RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: OZschwitz: Rote learning is a dangerous thing when ideas are in short supply  Fri Feb 26, 2010 2:29 am | |
| When I was 14, my family moved to London, where my father took up a four-year job posting. I reluctantly swapped my co-ed public high school in Canberra's northern suburbs for an all-girls independent (read private) school. Settling in was not exactly easy.
No one warned me, for instance, that school finishes at 4pm in England, not 3pm as it did here. I spent the last hour of my first day at my new school nervously eyeing the clock, wondering how long they would keep me hostage, these strange people who called Wite-Out ''Tipp-Ex'' and to whom ''pants'' meant underpants, not trousers, and thongs, well don't even go there. Eventually I got to go home.
After a few weeks of being quizzed relentlessly on upcoming plot points on Neighbours and Home and Away - to no avail, I had watched neither - I was soon overlooked as an oddity and left to go about the business of learning.
My new school was ranked in national league tables as the top private girls' day school in the country. My new teachers, having been introduced to league tables by the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, were ruthlessly adept at moulding their students into lean, mean, high-test-scoring machines.
English lessons consisted of reading through the set text and taking down as many of the teacher's observations as possible, for regurgitation in open book exams. In history, we drilled out endless practice essays from previous exams. A page we had to memorise from a chemistry textbook mapping all possible organic chemical reactions still haunts me. The schedule of mock examinations was relentless.
The fruits of our labour were that the school remained near the top of the tables and could boast that a large proportion of girls went on to Oxford or Cambridge. (I was offered a place at the former, but had to turn it down after we discovered the foreign student fees alone would require remortgaging the family home in Canberra.)
I received the best education the English system could offer. But I don't remember engaging deeply with any of it. I could list the tragic flaws that led Hamlet and King Lear to their downfalls. But I don't remember being much moved by their deaths.
I could recite the causes of World War II, but I had no insight into how future wars might be avoided.
Now Australia's own iron lady, Julia Gillard, has dragged the country's teachers kicking and screaming into the world of test score transparency and league tables, such teaching to the test here seems inevitable.
At primary schools, preparing for literacy and numeracy tests will potentially divert time away from pursuits such as the humanities, arts and sport. The focus on test results opens possibilities for gaming the system, like pressuring underperforming students to stay at home on test day. A study in the US found schools providing state-sponsored breakfasts were more likely to provide sweet, energy-intensive foods on exam days to boost test results. And it worked.
If we are to prize test results above all else, it is essential to test for the right things. To that end, Gillard will release a draft of Australia's first national curriculum on Monday setting out the desired learning curve in four core subjects: English, maths, science and history.
Gillard defends the narrower focus on numeracy and literacy. ''Kids have to be able to read and write and count,'' she said in a recent Sydney Morning Herald interview. ''You can't teach history to kids who can't read and write. You can't participate in drama, you know, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush, I'll tell you one thing, they can read.''
The chairman of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, Barry McGaw, says the new draft curriculum will include things like ''creativity'' and working together to solve problems. He says it is much shorter than existing state curriculums. Year 3 maths, for instance, fits on one page. ''It will be certainly less than they [teachers] have seen before, but we think it will be more demanding and allow for more depth than what they have had before.''
The Rudd government's shift towards individual school and teacher accountability is its most radical micro-economic reform so far. It is a legacy that will remain long after the school halls are crumbling.
It speaks volumes of Gillard's political journey from the left. This is no socialist revolution, but a ruthlessly free-market revolution whereby schools are service providers that can be measured on outcomes much like companies on the sharemarket.
The success of any market system relies on the quality of the information signals on which individuals base their choices, in this case, the choice of school. The commitment to use ''unique student identifiers'' to collect information on student performance over time, the ''value-added'' approach, will help to improve the quality of the information available.
But to be truly meaningful, tests must be designed to uncover the ability of students to think critically and deeply, and not just regurgitate facts.
And by the way, King Lear's tragic flaw was pride.
LNK |
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