On Saturday night in Melbourne, a 16-year-old missed her grandmother’s birthday so she could stay at home for an extra two hours’ study. Yesterday morning in Sydney, another student — this time a 17-year-old — vomited repeatedly before breakfast, exam anxiety crippling her chances of the exam mark she is banking on. And in Brisbane, another student was told she was banned from bringing a sanitary napkin into the exam room. Why? It might be an aid for cheating.
The stories go on, all revolving around the process of securing a silly double-digit number called an ATAR. Forget being naughty or nice this Christmas, this number will deliver merriment or distress by signalling who will be selected into specific university courses and who will miss out.
It is tortuous and old-fashioned and absolutely irrelevant to the people students become — professionally and personally. But perhaps even more significantly, it measures none of the qualities that will dictate how they fare once they’ve joined the workforce.
What are the skills and talents we want in our politicians and chief executives, teachers and nurses? A medical specialist able to diagnose an illness is crucial, but so is their bedside manner and communication skills.
Former Australian of the Year and co-inventor of the cervical cancer vaccine Professor Ian Frazer — whose work saves millions of women’s lives — was not the top of his class. Yes, he was bright. But it was perseverance that ensured he didn’t give up — for days and weeks and years — on the breakthrough needed to progress a vaccine.
Curiosity is important. So is comprehension and understanding and critical thinking. But emotional intelligence and teamwork and the ability to tell your story trumps those. Indeed if Donald Trump had any of those traits he might still be in the White House. And if Scott Morrison, despite his background in marketing, was able to engage the nation on any issue — from COVID to climate change — he’d be sitting in a much better place.
It’s not just politicians, but the examples are everywhere of leaders whose talents don’t match the office they hold. And if COVID does nothing else, surely it can influence what is needed in future.
In theory, we know this. The education system is played with by every incoming government and inquiry after inquiry after inquiry leads nowhere. (Even the stellar job done through lockdown doesn’t seem enough to provide an impetus for a fat and deserving teacher pay rise). But in practice, it seems we — parents too — are happy to go along with a system that is making many children physically sick, and GPs and psychiatrists busier than they ever have been.
Self-harm is up. School refusal is up. Eating disorders and almost every mental health challenge is up. COVID is a big part of it, but the enormous pressures and expectations put on our senior students is a contributing factor.
Parents need to cop some of the blame. While we talk about the importance of a new and more flexible system, we celebrate harder when our children’s marks provide awards, when they stand out in academic pursuits.
This year some universities increased the number of early entries, particularly for students in Victoria. This was a small recognition that many Victorian students are COVID casualties; almost two years of remote learning has destroyed motivation levels and long-term goals.
But what was the consequence of that in some schools? Some students were asked to hold off accepting those offers, and work to get the highest score possible (which no doubt would help in school comparisons and marketing opportunities).
The different way the ATAR is calculated in different states also points to an inability to create a future-focused education system. Surely, if an ATAR score is the best avenue to determine university entry, shouldn’t it be based on the same assessment of marks whether you are in Victoria or South Australia or Queensland?
But perhaps the best illustration of how old-fashioned and immovable the system is in assessing tomorrow’s leaders is in how students are tested — in big, uncomfortable and often cold halls where adults pace up and down looking for wrongdoing.
Who shouldn’t we trust here? Pencil cases have to be transparent, as do rulers. Tissues are forbidden. Someone follows students to the toilet. Surely there’s a better way to engage and encourage and nurture and educate the politicians and CEOs and teachers of tomorrow.
the basics are always require – how to calculate numbers and measure and read to write -” reading makes a full man and writing an exact man”- as the quote goes and if you don’t who wrote that you are uneducated. with the modern technology – coding should be included as wells the other technical requirements all this gender rubbish and other social trends of the moment should not be included but perhaps early introduction into ethics – rhetoric in the multi media age – would be the requirement –
Stress is not a bad thing as stress and anxiety keeps us going day to day – the last few generations of the young have not been exposed to adversity and their coping mechanisms are not developed . But there must be some measuring tools which shows where the individual actually stands -and if you don’t do so well objectively it is an incentive to improve oneself to do better OR go and get a mental health plan from your doctor and Medicare will pay for endless visits to a stranger called a psychologist to keep you where you are , comfortably hopeless, and feeling better in not developing to improve yourself. So competitive assessments are a must and should begin in early childhood – not all children should get a ribbon for turning up to sports day and losing not winning – that is not how life will treat you.
