Lemmings and similar phenomena

I just realised I had an unfinished post from months back in relation to computing and related technologies in education. When I ever get around to finishing it, a very poor substitute for a book that is still to be written, it will argue that the real issue is around education, or its formal bits, that of schooling and here I like to think in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary schooling. The more one reads research, talks to teachers, students and most other folk who are somehow involved in or with schooling it is clear that, at least for secondary schooling (I think similar crits of primary and tertiary are possible but it is at its most glaring here) is a game that almost no one believes in. There are many instances where humans do foolish, sometimes heroic things for no good reason. Indeed, biologists tell us that along with a blind mole rat in Africa, we are the only species capable of giving up our life to save the life of another of our species. One can understand moments of foolishness and heroism. It is part of being human. These are events which contribute to a sense of who we are and why we are. With Secondary schooling we have a system which, in my view, is increasingly difficult to justify. It is a form of what might be called organised child abuse which repeats itself over and over again, year in, year out. The only beneficiaries of this system are a handful of private schools in each capital city. That is not to say the huge efforts and energy goes into trying to do school differently. There is an amazing array of things that teachers do to try and escape the nonsense of a sytem that was designed to send a small elite onto university in the 50's and 60's. But any or all of these, and particularly if they appear to be working well for students are dubbed fringe or satellite to the main game, the high status subjects of years 11 and 12. It is important to recognise that what began as a system to select an elite has been turned into a mass system of ranking and rating that serves no purpose other than to determine access to a small number of high demand courses in a couple of universities in each State. One might say that this is a very expensive selection machine and it is. The human cost, of telling around two thirds of each cohort passing through school that they are dumb, deficient or in some way not up to scratch is an appalling outcome. While the system does not physically kill these students it stamps them as failures of one kind or other and then expects them to get on with their lives as if this trauma is akin to falling down and grazing one's knee. I work in a university. We have what is effectively an all expenses paid ranking system. It is not a good predictor of university success and why should it be given the disconnected nature of the high elements of the curriculum? But the best part is that universities don't have to pay a cent for it. Are there better ways to select? Yes. Are there better ways to support all students in our secondary schools and provide them with the genuinely high expectations that will prepare them well to shape, lead and grow this country? Of course. Do we have the will to do anything about it? Sadly, it appears that it is more important to attend to the low level expectations. Let's make sure everyone can spell catastrophe or onomatopoeia. But let's make sure our children do not learn how to engage the world, nor develop agency in it. It is easy to attend to some of the measurable stuff. It is more important to be concerned about spelling skills of the young but less about how the system treats them and what the social consequences are. So let's turn out the best spellers in the world and keep counting the lemmings as they run off the edge.

Blink

I stumbled across Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point a year or so back. I just got my hands on his recent book: Blink. I'd characterise his work as popular psychology which focusses on small changes having significant outcomes. Blink is about those decisions that are made in an instant, the kind we don't think about. Intriguing stuff for thinking about much of educational practice. Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown.

Ditches worth dying in

A long time ago Rob Walker, a great colleague and friend, used to talk in terms of ditches worth dying in. I, along with 1500 odd other folk attended AARE last week in Melbourne. It was the usual AARE in many respects but the Radford Lecture was, for me a wonderful highlight. Richard Teese spoke. It was measured, eloquent and so keenly to the point about the profoundly discriminatory schooling system that operates in this and other Australian states. Data that can't be wished away by the neo-conservatives who assert that it (school suyccess and life chances) is all a matter of ability and has nothing to do with where one is born and the family into which one is born. The patterns of success one finds in year 12 results suggests, if you follow the neo-conservative line, that all the ability in year 12 students is clustered, year after year, around a small number of private schools in each capital city. If you believe that then you would probably find Frances Wheen's little polemic (see the Mumbo Jumbo posting in this blog) upsetting, i.e. astrology isn't a reliable way to predict the future. If Australia is to realise it's often spoken of potential then the demolition of the nonsense social advantaging that flows from year 12 assessments in all States requires urgent attention.

We are a defect on an insignificance This kind of thinking seems oddly reassuring in a world that appears to be removed from its material reality. An interview by Robin Williams of Gerry Gilmore on the Science Show. Gilmore is an experimental philosopher at Cambridge.

A curriculum of questions

This little idea was hatched late one night in 2003 at Burwood, in conversation with Alan Reid who was at the time a DEST Fellow and working on the question of national curriculum. I turned it into words in February of this year. National questions, national curriculum The current period in education is characterised by considerable interest in curriculum. In most states and overseas there appears to be an unease about the suitability of current curriculum for preparing the young for a world that is much changed from the period when most contemporary curricula were developed. New curriculum initiatives can be found in many states. Debates that figures in these initiatives ask questions such as: what is worth knowing, what are ‘essential’ or ‘basic’ knowledges, and should there be more emphasis on process or content? For education curriculum/policy makers, contemporary computer-based resources such as the Internet appear to place an emphasis on knowledge (as per the knowledge economy) which subsequently slides into debates about content, i.e. curriculum is about content, and, more often than not, its consumption. Importantly, the social character of knowledge is largely ignored. The irony of schooling systems with an emphasis on the consumption of various forms of knowledge at a time when the production and leveraging of knowledge and research skills are prized, appears lost in the current debates. My own view of curriculum is that it is the stories the elders of the tribe tell the young. I want to suggest that increasingly these stories, in this era, are less narratives and more questions, i.e. how should we live in the world? what does it mean to be an Australian? how do we relate to our geographical neighbours? how do we understand global phenomena such as finance, terrorism and entertainment? As a way out of the problem of deciding in advance what is appropriate content to equip students to participate as active citizens I propose that we might think about curriculum in terms of questions. Importantly, this device might be used to engage the Australian community in contributing to the construction of a set of questions. One way to operationalise this notion would be to poll a large subset of Australians to nominate, say 5 or 6 questions that they believe to be important to Australia now and in the future. A variety of events, protocols might be employed to arrive at a set of national questions, which would be the basis for curriculum across the country. The process might be repeated at regular intervals (3-5 years) to reconsider the question set. How would the questions frame curriculum? Nationally they would constitute a statement of our priorities. Things that need to be investigated and thought about. A question, unlike a lot of content, can be contextualised at a national, state and local levels. This then would be the curriculum. Engaging the young and their communities in a set of national questions, locally nuanced, that have arisen after a process of debate and contestation would require them to engage in knowledge production/leveraging and research. It would mark the country with a curriculum that looks forward in a more pragmatic and potentially effective manner compared with current content-focussed thinking.

Mumbo-jumbo

I'm reading Francis Wheen's, How Mumbo-jumbo conquered the world. There is an opportunity for a book of similar levity and hard-nosed evidence to be written for education. Few of the new age gurus go untouched as he meticulously and carefully dissects the pomp, the false and the stupid over the past few decades. Wheen, Francis (2004) How Mumbo-jumbo conquered the world, Harper Perennial, London.