Bad Examples

Finnish Contumely

Deborah Hill Cone is a NZ Herald columnist. She wrote a provocative piece on government education the other day.  It seems that the Finns are doing particularly well in education--along with South Korea and Poland.   Her column makes reference to a new book by Amanda Ripley How Do Other Countries Create Smarter Kids?.

Journalist Amanda Ripley went on a worldwide quest to try to understand the mystery of why kids in some countries were doing well academically while more privileged kids in the US were struggling.  Ripley said she was stumped, until one day she saw a chart and "it blew my mind". The chart showed Finland had rocketed from the bottom of the world education rankings to the top "without pausing for breath".  Yet children in Norway, right next door, were floundering, despite their nation having virtually no child poverty.

So, after a bit of old-fashioned investigative journalism and research, Ripley presents her conclusions.  As you all no doubt are anticipating, the causal factors were all so humdrum and ordinary.  But--and we say this with reflective deliberation--they are also factors impossible to introduce into the New Zealand's enlightened education system as it currently exists.

What (Ripley) found seems like a glimpse into the obvious.  "Bright, talented teachers who are well trained and love their jobs."  Ripley says rather than "trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis", as Americans do, the Finns put the focus on high-quality teaching.  Only top students are allowed to enrol in teacher training programmes, and the training for teachers is much more demanding than it is in America.

A massive question is begged about now.  What is "high-quality teaching"?  Don't presume you know, because none of us are clever professionals trained and "educated" in the philosophical mumbo-jumbo that has successfully redefined quality education in New Zealand.  The sad reality is that enlightened, "high-quality" teaching in the New Zealand educational establishment is the kind that does not teach any prescribed thing, but artfully stimulates and guides a pupil to discover their own knowledge and truth when they are good and ready.  The cardinal sin now is teaching anything at all in any prescriptive manner--and worse, never, ever by rote or memorisation.

That is why the Finnish and Polish experience cannot be replicated in New Zealand--at least not until the current batch of carpet baggers are thrown out and replaced with common-sense, humdrum, ordinary folk who are too ignorant to have been sucked in by contemporary pomo, artsy-fartsy educational mumbo-jumbo.  And that, dear friends, is not likely to happen in our lifetime.  We are just too darned clever in New Zealand--way smarter than the average dumb bears that lurk in the forests of Poland and Finland and South Korea.

It was a similar story in Poland, which got to the upper echelons of international test-score rankings in record time by following the Finnish and South Korean formula: well-trained teachers, a rigorous curriculum and a challenging exam required of all graduating seniors.

Naturally, there are other common-sense factors at play.  Focus on core curriculum is one.  Getting rid of distractions such as computers and sports is another.  

But there were other variables too. For American high school students, sports are part of the "core culture" but at the school Ripley studied in Wroclaw, Poland, "sports simply did not figure into the school day; why would they? Plenty of kids played pickup soccer or basketball games on their own after school, but there was no confusion about what school was for."

So what can New Zealand parents take out of Ripley's valuable work? I was intrigued that the top-performing Finnish schools were described as "dingy", with desks in rows and an old-fashioned chalkboard - not an iPad or interactive whiteboard in sight.

Imagine if our class rooms were allowed to be remodelled into dingy rooms with desks in rows and an old-fashioned chalkboard and such learning environments became the new chic.  Imagine if the poor abused New Zealand taxpayer did not have to fork out incessantly for multi-million dollar "performing arts complexes" and gymnasiums, and massive sports fields, and endless upgrades of computer hardware and software.  Imagine if most of the money went into selecting high quality teachers and paying them well on a merit based system.  Imagine if rubrics such as "focus" and "core" came back into fashion.  Imagine if all the "nice to haves" were left to parents and communities to organise outside of school.  What savings we would enjoy.  What better results could be our boast.  

But no.  In the current miasma such radical retrogressions would amount to child-abuse--an imposition of an intellectual and pedagogical prison upon modern free-spirits.  Can't have that.  The great apostolic college of Derrida, Dewey, Foucault, Rogers, Rorty, Wittgenstein and others would hurl denunciations too great to be borne. 

The Finns spend most of their time in darkness anyway.  Why would we want to imitate them?