The future of education: are the real needs of students being neglected in favour of grades and test scores?

The future of education: are the real needs of students being neglected in favour of grades and test scores?

Students at a private primary school prepare for the start of classes in a high-income neighbourhood in the Pudong district of Shanghai, China.

(José Álvarez Díaz)
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For centuries, education was in the hands of the very few and inaccessible to the masses. Over the last 200 years, however, humanity has made significant strides in education. According to the World Bank, in 1820, only 12 per cent of the world population could read and write. Today, against the backdrop of an interconnected global community, the global literacy rate has risen to 87 per cent.

The Prussian educational model has left a mark on the way we imagine and organise schools, which has hardly changed over the last century and a half. From this shared basis, the education systems of each country have developed different nuances. While schools in Europe tend to be publicly managed and teachers publicly employed, education in the Americas often reflects the palpable inequality there, with fewer resources dedicated to public education and schools forced to compete against each other.

A comparison of the education systems of Finland, Estonia, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada, for example, countries that ranked amongst the highest in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), reveals similarities and differences between approaches to education.

The more developed countries of East Asia have traditionally placed greater emphasis on the sciences and a teaching style heavily reliant on repetition and memorisation. Until recently, schools in these countries have been more likely to inhibit students’ creativity, imagination, individual expression and critical thinking. This is still the case in China, which, represented by its four most developed regions, was the top performer in the 2018 survey, the most recent to be conducted.

While the opposite tends to be true in the Anglo-Saxon world and in many European countries, the OECD continues to recommend that countries like Spain, whose education system was disrupted by decades of dictatorship, focus less on memorising information and more on areas such as critical thinking, teamwork and creativity to improve its test results.

Meanwhile, in the Nordic countries, which place greater emphasis on ensuring quality and equal opportunity across all schools, teachers tend to have more independence than elsewhere to tailor their lessons plans to the needs of individual pupils. Similarly, the burden of examinations, teaching hours and extracurricular tasks tends to be lower there than in other parts of the world.

While the educational approaches of the various countries overlap and diverge in a variety of ways, it is fair to say that a general distinction can be made between systems that treat students as future human resources, to be trained to compete against each other in the labour market, and systems that emphasise the cultivation of fundamental rights, values and moral and emotional maturity.

The neoliberal GERM spreading across the world

Pasi Sahlberg, former director general of the Finnish Ministry of Education and currently professor of education at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, is one of the world’s leading experts in the global debate on how to improve education. For years, he has been critical of the careless application of neoliberal dogmas of competition and free markets to education. What he calls the Global Education Reform Movement, or GERM, has indeed spread across the globe like a virus, wreaking havoc in its wake.

As Sahlberg tells Equal Times: “Market-based education policies and management models became common in the 1990s as a consequence of what is known as New Public Management in England, the US and much of the rest of the Western world. It is based on very simple marketplace logic: The quality of schools will improve when parents can choose the best available school for their children.” This ability to chose means that instead of collaborating within a common system, schools are given greater autonomy to compete against one another for pupils.

However, as Sahlberg explains, studies show that education models of this kind have thus far failed to improve the quality of teaching. While there is increasing awareness of the problem, “we are still missing much of the important aspects of education outcomes that are being slowly recognised in education debates”.

“The need to measure learning outcomes in a more comparable and understandable way” began in the 1990s, long before the advent of today’s measurement methodologies. Instead, as Sahlberg explains, tests and evaluations for reading comprehension and mathematics were used, subjects for which there had been recorded assessments since the 1960s.

“These assessments soon became so dominant and such widely accepted measures of the quality of education that many forgot that schooling has many other important functions and outcomes. Creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, empathy and communication are just some of them. But we don’t know how these could be measured in school, we probably never will.”

For Martin Henry, research coordinator for Education International, the global union federation for teachers, the arrival of ‘New Public Management’ in education in the 1990s “caused absolute mayhem,” which he compares with Taylorism: “It didn’t work in Ford’s factories and certainly won’t work in a school,” he tells Equal Times.

Applying such ideas in the classroom is “limiting and insulting” for teachers and students “because you end up in a perverse system of driving students towards a limited set of results that can be recorded,” says Henry. “We are not training people on a wheel and a hamster cage, we are trying to grow people who can live in society, communicate with each other and work on being productive members of the society that we all share, and that’s a completely different thing.”

That is why, Henry argues, “the management approach is completely the wrong one to take. If all you do is measure, you are going to miss so much more from life”.

He therefore advocates a return to education’s original ‘humanistic vocation’. “I would quote a Hong Kong official, who said in an OECD meeting to me: ‘if we have 49 per cent of our students achieving success and going to university, that means 51 per cent are failing, and that is not good for a system.’ So, ultimately, if your system is particularly focused on academic success, focused on guaranteeing university and achieving an academic degree, you are never going to achieve it for the majority of the students,” he says.

“Education is about growing every individual and giving every person the ability to explore their potential, their talent, their way of thinking, their way of working, and becoming familiar and comfortable with that. It’s also about unifying society, giving students the experience and the ability to be in society, so that they learn the values of the culture that they are living in.”

The PISA survey is far from measuring “the full quality of education systems,” says Sahlberg. “There definitely is a clash of opinions on what good schooling looks like in many parts of the world.” In his view, the debate between traditional, teacher-centred models (where teachers teach and students absorb more or less passively) and more modern styles based on questioning and problem-solving, is a useless one. No one is absolutely right, he argues, as there is evidence in favour of both trends: “We need to listen more to what the grassroots experts say about this,” says Sahlberg.

The Nordic model

Perhaps the world can learn something from Northern Europe. While there is no common ‘Scandinavian model,’ the answer to the region’s educational achievement may lie in “having a less competitive society” and “strong public education systems,” where teachers are listened to and empowered and where “a lot of attention is paid to unity and equity” in access to quality education for the whole population,” Bjørg Eva Aaslid, advisor to the Union of Education Norway (Utdanningsforbundet), tells Equal Times .

Indeed, her country (as elsewhere in Europe, since the pandemic) has seen a growing interest in the mental well-being of its pupils, as well as an increasing political will to lighten the load of examinations and rote learning tasks for teachers.

As her Finnish counterpart Päivi Lyhykäinen, advisor to the Trade Union of Education in Finland (OAJ), explains: “If we compare it with the situation in France, for example, where pupils have to be at school all day and then study when they are at home, it’s true that we don’t have that. This is a unique feature of the Nordic countries: we don’t want students to be stressed about school; we want them to learn what we are trying to teach them”.

However, as Lyhykäinen explains, Finland may be Scandinavia’s “last bastion” where teachers feel respected in their work, as evidenced by a recent teachers’ strike in Norway. As Aaslid explains, the GERM that Sahlberg describes appears to have infected the Nordic paradise, with private schools becoming more common and the quality of teaching jobs declining.

According to Sissel Havre of the Norwegian union’s secretariat: “There is a general concern about this influence, [which comes] from all over the world with increased emphasis on measurable performance and result at the expense of a holistic view of education where values and attitudes are also important”.

This article has been translated from Spanish by Brandon Johnson