What's wrong with our schooling

Peter Wilson

IT is difficult being a full-time teacher in Australia and to contribute simultaneously to the nation's growing debate on education.

Aside from time constraints, government school teachers are reluctant to speak up for fear of censuring by their employers; and independent school teachers fear feeding the tall poppy syndrome.

I can challenge both hindrances with relative immunity because I have been fortunate enough in the past six years to have taught in a range of government and independent schools. I now work in a school where I believe the balance is right, but traversing the country on short contracts I taught in 13 schools in four states, some of which were superb but most were failing.

The differences are no more alarming than the similarities are poignant and two common threads stood out; themes that, I believe, permeate every school.

The debate over Australia's schooling does not come down to funding, or curriculum, laptops on every desk or a well-spent stimulus package. Schooling in Australia comes down to student behaviour. Period.

The elephant in the classroom, I have found in every school I have worked in, is the empowerment teachers have surrendered gradually as part of the collateral damage inflicted by the postmodern social revolution.

This elephant shows no prejudice for system, teaching style or subject. I noticed a significant loss of this power in the 1990s, the decade between me leaving the class as a student and returning 13 years later as a teacher.

This era coincided with the expansion of student-centred learning, a concept in which the student takes control of their education; a kind of existentialism whereby teachers must fit into and become a subculture of the student's world. It works exceptionally well in psychology and with gifted, focused kids in well-resourced schools but is completely destructive otherwise.

Child-centred education tends to neglect that children by nature need outright directing in their early years. To think a child's interest in, say, atomic structure is driven enough that they will research off their own bat until they discover the neutron for themselves is folly; but that is what the model wants us to implement.

Children, by nature, are going to take the path of least resistance. No education revolution or election campaign is going to change 100,000 years of biological and social evolution. Anthropological studies of indigenous cultures reveal the early nurturing of children by non-parental mentors is crucial for their later development. Child-centred learning is the complete opposite because self-discipline is rarely self-taught.

Another instinct we cannot ignore as a species is competition. We compete in sport, in business and in life, we suffer status anxiety as adults, yet when it comes to schooling we shy away from competition between individuals and institutions because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. School sport seems to have evaporated. All that outcome-based education, which assesses student performance uniformly, achieved was a generous amount of paperwork for teachers and underachievement by hundreds of gifted students. In this utopian ideal, equal opportunity equates to equal outcome. What a wasteful lot of nonsense.

The second consistent theme throughout Australian schools is that the tussle within education is a product of a societal attitude that does not hold education in high esteem, compared with countries that outpace us.

Playing up at school is a part of our national psyche; mocking teachers, truancy, smoking behind the bike shed and forming obstructive gangs that spill over into streets and bike clubs instead of on to sporting fields is all part of our larrikin nature, and until we confront this fallout of such a cultural attitude we can never, ever expect to excel academically on the world stage. Ever.

The energy that teachers in Australia exhaust on grasping at credibility could be much better spent. Some of the nonsense I have had to battle with across Australia includes having my homework annulled in a Hobart school because a bright student once almost had a breakdown under the weight of her assignments -- a kneejerk reaction I could not believe. A school in Queensland cut down overnight a row of 150-year-old bunya pines of significant historical and aesthetic value outside my classroom because a parent feared their child being killed by a falling cone.

In Melbourne, the trend is popular among co-ed schools to spend hours recombining different class rolls at year's end to accommodate students' wishes to be with friends. Some Victorian and Tasmanian students delight in writing cheat sheets for tests and exams, the argument for such hilarity being "they may not be revising properly but at least they're doing something".

I have taught at a government school where I physically measured how much of my lesson was spent on class control: it averaged to more than 35 per cent of the time. I relayed this data to a maths class and confronted them with the prospect of getting only four years of high school instead of six. That message got through at the coalface and the class responded well. But has the message been taken up by those in ivory towers with utopian academic dreams of how children should respond to minimal structure in their life with a magical sense of self-direction that never comes?

At another school I was unable to visit a former student of mine in hospital after she barely survived a savage weapon attack from a peer, because I was no longer an employee of the state. Never mind I had been her first daily point of civil contact in a very uncivil suburb for three months; a few weeks later and suddenly I am barred from contact, the whole essence of pastoral care lost in a heartless politically correct system.

These are all symptoms of a non-systematic approach to filling a void left by parents who do not value education as well as they should. And it should not be in a school's brief to do so. Little wonder there is so much disparity in the debate.

Finland is worth mentioning as a comparison, as it continually tops the world on all recognised international education standards. Not only is a Finnish child's education highly esteemed from a very young age by society at large but the profession of teacher is highly competitive (one in 100 applicants enter university) and the country has an early intervention program such that no child is left behind. Not one, in a nation of five million.

I do not suggest we steal the Finnish model outright as it suits a national identity with a consensus on the value of schooling. Finns are a sophisticated lot, and they tend to be pragmatic and to the point. Visit a crowded mall in Turku and you'd be deafened by the silence. Student-directed learning suits them to the ground, and the fact they do it in almost half the contact hours without uniforms or formality really rubs it in the world's face.

And good on them. They use technology in the classroom to astoundingly good effect. In contrast I have known students who can download shoot-em-up games to feed an eight-hour-a-day gaming habit and not once bring a laptop to my class, their parents oblivious to the true use of their extensive cash outlay.

In Australia we need to stop sugar-coating our education systems. Call the failures for what they are, recognise the decades of trends we have endured and turn our focus instead on what happens at home.

It will be an unpopular government that starts legislating for the full protection of the child, which means confronting advertisers, internet providers and FM radio stations; not only protecting a child from exploitation, violence and neglect but making the realm of their education a sanctuary against the myriad inputs that exist today.

Would a government be tough enough to force a telephone company, for example, to "dead spot" a school until its students have dealt with a cyber-bullying problem? It is sad that penalising families of truant students through welfare is considered merely a good idea; it should have been mandatory decades ago.

If schools truly need to pick up the social pieces for a child, then the school needs to be empowered.

Those schools in Australia whose outcomes buck the national trend are those that have resisted education fads of the past. They have avoided OBEs and ELs (essential learning standards) and any other abbreviations imposed from on high. They have retained uniforms; their students recognise the value in manners, respect for all, punctuality and responsibility for their actions.

When a young child has these building blocks in place, then developing any sort of curriculum is possible and the outcomes exceed the national standard. I have shared in this success at two of our nation's finest schools.

What is stopping the government from turning to such institutions and asking the hard questions: "How can we improve? What do we need to bring back? How do our schools get re-empowered?"

But to suggest such a thing is so un-Australian; and instead the debate between government and independent schools is all about funding and an apparent elitism.

From the breadth of my experience there is no elitism. There is simply brilliance in education being executed by a very few; and an inheritance by others, often only in the next suburb, of a social experiment that, in some cases, has gone horribly wrong.

Stifling the debate by making it all about funding and an apparent classist society protects the state from real scrutiny over what it has done with our kids for close to 40 years.

It is the education revolution itself that has spawned a classist society because it has stalled our nation's learning to a standstill; and the vilification of those who buck the trend robs the debate of any true depth.

Peter Wilson is an agronomist who left the CSIRO 12 years ago and has since taught in state, independent, non-denominational and Catholic schools across co-ed and single-sex campuses.