policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
the banana survives, but a Year 12 certificate
or an A is not the equivalent of surviving.
There are so many ways to survive, but
what we’ve done is now that has become a
proxy for life or death. It’s pass or fail, win or
lose, life or death, and it creates enormous
stress in a society.
I’m coming from a position of having
lived on five continents, and this is
absolutely the safest, most incredible place
to live. I’m absolutely stunned by the levels
of anxiety here that are societally induced.
It’s not like we’re in a war zone, or we’re
surrounded by 90 per cent of people who
are unemployed. That’s not the situation, so
the anxiety does not correlate to the level of
comfort in our society in general.
Is this just an inevitable outcome of the
increasingly competitive and globalised
world that we live in?
Perhaps. I think that’s part of it, and I think
that’s the narrative: that we’re in this race
to the top. The fact is, if you do want to
succeed in the ways by which we measure
success – for example, achieving highly in
an exam – the worst possible state you can
be in is a stressed position, because that
impedes cognitive function.
The things that we are aiming for, we’re
going about getting there in the wrong way.
If you really wanted academic geniuses,
you would be more concerned with kids’
nervous systems and whether they were
spending most of the day in a fight or flight
state, or in an optimum state called ‘high
coherence’. That’s a term coined by the
HeartMath Institute in California, where
blood flow to the brain is optimised for a
high-performance state.
All this sitting at a desk, sweating over
stuff and getting anxious: it might look
noble to those who see you falling apart,
but it’s not really in our best interest. If we
really did want to compete, we’d want to
be in the optimum state. We’ve lost sight of
what that is.
By easing the pressure on school leavers,
in knowing what they want to do with their
lives, is there some risk of them lapsing into
indecision and lacking drive or direction? If
so, how can we manage that or avoid it?
I think we fear that, because we think
drive or direction must be externally
induced – the carrot and the whip. But as
[educationalist] Ken Robinson says, when
kids find their passion or find their element,
there is no problem with motivation and
drive. It’s the lack of ability to find your
element, and then the lack of ability of the
society to support kids to take the time that
they sometimes need to find their element.
When you’re 18, you are not completely a
developed person. You don’t even know
what’s out there.
I was talking to some Year 12s yesterday,
and they said: “We don’t know what to
do because we don’t even know what we
can do.”
They don’t know what options there are.
The reality is we don’t know what the future
holds, what the enormous possibilities are
out there that don’t yet exist but will.
Our best bet is to support kids to develop
capacities and to not take away the time
that they need to find their passion.
There’s always a risk that people fall
off the bandwagon, but they are falling
off the bandwagon now in a very serious
way. Maybe it could be worse, but I would
say we’re at a static place. There are kids
dropping out, not being engaged at school.
Our school system is no longer meeting
the needs of society and the needs of
the students.
Our primal fear is that, “Oh my gosh, if
we don’t have a whip and a carrot, people
are just going to lie back and be covered in
chips until they’re 25 and play Xbox”.
That’s the risk anyway; that’s always
the risk. But imagine if you were given the
opportunity to find what you loved and
were passionate about for that moment –
how that might change your motivation.
What are some ways in which we can give
students the opportunity to find their
passion or their element? And how do we
change the message to ease the pressure?
That’s a great question, and that’s the most
important one of all. The first thing is to
take the weight off the product and put it
on the process.
Let’s choose a context. Let’s say in the
classroom you want kids to learn such
and such, and all the weight is on the
assessment piece. The process is only
geared towards an outcome. But what if
the weight was on the process? What if it
was a project with an open-ended result
that everybody was engaged in, and that
you could bring different talents to?
Say it was a project that crossed from
history to geography to maths. You
were designing a city, and were creating
how the water was going to flow, and
how population growth was going to
Either you’ve passed
or you’ve failed, or you’re a
success or you’re a failure,
or you win or you lose.
That’s the primary problem.
be controlled, etc. You had to use every
possible faculty, and the end result was
a design.
The reward is the process. Maybe you
get actual architects and city planners
and designers to come back and give you
feedback on your design, then you have a
real-world engagement with a real project
that might actually be useful to society.
This could be done in Year 3 or it could
be done at university. The idea is that we’re
not worried about a grade; we’re worried
about how well this is going to work in
the world.
Ken Robinson said creativity should be as
important as maths and literacy, and I agree
with that. That’s not just because we need
innovative thinkers. It’s because we need,
as human beings, an inner life. We spend a
third of our life asleep and dreaming crazy
things. We need an inner life, and we need
to feed that inner life. All the art, all the
sensory experiences that we get through
the arts are essential to our optimum
functioning as human beings.
When we take that away and we think
we’re just these heads that need to absorb
and then regurgitate so-called knowledge,
we’re actually diminishing the capacity of
human beings. [We need to make] space
for creative endeavours in every part of
our educational system, and educational
endeavours that are not graded or rated.
We’ve become so obsessed with
metricising everything. You’d see enormous
benefits in the things you did measure if
you allowed space for things you didn’t
measure.
We’ve become so obsessed with data
that we’ve lost sight of the fact that data
is produced by human beings doing
things, and that we can’t possibly measure
everything. If I were to try to get a picture of
you from a bunch of blood tests and scans,
I would know absolutely nothing about
who the person is.
Data’s useful – I’m not dissing it – but we
need to lose that narrative to a large degree
and replace it with a better one. ■
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