Rampant Positivity and Other Idiocies

Pedal Cars to the Rescue

The government education system is in a right royal mess, if the analysis of a professor at the University of Melbourne is to be given due regard.  The NZ government system is awash, apparently, with untested, speculative, high-risk novelties that pass as avant-garde, progressive, cutting edge educational practice.  Or, as Professor Stephen Dinham inelegantly puts it, the system has been " hijacked by fads, many of which he said had been either debunked or were unproven."

What are these fads that pass as leading edge pedagogical practice?  The leader of the misshapen herd of mongrel theories is the insistence on relentless praise, or

"self-boosting" where students were saturated in "rampant positivity".  "The danger with this is [students] get into the big, bad world and they find out they're not so good. This is a tremendous blow to their self-esteem," he told the Herald on Sunday.

He said a lack of honest, helpful feedback was leading to a confusion for children.  Giving children regular, constructive feedback about how to improve was a better policy, he said.  "We need to say to kids that they can do this, they can't do that but to move their learning forward they need to do this, that or the other. What we don't say is you're good or bad at something," said Dinham.

This reinforced a valuable message that effort brought reward. [NZ Herald]

We would add that it is not just a blow to self-esteem.
  Worse, it has the effect of raising a generation of children who become bitter, twisted, and resentful because what was ostensibly owed to them has not been delivered.  Consider the advice of Screwtape on how to make men perpetually resentful:

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. [C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd]

Have you ever wondered why it is that the "deprived" population has a perpetual sense of grievance to the effect that life, or the system, or the government, or the galaxy, or everything out there has denied their legitimate claims, and, therefore, they are victims.  One suspects that in large measure it may well be due to the relentless inculcation into the culture of "rampant positivity" inculcated through our schools, where inevitable success is touted as if it were an unalienable human right.

Last month, the Herald on Sunday revealed Auckland school children may have to play for the opposition at sport if they're beating them by too many points.  The Howick Pakuranga Principals' Association is introducing a fair play charter to East Auckland primary schools to encourage students, coaches and parents to play nice. A clause allows coaches to intervene when the points differential is 40 in rugby, 15 goals in netball and seven goals in soccer.  The charter was being introduced because children could be devastated if losing margins were too huge.

A second major problem in the government education system is the rampant fetish over "e-learning". 

At an education conference in Sydney last month, Dinham criticised techniques used in Australian teaching.  Talking to the Herald on Sunday, he added his concerns about the increased use of e-learning in schools on both sides of the Tasman.  He believed the use of devices, and the benefits they could provide to pupils, was largely untested.

Parents are now foolishly being seduced by professional educators into thinking that their children will be left behind if they are not attending a school where their constant companion is an i-pad or a laptop, and where learning largely consists of interaction with an inert machine.  It is a useful canard for failing educators.  Sure our national results are slipping, but if only we had electronic devices to employ, well then, our educational achievements would be exponentially better.  It's education for the modern world, don't you know.

Within twenty years we predict that the government education system will be acknowledging that it was all a useless distraction, leaving pupils educated merely in the skilful operation of a machine, rather than graduating with the ability to think creatively and critically, and reason soundly, and articulate coherently--and above all--with the diligence and discipline to work hard. 

Around about now some readers will doubtless have their equanimity disturbed wondering at the consequences of the horrible prospect that their children would go to a school only to graduate without knowing how to operate the latest smart-phone or run a sophisticated page on Facebook.  How on earth would such children be able to cope with modern life?

Yes, we well remember back in the day some parents were deeply troubled that their children were being neglected at schools.  It was obvious that the automobile was going to revolutionise human life and yet their little Johnny was spending time on peripatetics: running and walking and sitting and standing.  How reactionary.  How would such a child ever cope with the modern world?  They joined pressure groups seeking the introduction of pedal cars and go-karts to school playgrounds, and classroom instruction on road rules and playground driving instruction sessions, complete with a local traffic policeman to rule and adjudicate.  This was truly education at the cutting edge, preparing their kiddies for success in the modern world.  The most advanced schools were already into it boots'n all.  No child left behind.  Every child with a pedal car.

But what about learning the fallacy of affirming the consequent?  Ah, that's the boring stuff kids were taught before the automobile was invented.  Our children will never have to worry about stupid, mechanical, dry, dull stuff like that.  They will spend their lives zooming everywhere.  And so on, and so forth.  Pretty much like modern teachers and parents thinking that their children, when they grow up, will to conquer by zooming all over the virtual world.

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that we detest ludditism.  We are not opposed to the electronic age at all.  But we want our children to be educated so that they are prepared for and able to master electronic facilities and componentry by being able to think, reason, critically evaluate, examine, and test to the end that electronic devices become useful subservient tools, not empty, vacuous masters.

We expect that within fifteen years folk will be wondering how the education system could have been so stupid.  But by then the damage would have been done.  Another generation of victims of a failed education system will have hit the dole queues.