When past social or technological advances are discussed young people sometimes disclaim all knowledge and remark “I wasn’t alive then”, as if nothing can be known without having been lived through. This is not Hayek’s “pretense of knowledge” so much as the misguided view that nothing is real except what you have seen, touched and can vouch for in person. In fact, learning accumulates and is passed on through the generations. For example, a first-year university Mathematics student stands on the shoulders of generations of mathematicians from many cultures. The known evidence suggests that mathematics originated in Mesopotamia in around 3000BC and advanced greatly within the Islamic world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “but I cannot say for sure because I wasn’t alive then”.
New Zealand’s long-term educational decline can partly be explained by the abandonment of phonics in favour of “whole language” learning, and child-centred education replacing direct instruction. We lack high-quality national curricula available to all our students, including the disadvantaged. New Zealand history is now part of the curriculum, but it overplays tribalistic history rather than telling a richer story of a socially-progressive multicultural democracy that, for all its shortcomings, has succeeded in the world.
Traditional Knowledge as Science?
The requirement to treat mātauranga Māori as equal to science is already turning students off science classes and has attracted negative comment internationally. A draft science curriculum is being ridiculed for its near exclusion of whole fields of science such as physics and chemistry.
In recent times the education system has focused on making schools more responsive to students’ cultural, racial and gender identities, and more equitable. More effort is being placed on competencies rather than the deep disciplinary knowledge foundations that underpin competencies. There has been less emphasis on educational content that meets international standards, and on using the education system to support equal citizenship that underpins New Zealand’s democracy.
In New Zealand we have underplayed the liberating power of formal education. When a child with her identity forged through life experience goes to school she enters a new world of the counter-intuitive, the symbolic, the tedious, necessary repetition, the foundations built from the ground-up, not knowing what future structures they might give rise to. Doing it the other way around and starting with competencies is like building a house from the roof down without the necessary foundations.
The school system’s problems may soon be further compounded by a failure to address what knowledge should be taught and memorized, as opposed to being accessed externally, nowadays typically online. This issue is especially urgent because of the arrival of AI products such as ChatGPT and the certainty that AI will only get better.
As AI advances there will be greater temptation to reduce the content taught and memorized at school levels and beyond. The question posed is why should knowledge have to be memorized when it is only a few keystrokes or clicks away from anyone with a mobile device?
How to Think – not What to Think
The rhetoric in education is that we should not focus on memorizing Gradgrindian facts and instead teach students “how to think” and to “think for themselves.” However, it is difficult to think for yourself when you don’t have much to think about or with and do not possess the underlying knowledge or skills. What is often derided as ‘rote-learning’ is the foundation for advanced analysis. Memorization creates a base of knowledge and we draw upon this foundational knowledge as we engage in more advanced thinking.
Daisy Christodoulou has shown how Shakespeare’s genius depended on intensive rote learning and memorization. While no one suggests we revert to the days when school children crept like snails unwillingly to school, foundational learning is hard but necessary work. It requires quality content input and direction from authoritative teachers. It requires students to study hard and persevere and sometimes deal with failure. However, student attendance rates in many New Zealand schools are abysmal, and yet attendance is a necessary foundation for student success in future learning and working lives.
High-level learning foundations take a lot of effort to master, but the marginal cost of applying that foundational knowledge to each new application can be very low or nil. Good examples would be memorizing the alphabet, times tables and basic arithmetic.
Fate favours the prepared mind. You can’t look something up on Google or frame a question to ChatGPT when you don’t know what you are looking for. You can’t recognise it when you see it, and you can’t judge it if you find it.
A key future skill will be writing good ChatGPT and other AI prompts and sense-checking the results. To do so you need to be literate and understand the wider context. You must then frame the prompts or questions asked, and then understand the response the AI tool offers.
The Insatiable Human Memory
Some perceive the memory as a storage locker with a finite and inelastic capacity. Once it is full some knowledge must be lost to create space for new knowledge to be stored. This approach is mistaken. More ideas, concepts and facts stored in the memory enrich understanding and allow new connections to be made. These connections involve new combinations, and these give rise to innovation.
For example, Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, did not confine herself within her poetic talents. She was likely the world’s first computer programmer and worked closely with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. She drew on her multilingualism and poetic gifts as well as mathematics in her work with Babbage. Lovelace speculated that the Analytical Engine could be developed to produce symbols, graphics, artistic works and music as well as numerical calculations.
Steve Jobs’ interest in calligraphy sparked his fascination with typography, typeface design aesthetics and attention to detail. These interests shaped Apple’s approach to product design and creating market advantage.
The draft science curriculum tells us students will “develop place-based knowledge of the natural world and experience of the local area in which they live.” This is inwards-looking and parochial, and also creates unnecessary challenges for schools to develop their own curricula, some of which may prove to be of questionable quality. Science takes us to the outer reaches of the universe. It is an endless frontier, “we may be bounded in a nutshell but count ourselves kings of infinite space.”
