OPINION: Chaos Theory in Education

Chaos theory rules Education

In physics, things left to their own devices eventually atrophy. ‘Ever-decreasing circles’ is another analogy. Without constant energy, input and correction, systems lose balance and accuracy. It’s a lesson apparently lost on the Ministry of Education, where AMY BROOKE reports on a policy destined to mimic ‘the blind leading the blind’:

One wonders what planet they’re on, the education “experts” advising Anne Tolley, who still has to cotton on to the fact that until control of education is removed from our education bureaucracy (both from the ministry and the unionized “facilitators” in the classrooms) things aren’t going to change.

It won’t escape knowledgeable readers why I say the “facilitators” in the classrooms. I was reminded of how little things have changed, recently reading an interview of a former local headmistress. For well over two decades now, unionized once-teachers – although still demanding higher pay as actual “teachers” – have endorsed the concept of “facilitating” rather than actually teaching. And out came the same tedious mantra with her asserting it is irrelevant to teach content (i.e. actually teaching pupils) as “knowledge changes so quickly”. She, too, sees the teacher’s job as being merely to facilitate pupils accessing information.

Well, most of today’s children already know that with a click on their favourite Web search engine they’re able to do a quick cut and paste, then cobble it all together. They know how to access information all right. This has nothing to do with actual learning, studying, thinking, understanding, once the tasks expected by real teachers who knew their subject, choosing it because of its importance, and whose conviction had a good chance of carrying across to their pupils. In fact, they marked and tested pupils’ work to evaluate the results.

As Dr Kevin Donnelly, director of the Australian Education Standards Institute points out, leaving it to children to supposedly acquire their own learning leads, for all except the very bright with a genuine appetite for knowledge, “to a superficial and a narrow understanding…. The English syllabus, for example, ignores the importance of classical literature by arguing that students should study teen mags, avatars, social networking sites and manga” (Japanese-inspired comics and print cartoons). As in New Zealand, the significance of our Western heritage is ignored, as schools are made to teach from indigenous, Asian ,and environmental perspectives . Christianity, the underpinning of the West, barely rates a mention.

The shortfall in thinking of this retired headmistress, maintaining it is unimportant to actually teach content shows a mind unchallenged by deep thinking, or else highly politicized by the propaganda all teachers now receive from ministerial apparatchiks. The “facilitator” nonsense constantly recycles as in – “Not the sage on the stage – but the guide at the side” – doggerel that teacher friends passed on in disquiet a couple of years ago. It parallels the memory I have of a boorish teacher over a couple of decades ago at Nelson College. Out of his depth teaching English, he triumphantly trotted out the same facilitator jargon. I wonder if he, too, has since learnt to think for himself, but I rather doubt it. Basically a Phys-Ed Teacher, with other English teachers at the time he was parroting the radicalised Noam Chomsky’s nonsense that children don’t need to be taught grammar and syntax, as they learn it at their mother’s knee. What if mother is a bikie and hasn’t had much going for her, either? I asked, remembering some of the well-meaning mothers I’d met while teaching English and languages at Queens High School in Dunedin – and encountering girls sent through to secondary school having been being taught almost nothing throughout their primary years.

Those who had most objected to my concern that these children had been short-changed, and that we should be teaching all the little five-year-olds thoroughly and well, to as far as possible help them to compete on equal terms in the outside world, were most of my fellow English teachers. Somehow, teaching the skills to speak and write well was “inauthentic”… insulting to their railway workshop or freezing works parental backgrounds. The unfairness and even stupidity in such thinking quite stunned me. It took a time to comprehend what lay behind the teacher refresher courses – the Marxist aim – not to improve the chances of those who had least going for them, but to dumb down all teaching to remove the advantages of the brightest and best, scholastically. It has all been part of the plan to control society’s thinking, dumbing down a generation of unfortunate children who become the next generation of parents, and voters.

