Curios of the week #19

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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I am calling it.

This week, we have reached a watershed moment in Australian education. Up until now, it was unclear which way the federal government would jump on education policy. Prior to last year’s election, Tanya Plibersek, the Labor education spokesperson had been strong on the need to be more evidence-informed. However, after the election, she was replaced by Jason Clare who became the new federal minister. He has been enigmatic, talking a great deal about equity but not all that much about evidence, even when responding to a negative review of the National School Reform Agreement by the Productivity Commission.

However, the response to a more recent review by the Teacher Education Expert Panel, has been more robust and explicit. Clare and state education ministers have agreed that teacher education must be more evidence-informed and that trainee teachers must learn about cognitive science, explicit teaching and classroom management. As I noted this week, the effectiveness of mandating this content remains to be demonstrated because universities have strategies available to subvert the Panel’s intentions.

Nevertheless, this is an important juncture. As Paul Kelly reported in The Australian, both main parties now share the same broad agenda — one that aligns with many of the goals many of you would share for Australian education. Labor have avoided the temptation to align with a natural constituency — the leftish romantics of our education faculties — and have take a more clear-eyed view. And it is an approach supported by the nation’s serious media commentators.

Let’s see where we go from here.

This weeks curios include some race-based discrimination, metacognition, New Zealand science, lavish and extremely well-deserved praise for me and much, much more.

Educational progressivist of the week

George Monbiot is a British environmentalist who occasionally dabbles in amateur educationalism for The Guardian newspaper. As an amateur, he tends to avoid the obfuscations of institutionalised educationalists and lays his ideology out plainly for analysis. As such, he is informative.

Monbiot makes a standard functional argument, based on the assumption that the purpose of education is to prepare students for work and that the work of the future will be fundamentally different in some way to the work of today. This time, it’s because of artificial intelligence. He makes a case for understanding ‘complex systems’, for which I would like to see the lesson plan.

However, following the usual tired rhetoric about the evils of exams, Monbiot lands on an interesting argument:

“Above all, our ability to adapt to massive change depends on what practitioners call “metacognition” and “meta-skills”. Metacognition means thinking about thinking. In a brilliant essay for the Journal of Academic Perspectives, Natasha Robson argues that while metacognition is implicit in current teaching – “show your working”, “justify your arguments” – it should be explicit and sustained. Schoolchildren should be taught to understand how thinking works, from neuroscience to cultural conditioning; how to observe and interrogate their thought processes; and how and why they might become vulnerable to disinformation and exploitation. Self-awareness could turn out to be the most important topic of all.”

As with all discussion of the grab-bag of disparate things we tend to label ‘metacognition’, some of this is reasonable and some, hopeless — imagine the Year 9 lesson on interrogating thought processes. However, the key thing, as I predicted back in 2018, is that metacognition is now being used as a straight-up excuse for educational progressivism.

Due to its repeated failures, educational progressivism chews through justifications at an alarming rate and so constantly needs to replenish them with new ones.