It has become increasingly difficult to view the range of issues related to education without politics, economics and hidden agendas infiltrating and harming what should be one of a society’s most treasured and important opportunities for all children.

I have specialised in early education, preschool and primary years both as a teacher, an academic, author and consultant. Every day I work with teachers, government bodies, parents and children.
Most importantly education needs to be viewed much more than simply schooling. To be educated in the most general sense takes a whole life time. In the more immediate, especially for young children and their parents, to consider what successful education really means, what it might look like and how we might recognise it is something that is assumed or perpetuated by misleading headlines and advertisements.

Let us consider firstly the misleading, the politically skewed and the narrow approach to defining education. In its most basic and common definition, education is seen as “going to school”. Because nearly every adult has been to school, every adult assumes they know what a school should and should not look like, offer or how and what it should teach. Schools are judged often by parents and increasingly by governments based on infamous “scores” or “results”.

Schools are known to place gigantic billboards on their front walls so that everyone passing can read how a certain percentage of students reached a particular score. This is described as successful, as a great achievement. Students who complete their final secondary years with high scores even get into the paper and the media interviews them and schools congratulate themselves on the fine job they have done.

This is the first aspect of misleading information and propaganda about “education”. A numerical score does not necessarily equate to happiness, success in life or relationships, it does not necessarily mean a sense of identity, purpose, values or ideals. A numerical score perpetuates the misleading notion that we can base the character, resilience, future prospects, attitudes, competence and mental health of a person based upon a score.

Governments, universities, schools, even preschools are becoming more and more obsessed with scores and levels and results.

Read the sorts of comments I frequently here from government representatives and even some teachers themselves.

“This five year old is not reaching the benchmark expected. Either the teacher is not teaching well enough, the child has something wrong with them and so needs immediate recovery, or the entire school is somehow slack.”

“I have to teach to the test. Otherwise it isn’t fair to the children or their parents. We prepare them for the test even though it isn’t relevant; they don’t really need to know it and we are not up to it yet. We just can’t have the results low or the school will not look good.”

It is a sad indictment upon our education system that leaders and teachers are driven to “teach to a test” rather than to teach to a child.

It is a reality that economic and numerical scores just cannot accommodate. Not all children will be ready to learn the same thing in the same way at the same time. And nor should they be.
For all the rhetoric about individualised learning, valuing the individual and attempting to help all children learn and believe themselves to be successful, the sad reality is that the system itself now does the opposite.

We have seen the introduction of standardised tests across states and nationally. These assume that despite the huge variety of backgrounds, learning styles, rates of maturity and differences in children, a nation or state can accurately assess the needs and strengths of children through the same test!!

We are in so many ways a naive country. We follow the curriculum approaches from the USA and the UK even though over and over again decade after decade they have all proven not to work and change on average every three years due to their dismal results.

In addition, we continue to send children to school too young in this country. We assume that teachers can work miracles with all children despite their lack of maturity and then place additional pressure on teachers to somehow drag these very young children up to a benchmark that they are not actually developmentally or neurologically ready for. ‘Time to develop’ is an essential element for these children to be ready to learn.

We have reduced the richness of a holistic education to a set of scores, ranks and league tables.
The language of education has changed. We don’t talk about our goals, our aims, our children, our learning. We use terms such as standards, outcomes, benchmarks, rankings. It almost sounds like we are talking about an economy doesn’t it?

And here lies some of the problem. There is a narrow but widely held view amongst many Governments across the world, that we can measure the quality of schools, the quality of education, the quality of learning and the quality of a teacher by “results”.

Not until we redefine education, assessment, evaluation and effective learning will we ever truly start to meet the very real and immediate needs of young children.
Children don’t need endless tests. Parents don’t need a ranking system like the dark ages of ABCDEF on reports.

Let’s not kid ourselves, politicising schools and ranking and league tables of results is not about education. It is about measurement and an economic perspective on measuring quality.
We need a reality check. Young children don’t need tests and standards and benchmark that place pressure on them and their teachers. We do need accountability, we do need assessment that is authentic and systematic and we do need goals and aims for our children. How we do this needs a real revolution.

I agree with our Federal Governments call for an Education revolution.
My revolution would not concentrate on computers and ranking schools and measuring quality by pretending we can judge a nation’s learning by league tables and ranking schools by numerical results.

A revolution would take its time, tread slowly, look beyond debates about national curriculum and think more about what does it mean to teach, and what does it mean to learn? Arguments will exist forever about what “content” needs to be within a curriculum. What is never debated thoroughly is not the “what” but the “how” we need to teach and how children most successfully learn.

In my next editorial I will discuss some ideas of how our Australian education revolution might actually step up courageously to consider the deeper and more complex issues associated with a child’s education, rather than a politically based approach of testing, scores and rankings.