Strict school discipline will give Aussie students the best chance
Ignoring bad student behaviour and a trend of faddish education theories are dragging down Australia’s education system. It’s revealed in the abysmal fall in our academic results.
Opinion
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Several years ago, when my children were small, I worked as an artist-in-residence at several public high schools in Sydney’s southwest.
My job was to help the classroom teachers show the students new and innovative art techniques. It was great fun, the teachers were welcoming and most of the kids loved making the art.
But what surprised me was the lack of discipline at some schools.
Some boys brought basketballs into the classrooms, bouncing them on the desks every so often, disrupting everyone and shaking the artworks.
Some kids wouldn’t remove their school backpacks when they sat down, so they sat awkwardly constrained in their chairs.
Others hid their laptops between their bodies and the desk and wouldn’t put them away, even though their attention was meant to be on the art lessons.
How some of the teenagers spoke to the female staff was a revelation.
I remember being shocked at the quiet voice of one of the teachers, plaintively pleading for a bunch of out-of-control, noisy boys to calm down. They ignored her timid requests.
Another teacher later told me the school hierarchy would not back them up on matters of discipline.
So I wasn’t surprised when I read a policy paper from the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) recently, pointing out that Australia is ranked 70th out of 77 countries around the world on discipline.
We’re hopeless at it.
And it’s showing up in the abysmal fall in our academic results. Our 15-year-old boys and girls are months and, in some cases, years behind in their subject knowledge compared to students from the early 2000s.
Two in five students say their classmates don’t listen to what their teacher says and nearly half say there’s noise and disorder in most or all lessons.
Discipline is a dirty word these days. It’s rejected as old-fashioned by many modern educational theorists, just as progressive theories about “student directed learning” and flexible and open plan classrooms have taken hold.
One Nation MP Mark Latham has raised alarm bells about this for a while now, concerned so many new classrooms built since 2017 feature “modern and flexible spaces” – modern new buildings which can have up to four classes in the one open room with movable walls. There’s no distinct front of classroom. But students find it difficult to concentrate and there is little evidence of improved academic outcomes Latham says.
Latham also staunchly rejects what he calls “experimental” and “faddish” theories of “collaborative learning” or “self-started learning” or “student-directed learning”, which he says have been tested at thousands of schools around the world and are not as effective as “direct instruction” – the old-fashioned way where teachers stand at the front of the classroom and are the authority. He points out that the poster child of education – Finland – is now in decline with its education results, with experts pointing to two contributing factors – a move to more digital learning and the 2016 introduction of a “phenomenon-based curriculum”. That’s jargon for more student directed learning and studying in groups.
The alarm bells about our lack of discipline have reached Canberra. Federal education committee chairman and WA Liberal, Senator Matt O’Sullivan, has set up a new parliamentary inquiry into the issue of disorderly classrooms. He tells me it’s “vital that work is done now to fix these problems”.
“Disruptive classrooms lead to disrupted learning for our students, contributing to declining literacy and numeracy results and denying them the opportunity to reach their full educational, economic and social potential,” he says.
Our pollies might save a bit of time if they have a good chat with Britain’s “strictest” and “meanest” headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh.
Her London school is so strict that detentions are handed out for talking in the corridors or forgetting to bring pens.
Good manners are drilled into the children; they learn to be grateful for small things, to thank their teachers and even stand when the headmistress arrives at assembly.
When the UK tabloids in the UK dubbed her “Britain’s meanest headmistress,” Birbalsingh’s answer was that “true meanness is to keep a child illiterate and innumerate”.
New Zealand born, she created a remarkable new school from scratch in London — against much opposition — eight years ago called Michaeala Community School.
It’s based on traditional ideas of explicit instruction and tough love, a no-excuses behaviour policy.
The school recently topped the British Progress 8 tables for maths and came fifth best school in the country. Her students end up, on average, more than two grades higher than what would have been achieved at another school, despite many being disadvantaged.
The Centre for Independent Studies brought Birbalsingh out for lectures recently, and she spoke about the need to hold high expectations for all children, regardless of disadvantaged backgrounds.
She mentioned an earlier visit to Australia in 2011 which “rang some warning bells” and was “really quite shocking in many ways”.
“I remember there were a lot of Aboriginal children in the school,” she recalled.
“They were playing guitar, the teachers were playing guitar and they were doing a lot of singing.
“I was there for a while and I said, ‘So are we going to see some maths? Are we going to see some English?’.
“The teachers said to me, ‘Well these kids aren’t going to really amount to much. Let’s have fun while we can. Let’s sing some songs and let them enjoy life.’
“And if their teachers, through what they believe to be compassion, are constantly letting those children down by not holding them to account. The children end up in prison, on welfare, or in some dead-end job.”
Yes indeed. And we’re seeing the results of this Kumbaya approach in society. Faddish education theories and a lack of the very basics – an orderly classroom – are harming our next generation.
The hardest job will be to turn this all around. We must empower our teachers to create orderly classrooms by giving them the right skills at university in the first place and, more importantly, to have school bosses and families back them up 100 per cent.