Dialogue: We'd better decide what we want from education

By JOHN HOOD

In a thoughtful essay late last year the editor-in-chief of this newspaper posited that a failure to arrive at new goals as a nation heightened the chances that our country will slide off the First World register.

A little earlier the University of Auckland Business Review published a paper showing that the New Zealand economy had expanded by a meagre 60 per cent over the 37 years from 1960. This contrasted starkly with the average expansion of the other developed-country economies sitting in the range at 150 to 160 per cent depending on how they are grouped.

Simply stated, New Zealand's wealth relative to that First World register has rapidly declined. Similar trends for the next 3 1/2 decades would see our dollar valued at less than 20USc. The dismal impacts on our society of this possibility can be imagined.

In the lead-up to the last general election our politicians talked more often about notions of knowledge society and knowledge economy. This is a convenient shorthand to describe the growth and development in those other developed nations.

It has its genesis in part in the observation that new knowledge is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Although the amount of knowledge is an abstract concept, some estimate that it doubles every seven to 10 years. New knowledge combined with clever insights leads to innovation; innovation to new products, services and processes, and with necessary investment to new enterprises; these in turn contribute to economic growth and new job opportunities.

Those who prefer coupling the words knowledge and society (in preference to economy) wisely advocate the importance of social and societal dimensions. They recognise the reality of the broader challenge, of which education is a critical component.

Almost by definition education underpins notions of knowledge societies. If we do aspire to a higher-growth, civil, tolerant (knowledge) society, we are obliged to examine the value we individually and collectively place on education. Without a robust consensus among our political leaders, our policymakers, our opinion-formers, our parents, grandparents and children about the primacy of high quality education for all and a resolute, relentless commitment to its achievement, our foundations will remain too weak, our performance disappointing.

Lesley Max's piece on this page on Tuesday alarmingly illustrates just how far from this consensus we appear to be. There are too many other examples.

What do we want from an education system? Most would agree that we want to develop educated citizens, citizens with broad knowledge and understanding, with critical thinking skills and the skills and attributes that enable them to participate constructively and creatively in society.

We may also agree that we want a system that is culturally tuned and sensitive but internationally alert and aware. These aspirations require us clearly to distinguish education from vocation, knowledge from information and to design our curriculums and pedagogies for these purposes.

Syllabuses that focus attention more on information and process at the expense of knowledge and understanding, as does the 1993 New Zealand Curriculum Framework, are likely to be inimical to these objectives. This is not to deny the importance of vocational education (or of high quality vocational training institutions); rather, to position it appropriately in the order of things.

Many would also agree that we need confidence that the standards and performance of our educational institutions benchmark well in the international arena. In fact, our ability to achieve high international standards in education should be a given. We do not question such standards in sport; businesses ignore them at their peril. Careful benchmarking with the best in New Zealand is also necessary if we are to capture local insights and close local performance gaps.

Those who provide funding, those involved in governance, in leadership and as staff in educational institutions must be held accountable for designing incentives for high performance standards and for remedying shortfalls.

A fair observation today is that in too many cases we simply do not know how or where we stand, in spite of valiant work by the Education Review Office in the primary and secondary arena. Regular benchmarking and quality assurance requires soundly designed systems and publicly available, transparent information. These are overdue.

Few would argue that all New Zealanders must have access to high-quality education regardless of their individual or family means. However, with access goes the responsibility on all to use that access wisely, responsibly and to good effect.

Two further points arise here that may be more contentious. The first concerns choice: whether there should be greater freedom for individuals to choose their institution, and for institutions to choose their students.

There is a growing body of empirical research emanating from the United States that supports the proposition that choice improves institutional performance. New Zealand has just decided further to restrict choice. This may have been too hasty. Certainly the statistics correlating academic performance of our schools with socio-economic decile, as well as with ethnicity, are deeply concerning. If our quest is improved performance across the system, more careful diagnoses of our symptoms are warranted. Different prescriptions may result.

The second matter concerns the cost of tertiary education and how this should be divided between the student and the state. The notion that there is both private and public benefit is now more widely accepted. Today's Government recognised that the scales had tilted too far and that private cost was becoming a serious deterrent to participation and, upon graduation, to remaining in New Zealand.

The insight we have yet to glean from other countries is that until we have a broader portfolio of assistance, including merit-based access scholarships and better-funded pathway programmes, access will be difficult for too many. Loans alone have proved too blunt an instrument in our present condition.

Elsewhere, scholarship pools are created by private giving (with tax relief as an incentive, long overdue here) and from carefully designed public contributions.

New Zealand needs to bring into clear focus the broad international consensus around the dual roles of high-quality, research-led universities. They provide research-informed education. They also generate from their curiosity-driven research much of the intellectual property and knowledge that sparks the innovation cycle.

In the US, over 80 per cent of recent biotech startups and over 40 per cent of IT startups are believed to have had their origins in research from research-led universities. When New Zealand's inadequate public R&D budget is compared with international benchmarks, too little of it is invested in its research-led universities.

Underresourcing is the ultimate penalty in the aggressive international market for academic and research talent. It is a harsh penalty: we lose among our best and are unable consistently to match that standard with all new recruitment. The innovation and university system grows weaker.

The announcements by John Howard and Kim Beazley in Australia, both admittedly competing for electoral favour, indicate that Australia has well and truly accepted these challenges. Their aggressive education, research and innovation policies create our immediate competition; it is threateningly sharp.

Our education system and any aspirations we may share for a knowledge society are inextricably entwined. There is much to be accomplished. We need to move along.

* Dr John Hood is vice-chancellor of Auckland University.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

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