The Terrible Truth About Education Reform

A question is briefly on my mind after the release of this year's PISA scores. This is an event I am glad attracts a decent round of media attention every year, even though the tests themselves are of course a very flawed measure of educational comparison. I like it because it draws attention to the idiocy of education policy debate in the UK being dominated by school "choice", whatever mixture of faith schools, free schools academies, grammars, private school vouchers or what have you that the current government is using to impress floating middle-class voters. What we talk about when compare ourselves in actual results with our competitors is the stuff that actually matters: what is being taught, how it is being taught, the qualifications of teachers, the school hours, class sizes - the basic facts around which education revolves, not the most appealing grabbag of trendy new school types that tempts the sharp-elbowed into thinking they can out-do their neighbours for little Johnny.

I don't claim to know much about education policy, and I should, but I intuitively feel that education reform must revolve around a few very basic metrics. Metrics at which Shanghai and South Korea are doing particularly well at - long school days, well-respected and largely higher-degree holding teachers, intense competition in everything, and very high targets for all pupils. Private tuition is rife. Any school reform in the UK, if it chooses to avoid these fundamentals, must at least admit it is attempting the unlikely  task of doing more with less. Instead of faffing about with talk of different curricula, exam types, schools and yet more interference, Gove should be hammering away at finding better teachers and giving them a better environment in which to teach, for all schools, not just the free or the academised. This seems to be the Finnish lesson. Not that they're doing so great now either, compared to those countries who are are just willing to go harder for longer for their children.

Here's the thing - do we want to go harder on our children? This is partly a moral and partly a pragmatic question. If the metrics by which education is improved can be raised simply by bashing away at the basic questions of classroom respect/discipline, class time, homework levels, and the rest, then we've got to be honest with ourselves. At some level, either we want to win the "global race" or we want to be kind to our children. The children of South Korea are famously the unhappiest in the developed world. This seems to be largely because they are not seeing their parents any more, packed off to yet more private tuition or piano lessons while their parents simply get lost in the insane work hours of the modern Korean economy. And yet East Asia continues to cement its educational advantage on the backs of its suffering children.

My question is this. Is there a measurable economic downside to having a generation of overworked, lonely children grow up? If we are looking at human life in the mercilessly competitive economically utilitarian way that "global race" rhetoric asks us, could we conclude that the future workforce of a South Korea or Hong Kong will be so hobbled by mental illness and suicide that its productivity gains from a world-beating education will be as good as neutralised? This is crucial. If we are honest with ourselves, we are not going to beat the countries that try harder at educating their kids on PISA scores. If we can make the argument that trying too hard would be in the long run unproductive anyway, we might be able to find a comfortable middle ground where we both accept that education reform is dependent on fundamentals and that we should not push those fundamentals too far. That seems to me a better compromise than our current political's system's tendency to run away from the fact that a truly competitive education reform would be very painful for our children.

So yes, let's talk about reducing summer holidays, increasing teacher rewards (and liability), more Sure Start, more special needs focus, smaller class sizes, better discipline, and what have you. Be tough, if necessary, on everyone. But let's agree we don't want it to go too far. Let's take into account the economic value of happy children. And also to remember the value of creativity in a future economy, and pray that the kind of open-minded flexible children will be able to out-compete their peers in the maths-and-results-driven East. If not, we're leaving them to the wolves, but we're making sure they're happy while they wait.