Is this in the exam?
Will Australia become a nation of followers, with no leaders?
After finally completing the last gruelling year of school, I've had the chance to take a break and look back at the past 13 years of schooling, and to me it seems that there are some serious problems with our education system. I was always told that the true purpose of my education was to prepare me for life after school…unfortunately I'm not sure that it has achieved this goal.
I feel no better prepared for the harsh realities of the "real world", than I was before I started.
One of the main problems is that by choosing electives students are effectively forced to choose their career path in year 9. At the age of 14 or 15, how can one expect them to make such an important decision with so little knowledge of their options? And career advisors never seem to help either as discussed in John Ridge's blog.
One of the top students in my school, when doing an online career advice questionnaire organised by our career advisor, got ‘brewer' as his recommended profession. How was this supposed to help him decide the right subjects?
The eventual result is that students feel obliged to enrol in the university course with the highest entrance mark they qualify for, without having a true interest. This has the unintentional effect of pushing out people, who have a real passion to study those subjects.
This links in with the mystery of the scaling (algorithm) that the Board of Studies uses to weight different subjects, in order to compare them against each other. Scaling is so complicated, and misunderstood, that many people base their subject choices on rumours about which subjects scale better. Students flock to the subjects that seem to scale better, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also placing some people into courses which they cannot handle and do not enjoy.
In the final year, the past focus on gaining knowledge, disappeared, and the question "Is this in the exam?" dominated the classroom. I believe that this one-sidedness of the learning process, at the time when students are most mature and receptive, diminishes, rather than stimulates creativity – a quality I have been told, at least, is valued in the life beyond school.
Maybe I am wrong to think that individuality is important in the "real world". Maybe employers are more inclined to employ workers that sit down, do their job, and don't think for themselves. But what does this mean for the future of our workforce? Will Australia become a nation of followers, with no leaders?
There need to be different routes for those students that do not fit the mould, because at the moment, the few alternatives available are neither well publicised nor widely adopted. The feeble attempt by the government to establish vocational subjects – Hospitality, Construction, Retail Services etc. – to entice students to learn a trade, just results in those participants being scaled down in their final exams, as these courses are not seen to be as difficult as Latin, for example.
The majority of students are funnelled into the straight forward and planned subjects, where there is little room for originality, and the key to success is knowing what the examiner wants to read, not what you feel is the correct answer. In English, many pupils memorise entire creative stories that are finely tuned to cover all the bases. This counteracts the supposed value of having an examination system, which is to test how the student can adapt under pressure – an important skill in most professions.
Crucially, there is the inequality of the final year.
The core factor of this problem is of course the school which one attends. The way the system is set up means that if there is a majority of poorly performing students in one school, they will pull down the top students of that school, regardless of those individuals' own results, and vice versa. This means that some of our best school-leavers are being disguised, and not given the same opportunities as poorly performing students at better schools.
The other issue is that students who do not have access to experienced teachers, or teachers that know the system, are at a serious disadvantage. This is because the pupils do not learn strictly "what the marker wants", and thus while answering with what they believe to be the correct answer, are marked down, as their ideas do not necessarily fit with the examiner's own opinions. This hidden prejudice often leads to students being unjustly robbed of their marks… and since students never get their exam papers back (in the HSC), there is always a feeling of contempt for the system which is: inefficient, bureaucratic, not effective at doing what it is designed to do, and ultimately doesn't prepare you for anything other than memorising information.
sally.rose
January 28, 2009 at 3:32 am
A mystery indeed!
The scaling system is indeed a mystery. As I understand it there are two main arms to the scaling system which I have very different feelings about.
The first issue is weighting subjects according to their level of difficulty/desirability which is problematic because it is completely dettached form the job/course the student hopes to use the mark to gain entry with, but ultimately I believe a neccesary evil.
The second issue is a handicap system plots schools along a bell curve. This is problematic because, as you point out, it props up underperforming students in successful schools whilst dragging down succesful students in underperforming schools. This part of the scaling system is really unfair, and I don't think it is neccessary.
catherine
January 28, 2009 at 11:50 am
your comments got me thinking
great blog. from your experience, if you were to choose your electives in year 11 instead of year 9, do you think that would make a difference to your choice of subjects or career? do you think you would be more equipped to make that decision a couple of years later ?
re your point as to whether employers want people who think for themselves, i guess it depends very much on the corporate culture. If you read Malcolm Galdwell's new book 'Outliers ' you will see that the most successful people in the world are the ones that think outside the square. They are the ones that make a real difference. But it is not good enough to only be a lateral thinker. You need to know how to sell that idea to others. You also need to know how to work really hard, sometimes when you don't feel like it. This is something the HSC experience tries to teach and this is also real life. Most importantly, if you do well in the HSC and you have worked hard, then i think you have learnt the most important lesson in life. That if you work really hard, you can achieve something great……and if you don't work hard, you don't achieve very much at all.
so, 'is this in the exam ?' if you are learning persistence, then it definitely is.
alison gordon
February 5, 2009 at 4:26 am
preparing for a life outside university
Your blog took me back to my HSC days, which still after numerous years, sticks out vividly in my mind. I've always said that I've never worked so hard, and maybe never will again!
One thing I think your blog touches on but doesn't quite explore is the other options aside from university that one can pursue after school. I know from my personal experience, other paths like TAFE courses or work experience were not heavily promoted. Rather, the path to university, particularly to the "top" performing kids, was made out to be the only one to success.
You are right that there is little point to someone enrolling in a course they have no real interest in. You'll find lots of students are doing what their parents think is a good "smart" choice – much like a friend of mine who would have given her eye teeth to be a beautician but enrolled in a business degree to satisfy her folks. Equally, it's not fair that the next person, who really is passionate about completing that degree, misses their chance. But, like the "harsh realities" of life you speak of, this is just one of them!
olgabodrova
February 6, 2009 at 2:10 am
Sometimes parents’ advice is worth its weight in gold
My younger sister always liked to dance, so when the time came to choose a career, she thought of going into a theatrical school and even passed the first two auditions into a prestigious Moscow drama institution. My mum, however, persuaded her to choose a more conventional path so she enrolled into a university IT course and got her master's. All the way through her studies she performed in a dancing group in a leading Moscow theatre and even made an appearance in a movie by a renowned Russian director – so at the time I was secretly regretting she did not choose the artistic career over IT.
Life has proved I was wrong. My sister was able to immigrate to Australia, find a very good job in IT and build a healthy career as a programmer. She is very successful and well-respected in her current role and cannot imagine a life and lifestyle different to what she enjoys right now & is able to afford.
I appreciate the variety of educational choices for kids leaving school but I do believe our kids should be motivated to regard tertiary education as the ultimate goal. Perhaps it's a generational thing, it also comes from experience. Both my grandmothers did not have education opportunities, could barely write and read, so they worked very hard to make sure all their children have proper education. Both my parents have university degrees. This has been instilled in my generation as well – tertiary education as the only way to achieve anything in life. In Russia this push for higher education is still going strong, and most fancy well-paid jobs require a university degree.
My own degree served me well. I'd never been able to immigrate to Australia without it, not a chance. Your country sets a pretty high standard for independent immigrants in that respect.
So I support Stephen Wilson's view that
Read his comments here – "Take care generalising from personal experience".