Progressive teaching fads fuel youth crime, says Noel Pearson

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has railed against ‘progressive’ teaching fads that are ‘wasting lives and futures’’ of vulnerable children left illiterate.

Noel Pearson wants schools to focus on phonics. Picture: iStock

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has railed against “progressive’’ teaching fads that are “wasting lives and futures’’ of vulnerable children left illiterate.

In an impassioned plea to target children falling behind at school, Mr Pearson called on universities and schools to embrace “explicit instruction” – a more traditional show-and-tell approach to teaching instead of the modern “student-led inquiry’’.

Pinning juvenile crime on “failed learning’’, Mr Pearson said the need for top-quality teaching was “nose-on-the-face’’ obvious. “Yes it’s the pastoral care, yes it’s the love, yes it’s the dedication but without effective instruction, it’s nothing,’’ he said. “We are wasting lives, wasting futures.’’

Mr Pearson, who chairs Good to Great Schools Australia and set up the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy, which runs schools in Coen and Hope Vale, said in some remote schools “30 per cent of children have been tested at the lowest level of IQ”.

“The Royal Flying Doctor Service found that another 40 per cent are not much above that,’’ he told a Catholic education conference in Canberra on Monday.

“We deal with children who are the children of children of severe trauma, alcoholism and communities that are in tragic ruin.

“The difficulty of learning (for) children like that is vast.’’

Mr Pearson said many Indigenous children, like migrant kids, needed to be taught to read and write using the phonetic method of sounding out the letters of words rather than memorising and guessing words.

“The phonemes (sounds) of Aboriginal languages and other ESL (English as a second language) students often are at odds with English,’’ he said. “If you don’t give kids explicit instruction in these phonemes, they’re going to be behind everybody else.

“If you want to make sure that the most disadvantaged kids in the class will have a chance, too, then we have to address the fact that they need explicit instruction.

“It’s about learning from the teacher, and we learn a lot from reading and imitating someone who knows what we don’t.’’

Mr Pearson praised the Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn for its Catalyst program to train its teachers to use explicit instruction and phonics.

“Catalyst is the most important development in Australian school­ing,’’ he said.

“You’re going to be a beacon for the rest of the country.’’

Mr Pearson called for teacher-led instruction, memorisation, the streaming of students based on ability and regular testing to keep kids on track. He said a “placement test’’ of students’ knowledge and streamed classes would put students in the “right zone of learning’’.

“They experience the joy and pride of having learned something at the very next lesson because they’ve been placed correctly on the staircase,’’ he said.

Mr Pearson said explicit instruction had been wrongly characterised as “traditional, conservative and punitive … Do you think this is just an accident, that poor and disadvantaged children are denied?”

“We have a juvenile justice crisis in this country, and you know where it starts,” he said. “It starts with the failure to read, occasioned by the failure to teach, and a steadfast refusal for systems and educators to … see the evidence.

“Every year we spend stuffing around … we fail children and we destroy lives.’’

Mr Pearson said universities were failing to train new teachers to use explicit instruction and phonics, so it was an “uphill battle’’ to retrain them on the job.