On education..

Seems to have been a pretty quiet week in the world of blogging. At least in the bit of it I check regularly.

However, an opinion piece in The Age caught my attention. The writer, one Neil Hooley from the academia of education, talks about how being teachers forced by the terrible Federal government to use a simple scale to rank children's achievements is "letting the kids down".

"Apparently, parents are confused by other terminology that might use words such as "established", "consolidated", "developed" and the like. A grade of B, for example, is very explicit and everyone knows what it means."

Well, yeah. But in the world of education, nothing can be allowed to be so clear:

"We have a distinct choice here. Either it is appropriate to draw up an absolute scale that measures achievement, or we look at progress that has been made over time. In the former case, the context is really unimportant - all that matters is product at the time. Contrast this with the latter case, where the conditions are crucial and really shape what is achieved."

Here we go:

"The allocation of absolute grades to the learning of children fits into a particular logic of knowledge. This says that schools are involved in the passing on of predetermined information or subject content that can be known, taught, assessed and rated accurately at each age or year level. Under this arrangement, the logic is internally consistent and defensible. There trouble is, there is another logic.

An alternative view indicates that children learn by building their own knowledge and that learning is always a work in progress."

Fair enough. The problem comes with the next sentence in that paragraph:

"Under these conditions, it is highly problematic whether predetermined content can be known, taught, assessed and rated accurately. With this logic, a graded system of assessment is therefore entirely inconsistent and indefensible."

Why? Every sensible person agrees that it is good for an education system to encourage students to "build their own knowledge" and realise that you can go through life continually learning, if you want to. But why should that preclude being able to give a simple assessment of where the student is in their level of objective knowledge of a subject at any particular time?

Surely he is getting at something more subtle, and it would seem to be the lingering postmodernist idea that, at heart, there is no objective truth about anything. No point in testing kids for how much they remember or understand it then. Go on, admit it Hooley!

His ending is particularly silly:

"An imposed system of A to E labels assumes one logic. It assumes that schools are only about the passing on of knowledge from elsewhere, that both teachers and children are disconnected from their knowledge and that imposed external judgments are accurate and necessary.

Parents will make up their own minds, but children may have little option to do so, locked in the iron cage of A to E determinism."

Look, if teachers want to comment on a student's "progress over time" or general aptitude etc, can't they still do it in the way they always have (at least in primary school)? That is, little Johnny gets a C in maths, but teacher writes at the end of the report card that "Johnny could do better with increased effort" or "Johnny has improved considerably, but further effort should see better results." Damn simple, it you ask me. At high school level, you can test in other ways about general aptitude and combine it with the other testing of stuff learnt to get a general idea of a kid's potential.

And it is absolute rubbish to suggest students are going to be "trapped" by their school grades anyway. Surely everyone knows of fellow high school students who didn't do well there, but after a few years maturing have gone back to study properly and ended up with tertiary qualifications and well paying careers.

Oh,and he also starts by criticising the government not (he believes) allowing the aboriginal flag to be used at schools instead of the Australian flag. Yes indeed, I am sure the lack of that flag must account for so much of the educational difficulties in aboriginal society.