The narrow intellectual scope of the draft curriculum may be inadequate to allow students to pathway to study fields such as engineering. Universities can offer remedial or catchup study options, but it is far more effective to solve problems at their source.
Let’s Get it Right
So, what do we do from here?
We should reinstate the concept of “powerful knowledge” that alludes to education that teaches the principles, theories, and concepts that underpin more advanced learning. Powerful knowledge is cumulative. It does not come only from lived experience but also from ideas. It does not belong to any one cultural group. It is universal knowledge that belongs to every human being.
Within our universities, science is undertaken to advance the frontiers of knowledge in accord with agreed methods or sometimes with new or bespoke methods. These include falsification, experimentation, and replication. Being internationalist, universities belong to a “Republic of Science” that serves all humanity. Science is not simply one of many “ways of knowing”. It stands for the authority of empirical and tested truth rather than the authority of race, ideology, religion or cultural identity.
Parents, teachers, Māori and other communities need to make education more of an election issue. Regardless of the election outcome, there needs to be an investigation into the academic qualifications of those in the Ministry of Education working in such key fields as curriculum development, pedagogy, science, and policy and regulation governing such transformative technologies as AI. This investigation must start at the top.
Dr Peter Winsley has worked in policy and economics-related fields in New Zealand for many years. With qualifications and publications in economics, management and literature. This article was first published HERE
Traditional Knowledge as Science?
The requirement to treat mātauranga Māori as equal to science is already turning students off science classes and has attracted negative comment internationally. A draft science curriculum is being ridiculed for its near exclusion of whole fields of science such as physics and chemistry.
In recent times the education system has focused on making schools more responsive to students’ cultural, racial and gender identities, and more equitable. More effort is being placed on competencies rather than the deep disciplinary knowledge foundations that underpin competencies. There has been less emphasis on educational content that meets international standards, and on using the education system to support equal citizenship that underpins New Zealand’s democracy.
In New Zealand we have underplayed the liberating power of formal education. When a child with her identity forged through life experience goes to school she enters a new world of the counter-intuitive, the symbolic, the tedious, necessary repetition, the foundations built from the ground-up, not knowing what future structures they might give rise to. Doing it the other way around and starting with competencies is like building a house from the roof down without the necessary foundations.
The school system’s problems may soon be further compounded by a failure to address what knowledge should be taught and memorized, as opposed to being accessed externally, nowadays typically online. This issue is especially urgent because of the arrival of AI products such as ChatGPT and the certainty that AI will only get better.
As AI advances there will be greater temptation to reduce the content taught and memorized at school levels and beyond. The question posed is why should knowledge have to be memorized when it is only a few keystrokes or clicks away from anyone with a mobile device?
How to Think – not What to Think
The rhetoric in education is that we should not focus on memorizing Gradgrindian facts and instead teach students “how to think” and to “think for themselves.” However, it is difficult to think for yourself when you don’t have much to think about or with and do not possess the underlying knowledge or skills. What is often derided as ‘rote-learning’ is the foundation for advanced analysis. Memorization creates a base of knowledge and we draw upon this foundational knowledge as we engage in more advanced thinking.
Daisy Christodoulou has shown how Shakespeare’s genius depended on intensive rote learning and memorization. While no one suggests we revert to the days when school children crept like snails unwillingly to school, foundational learning is hard but necessary work. It requires quality content input and direction from authoritative teachers. It requires students to study hard and persevere and sometimes deal with failure. However, student attendance rates in many New Zealand schools are abysmal, and yet attendance is a necessary foundation for student success in future learning and working lives.
High-level learning foundations take a lot of effort to master, but the marginal cost of applying that foundational knowledge to each new application can be very low or nil. Good examples would be memorizing the alphabet, times tables and basic arithmetic.
Fate favours the prepared mind. You can’t look something up on Google or frame a question to ChatGPT when you don’t know what you are looking for. You can’t recognise it when you see it, and you can’t judge it if you find it.
A key future skill will be writing good ChatGPT and other AI prompts and sense-checking the results. To do so you need to be literate and understand the wider context. You must then frame the prompts or questions asked, and then understand the response the AI tool offers.
The Insatiable Human Memory
Some perceive the memory as a storage locker with a finite and inelastic capacity. Once it is full some knowledge must be lost to create space for new knowledge to be stored. This approach is mistaken. More ideas, concepts and facts stored in the memory enrich understanding and allow new connections to be made. These connections involve new combinations, and these give rise to innovation.
For example, Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, did not confine herself within her poetic talents. She was likely the world’s first computer programmer and worked closely with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. She drew on her multilingualism and poetic gifts as well as mathematics in her work with Babbage. Lovelace speculated that the Analytical Engine could be developed to produce symbols, graphics, artistic works and music as well as numerical calculations.
