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How to Fix Education

Entry 2214, on 2022-04-27 at 09:06:45 (Rating 4, Politics)

What should happen to a profession which is funded with billions every year, provides one of the most important functions we have in society, has been given a fair level of respect in the past, but has failed by almost every measure available? Most would say we need to do something significantly different, but the direction those new actions should take is the problem. This profession has endured a lot of political interference over the years, so I blame that more for the failures than the actual professionals who do the work, but the problem still needs to be fixed.

If you hadn't guessed after my opening tirade, the profession I am talking about is teaching, and I am specifically referring to the issue here in New Zealand, although similar problems have been reported in many other countries.

A recent study found that young people are leaving school without understanding how to use full stops (periods) and capital letters for new sentences, or who didn't know how many minutes there are in an hour, or who were unable to do relatively simple math using multiplication and division.

Other stats show this country's education results slipping further behind most of the rest of the world, especially in the "basics" like maths and literacy.

So what's going on? Well, as I said, education is a very political area in society, maybe the most politically significant part which isn't directly related to politics itself. Should that doubtful honour belong to health, police, or law? Maybe, but if education isn't at the top, it must be close.

This political influence takes two forms: first, the government creates policies and laws about how education should work, and they usually get that wrong (they are a government after all, and specialise in getting things wrong); and second, teachers are traditionally notoriously politically active, primarily on the extreme left side of the spectrum.

Those two statements are just my opinion and based on general observations of what I see in the news, on my interactions with the education system, and my on inherent biases (there, I admitted it), but I think they have some merit, and it is widely accepted that the problems really do exist, even if the reasons are debated.

Most education is run by the state although there has been some attempt to set up alternatives through "charter schools", which was a policy introduced by the Act party (libertarian) in 2012, but reversed by Labour (center-left) in 2017. The concept was heavily criticised by some parts of society, including teachers, but there is significant evidence that many of these schools worked extremely well.

So why did many people reject this idea? After all, the charter schools were not compulsory in any way, and if people thought they were not appropriate or effective they just wouldn't use them, yet they did. So it seems that this was a situation where extra services could be provided with very few disadvantages. Why was it so unpopular?

Well, it clearly gets back to ideology. As I said above, teachers are very left-oriented. I remember even back in my days at school that many of my teachers were openly political, and some made their support for socialism and communism obvious. So a policy which is generally seen as belonging to the opposite side (libertarianism) is never going to be supported by teachers, no matter how well it works.

And clearly, control is an important aspect of teaching. The charter schools reduced that control because those new schools had more flexibility regarding the subjects they taught, the techniques they used to teach, and what sort of people could be hired. Yes, I know this flexibility should be seen as primarily a good thing, but when your values are controlled by political bias rather than truth, then things rarely end well.

Just to get a bit further into conspirational thinking, I believe there is a certain amount of planned control behind this system. The easiest way to control future generations is to influence them with propaganda early on, and then let that filter through to society when those young people become adults. This starts at school and is ramped up at university, then some of those people go on to perpetuate the system by becoming teachers themselves.

Generally, because of the extreme bias and naivety of most teachers, there is no need for the government to interfere to boost the level of political correctness even further, but that doesn't stop them from doing it anyway! The latest attempt at insidious mind control over our unfortunate children is the new history curriculum which seems to have a significant component of racial bias, presenting the native people of New Zealand as superior, peaceful, and admirable, and the settlers as greedy, uncaring, and irresponsible.

I'm not saying that bad behaviour from the past shouldn't be studied in history, but I am saying that we need some balance here, and to point out there were good and bad actions on all sides. I would also like to see colonisation presented as a positive thing more than a negative, because there's no doubt it was good for everyone in many ways.

And I'm also saying that being able to regurgitate a pile of hopelessly biased and irrelevant facts when you can't even form a sentence or do simple maths seems rather counterproductive - but that's exactly the problem.

Maybe schools should be a bit more flexible in their approach. Maybe they should have a curriculum more in keeping with their principles, rather than those imposed by the government. Maybe they should try different approaches to teaching which might fit in with the background and culture of their students better, maybe they should have more variety on the people they hire to teach. In other words, maybe charter schools were actually a good idea!

I will admit here that I originally saw charter schools in a very similar way to the way the critics see it today. I thought these new schools would be inferior and teach based on alternative philosophical beliefs rather than good established practice. I was wrong. Like a lot of my more left-oriented prior beliefs, I have moved on to a more nuanced view. I now think charter schools are a great idea, and I would like to see them re-introduced, and maybe even have many of those more flexible principles extended to all schools.

According to the statistics and to the results of numerous surveys, we have a poor education system which is only getting worse. Government interference has failed in the past, and it seems unlikely that that trend would change. We need to get more flexibility into education. One size doesn't fit all, education isn't a mechanism for instilling certain political ideals into young minds, and we need to get the skills which are required to function in modern society right before spending too much time on non-essential topics. In other words, we need exactly what the charter schools provided. In fact we need to go even further, if possible.

Education is too important to leave it under the control of incompetent and politically motivated politicians, of incompetent and naive teachers, and of bureaucratic senior managers in the ministry. We might not be able to avoid all of those negative influences completely, but we could at least try to minimise them.

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