Cyber security in the Australian school curriculum

The Australian government proposes cyber security education for kids aged five to sixteen to help them handle this increasingly online world. The five-year-olds will be taught not to share personal information, like their date of birth or full name. After that they will learn about pop ups, online competitions and spam.

Then in later years, they will then learn what personal and location data is saved and stored by online service providers and how this might reveal their identity to unscrupulous actors.The proposal also talks about educating children in “the use of nicknames and why these are important when playing online games.”

Before the end of their primary education, under the proposed plan, children will learn about “responding respectfully to other people’s opinions even if they are different from their own.”The new draft curriculum has also extracted some 20% of existing material, which has been criticized as unnecessary in the 21st century, where digital skills and competence are more important than ever before.The governmental consultation process is already underway but it remains to be seen whether future generations of Australian children will truly become well-versed digital natives as foreseen in the plan.Australia's curriculum is developed by the federal government but enacted at a state and territorial level. In other words, even if the cyber security focused curriculum is executed, local education boards may still opt for their own curricula.Were it to be enacted, Australia would become one of the first countries in the world to formally educate its children in basic cyber security, including how best to assess potentially unsafe apps, manage their data privacy and avoid the pitfalls of online scams.Amongst already increasing digitization of everyday life, which was then boosted by online learning from the start of the global pandemic, cyber security education will probably enter many curriculums around the world in the coming decades.Learn about our cybersecurity solutions like browser isolation, web app isolation and the digital vault.Read more about this: Source