Clearing the clutter in our schools after Covid-19

Famed American domestic organisation guru Marie Kondo may have had a point when she started encouraging us to discard from our wardrobes anything that doesn’t bring us joy.

We’ve all had a little time to weed out the wardrobe in recent weeks and to create some space in our lives. To clear the clutter.

To that effect, we could do a lot worse than adopt a Kondo approach to bringing our schools slowly back to full operational capacity over the next few months. 

In fact, while educational smarty-pants around the world have been opining that the great remote learning adventure will teach us mountains about what we need to include in schools of the future – I’d like to suggest that the opposite will be true.

If we’re clever, we’re about to learn what we need to exclude.

The 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch are possibly the only reasonable comparison we can find when it comes to what Victorian students and schools are currently navigating. 

The sudden disaster in New Zealand resulted in most schools being closed for face-to-face learning for somewhere from seven to ten weeks. There was no opportunity to hold a few teachers back to build online programs or devise book packs to be delivered on school buses. 

The kids just went without formal schooling for a while.  And guess what happened to their senior secondary students’ test scores at the end of the year – they went up.

Up.

How could that be? Well, that’s a question worth looking into. Effectively, the students became the beneficiaries of two forced changes in their educative offer.

Firstly, they had a break. Their wellbeing was actually enhanced by an interruption to the high stakes pressure associated with a system and a community obsessed with useless mantras like “Knuckle down. Study hard. It’s the most important year of your life. Your whole future hangs on your ATAR score.”

As it turns out, that pressure doesn’t equate to better results. It’s quite the opposite. Students who reach the exam period in an exhausted and petrified state routinely perform poorly. 

Secondly, the Christchurch teachers needed to abandon any intention to “cover the curriculum” and instead were compelled to triage the important parts from the fluff and padding inherent in a curriculum that’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

These teachers were stuck with the task of focusing on the parts of their subject that mattered the most – and teaching those deeply. 

Their students responded in their exams with results that make a total mockery of the way we’re now collectively focused on what matters in education.

When it comes to a decent education, it isn’t about the number or hours or days in school that our kids get. Australia’s kids could miss an entire semester of schooling with zero remote or home learning in place and still end up with more hours in the company of a teacher than the kids of Finland.

Yes, that’s the Finland that routinely kicks our educational backsides on every possible measure of a decent education system.

When it really comes to a decent education, it isn’t about the breadth of the curriculum that a school offers or even the extra-curricular programs that we’ve so come to prize.

As it turns out, our kids get a better education in the company of a teacher freed to take their students into deep learning on topics that are both interesting and important than they do in schools that spend millions on the toys of tech, overseas ski camps and billboards on Eastlink.

When it comes to a decent education, we don’t need our kids to know more but know it superficially. We need kids who know a great deal about a handful of topics that they will use to build careers that change the world for the better. 

These are the sorts of careers that are fulfilling and that solve the world’s biggest problems. You know, like pandemics.

The clutter in our school system has become a gargantuan anchor on our educational progress. Our education system is so fat with programs, resources, approaches, compliances, tests and standards that we bought and committed to eons ago that it’s now too obese to even move.

While we may be targeting an economic snapback post Coronavirus, this is the exact opposite of what we need our schools to do. 

It’s time to throw out anything that doesn’t bring joy and meaning to Australia’s students, parents and educators.

It’s time to Kondo our schools.