Students sliding because 'too soft' schools and parents never let them fail

WHY are our kids failing to keep up with the best students in the world? Some experts blame parents and schools for being "too soft" .

Researcher Amanda Ripley says failure is part of normal learning.

AUSSIE parents and schools are too soft on kids for them to compete internationally and experts blame a growing "everyone gets a ribbon" culture for holding students back.

And it's unlikely Australian academic performances will improve without a dramatic shift towards "more rigorous" schooling.

New research this week confirmed Australian achievement has fallen over the past decade, despite a government target of reaching the top five countries in maths and science by 2025.

High-school kids going backwards

Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, said schools and parents were responsible for declining standards both here and in the United States.

"We tend to worry more about students' self esteem than about how challenged they are in the classroom," Ms Ripley said of her research, which explores how teenagers learn in top performing countries by following exchange students to Finland, South Korea and Poland.

"One of the things that stands out is that school is far more rigorous in these places, and that failure is part of normal learning."

This over-protective approach to raising children not only discourages competition, it leaves many high school graduates ill-prepared for life after they graduate.

"The trick is that teaching kids to fail and then recover is easier when they are ten than when they are 30, so if we don't teach them about resilience when they are younger we are not really helping them," she said.

"There is definitely this real anxiety about making kids feel uncomfortable, but then once they turn 18 we sort of drop them like a rock, and we set them up for some degree of failure."

Dr Kevin Donnelly, director of the Education Standards Institute, said the lack of competitiveness in Australian education was a large contributor to declining standards compared to the education superpowers in Asia and Europe.

"It's funny because in sport, Australians are comfortable being very competitive, but when it comes to education we have this egalitarian dumbing down, where you don't want children to compete and you don't want to hurt them by failing them," he said.

This had seen a particularly sharp drop in standards for top students, reflected in new research from the Australian Council of Educational Research.

"We don't really recognise merit or ability in education because the argument for a long time has been that that's elitist and unfair," he said.

"This idea that everyone gets a ribbon or a prize when you go to a speech night, it doesn't help students to aim high."

But Rachel Sowden, from the Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations, said Australian students were better off than those in countries with an overly strong focus on academic achievement.

"As parents we are not too soft at all. All everyone wants is for their children to be happy and resilient, but it's important that they get a well rounded education," she said.

"We need to take a broader look than just at numeracy and literacy, and focus on the whole child. Here there is also a lot of focus on physical activity, creative arts and the social skills they learn at school, and they are all as important as literacy and numeracy as academic performance."

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