I was in the middle of writing the introduction of this week’s blog post, which was meant to be part 1 of a three-part series on why school sucks, when I received an email from a colleague that linked to an article about the current review of the New South Wales curriculum and the notion of a move towards what the article calls an un-timed syllabus, or what is more commonly thought of as a competency-based curriculum.
A competency-based curriculum is something that I have been advocating in my lectures for years. Not that I have thought through all the implications of such a curriculum, but to me, it just makes sense: students work through the curriculum at their own pace. This would allow students who have mastered content to move faster than their peers and also allow students who struggle with particular ideas or concepts to spend more time working on them, rather than being pushed along in the system because of their age. There is a quote from Sir Ken Robinson in a talk he gave at the Royal Society for the Arts called Changing Paradigms, where he asks: “Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?”
I think we are all familiar with the concept of an age-based curriculum, where students move through school year by year, but has anyone ever stopped to ask, why? In the current system, students start school around the age of five, and unless there are remarkable circumstances to either hold a child back or advance them, which is very uncommon, they will learn with their age-group peers until they finish year 10 and move on to an approved apprenticeship or similar; leave school of their own volition at age 17; or, finish year twelve, which is essentially a prep-year for a standardised exam that gives a student a rank to get into university.
There have been continuous calls for reform to the system for decades. While there have certainly been advancements and improvements of the current system over time, for the most part, free (in that it is paid for through some form of taxes) and compulsory (from and to a certain age) education hasn’t changed much since its inception. In the past 20 years, there have been at least 10 national reviews of education in Australia, a country where the education systems are run by the states. The number of state reviews, if totalled, would likely double or triple that number, but this is only adjacent to the point I’m trying to make. What we have is a system in desperate need of change but a lack of understanding of how that change can and will manifest at scale.
The article I referred to above that calls for an untimed syllabus will be the starting point for this post because, in it, we see a smart, rational approach to a major reform of the system and an equally smart, rational rebuttal to that suggestion. It is these two views, which when analysed and understood, explain why the reform agenda for education has led to such little change. In the article, we have Professor Geoff Masters AO, CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), who conducted the 2020 NSW Curriculum Review, a state-wide review of the NSW school curriculum, who suggests that an untimed syllabus, or what I am calling a competency-based curriculum is a ‘radical solution’ to the ‘industrial-era way of thinking.’ Later in the article, University of Sydney Associate Professor Rachel Wilson indicates that this approach is not evidence-based and suggests that switching to a non-age-based approach to schooling could have psychological and developmental disadvantages for some students. She adds that ‘schooling is not just about academic outcomes,’ but that the focus needs to be on ‘the social outcomes of schooling as well as academic learning.’
So here we have two rational and logical arguments in regard to a major reform in education. How does one decide which point of view is best? The easy approach is to just pick a side, the one that sounds best. But what if there is a philosophical question here, one that is actually raised by Wilson in that line quoted above: that we must consider both the social and academic outcomes of school?
Education reform movements, at large scale, are at an impasse: until we decide what the purpose of school is and have ideas and ideals that are congruent, it will be difficult to have any meaningful reform. There have been various declarations that have set out the goals of schooling in Australia: The Hobart Declaration on Schooling (1989) was superseded by The Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling, which was then superseded by the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (2008), which has now been superseded by the Mparntwe Education Declaration (2019), Mparntwe being the Arrernte [indigenous] name for Alice Springs. The Mparntwe Declaration states only two goals:
1. The Australian education system promotes excellence and equity.
2. All young Australians become confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active and informed members of the community.
How do these inform curriculum and schooling in Australia, you ask? Well, my guess is that’s the same question every educator asks every time a new declaration is announced. These are great goals, but how do they inform practice, and what can they tell us about the Masters’ review and Wilson’s argument against a competency-based curriculum?
What I want to argue here is not that these goals aren’t worthy; they are, but rather that they are impracticable in a system that does not have a clear function that is easily distinguishable by stakeholders. In other words, the goals are incompatible with one another. So, what happens in the face of this incompatibility is…. Nothing! Inaction has been the response since the start of the reform movement decades ago and will likely continue to be the response until we accept the incompatibility of what we are trying to achieve in contrasting goals for schooling.
If you remember back to the beginning of this post, I was in the middle of writing the first of a three-part series on why school sucks when I was sent the article that has become the centrepiece for this post. One of the posts in that series was going to be about the lack of a clear and congruent vision for schooling in Australia, but also in most other Western democracies. And at the centre of that argument is a contention about the three competing, and incompatible voices for the curriculum, which are highlighted in a paper and a talk by SFU Professor Kieran Egan entitled, Why Education is Difficult and Contentious. In the paper, Egan argues that educational thinking draws on only three ideas that are foundational in all educational positions and that only when we face and understand the incompatibility of these ideas will we be able to overcome them. The three ideas are the ideal of socialisation, the academic ideal, and the developmental ideal.
