New Zealand is these days the place Australians should go to get lessons on policy making. Next year it will have a budget surplus, its top rate of personal income tax is 33 per cent, and it doesn't have capital gains tax.
Before any Australian politician decides to make science and mathematics education compulsory they should read a report released last week from that country's pre-eminent policy think tank, the New Zealand Initiative. UN(AC)COUNTABLE: Why Millions On Maths Returned Little, examines the failures of maths teaching in New Zealand. Whereas once children were taught "instrumental" skills like times tables that were memorised and which gave them tools to solve maths problems, they are now educated in "relational" maths that emphasises the use of analysis and language. The result is that while children might be using their imagination to solve problems, they're not learning maths.
Almost half of New Zealand's year 5 students cannot add 218 and 191. And the problem flows up the system. Thirty eight per cent of qualified primary school teachers could not give the correct answer to 7/18 plus 1/9. The results for Australia wouldn't be very different, and in fact New Zealand's maths curriculum is copied from New South Wales.
Julia Gillard set the goal of Australia being ranked a top-five country in reading, mathematics and science by 2025. The Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten wants all Australian students to be taught computer coding as a core skill. And federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne wants maths and science to be compulsory in year 12. These aims are all laudable, but they're all based on largely unquestioned assumptions about the value of so-called "STEM" subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
READING AND WRITING
Having more students proficient in maths would be a good thing, but reading and writing must come first. Australian students in year 4 are significantly outperformed in reading by students in 21 other countries. And as the New Zealand initiative report demonstrates teaching more maths using the current methods is unlikely to lead to any significant improvement in outcomes. Furthermore, it's unlikely that the current cohort of teachers have the required aptitude in maths and science. Only around half of year 4 students in Australia are taught science by teachers who feel "well-prepared" to teach the subject — meaning half are not "well-prepared".
Even if we could find enough teachers to teach maths and science, making those subjects compulsory could do more harm than good. It will do nothing to engender in students a love, passion or interest for these subjects. According to two leading educational psychologists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan when students are motivated to do something rather than forced to do it they'll get better results. In their book Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination of Human Behaviour they explain that in the absence of motivation student achievement declines and teachers are faced managing disruptive classes full of disengaged students.
Last Friday, Victorians celebrated the state funeral of the state's first and only female premier, Joan Kirner. She was a good person and a fine Victorian but unfortunately some of the decisions she made were not necessarily in the best long-term interests of the state. As education minister, Kirner led the charge to shut down Victoria's renowned system of technical schools. The merging of technical schools with academic high schools into comprehensive "colleges" was a disastrous mistake. The "one size fits all" model of the original college curriculum was guaranteed to turn students away from maths and science. For some students the subjects were too hard and for some too easy. It's ironic that a central plank of the Victorian Labor Party's education policy at the 2014 state election was the re-establishment of technical schools.
The reality is that only a very small percentage of students are actually able to study higher levels of maths and science successfully. Not every job in the future will require a tertiary qualification in STEM. More students studying maths and science is no more the answer to Australia's economic challenges than is more students studying an Asian language. And not every job in the future will require maths and science. It's debatable whether early childhood workers and aged-care workers will really need to have studied year 12 physics and chemistry.
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