I first published this story in February, 2016. In 2020, when politicians were taking notice of health experts to counter the ravages of Covid 19, I amended the closing paragraphs to suggest it was time that politicians starting taking notice of education experts. Sadly it has not happened.
In 2009, the standardised testing of literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) in Years
3, 5, 7 and 9 was made mandatory in all Australian schools by the Rudd Labor
government. NAPLAN was a refinement of earlier national testing programmes
introduced by the then Federal Ministers for Education, Dr David Kemp and Dr
Brendon Nelson, in the Howard Government. The Gillard Labor government
subsequently established the Myschool website so that parents, and others,
could check on a school’s NAPLAN performance and compare it with other schools.
The fact that all schools were able to be compared and judged on their
NAPLAN results caused principals and teachers to focus on improving their
NAPLAN scores. Media attention also brought pressure on schools to lift their
NAPLAN scores. As a result, many schools instructed teachers to concentrate
almost exclusively on literacy and numeracy in term one each year in
preparation for the NAPLAN tests in May.
Many parents began enrolling their
children in after school and weekend pre NAPLAN classes to improve their
chances in the tests. At the same time “distractions” like in-term swimming, interschool
sports fixtures, cultural and educational excursions were postponed until after
NAPLAN. The focus on NAPLAN also pushed formal education down into the early years of
childhood.
The dangers of inflicting formal education on very young children was
highlighted by Professor David Elkind in 1989, when he published his bestselling
book, “The Hurried Child, The Power of Play and Miseducation.”
Elkind, born in 1931, is now Professor Emeritus at Tufts University,
Medford, Massachusetts. He was formerly Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and
Education at Rochester University, New York. He spent many years studying “The
Hurried Child” and the many problems that arise from getting young children
involved in formal education too soon. He stressed that “Education is not a
race.” He believed that children’s education activities should be
“developmentally appropriate.” Unlike our politicians, Elkind has spent a
lifetime researching the subject.
In 2001, Elkind published a paper entitled, “Much Too Early”. He again
warned of the dangers of forcing formal education on minds not yet ready. He warned of the “Growing call for
early-childhood educators to engage in the academic training of young children.
The movement's beginnings lay in the fears sparked by the Soviet Union's launching
of Sputnik in 1957.”
Elkind says that in the United States the civil rights movement highlighted educational
inequality and led to the creation of Head Start, a program aimed at preparing
young disadvantaged children for school. He says though Head Start was an
important and valuable program, it gave rise to the belief “that education is a
race - and that the earlier you start, the earlier you finish.” Unfortunately,
Australia, although it had arguably better and more equitable education programmes
than the USA, was encouraged to follow America’s example of providing formal
instructions to children in Kindergarten and Pre-Primary classes.
Elkind went on to point out that
“Those calling for academic instruction of the young don't seem to appreciate
that maths and reading are complex skills acquired in stages related to age.
Children will acquire these skills more easily and more soundly if their
lessons accord with the developmental sequence that parallels their cognitive
development.”
He says much research over many years shows that children benefit most from
learning activities that are developmentally appropriate for their age. He
poses the question, “Why, when we know what is good for young children, do we
persist in mis-educating them, in putting them at risk for no purpose?
"The short
answer is that the movement toward academic training of the young is not about
education. It is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in what
they regard as an increasingly competitive and global economy. It is about the
simplistic notion that giving disadvantaged young children academic training
will provide them with the skills and motivation to continue their education
and break the cycle of poverty. It is about politicians who push
accountability, standards, and testing in order to win votes as much as or more
than to improve the schools.”
Elkind wrote these words in 2001. They are even
truer today than they were then. Even though Elkind clearly identified the
problem seventeen years ago, politicians have continued to push for policies that
win votes but do not necessarily improve schooling.
National and international standardised testing regimes such as PISA have highlighted
differences in achievement levels in schools and between countries. Unlike the
USA and the UK, Australia is generally placed in the top twelve in PISA tests
and compares very favourably against countries that do not have an indigenous population or a large multi-cultural society in which significant numbers only speak English as a second language.
Unfortunately, some parents and most politicians, do see education as a race.
Despite the research evidence of educators like Elkind, who have spent years
studying the effects of “Too much Too Soon”, they believe that they can give children
a head start in “The Race” by starting them earlier and earlier.
