‘Progressive education’ faces a steep learning curve

Standards in Australian education are in decline, with 41 per cent of our 15-year-olds failing to meet what are considered minimum standards for reading, and 20 per cent being functionally illiterate.

As the summer holidays wind up and children return to the classroom in coming weeks, debates about education are likely to heat up – and for good reason.

Schools in Australia have been intermittently closed over the past two years, with pupils in Melbourne and Sydney spending the bulk of last year at home in front of a computer screen. The impact of school closures on educational outcomes is not yet known, but it is likely that a concerning trend will have been accelerated.

Every three years, an organisation called PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment) tests a randomly selected sample of pupils from OECD countries to assess levels of education around the world. The most recent set of results, released in 2019, confirmed that standards in Australian education were in decline, with 41 per cent of our 15-year-olds failing to meet what are considered minimum standards for reading, and 20 per cent being functionally illiterate.

Why? Education researcher and primary school teacher Greg Ashman believes Australia’s educational decline is in large part due to a suite of teaching methods loosely described as “progressive education”. Progressive education is not synonymous with progressive politics; rather, it is an approach to teaching that prioritises skills-based learning over memorisation.

In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge writes: “Up through the 19th and early 20th centuries, a classical education often included rote memorisation of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical ­attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum because they were too rigid, boring, and ‘not relevant’. But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity these students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols.”

The most widely valued skills in progressive education are not fluency and grace with language or mathematics, but the higher order skills of critical thinking and problem solving. An article published by the ABC on Monday, “Could our education system be more engaging and fun for our kids? These schools think so and are giving it a crack”, reflects this approach well:

“Students and educators spend parts of their days outside school grounds, exploring local parks and beaches and interacting with the community. They have reading and maths lessons on the beach … Ms Nuss (Principal of the Village School at Coolangatta) started to question why school couldn’t be more like kindergarten … Why can’t children wear tutus to school? Take their shoes off in the classroom? … Our unofficial motto is ‘Failing Forward’. We fail almost everyday at something; as long as we can learn from it, it was a good fail or lesson.”

This may all sound harmless in and of itself, but there is no evidence wearing tutus or taking shoes off helps children learn to read and write and memorise their times tables.

Another teacher profiled in the article reports that “There are fabulous teachers trying to make their classrooms more relevant and engaging, and schools adopting programs to enhance skills and more real-life experiences, but there are still many, many classrooms that have a teacher at the front of the room, kids sitting in rows being asked to regurgitate information without thinking, analysing, critically or creatively problem solving to come up with solutions”.

The problem with such an assertion is that there is no evidence critical thinking and problem solving are skills that can actually be taught. Psychologists suspect we can only think critically about a subject after we have accrued some deep knowledge in it. This makes intuitive sense. To think critically about 19th century English literature you would need to have read Dickens, the Brontes, Hardy and more. To think critically about trigonometry, you would need to have developed some deep mathematical knowledge. Critical thinking does not occur in a vacuum.

The notion that critical thinking is a skill that cuts across domains is a fallacious one. Ex­pertise in one area often corresponds with blindness and ignorance in another. Such epistemic overconfidence leads epidemiologists to pontificate on racism and medical doctors to sound off about climate change.

It is often argued today that memorising facts is redundant because knowledge is just a couple of clicks away. This may be true, but as our digital information ecosystems continue to be polluted with propaganda and disinformation, it is not an ideal scenario to have children searching the web for ­reliable sources. Ideally, children would accrue a foundation in the basic disciplines before venturing into the Wild West of the internet.

The educational mania for soft skills comes from a place of good intent. We all want our children to be able to communicate well, think creatively, critically and solve problems. We all want our children to be able to adapt to novel environments and find solutions that are not immediately obvious. Nobody wants their child to sit inside a dusty classroom rote-learning arbitrary facts they will have no use for later in life.

However, children only get one shot at school. The schooling years are some of the most important years of their lives, and time squandered during this period can never be regained.

If teachers want their pupils to think critically, the first step is helping them to build a deep foundation of knowledge that enables them to do so.