So, yes: apparently, as in the college interview where the virtually zombified teacher intoned that putting red pencil on students’ work to indicate mistakes was out – “inhibiting their spontaneity”, this nonsense still recycles over two decades later, in recent educationists’ pronouncements. Nothing changes. What I have belatedly discovered was the sheer incompetence of those teachers who were glad of an excuse to avoid displaying their own ignorance. Most English teachers I’ve encountered know no more about teaching English, its grammar and syntax, its great literature and poetry, than their unfortunate pupils.

Yet Professor John Hattie told the Labour Party conference in October that our education system is among the best in the world. It isn’t. And he advises Minister Tolley – among others whose names are familiar from their advocacy in the 80s and 90s when the last steps in removing schools’ accountability were taken, with the Left’s successful phasing out of external examinations to replace them with standards-based assessment and the third-rate NCEA structures.

Contradiction Hattie’s over-confident pronouncements, Peter Hughes, a former secondary maths teacher now lecturing at the University of Auckland, reminds us that only one third of primary pupils going into secondary school are numerate, and “most secondary students do not understand numbers to a level classed as numerate.”

Both science and maths teachers have written shocked analyses of what has happened to the prescriptive requirements for teaching these subjects. Arguably, not only the teaching of English but of other subjects as well is now in the hands of those who were never properly taught themselves – including a former jovial pupil whom I inherited too late (particularly in view of his considerable self-esteem) to succeed, in the short time I taught him Latin, in reducing the massive ignorance he showed of English grammar and syntax. I recall his mother laughing recently when, having heard that he himself is now teaching English, I expressed surprise, as he hadn’t had any understanding of how the language worked. He still hasn’t, she cheerfully replied.

However, the outcome for this happy chappy’s students is fairly obvious. Little wonder all these teachers aren’t in favour of external examinations which show up ignorant teachers, as well as their unfortunate pupils. And the internally assessed National Standards simply promises more of the same – particularly as two thirds of primary school pupils are reportedly already failing these. The so-called “moderation process”, enabling teachers to fiddle with and fudge their pupils’ results, is open to precisely the same abuse as all other internal assessment. Naturally, the education bureaucracy is now talking about the “challenges involved in improving moderation” – exactly the same as tweaking the results to get the desired outcomes. Education Minister Anne Tolley, talking about “the poor teachers”, says that is “a complex matter for schools and teachers to moderate the standards”. Poor dears. Life get so very complicated when the truth of issues becomes unpalatable.

The tide has well and truly turned overseas when discovery learning, with the consequences we can see from the above, has been described by Jerome Bruner in a memorandum submitted by Tom Burkard in a UK Parliamentary publication * as “the most inefficient technique possible for regaining what has been gathered over a long period of time… It poses insurmountable obstacles for pupils with poor working memory: deficits in this area are central to hyperactivity and low attainment in literacy and maths. “

What can possibly be wrong with the mental processes of ministerial advisers and so-called experts who continue to regurgitate this sheer nonsense – that it is not necessary to teach children thoroughly and well to help each individual child achieve his or her full potential ? How can it be that for over 20 years the nonsense of “self-discovery” still underpins the educational failure of so many children so very cheated out of quality teaching? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize what the ministry and numerous principals and teachers obstinately refuse to face – the fact that “effective teaching, yes teaching, is the key to social and intellectual development”. *

Does this seem familiar? “The curriculum has been progressively stripped of declarative knowledge which virtually all children can master.”* (The Japanese point out that it takes the slow pupils a little longer, but that all, well-taught, can get there.) “Sending pupils ‘to problem-solve’ and to ‘facilitate their own learning ‘ depends upon knowledge bases which children of poorly educated parents are unlikely to have….Discovery learning, in fact, degenerates into a charade of pseudo-enquiry which fools nobody, least of all the children, but which wastes a great deal of time.”*

No single minister has a hope of reforming our education system, nor can she rely on her fellow politicians, largely themselves undereducated and often worryingly ignorant products of a system long failing. Only a knowledgeable, parent-controlled initiative is now capable of opening the doors of the Augean Stables of ignorance and political hypocrisy. Individuals, as always, will have to stand up to be counted.

© Copyright Amy Brooke
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