After a thirty year slide down the world rankings of school systems, still no one in the we-are-above-criticism Ministry of Schools will admit that NCEA has been an absolute and unambiguous failure. eN-Zed’s education system used to be the best in the world. It gave us people like Ernest Rutherford and William Hamilton and Brian Barratt-Boyes. But schools were considered too expensive and so something cheaper was sought. Fizz, bang… Tomorrow’s School’s. Star Trek – The New Generation. And NCEA.
Some kids failed School Cert and apparently their feelings were hurt. Bless them. No doubt some even cried real tears. The solution to failure, as Robert the Bruce knew was to ‘try, try, try again’. But some felt that a better solution is to give a loving hug and free chocolate fish. There there, do you feel better now? And because that made kids happy, the Ministry decided to also give them certificates. And then everyone was happy.
It may be that after 30 years of chocolate fish NCEA, no one in eN-Zed Education even understands the word ‘failure’ because, as the glossy NCEA propaganda brochures tell us, there are no failures in a caring, loving society, only learning objectives not yet met. And certificates with gold stars not yet handed out. We all can and will be winners.
One significant reason for NCEA’s failure is that a lot of the time that was previously spent teaching and learning was now spent assessing and reassessing and reassessing… until Little James gets/guesses the correct answer…, er…, achieves the learning objective. By the time James enrols in Mechanical Engineering at Canterbury University and Professor Park finds he can’t even add 2 numbers together, it’ll be too late. The snowflake, as they say, will have settled. All is not woe though, James will of course be able and indeed feel very comfortable and safe sharing his feelings about plastic waste, gender identity and the meaningfulness of belonging and he’ll probably be able to communicate the latter through the magical medium of interpretive dance. So he’ll be able to earn a degree in Post-modern Interpretative Emotional Science (PIES).
Another reason may be that although kids are at school, they may not be learning how to write and read and do Maths and Science. They may be achieving alternative, but equally valuable (obviously) learning objectives such as caring for a pet paua, rugby ball maintenance, spinach harvesting and mindful movement. Or gender transition. Of course. Plussing, you see, is so Industrial Revolution and now the only certainty is uncertainty. Although cliches are also a certainty.
They threw out dear old School Cert. UE and Bursary. That was the Big Mistake. External exams aren’t perfect, but they’re the least imperfect of all the assessment systems, which is why the countries with the top-performing education systems, like Singapore, still use external exams. A Levels use exams – and while they tried internal assessment, they dumped that. IB uses exams and a little birdie tells me they’re dumping internal assessment as well. The more of the course is in an exam, the more accurate the exam becomes as an indicator of knowledge and understanding and skills. So big exams are good for telling us all who has learnt the material in a Maths or Physics or English course and who hasn’t. No one wants kids to feel the heart ache of failure but the answer isn’t to just give free passes and gold stars to everyone. If you do that, everyone fails. So to stop kids from feeling the pain of failure, we should teach them. We!
It takes a whole village to raise a child. ‘We’ should all be involved – especially parents. Kids should be able to write the alphabet and read a few sentences and do some counting before they even come to school.
The school curriculum should focus on literacy and numeracy. Dance skills, this may come as a surprise to some, are not as valuable in the world as being able to add numbers. High school English teachers can’t teach critical thinking skills if they are having to teach kids how to write sentence, spell and how to do apostrophes (all of which should be done before kids even get to high school). High school Science teachers can’t teach kids about orbits and photosynthesis if kids haven’t learnt about gravity and chemicals. I understand that kids in primary schools don’t have time to do Science and Maths anymore because they’re so busy with gender identity and pronouns, and empathising with kereru and Somali refugees, and mindfulness sessions.
Kids in exam countries stay up late and do homework and memorise stuff that may be in the exams, the results of which will be life-changing. And parents care about whether their kids fail or succeed in their education. NCEA is the biggest disaster that struck eN-Zed. Getting anyone to admit that seems to be the greatest hurdle to improving our education system and everything else that flows on from that. If that’s too complicated, we should send a few people from the Ministry of Schools to Singapore to see what they do because their kids are at the top of the world and heading upwards.
eN-Zed 