Rupert Murdoch: 'schools a moral scandal'

Rupert Murdoch has used his fourth Boyer Lecture to slam Australian schooling. No punches pulled here. “Our public education systems are a disgrace” was almost his opening sentence. And the reason is clear: “despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less.”

A residual affection for the land of his birth is probably the main driving force of his critique. His country is going down the gurgler. It is a realistic assessment of the situation we are in. India and China, especially, are poised to wipe us out. Finland irks. Singapore and Korea also graduate students who both know more and think better than Aussie grads. Intellectual sophistication in Australia is an increasingly rare and obviously endangered phenomenon. Football commands the Aussie imagination. Those who study think of learning as work, from which escape must be regularly programmed in order to maintain sanity.

Explanations for poor results abound. The teaching staff of our schools manifest a huge compassion for instance, for the children who have a low SES (Socio-Economic Status) rating, and stress that these children don’t/can’t learn because they don’t have space at home to do their homework. Murdoch is properly scathing about this and about all the other various excuses offered to explain why so many children are learning so little: “a whole industry of pedagogues (is) devoted to explaining why some schools and some students are failing. Some say classrooms are too large. Others complain that not enough public funding is devoted to this or that program. Still others will tell you that the students who come from certain backgrounds just can’t learn.”

While George Bush may be reasonably classified as a major disaster, someone seems to have provided him with a memorable, useful and highly pertinent assessment. (The US Department of Education has been a good deal more useful to humanity than its Department Of Defence). His words were resonant. He said we should overthrow “the tyranny of low expectations”. (I have written more extensively on this dereliction of professional duty in a paper that can be read here.)

Murdoch is of the same view, that all our students need us to have high expectations of them, and “the real answer is to start pursuing success”.

Having observed that “70 million people are joining the new global middle class each year”, and that “these people are talented, they are confident, and they are increasingly well-educated” Murdoch notes that “When I travel to places like India and China, I do not hear people making lame excuses for mediocre schools. Instead of suggesting that their students cannot learn, they set high standards and expect they will be met.”

What Murdoch doesn’t say, because his lecture shows some concern for being diplomatic and not getting too many folk offside, is that all the excuses are marvellously useful for teachers who are not scholars, who are not passionately in love with their subjects, and really do not want (or do not know how) to spend their time trying to strike a spark of intellectual fire in their classes. Instead of hectoring a teaching staff that cannot really respond to the demands we would like to make of them, why not insist that all high school teachers, for instance, be recruited exclusively from among those who have obtained a university degree.

This situation we are dealing with is a direct consequence of 50 years of training teachers in pedagogic method, and downplaying the importance of subject knowledge. From 1958 in Victoria student teachers destined for high school placement went directly to the then newly established Secondary Teachers’ College, instead of as previously, getting a University degree and then a teaching qualification (the one year post-graduate Diploma of Education)

A corollary of this dropped connection with university taught subject matter was the acceptability of a lower Year 12 (Matriculation) score as an entry ticket. If you only needed to know how to “encourage” students to learn (by themselves, or in the soon-to-be-ubiquitous group), then you didn’t need to know your subject. In a sense anybody at all could learn to be a teacher of any subject at all.

[I found this situation personally quite galling when, as a History Honours graduate, with a second postgrad degree from an Ivy League US campus, I did a stint in an Adelaide High School teaching English, while History was being taught by the Phys Ed teacher! My consolation was to be told that English was “more important”!]

The old furphy of class sizes is often introduced by teachers and teacher unions trying to explain poor assessment outcomes while extracting more money from government for more salaried positions.

A teacher who cares and is knowledgeable about their subject could inspire a lecture theatre full of students packed to the rafters. To such a teacher a class of 30 is very little different from a class of 20. It is true there are a few minor downsides from larger classes - marking written work can become a burden, and so-called “individual attention” might have to be curtailed. But the doctrine gained currency that a teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage. This was the “teacher as facilitator” model for the professional. We are being severely punished for insisting that teachers regard themselves as facilitators.

