Alphacrucis Associate Dean of Education, David Hastie, has been part of a multi-sector steering committee, putting The ‘Literacy, what works and why’ conference, to be held 26 June 2018. The premium lit education event at UNSW attracted over 500 delegates in 2016, and includes top international literacy specialists, including Ian Wilkinson, Professor, Teaching and Learning, OHIO State University (Quality Talk about Text: Research-Based Practices for High-Level Comprehension); Jann Farmer-Hailey,  Consultant, Literacy Leadership (Professional Learning Conversations To Lift Student Outcomes); Janet Gaffney, Professor, Educational Psychology – Literacy. Director, Marie Clay Research Centre, Auckland University (A Systems Approach To Literacy Intervention: An Insider’s Research Story). 
The event is widely attended across DET, Catholic Education, and Independent schools, and x2 workshops are being run by Christian School specialists, including Jeff Davis (Principal, Hillcrest Christian School), and Sharon Williams (Support Educaiton, Danebank School). Dr Hastie is once again taking on the delicate role of chairing the QA panel, in this most controversial educational topic...book now, spaces are filling up fast! 
Registration: By Friday June 8, 2018    Cost:   $ 280   (Full time students  $160)  
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Two academics from Southern Cross University recently wrote an article called “Seven Reasons People no longer want to be teachers”.[1] They were careful to place research links to most of their claims as they outlined their suggestion that if people were leaving the teaching profession, or were not wanting to train as a teacher, there were at least seven good reasons why.

Soon after this article was posted, Mr Gonski and colleagues released a report, commissioned by the Government, called Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian Schools.[2] It outlined three priorities, accompanied by recommendations across five areas to address the priorities.

Does the ‘Gonski 2.0’ plan give us cause to be optimistic in the face of critiques like those by Drs Bahr and Ferreira? Or are in we for more of what Seymour Sarason described in his now somewhat classic text, The Culture of Schools and the Problem of Change, (1982), that the “more things change the more they stay the same”? (p. 116)

Some commentators (e.g. Bill Louden 2018) have already noted some shortcomings, such as not recognising that part of what is being recommended is already occurring[3]. Others (e.g. Glenn C Savage) have noted that the report ignores other previous significant reports (like the 2014 Donnelly and Wiltshire review of the National Curriculum), and that it is repetitive of certain (ideological) educational thrusts of recent times[4].

Whilst it is encouraging to see our political leaders committed to education for our young, and for them to be concerned to improve outcomes for all students, an almost tragic aspect of the report is that it manifests a profound incapacity, perhaps from unwillingness, to discuss education philosophically. There are many unstated assumptions within this report, and perhaps one of the most dangerous is that education is simply about knowledge and skills.

For example, if one reads through the twenty-three recommendations and seventeen findings, one can see that there is no reflection on character, beyond achievement of competencies that tend to be process oriented. This is represented through the language of ‘general capabilities’.  Such rhetoric, in turn, reflects a withdrawal from the consideration of the relationship between core sequential knowledge, capacities, and commitment.

The report is utterly silent about this last aspect – commitment. It carries within it the assumption that simply giving people more of what they believe they need – students and teachers – must improve results. If that were true, then the millions of dollars spent over the last decades would not have resulted in such a decline of results. A deeper reflection would see a report that also recognises that the character of people and the character of the social structures in which they undertake educational tasks is critical to understanding the cultures of schools and resultant possible change processes.

In contrast to the reductionist approach of this latest Government report, James Davison Hunter[5] noted that in earlier times character was linked to an explicitly moral standard of conduct, but that currently in the West, a vision of personhood is dominated by “emancipation for the purposes of expression, fulfilment, and gratification.” (p. 7)

He mapped how:

The content of moral instruction changed – from the “objective” moral truths of divine Scriptures and the laws of Nature, to the conventions of a democratic society, to the subjective values of the individual person…. Finally, there has been a transformation in the purpose of moral education itself – from mastery over the soul in service of God and neighbour, to the training of character to serve the needs of civic life, to the cultivation of personality toward the end of well-being. (pp. 146-7)

This report does not make explicit the moral purpose of the educational reforms, beyond a vague form of egalitarianism that assumes that equality means the same outcomes for everyone. Even if that were desirable and achievable (and both of those assumptions need deeper discussion and testing), what is to be done with these possible achievements?

