Education Minister Christopher Pyne has appointed think tank commentator and former Liberal Party chief of staff Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire, professor of public administration in the University of Queensland's business school, to review the national school curriculum with the aim of removing ''partisan bias''.

Pyne claims he wants children to be taught critical thinking but Donnelly, though he makes a living from critical thinking, thinks critical thinking should be removed from the curriculum. In his 2004 book Why Our Schools are Failing Donnelly rails against the belief that education is essentially a process ''where students had to be 'socially critical' and 'empowered' to enable them to 'challenge the status quo' ''.

Credit: Julian Kingma

Donnelly is an associate of right-wing think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, and is on record criticising the whole idea of a national school curriculum. In an institute backgrounder on education reform in 2000 he asked: ''What is the point of parents and students being able to choose which school they want if all schools are made to follow the same centrally determined curriculum?''

Ironically, he pointed out that ''if the curriculum is centrally mandated, especially by the state, then it is very easy for it to be co-opted by whoever is in control at the time to further their own ends''. Apparently this is not a concern if he and Christopher Pyne are the ones in control and doing the co-opting.