I don’t want to spend too much time explaining each of these as you can simply read Egan and get a much better and more in-depth analysis, but I will try to summarise briefly what each ideal represents and relate it back to the ideas presented for reform. The idea of socialisation is an easy one for most to realise, and it is easy to see in the Mparntwe goals above active and informed members of the community. Schools are social institutions that get the younger generations to conform, in some sense, to the norms of society, learning rules and following directions and learning, much like their parents and grandparents before them. The academic ideal is probably the most obvious. Children go to school to learn pre-determined subjects: mathematics, science, reading, writing, history, etc. The subjects are chosen because of their seeming importance by bureaucrats advised by experts. The academic ideal is at the heart of teacher or expert-centred education movements. The last is the ideal of development, which relates to the time period in the development of the mind and child when things are best taught and learned. This developmental ideal is at the heart of the ‘student-centred’ movement and such traditions as Montessori and Steiner education, where students learn about what they are interested in when they are interested in learning it (for more about the teacher/expert-centred ideas versus student-centred read my first post).
So here we have the three ideas that are foundational in education and curriculum, but I’m not sure why these ideals are incompatible yet, so we will need to explore them in the context of the current argument. In a competency-based curriculum, it would seem that the academic ideal is the most prominent. The idea is based on students moving through the curriculum at their own pace, advancing when ready and spending more time on areas of challenge. This makes perfect sense if school was all about academics. This concept, however, as Wilson so readily points out, does not consider the socialisation of students. What psychological impacts are at play when a 15 or 16-year-old student who reads at an 8-year-old level is studying with students who are aged 8 and 9 or is reading a children’s book in her/his year 10 class? In a system without standards – (yes, you heard that right – the NSW curriculum does not have standards – the system currently heavily favours socialisation) how does one square this circle in the academic versus socialisation debate, especially when there is still the developmental ideal yet to consider? In the developmental ideal, we have to consider the child and their developmental readiness; however, it becomes obviously clear that the idea of a child’s own unique development is at odds with the socialisation aspect of school, which aims to homogenise. It is also at odds with the academic ideal in that one’s own development requires agency, which in turn requires individualism.
To put it simply: The academic ideal focuses on the mind – kids are in school to get smart and learn stuff. The developmental ideal is about the individual and their inherent uniqueness – kids are in school to develop and learn at their pace in line with their interests. The socialisation ideal is about socialising to the norms of society – kids need to learn how the real world works.
Let me give you an example: if I am a great cricketer or a masterful chess player, can that be part of my formal schooling? Well, no, students don’t get to choose the subjects they want to study, which would be a poor manifestation of the developmental ideal; they must, like all other students, complete the requisite curriculum (academic ideal). If I am a masterful mathematician or artist (academic ideal), but I’m only 10 years of age, can I take my year 12 final examinations and go to university at age 11? Again, the answer in 99% of cases is no; you must learn with your age group (socialisation).
As I mentioned earlier, reading Egan will provide a clearer articulation of these ideas, but here is one part of his paper that summarises this incompatibility: “Adequate socialization requires successfully inculcating a set of beliefs, values, and norms of behavior in the growing child. The academic program is specifically designed to enable the growing child to question the basis for any beliefs, values, and norms of behavior. ” The two aims pull against each other: the more successfully one socializes, the less one achieves the academic ideal; the more successfully one inculcates disciplined academic thinking, the less easy it is to socialize successfully. Socialization requires acceptance of beliefs, values, and norms that the disciplined academic mind sees as stereotypes, prejudices, and homogenization.” In regards to the developmental ideal: “The academic commitment to shaping the mind by teaching disciplined forms of understanding isn’t compatible with the belief that the minds of different people can be optimally developed by knowledge chosen to suit their particular style of learning, kind of intelligence, needs and interests. One cannot have two masters, especially when both mandate different things. We can’t construct a coherent educational institution using radically different criteria.”
The problem isn’t that there are not great ideas about how school can be reformed and re-shaped, the problem is we don’t know what master we are serving. The Mparntwe Declaration sets out two ambitious and worthwhile goals; however, to achieve all aspects of both goals, we have to sacrifice the level at which we can reach each aspect of goals. If we want a world-class education system, judged by international standardised testing such as PISA and TIMMS, we may have to sacrifice the socialisation and developmental ideals of schooling. On the other hand, if we want to promote equity and confidence, we may have to sacrifice some academic excellence. If we want creative and confident individuals, we may have to overhaul the entire system.
I’m not suggesting that we have to or should sacrifice any of these goals: they are good goals to aim for. However, what we must understand is that the tension between these goals requires a balance: we cannot expect to have academic excellence without sacrificing some measure of socialisation and individuality, and we cannot have socialisation without sacrificing some academic excellence and some individuality.
Until we recognise the incompatibility of the current system and its competing demands, the endless reviews of the current state of the educational system will likely continue to result in inaction.
Maximising Student Potential 
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