Hear hear. Not only that, but the end of high school exams mirror the process a student will have to endure at university, where the exact same system is used for many courses, particularly the “prestige” ones. Failing to equip students for this system is setting them up to fail. Or instead perhaps we could give up on exams at university and insteadt distribute degrees in Corn Flakes packets? Far more egalitarian.
Ahhh, the good old days, eh DG?
Kids these days have stress that you and I never had, mate. I left school in 1969, never having heard of the word ‘resume’, let alone having spent hours learning how to ‘market my brand’, because we just walked into jobs back then, no matter how inexperienced, ignorant, or useless we were. We were trained on the job. Now the employment market is so competitive that even juniors are expected to have experience, and most job applications go straight into the bin. ‘The last few generations have not been exposed to adversity’ is an ignorant and insulting comment.
Yes, measuring tools are important, but do exams measure what we actually want kids to learn, or are we happy if they just measure short-term cramming ability?
Good article that raises interesting points. But maybe the education system is fit for purpose, training people not to think and just be yes-men and yes-women, as the next couple of Crikey articles demonstrate.
I was an allied health professional in a state public health system for 40 years before retiring in 2015. At the beginning of my career, we were career public servants who were permitted (and even expected) to think for ourselves and voice our opinions honestly. By the end of my career we were expected to believe in and slavishly implement whatever bureaucratic crap came down to us from above, to brown-nose those above us in the bureaucracy, and to play our political masters’ great game of pretence that the whole rotten system was actually functioning. Most of the young kids coming through were on contracts, to make sure they toed the line (sorry, fitted into the team), and those of us oldies who hadn’t burned out were increasingly being disciplined or performance-managed in an attempt to shut us up or piss us off enough to leave. ‘Patient care’ had long been replaced by ‘patient flow’.
So I’m not sure modern employers actually want the education system to give them employees who think for themselves.
the ATAR system will stay, while it advantages the coalition heartland “nice” suburbs and the “right” schools.. We can’t have just any old pleb getting into Sydney or Melbourne medicine or law, can we now?
I have a friend who is a high school teacher. She can’t discipline any of her students until she has submitted three write-ups of bad behaviour. Time consuming for time-poor teachers, especially if there are multiple students. In the meantime, students keep disrupting classes. Students aren’t required to submit assignments by deadline – as long as it’s submitted by end of term, they get marked the same way no matter how many extra dats/weeks/months they had to complete it. This wishy-washy philosophy us not doing our kids any good. Where else are they supposed to learn how to meet deadlines, how to work and interact productively with people outside their families and friendship groups.
ATAR and the like are rites of passage. They can and should be updates but students need to be evaluated on a common scale in some way. Not every kid should go to uni and it’s harmful to hold up getting into uni as the default goal. Evaluations to get into TAFE and the like should be held with equal value.
I would get that maths and science are still considered higher value than English, history, drama, music, art and the like despite the latter skills being increasingly useful in the modern world.
The range of subjects students need to study at school have value as it helps them figure out what they are and aren’t good at. Learning how to do something you’re not good at is an incredibly valuable skill.
Doing ‘badly’ in ATAR etc never has been the end of the world. It’s possible to get into desired courses by other routes, or perhaps ATAR isn’t relevant to particular students. What are students being taught to value – what are they being told is an accomplishment. There needs to be more than just a purely academic option but the academic option still has value.
The old school ways are tortuous, old-fashioned and irrelevant, and students are being let down year after year.
God yes. We still run our education system as if the Industrial Revolution is happening now; dull, plodding and filtered on outmoded principles – designed to feed increasingly underfunded universities and industries and trades that no longer exist as they did 170 years ago.
If you add in the fact that the federal government increasingly underfunds the public sector (which surprisingly still does a good job in so many ways) then we have a recipe for a disenfranchised generation or two [or 3] of those not favoured by the socio-economic gods.