Dave Armstrong: ‘Back to basics’ education policy push is all too familiar

Monday, 27 March 2023

At the heart of National’s latest education policy lies the debate between skills and knowledge, writes Dave Armstrong.

Dave Armstrong is a playwright and satirist based in Wellington. He is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: ‘Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’

Charles Dickens was satirising the back-to-basics movement when he wrote Hard Times, but I was immediately reminded of merchant Thomas Gradgrind when National last week announced its education policy.

Forget the airy-fairy, trendy-lefty curriculum. With the Nats in charge, it’s an hour a day of maths, reading and writing. If there’s any time left you can do all that fun stuff that left-wing educationists advocate. And you’ll be tested twice a year in a policy that seems to be labelled Not National Standards by leader Christopher Luxon.

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Christopher Luxon reveals the National Party's education policy for primary and intermediate schools.

Despite the chronic teacher shortage, graduates leaving training college will also face a test. As we all know if you’re embarking on a 40-year career changing young people’s lives, a written exam is the best way to judge if you’ll be any good.

At the heart of National’s policy lies the debate between skills and knowledge. Of course you need both, but most conservatives think teaching ‘important’ knowledge has been lost to overly focussing on skills.

Given I spent many hours in my youth learning important ‘knowledge’ on how to use log tables, VHS machines, film projectors, a manual shift on a car and a slide rule, I tend to favour the curriculum’s current skills emphasis.

However, National must be congratulated for coming up with some actual policy. So far we’ve had promises that it would repeal many government initiatives, but few positive alternatives except that old, flea-bitten dog, tax cuts.

Nevertheless, this has been quite effective, with the prime minister ditching many policies that the Nats vocally opposed.

The back-to-basics move in state education has been happening for some time, but under National the trickle would turn into a torrent.

National’s policy emphasises the curriculum. It’s not how we’re teaching, how many we’re teaching, or who we’re teaching that’s the problem, it’s what we’re teaching.

Most of us are aware that our international PISA rankings – where 15 year-olds around the world are assessed – have been dropping.

What’s caused it? Covid, understaffing, truancy, increasing student anxiety, large classes, cuts in professional development, streaming, lack of streaming, overassessment, underassessment? All of the above?

0322022 Photo: JERICHO ROCK-ARCHER/STUFF Mugshot Dave Armstrong. Stuff staff mugshot Feb 2022.

No-one knows for sure, but the Nats targeted our crowded, flexible and liberal curriculum. It’s quite unusual for a political party to be so hands-on, but it may be a vote winner, however misguided.

It’s the aviation equivalent of an airline CEO going down to catering and saying ‘forget the low-calorie popcorn and healthy beetroot cracker bites, this company’s going back to the basics of the sweet Big Time Cookie and salty Mexican corn chips.’

Sadly, I suspect Mr Luxon knows as much about educational theory as I do about running an airline. He made great capital out of the supposedly needless curriculum flexibility.

Our children are only taught algebra anywhere from Year 6 to 10 whereas in Australia they start in Year 5!

Dude, that’s not the problem. The problem is the cheap, uncreative, equipment-less, assessment-obsessed, fun-less, non-expert-led way that subjects like maths are often taught.

I sometimes teach algebra to my four-year-old (great) niece. But I don’t sit her down with a pad and write x and y, however, when she gets out her toy $2.50 pizza and plays shop, I might say ‘give me one more piece than you’re gonna give your mother’.

So she’s learning that, today, D (Dave) = M (Mum) + 1, and that is algebra. Give me pizza over PISA any day.

After about 10 minutes – not one hour – when my algebraic demands get too difficult, she simply says ‘pizza shop’s closed’. Calculus and even that nemesis of secondary students, mathematical proof, can be taught to young kids provided the teachers are well-paid, creative, trained properly and have access to experts and apparatus. (‘Were Jack and Jill the only two people who went up the hill?’ ‘Do all people who go up hills fall down?’ Did Jack fall before Jill’.)

Unfortunately, National got rid of both the Creatives in Schools scheme and the expert teacher advisory service when last in government, so I’m not holding my breath for a creative approach to numeracy and literacy.

Can schools go too far down the fluffy, flexible, curriculum road? Yes. I’m reminded of writer CK Stead who wrote that when one of his children studied Macbeth at secondary school the class simply built a model castle.

Most teachers know that parents want literacy and numeracy to form a substantial part of their child’s learning. The question is how you do it engagingly and effectively.

My worry is that National’s plan will not see the outpouring of pedagogical brilliance that they say it will.

I worry it will lead to an orchestrated litany of boring written work and rote learning. Standards will drop and in a decade there will be yet another desperate, back-to-basics, whoop, whoop, pull-up, pull-up from political parties.