Why our primary education system is failing (to educate) our children

I am somewhat perplexed by the priorities in our national curriculum, the things and way we test in NAPLAN, and the alarming increase in the number of children who are locked out of the system.

Our primary education system, which I use to refer to the entire P - 12 sector in Australia, is still based upon the foundations laid by Victorians in the 19th century, with many of the structures, methods, and organisation relatively unchanged for over a century. I’m not talking about content, which has clearly changed, but the organisational structure by which the education system is structured, learning delivered, and ultimately assessed.

Why for instance do we believe that a person’s date of manufacture (DOB) is the single best reason for determining what they should learn and with whom they should learn it?

A lot of what I see and read would suggest we are moving backwards not forwards, with heavy political influence driving a focus on the 3 R’s of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (even the acronym is wrong).

The education system seems impervious to adapt to the technological revolution of the last 70 years whereby the internet has made access to knowledge and learning resources free and available to all. Which is fundamentally why internet access is being touted as a basic human right.

Why then do you still have learning and assessment methods that emphasise learning by rote and recall of facts in a closed environment (exams). This is so alien to what almost everybody experiences at work or in their day-to-day life where a great deal of research is done online, So why are we failing in training our children on how to do these things, and assessing their competence at doing that?

Instead of the 3-Rs I believe we should educate and assess the 4-Cs; Creativity, Critical Thinking, Curiosity, and Communication

So many social issues created by (anti) social media, and even mainstream media is the fake, distorted and biased information that algorithms drive to fuel our outrage. Something that generative AI has the power to make much much worse. That is why critical thinking is such a fundamental and important skill that it is never too early to teach and nurture. Only by being able to assess information, not just on the content but the source of the material, it’s reference ability, multiple sources of the information, and any inherent biases in the source of it, can allow a person to determine what is truly true/false, or even (morally) right/wrong. Why is this imperative in Tertiary Education (citations on work) but not in primary education. Children’s ability to review content, assess its accuracy, and provide a statement of what they took out of it (comprehension) and importantly for them to explain why, is what we need to teach and assess.

The irony of the other two, Curiosity, and Creativity is that every child is innately born with them, but by the end of mainstream primary education it is largely absent. We have an education system that is actually removing critical life skills.

Curiosity is essential to exploring new knowledge, gaining new skills, enriching and enhancing our appreciation of the world in which we live. Any desire to learn should be encouraged, as it is the desire to learn that is important, not what is being learnt.

Creativity is essential to leap beyond what is known, to imagine what could be, and is a critical part of problem solving. So many of the problems we face in the world require transformational thinking not step incremental iterations to what we already have. Creativity is key to this and is why I encouraged students in STEM to think STEAM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.

Finally, Communication cannot be emphasised enough – this is so much more than ability to read and write. Speaking, presenting, questioning and active listening are all major components of this – essential for all aspects of an individual’s adult life.

Like it or not the AI genie is out of the bottle and isn’t going back and neither is the internet going away. The primary education system’s initial response to AI is to ban children from using it, although I know a lot of enlightened educators who are embracing it for their own use, because the people running our education system believe the children will use it to cheat. This reminds me of the invention of the pocket calculator when I was at school that too was initially banned for cheating.

Our children aren’t cheating by using AI or the internet, they are learning to use new tools that will become an essential part of their daily life. What the arrival of AI has thrown into stark clarity is exactly why our learning methods and assessment are fatally flawed, in much the same way the internet has challenged it for some time too. With AI and internet assistance our current assessment methods can be aced easily as shown by AI’s ability to pass the lawyer’s bar test, or many medical exams. However, what is totally relevant here is that AI and the internet are essential in teaching and assessing the 4-Cs.

So it comes down to do we actually care what and how we are teaching our children? I have observed for some time what is going on in our schools and am left with (critically thinking) that the primary purpose of the primary education system is as a national childcare service. A safe place to send children whilst their adult careers go to work and ensure they don’t create too much mischief. The actual delivery of education is an accidently by-product of that primary social service. This was best exemplified when I attended a crisis committee during COVID lockdowns and senior representatives from the education sector said “we need to get the schools open so the parents can go back to work”; there was simply no mention or consideration of the learning opportunities the children could be missing out on.

The National Curriculum is failing our society with too many well-intentioned people cramming more and more into an already crowded and impossible to deliver agenda by our besieged teachers.

None of this is meant as a slur of the many dedicated and talented teachers in our education system who are leaving in record numbers because they too see the system as fatally flawed. What I am doing is using my Curiosity, and Critical Thinking to identify we have a really BIG problem, and it is going to need Creativity and Communication to solve it.

BTW this article was entirely authored by me with assistance from some human proof readers, and I resisted using the temptation of AI assistance, except for the graphic which was created with the Assistance of Microsoft Copilot/Designer.