After nearly six months speaking with New Zealand’s schools and universities, I have witnessed firsthand how this nation has become the unwitting laboratory for one of education's most destructive experiments.
Over the past fifty years, New Zealand has plummeted from the top tier toward the bottom of industrialised world’s rankings. The culprit is not lack of funding or teacher dedication. It is 20th century educational ideology that neuroscience has revealed to be fundamentally flawed.
Student-centred approaches dominating New Zealand schools sound appealing: let students discover knowledge naturally and minimise memorisation in favour of poorly defined “critical thinking skills.”
But brain science reveals a harsh truth - these methods systematically undermine learning. It is just too hard to recognise mathematical patterns or develop the fluency for higher-order thinking if you do not know your times tables.
Education schools have become echo chambers, training teachers in outmoded methods that violate everything neuroscience reveals about memory, learning, and skill development.
These institutions resist change. Too many careers and reputations are built on failed theories.
But students need foundational knowledge stored in long-term memory to think critically. They need explicit instruction for complex academic content. They need practice to develop procedural fluency.
Disruption offers opportunity. New Zealand could pioneer new schools of education deliberately developed outside traditional education schools, freed from the failed orthodoxy.
These new schools could create new, "trilingual educators" — teachers fluent in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and evidence-based pedagogy. These new teachers could provide fresh blood to support the lonely, talented teachers who come up after my talks, cheering the clarion call from neuroscience supporting approaches they knew all along to be best for students.
As Briar Lipson notes in New Zealand’s Education Delusion, in the year 2000, out of 32 countries, New Zealand’s students proudly ranked 3rd in mathematics on the PISA test for International Student Achievement. By 2018, they had declined to 19th—losing the equivalent of nearly a year and a half’s worth of schooling.
But a turnaround is possible.
When Taiwan experimented with mathematics teaching methods like New Zealand’s current methods in the 1990s, their math scores plummeted. When they moved away from those approaches, mathematics performance quickly improved.
The choice is stark: continue the decline under educational theories that neuroscience has invalidated, or pioneer the future of evidence-based teaching. New Zealand's students — and global reputation — hang in the balance.
Barbara Oakley is Professor of Engineering at Oakland University (Michigan), currently on sabbatical in New Zealand. Her work focuses on the connection between neuroscience and social behaviour. Her research has been described as "revolutionary" in the Wall Street Journal. This article was sourced HERE
Student-centred approaches dominating New Zealand schools sound appealing: let students discover knowledge naturally and minimise memorisation in favour of poorly defined “critical thinking skills.”
But brain science reveals a harsh truth - these methods systematically undermine learning. It is just too hard to recognise mathematical patterns or develop the fluency for higher-order thinking if you do not know your times tables.
Education schools have become echo chambers, training teachers in outmoded methods that violate everything neuroscience reveals about memory, learning, and skill development.
These institutions resist change. Too many careers and reputations are built on failed theories.
But students need foundational knowledge stored in long-term memory to think critically. They need explicit instruction for complex academic content. They need practice to develop procedural fluency.
Disruption offers opportunity. New Zealand could pioneer new schools of education deliberately developed outside traditional education schools, freed from the failed orthodoxy.
These new schools could create new, "trilingual educators" — teachers fluent in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and evidence-based pedagogy. These new teachers could provide fresh blood to support the lonely, talented teachers who come up after my talks, cheering the clarion call from neuroscience supporting approaches they knew all along to be best for students.
As Briar Lipson notes in New Zealand’s Education Delusion, in the year 2000, out of 32 countries, New Zealand’s students proudly ranked 3rd in mathematics on the PISA test for International Student Achievement. By 2018, they had declined to 19th—losing the equivalent of nearly a year and a half’s worth of schooling.
But a turnaround is possible.
When Taiwan experimented with mathematics teaching methods like New Zealand’s current methods in the 1990s, their math scores plummeted. When they moved away from those approaches, mathematics performance quickly improved.
The choice is stark: continue the decline under educational theories that neuroscience has invalidated, or pioneer the future of evidence-based teaching. New Zealand's students — and global reputation — hang in the balance.
Barbara Oakley is Professor of Engineering at Oakland University (Michigan), currently on sabbatical in New Zealand. Her work focuses on the connection between neuroscience and social behaviour. Her research has been described as "revolutionary" in the Wall Street Journal. This article was sourced HERE
7 comments:
The problem isn't a lack of knowledge of good education policies. There are examples of successful schools all over the world. The problem is the entrenched views of the NZ bureaucrats and teacher's unions who find successful education a threat.
You have my vote Barbara. What steps are needed to change the system?
Thanks for observing what most parents can see. Now if only the political will and the MOE would listen and take action?
They will not of course because we (as in the citizens) have people in charge that will willingly burn 'education' (among other things) to the ground while they can still be able to rule over the ashes......
Look at our standing in the OECD across the board........
As you said careers and reputations are at stake but I hold the opinion it is also their ideology.
It is this that they cannot stray from because to do so creates such a conflicted cognitive disonance that cannot be confronted by their ego and never will be.
Until these people are rooted out of the system nothing will change and children will be doomed to forever be, less than they could be......
The mistake Barbara makes is that our education system is there to teach children to think. This is the last thing anyone in power wants. The worst thing for the dictators of the world was a population with the ability to reason.
“Over the past fifty years, New Zealand has plummeted from the top tier toward the bottom of industrialised world’s rankings”.
The enacting of the 1975 TOW Act marks the beginning of The Great New Zealand Delusion Experiment, though I would call it The Corporate Agenda.
Applying the "let the kids discover it for themselves" paradigm to science education is both absurd and dangerous. Kids can't "think like scientists" as they do not have the knowledge base and high-order reasoning skills to do so. 'Playway' in the science lab is likely to lead to injury and lawsuits against teachers and schools. Hence the make-believe 'discovery' approach where the kids end up being given full instructions as to what to do, but it takes three times as long to get them across so that it doesn't sound like the teacher instructing them (which s/he is). What utter rubbish!
Why even bother when you keep getting told you’re owed a living because you are a victim or tangata whenua (which is both).
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