All we can see outside, and what the syllabus still teaches inside. (and that is a phonemically multisyllabic word!)

There is a line in the NSW Stage 3 English syllabus.

Under the spelling outcome, the students have to segment unfamiliar multisyllabic words

They need to know the word ‘recognise’ has 3 syllables and 8 phonemes.

Phonologically I am sure that is correct.

Pedagogically it is impressive in its precision.

As a piece of preparation for the working lives of Australian eleven-year-olds, it is lacking.

The same month the syllabus is being taught...

• Canva is reporting that ninety per cent of its workforce uses AI daily across all functions.

• Large corporations now have an internal system that breaks roles into tasks and skills and automatically recommends upskilling pathways for employees.

• Engineers are managing multiple agents in parallel, and very soon will be managing AGI.

The skill people are being hired and promoted on is not phoneme segmentation but the orchestration of work across humans and machines.

I have no quarrel with phonemes. I would just like to register that the gap between what we teach and what kids will need has widened to the point of comedy.

The proposal at www.primarai.com.au/theprimaraischool is what closing that gap could look like.