One of the major changes that I advocated is to end our obsession with competition and testing in education. All this does is pit schools, students and teachers against each other in a never-ending and ultimately pointless quest to "drive standards". This is crushing the teaching profession and, more to the point, has done nothing at all to actually improve the quality of education.
But of course it isn't just about competition at home. Nicky Morgan (doing the bidding presumably of her puppet master, Michael Gove) also wants the whole country to compete with other countries and win the "global race" for having the Smartest Kids in the World. So it was on Sunday that Morgan set out her target for England's schools to enter the
top five of the PISA tests in English and maths by 2020.
The Tories are big on bold targets like this, with Labour more often than not following them down the same path, desperate themselves not to be accused having "low aspirations."
So if we are in a "global race" (what a truly horrible term) for the best education system, who are we competing with? And on what terms?
Well, in order for the United Kingdom to achieve Morgan's target of entering the top 5 of the PISA rankings, we would have to surpass not just our better performing European neighbours, but the East Asian powerhouse economies of Japan, Macau-China and South Korea, currently in 7th, 6th and 5th respectively.
There's nothing wrong with setting high standards of course, but anybody who thinks we can 'outgun' countries like Japan and South Korea when it comes to things like reading and maths is frankly misguided. We might be able to challenge these countries on standards in the long term, but not within the next five years and certainly not by taking them on at their own game.
The truth is that high educational achievement in Far East Asian countries has come at a great social cost and is largely based on things that we should be trying to avoid here like the plague. And the people there know it.
The case of South Korea is a perfect example. This is the country that currently occupies 5th place in the PISA rankings and is the country that Nicky Morgan would like to see us surpass by 2020. But Morgan needs to look a bit closer at some of the social costs of Korea's apparent success story.
Here are a few facts, supplemented by own experience of working within South Korean public and private education sectors:
- Fact One: Educational achievement in South Korea owes more to the private sector that a successful public education model
Many observers look at the success of South Korean students and assume it is attributable to a well run state education system, but the reality is quite different. In fact, standards in Korea are mostly driven by a bloated private sector, with Ministry of Education figures showing Koreans spent
19 trillion Won (US $17.9 billion) on private tuition in 2012.
The average South Korean household spends
three times more on private tuition than other OECD countries. Conversely, the Korean government actually invests less than the OECD average on public education. Private education accounts for 12% of all consumer spending.
What this means is that standards are not being driven by the government, but by fierce competition amongst parents, hence the high per household 'consumer' spending on private education.
Most of this spending goes on cram schools called 'hagwans' which supplement the basic education children get in school. Naturally, the richer children can afford to attend the best hagwans with the best teachers, which increases inequality. This puts intolerable pressure on low and middle income families to keep up.
The government are acutely aware of this problem and moved to impose curfews, banning hagwans from opening after 10pm or on weekends. However, this has resulted in an
illegal 'black market' springing up to satisfy the voracious demand for private schooling.
- Fact Two: South Korean children tend to burn out
Another cost of Korea's high educational achievement can be seen at university level. One would expect a well-balanced education system to see high standards continue all the way to university level. However this isn't the case in Korea, where performance typically starts to dip post-18.
This is widely attributed to the "burnout" factor. From around the ages of 8 or 9 the pressure on children to start topping-up their learning at hagwans begins. Every hour of extra schooling is matched with an hour of extra homework which means that astonishingly it is not uncommon for primary school children to be doing school work every day until 8 or 9 o'clock at night. This then intensifies at secondary school, peaking with the "suneung" university entrance exam at 18.
This educational war of attrition drives young children and teenagers to work completely unsustainable hours, which crushes their natural capacity for curiosity and creativity.
And of course it isn't sustainable. Many teenagers who do well on the suneung just don't have the energy to maintain the same levels of work once they start university. As a result, all that knowledge goes to waste as the student coasts through their college years.
This could be one of the reasons why Korean universities don't typically rank highly compared to those from other countries. According to TES rankings, South Korea has only
one university placed in the top 50 (Seoul National University, in 50th place). Furthermore there have been reports of Korean international students failing to adapt to the more abstract expectations at foreign universities, despite having outstanding scores on standardised tests at the age of 18. One alarming study found that 44% of Korean Ivy League students
dropped out halfway through their course, unable to adapt to a system that rewards innovative thinking above an ability to merely memorise and recycle information.
- Fact Three: Educational achievement often comes at the expense of mental health
South Korea has the sixth-highest suicide rate in the world, according to
WHO figures.
For the reasons above, tragically a large number of suicides in Korea include young people, with 1 student committing suicide every 3 days. Of the 630 total student suicides between 2010-2014, 12% were
directly linked to poor grades or career concerns, making it a more serious determining factor than bullying.
However, the intense pressure to succeed in Korean schools all adds to the pressure cooker environment that plays havoc with young people's mental health. A survey carried out by the Korea Youth Counseling Institute suggested that up to 48% of students have contemplated suicide.
- Fact Four: South Koreans know their system is flawed
All of the above leads to this point, which is by far the most important of all. The South Korean people and their educational leaders are fully aware that their education system is badly in need of reform.
There is an acknowledgement now that the nation's obsession with competing for the highest scores in tests is in fact a zero sum game, with society seeing few benefits to counterbalance the disastrous social costs.
The following quote from former education minister and academic, Professor Lee Ju-ho, speaks volumes:
"Test scores may be important in the age of industrialisation, but not anymore. So we look into the ways to reform our education system, not based on test scores, but based on creativity and social and emotional capacities."
To drive my point home, it isn't just educational researchers (so often bane of free market extremists like Gove) who are saying this. Even Seo Nam-soo, the current Minister of Education under the staunchly conservative Park Geun-hye administration, speaks along the same lines:
"Our administration is trying to go beyond the focus on exams and tests. In the past, students studied to achieve a higher economic and social standing than their peers. We are now trying to nurture students by unleashing their potential and their dreams. This is my top priority."
This throws everything in perspective and frankly embarrasses our own supposed educational leaders. While on the one hand the likes of Morgan and Gove are trying to use test scores to drive up standards, the very country we are tying to catch in the PISA rankings is saying precisely the opposite.
Far from being ambitious forward thinkers when it comes to education, our Government is actually totally behind the times when it comes to educational reform.
The message we can learn from the rest of the world is clear: stop obsessing over standardised testing; stop obsessing over documenting 'progress'; stop obsessing over competition.
Yes, let's move towards improving standards in schools, but as the South Koreans are now saying, let's base this on a more balanced system that focuses not just on the 'Three Rs' but also on enhancing creative, social and emotional capacities.
