Quick thoughts on a few other basic educational issues you did not really unpack: screens, homework, Assessment Based Criteria.
We know that screens in schools (Joe Clement & Matt Miles, Screen Schooled, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2018) and homework (Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth, Cambridge MA: Perseus, 2006) are super bad for intelligent teaching and learning for our kids. Norway does (or at least, did) very little homework (you actually go to school to learn), respects and rewards teachers, and doesn't relentlessly try new pilot programs with a labyrinthine (incomprehensible) curriculum, and we know that no-screen schools are very popular in Silicon Valley (but there is not a single no-screen school in Brisbane I could send my kids to), and these two factors make an enormous difference in teaching and learning. But we are running as fast as we can in the wrong “innovative” direction with ever more IT, ever more homework, and ever more incomprehensible curricula. Our educational bureaucratic and administrations are infatuated with shiny tech-toys, and simply love requiring our kids to do pointless time-consuming hoop jumping exercises (perhaps giving them ‘good’ preparation for the Australian workforce), but these two trends signal a national intellectual formation disaster. Assessment based criteria is also a huge disaster. We are teaching kids to jump hoops rather than think deeply and creatively, at the same time as they are required to actually know less. I got out of education 20 years ago greatly discouraged, and unsurprisingly things have continued to dive since then. It is very discouraging…
This may sound very counter intuitive but I've come to believe there are simply too many kids graduating from high school... Many children are simply not academically inclined nor gifted and there is nothing inherently shameful or bad about it - there used to be a time when they would leave at 16 to get an apprenticeship and a decent tradie career. Now they are vegetating, learning nothing appreciable, wasting 2 years and making learning harder for the ones who remain. (Same analogy would actually apply to Unis).
I graduated in 1994 and even then remember functionally illiterate kids still in yr10. Why were they there? Because they were promoted every year based on age group rather than educational attainment.
Great podcast. Many thanks Julie and Ben.
Quick thoughts on a few other basic educational issues you did not really unpack: screens, homework, Assessment Based Criteria.
We know that screens in schools (Joe Clement & Matt Miles, Screen Schooled, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2018) and homework (Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth, Cambridge MA: Perseus, 2006) are super bad for intelligent teaching and learning for our kids. Norway does (or at least, did) very little homework (you actually go to school to learn), respects and rewards teachers, and doesn't relentlessly try new pilot programs with a labyrinthine (incomprehensible) curriculum, and we know that no-screen schools are very popular in Silicon Valley (but there is not a single no-screen school in Brisbane I could send my kids to), and these two factors make an enormous difference in teaching and learning. But we are running as fast as we can in the wrong “innovative” direction with ever more IT, ever more homework, and ever more incomprehensible curricula. Our educational bureaucratic and administrations are infatuated with shiny tech-toys, and simply love requiring our kids to do pointless time-consuming hoop jumping exercises (perhaps giving them ‘good’ preparation for the Australian workforce), but these two trends signal a national intellectual formation disaster. Assessment based criteria is also a huge disaster. We are teaching kids to jump hoops rather than think deeply and creatively, at the same time as they are required to actually know less. I got out of education 20 years ago greatly discouraged, and unsurprisingly things have continued to dive since then. It is very discouraging…
This may sound very counter intuitive but I've come to believe there are simply too many kids graduating from high school... Many children are simply not academically inclined nor gifted and there is nothing inherently shameful or bad about it - there used to be a time when they would leave at 16 to get an apprenticeship and a decent tradie career. Now they are vegetating, learning nothing appreciable, wasting 2 years and making learning harder for the ones who remain. (Same analogy would actually apply to Unis).
I graduated in 1994 and even then remember functionally illiterate kids still in yr10. Why were they there? Because they were promoted every year based on age group rather than educational attainment.