Lessons in the value of knowledge: a new start for kids

Knowledge Society’s Elena Douglas says primary school is where improved teaching can make the most difference.

Elena Douglas’s philosophy of teaching is based on the view that knowledge is paramount. Picture: Aaron Francis/The Australian

Elena Douglas is an educational reformer, but hasn’t studied the discipline or worked as a teacher. She is an economist.

After completing her degree at the University of Western Australia in 1991, she took jobs in consultancy at KPMG and Deloitte, eventually becoming the convener of the Centre for Social Impact at the UWA Business School. While there she became interested in the nature of disadvantage and the role education has played throughout history in enabling people to overcome economic disadvantage.

Douglas went on to found The Knowledge Society, which started as an innovation agency working on projects such as helping the Royal Automobile Club of WA develop new lines of business.

She was then approached by Tim McDonald, the leader of Catholic schools in Western Australia, to work on solutions and strategies to improve educational outcomes in the state’s Catholic education system.

“We started to discover that there was this body of knowledge called the science of learning and the science of reading that were essential for educators to be able to give kids the greatest amount of knowledge and learning,” Douglas says.

“And then the shock and awe that no teachers, and none of the people in the entire education system, knew about this body of knowledge.”

Douglas’s philosophy of teaching is based on the view that knowledge is paramount.

“By convention in education for hundreds of years, we understood that the purpose of education was sharing inherited knowledge, that that was the purpose, and that would enrich people to go out into the world and create new knowledge and new things in the world,” she says.

“Education was the sharing of the common inheritance in science, maths, history, geography, literature.”

However, as Douglas explains, about a century ago, starting in the US, school education moved away from this philosophy, de-emphasising the importance of knowledge and instead focusing on project-based learning and discovery-based learning. That was centred on the view that children could be “knowledge creators”, rather than “knowledge inheritors”, who would subsequently go on to create knowledge.

The teaching methods were adopted in Australia about 50 years ago, she says. But she adds that there’s been a realisation that “it’s the curriculum, stupid”.

“You have to have very knowledge-rich, very specific curricula that specify the knowledge, and the knowledge has to be of an ambitious standard, and you have to teach well enough and fast enough to share that knowledge, which means teaching explicitly,” she says.

“With projects and stuff, you don’t learn enough knowledge, you just learn how to cut things out. We’ve degraded our education capability.”

Douglas describes the teaching of reading as a “tragedy”, being based on the belief that exposing children to good books would make them effective readers.

The solution is evidence-based reading instruction; making classrooms places of attention with good behaviour and rules and routines; and knowledge-based curriculums.

Children need to feel safe and know what’s expected of them.

While this might sound like a return to the teaching methods of decades past, Douglas says: “We hate the line, ‘back to basics’.

“It’s the confidence that creativity is based on having multiple bodies of knowledge secure in your memory that you can smash together. That’s what creates creativity,” she explains.

The Knowledge Society is also taking on what the Grattan Institute has termed “the lesson lottery”.

This is where the responsibility for setting the standard required and conveying that day’s body of knowledge is left to individual teachers in the lesson plans they write, and the quality of these lessons will vary from teacher to teacher.

Primary school teachers don’t have time to write up to 700 lesson plans a year.

“Good lessons make quality education repeatable and scalable. Whereas letting everyone write their own was a recipe for overall declining standards,” Douglas says.

After initially being adopted by the Catholic education system in WA, Douglas’s pedagogy has been picked up by the Catholic education system in Canberra and Goulburn, is spreading to Melbourne, and has attracted the interest of the Catholic system in Tasmania and South Australia.

“The Catholic education systems have been the first adult,” she says, adding that the teaching methods have also since been adopted by some state schools in Victoria.

Douglas says primary school is where improved teaching can make the most difference.

“If you have primary schools where you don’t have 100 per cent of kids leaving and going to high school able to read, it’s a disaster for everyone, and that’s the situation we’re in in low socio-economic schools,” she says.

On the difference between girls’ and boys’ education, Douglas says not enough girls are studying maths.

It’s because girls are naturally good at speaking and writing, and so gravitate to that instead of doing the hard practice required for maths, she says.

“Girls make a judgment early that because it’s so easy to talk and write, that therefore they’re comparatively not as good at maths,” she says.

“Boys are not as naturally good at speaking and writing. So for boys everything’s work. Maths is work, and … they like maths better because maths is either right or wrong,” she says.