Our outdated education system failing kids in a brave new world
More innovation and competition of ideas needed for success in life
The break between term one and term two in the education system is a time of optimism for those of us with children in their school years. We have successfully completed one 11-week block, the weather is good enough to get the kids out doing things during the break, and for the most part everyone is still healthy. Of course, the darker, colder terms two and three still lie ahead.
More broadly though, optimism is not a word you’d use to describe the New Zealand school system. The first term has been a cacophony of stories about poor attendance, building projects unfunded or postponed, poor international test scores, and a rollback of changes to the curriculum and exams. Taking the helicopter view, education is in a bit of a mess, and our newish minister has her work cut out for her.
Behind it all lies an even bigger question we haven’t begun to grapple with. What are we preparing our children for? In a world where the potential, if not the reality, of artificial intelligence looms large, what skills will our children need to succeed through their likely 100-year-plus life span?
Life used to be so much simpler. Pre-internet we all went to school, we did some rote learning and learnt to write and do maths, and then went out to the playground. We ate our lunch together (yes there was food envy), and we socialised because we had to — there was nothing else to do.
Pecking orders were created and broken down, bullies appeared from time to time, and if it all got out of hand there was a stern senior teacher ready to dispense some summary justice. And before we head down that rabbit hole, I’m not talking corporal punishment.
Over the past two decades, many things we used to take for granted have been turned on their head. You used to need to know stuff, but then Google came along and the world’s biggest encyclopaedia was at your fingertips. You used to have to socialise with real people, and then social media came along. You used to learn in a group because there was no other way. Now you can learn online in a room on your own, and not talk to anyone if you don’t want to. Uni students do it all the time, staying away from lectures in droves and listening back to video recordings at double speed in half the time, with the lecturers sounding like chipmunks.
The nadir of all these social changes came during Covid, when we proved to ourselves that desultory online learning as an alternative to the in-person socialised approach condemns children to a stunted education and often complete disengagement. I’ll never forget the challenges my own daughter experienced during that period along with all her friends. Or the miraculous improvement she and a friend showed when we bent the ludicrous lockdown rules to have the friend over, and God forbid, use the same bathroom.
The changes of the past 20 years have been relentless and our centrally run education system has not coped well. We’ve had an ongoing debate over that time about the merits of learning knowledge (facts, figures, and so on) versus skills. The argument twists and turns, but it feels like the debate itself is now inadequate. The truth is that we need both, and by themselves they aren’t sufficient.
In the world we now live in, socialisation itself is not a given and needs to be actively fostered. Learning and consciously adopting life values is also important. Among a cacophony of dubious displays of values in the online world, young people need the space to examine and assess proactively what values systems work and which they should adopt, rather than simply inheriting or rebelling against those of their parents.
I believe there is another thing that’s needed, too — actively building an understanding in young people that they have agency, or an ability to succeed. In the face of social media and constant online catastrophising, it would be way easier to feel helpless and despairing of the future, with no ability to influence it. My admittedly amateur view is that it is vital for young people to find something they are good at, which they can achieve at through their own hard work, to give them confidence they can achieve at life. It almost doesn’t matter what it is, although it’s preferable it’s a sport, a subject or a musical instrument perhaps, rather than ram-raiding.
If you take all those things, and all the changes occurring around our children, then it is little wonder that our bureaucratic top-down education system is visibly failing us. Monopoly systems by definition are slowmoving, internally focused rather than customer focused, and unresponsive to changes in the environment around them. They are characterised by a lack of trust, and a lack of innovation.
Our education system exhibits all these things. Innovation, when it does occur, is often despite the system rather than because of it. Or it is debated endlessly and then mandated for everyone so we all march forward together. That’s how we ended up with the increasingly debunked “modern learning environments”, a supposedly excellent educational theory which has been round at least once before in the “open plan classrooms” of the 1970s. If the mandarins in the Ministry of Education knew all the answers we’d have a perfect education system by now and we don’t.
Students, and their parents, are voting with their feet. Truancy is a huge problem in the public system, while even in tough economic times, private schools are overflowing.
For education to remain both relevant to students and futurefocused, we need more innovation, but at the single school level rather than imposed from above. We need more opportunity for schools to adopt new approaches; we need to trust principals more to hire the right people and pay them well; and we need a matching increase in accountability for their results.
Most of all we need something that has been sorely missing from our education sector, as it has in many aspects of modern life. In a time of great change, we need a competition of ideas. Healthy competition is the force that sorts great ideas from mediocre ones, and rewards results and excellence. I know from my seven years as Tertiary Education Minister that the innovation we did see invariably came about where competition was permitted and success rewarded.
There are those for whom a onesize-fits-all top-down education system is an article of faith; for whom any fostering of competitive innovation is political anaethema. But there is one increasingly apparent if unpalatable truth: in a world of accelerating technological and social change, top-down monopolies can’t keep up, and the one we have in education is doing our kids a disservice.
Steven Joyce is a former National Party Minister of Finance and Minister of Transport. He is director at Joyce Advisory, and the author of the recently published book on his time in office, On the Record.