ATAR – it’s really just parsley

“Sir, did you enjoy your parsley?”

No waiter has ever asked me this. 

The reason they don’t ask this ridiculous question is that the parsley wasn’t the point of the meal. The garnish never is. It’s just some ritualised ceremony that restaurants, particularly the fancy ones, have convinced themselves that they need to go through in order to impress the customer.

But really – nobody cares about the parsley. Nobody remembers the parsley and nobody enjoys it. Nobody has given a restaurant an extra review star for its commitment to parsley.

In fact, most of us don’t even eat the parsley. If the restaurant bothered to ask, we’d probably prefer that they didn’t even adorn my perfectly cooked filet mignon with some sprig of raw, lawn clipping just because the restaurant is trying to show off.

You don’t need the parsley; you don’t want the parsley, and nobody really cares if you consumed that parsley – but the parsley keeps showing up for no other reason than we’ve always done the parsley thing.

When it comes to the education of our kids, ATAR is parsley. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that ATAR is an important part of the dish and we’re now finding ways to bend over backwards to make sure we’ve got parsley.

A Monday morning talkback caller suggested that we should stagger more comprehensive student returns to school by bringing our Year 12 students back so that they can get their precious ATAR.

Let’s be clear. Parents and students have spent the last thirteen years together in the kitchen, slaving away at the task of cooking up a decent and educated person out of our kids. We should not be measuring our kids’ individual or collective worth by the final, innocuous step in the recipe.

Despite our PM’s insistence that “our kids’ education hangs in the balance” when imploring our teachers to present as physical barriers between Covid-19 and our economy, that just isn’t the case. 

Our kids – including our current Year 12 students today – will be just fine. They will have thousands of extra university seats available to them, vacated as they’ve been by international students who can no longer come here.

They’ve been well cooked and carefully prepared by people who know what they are doing.

They’re being supported by ingenious and hard-working schools that have completely re-imagined their entire educative offer in just a few short weeks to ensure that they are kept engaged, sharp and curious.

They are having their mental health and personal wellbeing preserved by teachers and school leaders who are connecting them with peers and friends through everything from online classes, to trivia nights and even to teacher drive-bys, where a wave and a smile can be shared with families as easily as a box of books can be dropped on the footpath.

These are the features of the current interruption that our young people will remember and that they’ll be shaped by.

They’ll remember how well their teachers and parents galvanized around that priority of their kids’ mental wellness. They’ll remember the collaborative intent that they relied on when things were tough, and they’ll note that they didn’t turn on each other.

Our kids will remember that their anxieties were assuaged by professionals who knew what matters most when bureaucrats insisted that their test results mattered more. 

They’ll look back fondly on times that teachers trusted them to complete tests, assessments, projects and tasks from home rather than believing the worst in them about potential plagiarism and over-Googling. 

But we currently risk them remembering the year that we bought the two big lies that we’re telling ourselves about ATAR mattering and that kids don’t carry Coronavirus very much.

Should we send our kids, even our Year 12s, back to school to early, we risk them remembering school as the place that they unwillingly infected a favourite teacher and denied their kids the chance to farewell them.

This isn’t alarmism. The University of Florida has published a paper suggesting that their own adult and pediatric ICU beds are due to be overwhelmed after a gross underestimation of the volume to which asymptomatic kids carry Covid-19.

As time progresses in like countries experiencing significant outbreaks, the rate to which children are both responsible for transmissions and measured as deaths is increasing.

Dr Dyan Hes, an expert pediatrician in New York, now estimates that up to 80% of New York’s kids are carrying the virus without symptom and are gleefully spreading it to every older person they meet - including their teacher, parents and grandparents.

This is not the time to spoil the dish for the garnish. The dish is good and the dish is what matters. Adorning them the parsley of an ATAR is not worth spoiling that dish.