To those politicians who are intent on seeing Australia at the top of the
PISA Premiership race, Professor Elkind has warned, “The deployment of
unsupported, potentially harmful pedagogies is particularly pernicious at the
early-childhood level. It is during the early years, ages four to seven, when
children's basic attitudes toward themselves as students and toward learning
and school are established. Children who come through this period feeling good
about themselves, who enjoy learning and who like school, will have a lasting
appetite for the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Children whose academic
self-esteem is all but destroyed during these formative years, who develop an
antipathy toward learning, and a dislike of school, will never fully realize
their latent abilities and talents.”
That last sentence is chilling. Elkind is
talking about a generation who had their childhood taken from them. It is
society that will reap the whirlwind of these alienated disinterested, antagonistic and
unmotivated students. Every day the media tells us of the antisocial behaviour of the disgruntled youth, mainly young men.
Elkind concludes by saying, “If we want all of our children to be the best
that they can be, we must recognize that education is about them, not us. If we
do what is best for children, we will give them and their parents the
developmentally appropriate, high-quality, affordable, and accessible
early-childhood education they both need and deserve.’’ ) These words should be
written in bronze on the walls of every politicians’ office. The problem would
be getting them to read them and understand them.
Many Australian educators agree with Elkind. Like him,
they believe, especially in K to 6 primary classrooms, that children should
progress developmentally and that their natural curiosity should be fostered so
that they will feel good about themselves, enjoy learning and develop a lasting,
life-long appetite for the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Their fear is
that standardised testing and formal learning, especially in the very early
years, will destroy self-esteem and develop as Elkind warns, “an antipathy to
learning and a dislike of school.” This will create an enormous educational and
social debt that we will have to face up to and pay, at great cost, sometime in
the future.
Of course literacy and numeracy are very important, but the pressures caused
by NAPLAN has had deleterious effects. School principals know very well that their
school, hence their own performance, will be judged by the parents, the
Education Department and the media on their school’s NAPLAN results. As a
consequence, in many Australian schools, pressure was firmly applied by school
administrators on early child hood teachers for them to deliver a more formal
approach in developing literacy and numeracy skills in Kindergarten and Pre-Primary
children.
About three years ago I was supervising a student teacher in a Pre-Primary
class. The children were asked to retell a story the student teacher had read to them.
As they finished their stories they took them to the student teacher to receive a
tick or a stamp of some kind. One little girl, on her way back to her desk,
proudly showed me her work. It was a wonderful effort. Her work was neatly
printed, her spelling was correct, her sentences well-constructed, punctuated and with interesting word usage. I could not believe she was in Pre-Primary.
To me it looked like the work of a good Year Two child.
I subsequently observed
work of a similar standard by the other Pre-Primary children. Later on I complimented the
class teacher on the high standard of written work in her class. However, in
this particular case, the Pre-Primary teacher was unhappy that her strong focus
on language development, at the principal’s direction, had been to the
detriment of many other worthwhile creative and interesting learning
activities. She wasn’t as happy in her job as she should have been and she felt
that her children were missing out on the “fun and socialising creativity” that used to epitomise pre-primary
learning.
These stresses on early childhood teachers are exacerbated in schools
that previously had strong child centred, activity based learning programmes
that followed the Montessori and Regio Emilia philosophies of learning. Over
time, in my mentoring role with student teachers, it became increasingly clear
that, as far as number and language development were concerned, Kindergarten
was the New Year One and Pre- Primary was the New Year Two. A clear case of too much, too soon.
A few years ago, I attended a huge school assembly to farewell the school’s
Pre-Primary teacher. She was not retiring because of age or ill health; she had
in fact resigned because, for her, early childhood education had become far too
formal. I listened, teary eyed, as her students, ex-students, fellow teachers,
the principal, parents and community members and even the local MP, sincerely thanked her for the
wonderful impact that she had had on them and the lives of all of the children
in her care.
Teenagers, some of whom she had taught twelve years earlier,
turned up from the nearby high school to express their gratitude and to recall
with great pleasure, not only what this wonderful teacher had taught them, but,
more importantly, how “special” she had made them all feel.
