Gonski plan will turn students into ‘automatons’, UniSA Professor Alan Reid says

THE national plan to overhaul schools will turn students into robots and push teachers to the sidelines, says the expert who led the state’s key education advisory group.

THE national plan to overhaul schools will turn students into robots, fail to prepare them for the future and push teachers to the sidelines, says the expert who led the state’s key education advisory group.

UniSA Professor Alan Reid has produced a scathing assessment of the Federal Government’s new education blueprint, claiming technology companies who make online test systems are more likely to benefit than students.

The blueprint from businessman David Gonski, whose recommendations the Federal Government has accepted in principle, found Australian schools had “failed a generation” of children.

It recommended a shift away from traditional year levels to a focus on individual progress independent of age and a new online test tool for teachers to plot each student’s progress constantly and help them tailor programs for each child.

Prof Reid, who led the former Labor state government’s public education advisory committee, wrote in an education union journal that the proposed “personalised learning” would “tightly constrain” students and teachers.

“It recommends an approach where content and skills across every area of the curriculum are atomised into bite-sized chunks of knowledge, then sequenced into levels of ‘learning progression’,” he wrote.

“Students work on their own and, at regular points, use online assessment tools to test their readiness for the next chunk of knowledge.

“This version of personalised learning is not unlike the model of direct instruction, which was developed in the 1960s. Its recent manifestation in the US has been a financial bonanza for private technology companies, which have developed online tests and learning resources capable of tracking the progress of, and devising programs for, individual students.” Prof Reid wrote such programs turned students into “automatons”.

“And teachers are increasingly excluded from the process, as planning and decision making is done by algorithms. The result is a narrow and highly individualised learning experience which is unlikely to prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century.”

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the Gonski report, released a month ago, had received “widespread support” from primary and secondary educators from all school sectors, as well as from parent, welfare and business groups. He said too many students were “cruising” through school and the recommendations, which need the states’ co-operation to deliver, were designed to stretch students “to their maximum capabilities”.