Another one from last year that I wrote on the back of a concern about how the language around how learning happens, is, and what counts as learning outcomes was being co-opted by a narrow ideology.

Of course, we in NZ are now in the throes of this, and it’s even worse than we thought. So I am republishing this as a way to provoke some thinking about that word ‘outcomes’.

Hours and hours my son spends, shuffling through cards, be they your typical deck of playing cards or other kinds made for specific games like Magic the Gathering.

Hours and hours, crouched over on the floor, sorting, making piles, studying. It’s so easy (tempting) to view it as meaningless activity, an excuse to avoid doing things he’s been asked to do.

Hours and hours.

Just quietly, it often drives me nuts, and I struggle to let it roll. Sometimes, I can’t.

Anyone who creates space for kids to take the lead has felt it, this tension between self-directed immersion and the time that takes up, and the need to get important things done within a specific timeframe.

Certainly, the current political narrative about education in New Zealand, and mirrored in many other countries, sets these up as opposing forces and stresses the need to focus almost exclusively on getting important things done in a timely manner. Learning in schools is about kids learning the basics according to schedule, we’re told. Hours must be spent each day making sure this happens (here, the political party on course to win the upcoming election has in its education policy that each day every child up to year six must spend an hour on reading, an hour on writing, and an hour on maths. Three hours out of four and a half learning hours every day on two learning areas. Or, to put it another way, one and a half to two hours a day on all the other ways we can be human). And not only that. Now we have science to tell us that there is a right way to do this learning and so scientific approaches are going to be mandated.

But you know what? This ideology is the imposition of corporate ideas about productivity into education, and it’s bullshit. Meaningful learning is not the result of the effective application of managerial principles, no matter how ‘scientific’. 

I’m not against kids achieving. I think the ‘basics’ are really important. And it seems pretty clear that achievement levels in those basics have been declining for a number of years. I’m all for doing things to arrest that decline. I just don’t think we’ve done enough to identify why they’ve declined. 

The educational managerialists with all their science say the reason achievement levels have declined is because the pedagogical approach was wrong. 

But, their logic doesn’t work. 

For achievement levels to have declined it means they must have been higher (and it turns out they weren’t just a little higher but significantly so) but how can that be if we were teaching all wrong?

So what were we doing back when achievement was higher? An obvious place to look is the nature of childhood. A lot has changed in the last 20 or so years:

• Technology has colonised childhood.
• More children are spending more time in childcare from a younger age.
• Families are more time poor than ever, and this is cited by many parents as a reason why they don’t read to their children as much as they would like to.
• Children are living more pressured, scheduled lives which, combined with the rise of technology, has reduced the time, opportunities, and inclination of children to play.
• A booming housing market has led to more insecure housing for many families and is one of the reasons for the entrenchment of child poverty.

(I read that list now, and you know what sticks out? All these are outcomes of neoliberalism. The educational changes being mandated are neoliberal, coming out of right-wing think-tanks around the world. So, harder neoliberalism is the answer to the poor outcomes caused by neoliberalism, apparently).

Add into the mix the increasing pressures placed on schools to raise achievement over that time, and you’ve got an environment that pays little attention to the developmental needs of children.

There is plenty of science about the negative effects of these changes on children, including on their ability to learn. But then, there are plenty of adults getting rich out of those changes, so I guess we can’t change them.

Here’s why that matters.

One thing I believe schools are for is to help kids discover and grow the gifts they’re born with. (Are there any parents out there who would say this isn’t an outcome they want from the education system?) The narrowing of what’s important as learning, and the increased amount of time devoted to those things, makes schools exclusionary places because of the emphasis placed on a certain kind of learning and learner. To do that, as well as doing nothing about the environmental conditions that cut against the developmental needs of children, is to place greed before health and equity.

There’s a great book I read recently by Temple Grandin called Visual Thinking. In it, she says:

Visual thinkers are being screened out by a curriculum that favours verbal, linear thinkers who are good at taking tests. The hands-on classes where some of these ‘poor students’ might have shown great ability are gone.

The educational managerialists want there to be only a little time in schools for the visual thinker, the dreamer, the builder, the artist, the dancer, the ecologist … Their approach, which privileges the basics and emphasises process, productivity and progress, as determined and managed by an authority figure, excludes from view so much that is learning, so many gifts that if allowed to flourish could enrich so many lives. It is, no matter the narrative about ‘not accepting failure’ and ‘not gambling with kids’ futures’ that’s spouted, a political position that excludes many children from seeing themselves as learners who have something valuable to contribute.

To that, I say no thanks.

Kids deserve to grow up in an environment that supports them with the time and resources they need to find their gifts and grow them. It’s up to us, as caring adults, to have the imagination to see it and give them the space they need for it to come to light.

On a cold dark night, the fire roaring, Albert comes to me with a deck of cards. ‘Want to play a game I’ve invented?’ he asks. 

There are a few clunky bits that we have to work through, but the game is beyond basic and it works. And as we play it occurs to me that all that time crouched over decks of cards was time well spent. He has a feel for patterns, groupings, relationships, can see how cards can speak to and slide past each other, how that can create tension. I think, What was that moment like when, cards in hand, he saw it? How did he feel?

Here’s a little secret that the educational managerialists don’t want you to discover: they don’t have a monopoly on the science of learning. There is science about learning to be found in self-direction too, and it’s to do with emotions. It’s a science that sees learning as an embodied, expansive endeavour. It’s a science that, if we embrace it, allows us to understand how to help children and their gifts to flourish.