The advantage of having so many drafted posts is that the history adds even more context. The title and notes around this post have been sitting in my drafts since October 2022. That’s nearly 4 years ago. The core provocation that I needed to get off my chest at the time was seeing how school and education were feverishly getting back into regular programming, by going back to ‘normal’ as if COVID never happened.
School systems were in such a rush to return to their ideal schooling routine that they built the school system back exactly the way it was. All the learnings from COVID, all the potential, all the insights on how learning might actually be experienced differently. All ignored. In my opinion, they literally ‘built back broken’. And now, 4 years later from those frustrations, many school systems have also decided that it wasn’t enough to return to a sense of routine, but they also introduced even tighter controls on structured, predictable teaching and learning ad nauseum. The Science of Learning had arrived. They clearly understood the brief to ‘never waste a crisis’.
I used to find it ironic that the first 10 years of school often tried different teaching and learning experiments, only to push students through Years 11 and 12 with very scripted courses so that ATAR scores could be maximised. Only for those young people to realise that their ATAR scores do not really matter at all once they were out in the real world. I saw the irony of having highly capable, critical, and creative students coming into their final high school years, at a time when they wanted more agency and control over their learning, only to be told to suck it up and meet the marking criteria so they could go to university. Let’s face it, the ATAR is an extrinsic pursuit that schools and society are convinced best tests and prepares young people for the world. In many ways, there is very little that is intrinsic about many Year 11-12 certificates. It relies on and pursues fine-tuned instruction, curriculum control and dissemination of knowledge. Follow the structure, get good grades. Rinse and repeat.
How ironic is it now that many thought ATAR was going to die and become a worthless number, because there were some perceptions that workplaces and tertiary pathways wanted to measure so much more of the value a young person could add. Instead, what we’ve seen since COVID is school systems at scale responding to the assumed chaos of this period by assuming young people must be controlled and told even more than before. We’ve done to every year level from Foundation to Year 10 what the high school certificates had manufactured. Rigid sets of curricula to produce predictable results. Rinse and repeat.
When viewed from this perspective, ‘The Science of Learning’ was the perfect antidote to folk wringing their hands about the ‘out of control’ kids, who’d tasted freedom and agency, but now needed to be corrected and inducted back into routines. The deep issue I have with this is that this is building back a broken model… so much so that some systems have doubled down and applied this tightly scripted approach to EVERYTHING. If you want compliant kids, it works well. If you want success to be measured by test results, it works well. If you want complacent kids who struggle with creativity, it also works well. Just ask China, South Korea, Japan, or Singapore… who openly and desperately want more creativity in their students and recognise that their rigid systems have resulted in a steady climb in youth suicide.
We all know that there can be too much of a good thing, and there are some good things in using what works for specific teaching and learning contexts and subjects. But using anything to extremes in life is hazardous – surely we’ve realised that by now. But the extremes some have gone to in their rush to ‘get over COVID’ have resulted in sections of education relying on narrow, self-perpetuating evidence backed by a rigidly dogmatic education evidence body, while openly accepting that there can be only one ‘Science of Learning’ as a solution to the flaws in education. It’s a bizarre about-face for many schools. I totally agree that some of these old methods (because none of this is new) are sensible and effective for very pragmatic knowledge and skill building. But to show contempt and ignorance of what education could have evolved into when the shackles were off (during COVID) almost amounts to reducing students to ‘second-class robots’.
If any of what has been built back is based on evidence of what ‘The Science of Learning’ dictates for schools, then explain how anyone who attended a Steiner school, a Montessori school, an IB school, or any alternative school managed to get through life as a fully functional, capable, and creative individual? I wonder whether this about-face might have contributed to teachers leaving the profession, feeling de-professionalised, or going to schools where their intuition and creativity are rewarded and recognised. And we see more parents moving students to independent schools, potentially for the same reasons. And we wonder why patterns in schooling are shifting.
We may have helped further entrench Australia as one of the most stratified and inequitable school systems in the world. We let the traditionalists take control, who have no problems pushing out anything that doesn’t fit their agenda. That includes students who don’t fit their agenda. For example, do you know what the biggest school in Victoria is? It’s the Victorian Virtual School, which has experienced over 300% growth in numbers since COVID. I dread what will happen in the next decade with a generation who had to follow The Science of Learning rituals from Foundation to Year 12.
We’ll wish we’d stuck with solving how to emphasise skills, how to make time for deeper critical and creative thinking about the world, how to connect young people to the needs of their communities, and how all that memorisation of knowledge didn’t add up to much with a world that has already evolved and eroded. We’ll come to understand what build back better could have been.
