Every competent teacher knows what it is like to enter a class room unprepared. "Winging it" can sometimes work out--that flash of inspiration at the critical moment; the unexpected connection with students leading to mutual engagement with the subject of the day; ending with the satisfaction of knowing the learning had occurred. But more often than not, "winging" results in pedagogical failure.
Today we are told by the New Zealand Educational Institute ("NZEI"), the union of state primary teachers, that "three-quarters of teachers are feeling unprepared and rushed as they work to implement national standards". It gets worse:
Of more than 700 principals, 74 per cent said they had not had enough time or training to implement the national standards, which are designed as benchmarks for reading, writing and maths in primary schools.If the NZEI is representing the matter truthfully (which may well be a gratuitous assumption) we should expect that at least the first round of national standards testing will be equivalent to "winging it". In some cases this will work out all right--but not in most cases.
What are we to make of this? If three quarters of principals have not had sufficient time to get adequate training and ensure appropriate implementation of national standards testing, whose fault is it? Our parents used to tell us, "you never get time for what is important; you make time." The more importance attributed, the more time that will be made. So, assuming that the NZEI report is truthful and a fair representation of the actual state of affairs in state primary schools, are we to conclude that the vast majority principals simply don't think that national testing is important? We suspect that this is the case.
If so, we believe it will due to two reasons. A policy of systematic, annual, national testing on reading, writing and arithmetic presupposes a belief in a hierarchy of knowledge. It assumes that these subjects are at the core or foundational to all other learning and educational activity. Therefore, if a child is not sufficiently well instructed to levels of competence in these three subjects, he will be virtually uneducable in every other subject. This is clearly the present government's view. However, we believe it is not the philosophy of what we may call the educational establishment: the Ministry of Education bureaucrats, the NZEI, and the vast majority of primary school principals and teachers. (With respect to the educational establishment, the current government is an alien interloper and temporary.)
The educational establishment has for several generations now been inculcated in a view which deconstructs all knowledge into paradigms, or perspectives, or "glass fly-bottles" (to use Wittgenstein's analogy). Therefore, there is no such thing as core or foundational subjects. There are only emphases. The most "sophisticated" and "enlightened" educational theories approach knowledge not as a structured hierarchy to be taught systematically from the foundational elements upwards, but as a series of self-actualisations and discoveries with one in no way necessarily more important than another.
Because this is the dominant paradigm within the educational establishment, testing achievement in reading, righting and arithmetic is a misshapen incongruity. It is a distraction. It cuts roughly across the grain. It is simply irrelevant to the wider educational enterprise. No wonder principals and teachers have struggled to find time to get prepared: if it is not important, why would they find time? They would naturally regard the government's testing policy as a distraction, an intrusion, and a waste of time akin to one more bureaucratic process to be completed that takes them away from "real" teaching.
So, the first reason why the educational establishment is struggling with national testing is that it does not fit with the prevailing pedagogical theory of the establishment. The second reason is "like unto it". The "perspectives" theory of knowledge has produced over time an increasingly disparate, dissipated, unfocused, thinly spread and over populated curriculum. Teachers are being expected to accommodate more and more "perspectives". Couple this with the prevailing idolatry over education--that it is the redemptive power to deal with all social evils and sins--and you have a state education system which is drowning in swamp of curriculum scope creep, coupled with an ever-expanding exoskeleton of centralised bureaucratic reporting, data collection, and management to "make sense of it all".
If national testing for three subjects is placed over the top of this turgid swamp, it is understandable that the educational establishment will groan. (The establishment's "answer" to such pressure, by the way, is always to cry out for more resources--time, money, people, but ultimately it all comes down to more taxpayers' money.) The only real answer is to drain the swamp. But that is impossible, because the educational establishment cannot deny itself.
We believe the state education system is irreparably broken and cannot fix itself. National testing standards in reading, writing, and arithmetic will prove to be nothing more than a fad, to be tried, and eventually discarded (like "work for the dole" schemes). Not that the proposed national testing standards in the core subjects would not make a positive difference if properly implemented--but proper implementation would be far too radical for the current centrist-hugging administration. Moreover, the current administration's approach, we suspect, is too superficial to grasp the clash of pedagogical theories or world-views entailed. It naively thinks that one new policy will revolutionise a deeply entrenched and mutually interlocking establishment.
Therefore, it will turn out to be a tried-but-failed policy, relegated within a decade to the "too hard" basket. If so, it would have been better not to have started at all.
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