Further to Grant’s ‘listen and weep’ post on Anne Tolley’s performance on Morning Report, Gordon Campbell has written how the Minister’s approach harks back to the golden age of Queen Victoria “when the three Rs and a stern testing regime were seen to be all that a young lad or girl really needed”.
He notes that standards and the three R’s hardly help equip our kids to compete and do well in the face of globalisation.
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times takes up the argument:
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination… to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”
Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”
Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
I agree with you that education must involve keeping young people up with the play, but find the article you are quoting from repulsive. A society must have innovators, but cannot be made up of them entirely, and the dull attentive types who are going down the gurgler by this account are often needed to translate bright ideas into things that actually work, or repair the damage from those that did not. Here in New Zealand, look at both Cave Creek and leaky houses – both arguably the result of privileging hares over tortoises – “ideas” people such over people who actually have solid knowledge of how to do something. The article also endorses the egalitarianism of the “each” over the “all,” which I regard as social poison. Did you see that NZ is now in the top 10 on the income inequality hit parade?
I think the 3 Rs have their place in education, it particularly bugs me when people mangle the English language, e.g. your instead of you’re. I read an article that said that due to things like texting that English is becoming a foreign language.
Creativity and innovation are also important, but I’m not worried about this because students have never had it better in terms of the access they get to all kinds of stuff, especially computer software.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to describe the current Government’s approach to actual experts in any subject whatsoever as anything but utter disdain.
Witness for example health, climate, transport, foreign policy, and now education.
It’s symptomatic of a worldview that sees things in simple right and wrong terms, and sees simple “common sense” solutions to complex problems. Distressingly prevalent in this Government.
Actually Phil, the Victorian age was one of the finest in English history. Great advances were made in engineering (such as the the building of vast bridges and tunnels, the start of the building of the london underground under the thames), with engineers the likes of Brunell, who went on to design the SS Great Brittian, the size of ship wouldn’t be seen for another 50 years (till the Titanic).
sweetd – that may be, but I’m not sure we really want to emulate the Victorian era’s view of children themselves – child labour was rife during that time, including a large number of children used in prostitution.
What’s being pointed out, of course, is that a Victorian view of education is unhelpful for a 21st century world. Tolley, unfortunately, doesn’t get it.
21st century kids need to have a wide base of skill sets in order to navigate the global world we live in. The ‘3 r’s’ are important, but not in isolation. They need to also understand the wider complexities of the world – and use their literacy and numeracy skills within a range of contexts. No two kids are the same – for the disengaged and the at risk kids, the Nat stds will not change the fact that if their social, emotional and behavioural competencies are not met, they will not be able to access the academic curriculum. Pretty hard to focus if you are hungry, don’t have the social skills to relate to others or if you have a background where violence is an everyday occurrence.
@spud – unfortunately this world we live in – that includes nz – is not created equal. Not all kids have access to updated technology – the digital divide between the haves and have nots is growing wider by the day. I guess this will not get addressed by the Nats either!
@Paul – That’s true