Steve Jobs’ interest in calligraphy sparked his fascination with typography, typeface design aesthetics and attention to detail. These interests shaped Apple’s approach to product design and creating market advantage.
The draft science curriculum tells us students will “develop place-based knowledge of the natural world and experience of the local area in which they live.” This is inwards-looking and parochial, and also creates unnecessary challenges for schools to develop their own curricula, some of which may prove to be of questionable quality. Science takes us to the outer reaches of the universe. It is an endless frontier, “we may be bounded in a nutshell but count ourselves kings of infinite space.”
The narrow intellectual scope of the draft curriculum may be inadequate to allow students to pathway to study fields such as engineering. Universities can offer remedial or catchup study options, but it is far more effective to solve problems at their source.
Let’s Get it Right
So, what do we do from here?
We should reinstate the concept of “powerful knowledge” that alludes to education that teaches the principles, theories, and concepts that underpin more advanced learning. Powerful knowledge is cumulative. It does not come only from lived experience but also from ideas. It does not belong to any one cultural group. It is universal knowledge that belongs to every human being.
Within our universities, science is undertaken to advance the frontiers of knowledge in accord with agreed methods or sometimes with new or bespoke methods. These include falsification, experimentation, and replication. Being internationalist, universities belong to a “Republic of Science” that serves all humanity. Science is not simply one of many “ways of knowing”. It stands for the authority of empirical and tested truth rather than the authority of race, ideology, religion or cultural identity.
Parents, teachers, Māori and other communities need to make education more of an election issue. Regardless of the election outcome, there needs to be an investigation into the academic qualifications of those in the Ministry of Education working in such key fields as curriculum development, pedagogy, science, and policy and regulation governing such transformative technologies as AI. This investigation must start at the top.
Dr Peter Winsley has worked in policy and economics-related fields in New Zealand for many years. With qualifications and publications in economics, management and literature. This article was first published HERE
7 comments:
Great article, Peter.
Surely, education is among our most important education issue, if not the most important. What is more critical to our future, and to the futures of generations of young New Zealanders, than ensuring that they acquire the skills, knowledge and know-how to compete in the domestic and international marketplaces?
Ensuring the integrity of our hard-won democracy is highly important. Protecting science from the intrusion of superstition and traditional knowledge (beyond those elements of traditional knowledge that are genuinely science-based) is also very crucial. But the most pivotal of all is the teaching and learning of our children and safeguarding their futures.
David Lillis
Well said.
You are right suggesting a "start at the top", but the academic qualifications? - uhm, I'm not so convinced on that one looking at what I know of just one of the authors of the latest curriculum refresh. And just look at the qualifications of the 2000-odd woke group-thinkers that signed the Hendy / Wiles letter challenging the Listener 7. Now, if you were one of the investigators, and/or the likes of David Lillis, Caleb Anderson, Michael Johnston, et al, then I'd be quite a lot happier.
But rather than the academic qualifications per se, oughtn't it be more an investigation into the identification of the critical thinking or social consciousness/awareness of those formulating and promulgating the current policies - by identifying not only what they think should be taught, but especially the demonstrable priority they place on the teaching of the fundamentals, like the 3 R's and traditional core subjects?
Clearly, many have lost sight of what's required and expected of them, and are importing their own woke beliefs and agendas at the expense of not only our young, but those older generations, as well as those yet to come.
A wonderful essay Peter. Who would have ever imagined that we would have to face this situation even 5 years ago. The Maori coup is astounding in it's cunning and ruthless effectiveness. When we were kids we used to hear adults say "As cunning as a Maori". This was more a statement of fact than a racist comment.
MC
This is a magnificent article.
In my 40 years experience in interaction with the educational establishment through the reading wars,I must admit my perspective has been gained through a combination of experience and study of educational theories.
My mother, Doris Ferry, in teaching 1,500 pupils phonic reading privately, actually taught parents to do the remedial teaching of their own children. These parents were of all SES with some even semi -literate themselves. Doris emphasized to the parents that it was not only the phonic content they had to learn but also the traditional methods of child discipline. A failing child often displays many difficult behaviours but they had to learn to be compliant to succeed. This is an aspect not emphasized when discussing our appalling failure in the basics.
This discipline cuts right across the tenets of progressive education and constructivism which comes from Roussean freedom and others, and has the child do their 'own thing'
The ideologies behind our failing system need exposing as well as only the methods and content.
Hi Peter.
The first sentence of my above comment should have read:
Surely, education is among our most important election issues, if not the most important.
David
You are correct about discipline Gaynor, which is now a fast growing societal problem. I'd urge everyone to search out and listen to what, Thomas Sowell has to say. A good and very pertinent starter is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WYi-64MejU.
Inter alia, have a listen to what he recalls about some of his schooling he and his mate had, and tell me that this isn't appropriate, or how it's held this very learned and wise man back in his far from priviledged early life?
Indeed, he would be the first to acknowledge how important it is, and it should be compulsory viewing for all.
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