Like me, everyone
present was affected by these emotional outpourings, but I was also saddened to
think that such a brilliant teacher, a pre-primary teacher Par Excellence, was
lost to future generations of young Australians because of the system’s
pressure to push formal literacy and numeracy learning into the lives of our
very young children. She now works for less pay, but very happily, in a
childcare centre where she nurtures very young children with love and with interesting,
challenging and stimulating activities well suited to their developmental
levels. The children all love her, they love being in her care and learning about themselves and their friends, their family and world outside their front door.
Sadly, we hear more and more stories of good early childhood teachers who resign because the job they are being asked to do is not the job they signed up for and loved. A very sad and unintended outcome of universal standardised testing.
Universal standardised testing has had a great many unfortunate unintended
outcomes. It is so unnecessary. In 2009,
as NAPLAN was being introduced in Australia, The Cambridge University Review of
Primary Education was published. It strongly criticised the way in which
standardised testing was taking the focus, and important teaching time, off
other worthwhile subjects.
In that same year, in the USA, Dr Diane Ravitch
published her bestselling book, “The Death and Life of the Great American
Public School System”. The book’s subtitle was “How testing and choice are
undermining education”. Cambridge University pointed out that education systems
could gain valid and reliable accountability information about literacy and
numeracy and other subjects by doing away with costly universal testing and
making use of random sampling. After all, that is what PISA does and our politicians and popular press are transfixed by the results obtained.
Politicians have always like universal standardised testing. They believe it makes voters think that they know what they are talking about and talking about accountability of teachers is always a popular sport. In the 1990s Western Australia operated WAMSE, a very successful random sampling monitoring of language, mathematics and science. In the early 2000s, Federal Education Ministers, David Kemp and Brendan Nelson, both medical doctors, used the extortionate tactics of Al Capone, threatening to withhold WA's federal funding unless it adopted federal universal standardised testing. WAMSE was shelved.
Unfortunately, in Australia, teachers are not politically powerful. Our
education system is controlled by politicians who, as Professor Elkind observed
over twenty three years ago, generally make decisions based on what attracts the
most votes, not on what is in the best interests of our children...and
ultimately, our country. The late Dr David Mossenson, a highly esteemed and
very effective Director General of Education in Western Australia in the 1970s
and early 1980s, was once heard to say, “I spent the first half of my career
trying to get politicians interested in education and the second half trying to
get them out of it.”
We can only hope that more and more Australian educators will acquaint
themselves with the evidence presented by the Cambridge University Review of
Primary Education and Dr Ravich’s “The Death and Life of the Great American
Public School System”. We can only hope that they continue to try to influence
our politicians before our primary children are completely deprived of the
wider curriculum they previously enjoyed and before our kindergarten and pre-primary
children are further burdened down with the pressures of formal education.
Many readers may have seen and possibly been shocked by the ABC’s Foreign
Correspondent programme aired on June, 16, 2015, highlighting education in
South Korea, a leading PISA country. What they saw was a “Battery Hen” approach
to education. Students spent all day in school and then went to a “cram school”
for further instruction and tutorials or to study centres to continue their
school work. Most students did not return home until 11-00pm at night. The
video showed students asleep at their desks and designated staff walking around
to rouse them back to their studies.
After the Korean War, South Korea was
a poor country with a weak education system. It saw education as a means to economic
improvement. Today South Korea is among the world’s largest and most robust
economies. It also has the highest suicide rate in the world and the suicide rate
for 10 to 19 year olds is increasing alarmingly. This is understandable,
considering the enormous physical, mental and emotional pressures that it puts
on its school children.
In our primary schools and especially in our Kindergartens and Pre-Primaries
“enjoyment” should be the operative word. During the Covid pandemic politicians listened to the health experts. They now need to listen to the education experts.We should all be praying that one day
we can have someone with real life teaching experiences making the important
decisions that will impact on children in our primary schools and kindergartens.
It is to be hoped that more and more Australian educators will speak out
strongly against speeding up children’s formal development. That more and more Australian educators will stress the
benefits of letting our children enjoy their childhood, learning in
developmental, incremental stage, not being force fed as early and
unwilling participants in some educational race. Finland provides a good example. In that enlightened country, there is no formal instruction until children are aged seven and there is no standardised testing in schools at any level.
In the meantime, we can only wait and see what troubles lie ahead as those
children who are now in their early childhood years and who are being robbed of their
childhood today, grow into their mature tomorrows. Sadly, too many of them of them will become alienated The Lost Childhood Generation.
I wonder if they will look back fondly and thank us for the way we
made them feel?