This theory of the role of teacher went hand in hand with the “progressive” (aka “constructivist”) theory of learning, in which it was religiously maintained that ALL learning should be self-initiated, discovery-based problem-solving. This was pilloried in a cartoon depicting a teacher as a guide on the side in charge of a bunch of monkeys who were being given the opportunity to bash on their keyboards in the hope that one or two might miraculously produce something equivalent to the works of Shakespeare.

The older system allowed teachers to focus on subject knowledge, to be proud of their ability to actually teach students content that mattered, and to be responsive to the obligation that their students could prove that they had learnt something of value. This produced highly articulate pupils at all levels of society, including for instance, both Ned Kelly and Ronald Ryan, who wrote heart wrenching letters from jail with a facility that would be entirely beyond those currently incarcerated.

We should not dismiss out of hand the teaching methods that allowed students to personally “own” each subject area. Nor are assignments and projects and class reports undesirable. But it is probably true that they only produce good results when used by a knowledgeable teacher who intersperses assignment work with inspirational direct teaching, and expertly framed - rather than desultory - class discussions.

Thus the realisation is finally dawning, that one of the most important keys to improving educational results for Australian (and other) children is “teacher quality”. (It is not, by the way, putting a computer in every high school student’s hands - this a charming extra, not a fundamental necessity.) Focus here and we may be able to at least partially meet Murdoch’s challenge.

What else should be done? Jumping up and down about assessments and test results may help a little. I am sure that our primary grades now have students with a mildly improved knowledge base. They are not the whole story. The greatest advantage of tests and exams and so on and so forth is that they do directly challenge the student to do well. They are an important part of any teacher’s resource tools. Every child likes to do well. Hurdles successfully jumped are a great ego boost. They assure the child that they are indeed able to understand and use the information they have been acquiring. They also rank children by ability or by success. Children who fail a test of any kind need an immediate pick-me-up addressing that failure, and showing how success could have been achieved. Given this, the discussion of the negative effects of tests and exams can be disregarded.

But how do we get children who can leap with joy over every intellectual hurdle put in front of them?

Murdoch’s vision is clear. He wants students who will acquire formal skills, as well as possess “good work habits, the judgment that comes from experience, a sense of creativity, a curiosity about the world, and the ability to think for oneself”.

This is a more rounded set of specifications. But the interesting thing is that neither the narrower nor the broader definition of idealised outcomes from schooling can be ensured by what happens at school. No matter how excellent the teacher, no matter how diligent the student, the fact of the matter is that a child’s future is first framed in the first five years of their lives.  There has been a lot of discussion of this lately, and it is surprising therefore that Murdoch’s analysis does not incorporate some reference to it.

The public discussion has so far been dominated by calls for universal pre-K centres, with Early Childhood trained staff. Rudd’s education revolution includes plans for 15 hours a week in pre-school for all four-year-olds. This is not a bad thing - could be quite nice in fact. But it won’t do very much to change the educational profiles of the high school or university graduate populations. Government has yet to learn that you can’t save children independently of their parents. And while there is a lot of talk about involving parents, it doesn’t amount to much. This is not surprising, given the conflict of interest between professional staffs and families about who really should monopolise the centre of a child’s heart.

Talcott Parsons had a lot to say, an aeon ago, about the constant process of expansion of the role of so-called experts in modern western societies - an expansion matched by the contraction of the private sphere of individuals in family settings. If we wish to halt the deterioration of our schooling systems we have to look to Jewish and Asian families for our guide to high-investment parenting. They have a record of success we should emulate in the key particulars. Chief of these particulars is an intellectually stimulating home environment for little children.

Since the rot set in 50 years ago, we won’t change it by changing superficial factors, and we won’t change it overnight. But if we want change we’d better get going on the fundamentals.