The lack of reflection of these deeper purposes, that are inherent in educational practice, has direct implications for what happens in our schools:

• The relationship between families and schools – the language of the report focusses on supporting parents to have their children better prepared for learning to read at school. However, a stark question is not mentioned, and it is a question that begs how we approach our social good: what if the parents do not care, and do not want some Government intervention? How we respond to that issue reflects our view of human nature, the role of government, and why we are committed to helping children. Are we driven by a hedonistic economic rationalism, or something more honouring to humanity, and families per se? Should we introduce charter schools in Australia, like in New Zealand, and give parents more structural freedom to choose which school they believe is best in the home-school partnership? Or will we increase government level interventions to take control of children’s lives earlier, and more broadly?
• The culture of schools – schools can be notorious in being reactionary and conservative to change (and of that there is a legion of commentary).   The Report’s observation, while speaking to this area of life in its recommendations about teacher development, status and leadership, is again shallow. It assumes, like Rousseau, that providing a ‘better garden will automatically help people blossom – or flourish – more’. History shows us otherwise.  For example, some time ago Rappaport (2002)[6] commented, after reviewing many change efforts in schools, that: [teachers] have a serious preoccupation with order that may interfere with the capacity to experience the pleasure of joyful engagement in a learning environment…. [and] Students appropriate the settings’ self-narrative… such that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (p. 20)

A recent attempt to move beyond the individualistic school-focus towards student achievement is the ‘schools-helping-schools’ concept being trialled in the United Kingdom. These clusters of schools (often called Foundations) work on the principle of stronger helping those who are weaker. Some independent schools are working in such clusters in Australia and have succeeded in improving the character and results of small, struggling, and even dying schools. Such efforts seem to have no space in this latest report, which recommends yet another government instrumentality (called an ‘independent institute’ – which of course, would not be independent, but reflective of the ideology of the government of the day) to assist in their recommended endeavours.

• Pedagogical Assumptions – the report continues the conceptual language of ‘evidence based’ and ‘data driven’ improvements. However, the philosophical underpinnings of this approach are left untouched in this report, even though there is a reasonable case to suggest that this is one of the foundational reasons for lack of improvement (and some decline) in recent decades. As noted in one of the cited articles above, the Report’s silence on a previous government review (by Donnelly and Wiltshire) is indicative of the apparent timidity in introducing such deeper issues into the sphere of government and public discourse.

Perhaps Hunter’s (2000) conclusion may be an apt summary for the limitations and implications of this report, for those of us interested in and committed to education with soul:
 
   The problem in democratic theory is that it leads to indefensible propositions about the neutrality of the   
  state.  The distinction most regularly made is between ‘neutral’ secularity and ‘partisan’ sectarianism.   
  Though some continue to press this distinction, ever since Polanyi, it has been less and less tenable… The
  public school will represent and attempt to inculcate values that a particular family may find abhorrent to 
  its own basic beliefs and way of life.  The family is then faced with the choice of (1) abandoning its beliefs in
  order to gain the benefit of a state subsidized education, or (2) forfeiting the proffered government
  benefit in order to preserve the family belief structure from government interference. (Last section by
  Stephen Arons 1976) [Footnote 12 on 295,296]

Dr. Stephen Fyson
Centre for the Future of Schooling/ AC
​[email protected]
 
Notes:
[1] Seven reasons people no longer want to be teachers, from The Conversation.
By Nan Bahr and Jo-Anne Ferreira Posted 16 Apr 2018, 8:47am
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-16/seven-reasons-people-no-longer-want-to-be-teachers/9661878 [Downloaded 2/05/2018]
[2] Gonski, E. et al. (2018). Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools. Commonwealth of Australia
[3]  https://theconversation.com/gonski-2-0-teaching-creativity-and-critical-thinking-through-the-curriculum-is-already-happening-95922
[4]  https://theconversation.com/gonski-review-reveals-another-grand-plan-to-overhaul-education-but-do-we-really-need-it-93119
[5] Hunter, JD (2000). The Death of Character: moral education in an age without good or evil. Basic Books
[6] Rappaport, J. (2000). Community narratives: Tales of terror and joy. American Journal of Community Psychology, 28, 1-24.