All high praise should be made for Balmoral State High School for a program with very good principles of education.
However, those principles were shut down by the Queensland Government when the same type of programs were introduced before.
This Balmoral State High School program was the approach in Queensland secondary schools during the 1970s, and then the fools in Queensland Education decided, in the 80s and 90s, that this progressivist approach was too radical, and took such assessment programs out of the schools. I demand historical accountability by Queensland Education apologizing for their past mistakes.
There is much more to be said in how the Queensland Government had screwed up education in the past. I make reference to a series of my blog essays and articles on what the Queensland Education had missed, the alternatives which were shunned in the past, the benefits missed for students, and the damaged it had done for teachers’ careers:
180. Buch, Neville (2025). Misunderstanding Critics in Education, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, February 5, 2025;
161. Buch, Neville (2025). Failures in/on Higher Education Economics; the solutions are a start in policy reversal, against commodification, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, January 6, 2025;
155. Buch, Neville (2024). Stephanie M. Lee on “AI by omission”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thursday, December 19, 2024, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, December 20, 2024;
139. Buch, Neville (2024). To the new Queensland Minister for Education and the Arts, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, November 16, 2024;
114. Buch, Neville (2024), How out-of-touch Queensland educational authorities are with the global thinking on assessing learning? Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, July 9, 2024;
107. Buch, Neville (2024), The Challenge to the Educational Authorities, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, June 18, 2024;
100. Buch, Neville (2024), TASA Sociology of Education SIG Social Sciences Week Event: Expressions of Interest, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, June 13, 2024;
080. Buch, Neville (2024), Philosophically Ontology Logic Intersect Compatibility Education (POLICE), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, March 4, 2024;
077. Buch, Neville (2024), What it Takes in Education: Demythologising Education, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, February 23, 2024;
075. Buch, Neville (2024), Culture-History War in Educationalist Theory and Design, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, February 16, 2024;
069. Buch, Neville (2024), Queensland History, Religious Education, and Belief, in Socio-Anthropological Approaches to Religion: Environmental Hope, Edited by David W. Kim and Duncan Wright, London: Lexington Books;
052. Robert Calfee. Cognitive Psychology and Educational Practice at Buch, Neville (2023), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, Calfee, R. (1981). Cognitive Psychology and Educational Practice. Review of Research in Education, 9, 3–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/1167182
051. Suzanne Hidi. Mental Resource for Learning at Buch, Neville (2023), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, Hidi, S. (1990). Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning. Review of Educational Research, 60(4), 549–571. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170506
049. Buch, Neville (2022), Regarding Our Education Systems Needing Thinking in Contemporaneous Compatibilist Epistemology, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, 20 December 2022;
005. Buch, Neville (2015), No Regrets in the Evening of Life: Access, Equity and Exclusivity at Junction Park State School in the Early Twentieth Century. History of Education Review. Volume 45, No. 1, June 2016;
The critical question is the government still making the same mistakes in its understanding of education.
Dr Neville Buch is an expert on histories and historiography of big belief and doubt, educational theories and practice, within the scope of Queensland intellectual history and policy.
He has worked as higher education policy researcher for the Vice-Chancellor, Professors Roy Webb, Glyn Davis, Kwong Lee Dow, and Alan Gilbert, along with work for Chancellors, Mr. Ian Renard, and Sir Edward Woodward (1998-2008). He has been a Q ANZAC Fellow at the State Library of Queensland (2015-2016). He has recently published on the influence of Charles Strong in Queensland conservative, radical and liberal progressivism.
Dr Buch is a certified member of the Professional Historians Associations (Queensland) Incorporated and had previous responsibilities as the PHA (Qld) e-bulletin editor. He is well-published and recognised for his contribution in the histories of both Catholic secondary and state primary education in Queensland, as well as histories in the cultural and religious shaping of Protestant and Catholic organisations.
As a scholar with over 30 years’ experience writing on Christianity as religion and society, from both Christian and Post-Christian perspectives, he is Queensland’s foremost historian on belief and doubt.
Dr Buch is a local historian and Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network and the Mapping Brisbane History Project, assisting voluntary local history societies on the Brisbane to work together to gain a regional history perspective.
Currently he is a voluntary worker, but not by choice, but by the failure of the Australian economy. Dr Buch is a thematic group Convenor, in Sociology of Education, for The Australian Sociological Association (TASA). He still needs paid work.
Dr Buch has published several research papers on local history and historiography. See https://drnevillebuch.com/
Featured Image: Students suffering from fool bureaucrats in the education system. Purchased from Dreamstime.
Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
- Agency, Cultural Construction, and Synoptic Vision: On Matt Patterson’s Comprehensive Examination in Sociological Theory (2009) – September 20, 2026
- Human Existence, Existential Angst, and the Protestant Worldview: An Essay on Buch’s Existential Thesis – September 20, 2026
- Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto. Ciceronian Statecraft, Spinozan Toleration, and Prophetic Praxis – September 19, 2026