giving attention to them in the literacy classroom does not mean that there is no place for the classics and basic literacy skills. For people interested in learning about the state of literacy education in the nation’s schools, Dumbing Down offers little insight about the many challenges teachers face.