The history lesson in National's standards

The fact that Anne Tolley looks like a particularly self-satisfied and ambitious decile 10 primary school principal has nothing to do with my misgivings about her national standards plan. Honest. I don't for a second think she views educational achievement and the social success it predicts through the prism of her evident middle-class, monocultural, establishment bias. Really. Just as I'm sure Tolley doesn't think every critic of her scheme is some Labour-leaning, everyone-gets-a-prize-for-participating, let's-make-basket-weaving-compulsory, PPTA dupe. Right?

Wrong. Witness Tolley's dismissal of the expert opinion offered last week by four senior educationalists, who warned national standards had been hastily developed and were doomed to fail. They quoted international research that has shown such blunt measures of achievement have all manner of unforeseen negative consequences, not least for the poor kids who end up in a feedback loop of failure.

Yes, yes, she'd heard it all before, off you go, said the minister, like some bustling headmistress shooing stragglers off to class.

Like the unholy row over NCEA before, the standoff between the government and nearly everyone in the education sector is symptomatic of a much deeper rift. To describe it as liberal versus conservative doesn't even begin to do it justice. As much as anything it's a battle of perceptions and prejudices, wrapped up in sentimental yearning for some imagined golden age when the three Rs ruled, and ill-informed contempt for today's supposedly devalued curriculum.

Because everyone has direct experience of school, either as a former pupil or a parent or both, they bring their own particular memories and attitudes to the debate. One's school years tend to assume the anecdotal status of minor traffic accidents or early sexual encounters (often contemporaneous, of course) – rites of passage, often amusing in hindsight, all part of growing up.

The boomer generation in power, I think, is no less prone than previous generations to experiencing a kind of conservative nostalgia when it comes to education. Having endured the rote learning years and the instant categorisations of School C and UE, their own children's minutely assessed, multi-optional syllabus can seem soft and superficial. The appeal of an easy-to-understand ranking system is not hard to understand.

The trouble with defending the status quo against Tolley's back-to-the-future experiment is that she has been unwittingly aided and abetted by schools themselves. The direct democracy ideals of Tomorrow's Schools notwithstanding, one consequence of the modern curriculum's mystifying theoretical framework is that primary education can seem curiously depersonalised.

I've read end-of-year reports that not only might have been about someone else's child for all the individual insight they offered, but were virtually indecipherable as a guide to their actual progress. I suspect many parents long for the brute clarity of those multi-choice character assassinations – "lacks application", "easily distracted" – underlined by the teacher in their own faded reports.

More than that, though, there is now an abundance of researched and anecdotal evidence that basic literacy and numeracy levels have declined. Universities regularly complain about this. As one lecturer said to me, an inability to actually comprehend a text and express a response adequately undermines the whole basis of higher learning, which is critical thinking.

The fact there are serious misgivings about how we're teaching youngsters to read and count, however, does not in itself justify Tolley's push for national standards.

Indeed, she's displayed an attitude to research and evidence that calls into question her own critical thinking faculties. And the fact this major change to education policy was rushed through under urgency (like so much of this government's dubious legislation) shows just how interested she and her colleagues really are in informed debate.

Obviously our school system could do better. But Tolley's updated version of the Victorian schoolroom, where children have it drummed into them as early as possible that they're either successes or failures, is recklessly retrograde.

Her national standards experiment will prove nothing more or less than what we already know – poor kids from poor backgrounds at poor schools tend to struggle, while the comparatively privileged middle and upper classes thrive regardless. Standard National, in other words.

finlay.macdonald@star-times.co.nz

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