ArticleToday, the NSW media will be awash with results from the HSC, IB and A-Levels. We will see videos of the “wait”, with exuberant responses, and ranks of schools who scored the most Band 6s in Maths and English. There will be fancy graphs, some schools – mortifyingly – dropping and others rising like a phoenix through the ranks.
What we will not see is the most important and interesting story: how those students and schools got there. I often tell parents that there are two ways to achieve strong results, two ways to achieve focussed, committed classrooms. One is by leveraging the fear of failure that so many teenagers secretly harbour. The other is by cultivating that old-fashioned but important word: love.
The fear of failure is a potent force in our education system. Whatever the value of our habit of publicly ranking students and schools as a mechanism for university entrance or for news content, this practice has slowly but surely become more than a measurement. It has become the goal toward which public consciousness tends when we think about the purpose of education. And as Goodhart’s Law tells us, when measurement becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measurement. More than that, to become solely focussed on ranks as a measurement of an education is to introduce the motivation most antithetical to the risk and play associated with real learning: fear.
The unintended consequence of a results-focussed ranking system introduces the economic notion of the myth of scarcity into the education and thinking of our young people.
Pursuing ranks above all else systematically and powerfully suggests that only one person can be excellent (or, in the case of the ATAR in NSW, only the 17 who receive 99.95). And as anyone who has been subject to the scarcity myth knows – stories of adults fighting over toilet paper come to mind – when we are told that a good is in limited supply, frenzied, harried fear can take over.
Can those who are motivated by fear produce excellent results? Of course they can. But as a teacher who has been up close to the engine room of education, I will tell you that this way of approaching excellence is accompanied by misery and loneliness, since no peer can ever be company, teachers become grist for the mill, subjects become a kind of game, and the student begins to see even their own body as a nuisance that needs to sleep or eat, let alone laugh with friends. This way of thinking does not see the lessons as valuable in themselves, but a ladder on which I might climb over others to achieve a lonely summit.
One response to this all-too-common scenario is to introduce a wellbeing framework that supports self-care. That’s important. But it can only attend learning. We need another way of thinking about learning entirely, one that will unseat the myth of scarcity as a model, even as we continue to use ranking to understand how one student’s success compares with another.
When I was a young girl, and frightened over something or other, my gentle father gave me a verse from the Bible’s book of Proverbs: “Perfect love casts out fear”. It is useless to turn to a student wracked with self-doubt and enveloped by the myth of scarcity and say, “don’t worry, don’t be scared”. It is like saying, don’t think about the colour red, which then becomes all we can see. Instead, this verse tells us, reach for the colour blue. Reach for love.
What does this look like in schools?
It looks like loving a subject so much that one might want to do it for hours. It means loving others who are perhaps better at something than I am, and being thankful for their skills. It means loving your teacher, who will almost certainly be an eccentric, committed to their subject to the point of oddity. And when it is hard to love something (because success has not come yet), it means borrowing love from someone else. It means looking at another and thinking: “I wonder why that person loves that thing so”. It means being open to grasping the patterns inherent in each subject. That outward mobility produces a kind of infectious joy. It is life-changing.
As I often tell parents, fear will encourage students to remember things. Love will teach them to learn things. And true education is learning, not remembering.
The familiar rite of students receiving their marks and ranks can unwittingly suggest that the point of an education is this piece of paper. And it is an important piece of the puzzle. But as any teacher who has stood vigil over a teenager as they struggle to understand something and then come up victorious, the point of an education is not the mark, so much as the changed human being who produces the mark. Just as we marvel at weightlifting athletes: the point is not the weights on the end of a barbell. The point is the majesty of the human being who lifts those weights as if they were nothing.
The point of an education is only secondarily entrance to university. Primarily, the point of an education is the strong, young, hopeful, funny and wise human beings leaving our schools on their next venture.
It is customary to finish these articles about final school results with a hearty encouragement to students to see this moment as a gateway, to not be limited by their results. Instead, I would like to conclude by asking the adults around these young people – school leaders, commentators, parents – to think about our language as we speak with and about graduating students in the coming weeks.
Congratulations and consolation will be important, yes. Far more important will be our love for them – which includes the high expectations that accompany real love. I learned a phrase recently that helped me to articulate this: the Hebrew phrase “ayin tovah”, which means to “look with a kindly eye”. A rich education teaches teenagers to look on their subjects with a “kindly eye” and so be transformed in the process. I now say to adults surrounding these graduates: Look on them with “ayin tovah”. Watch where they go next and never mistake the measurement for the human being at the centre of it all.
Sarah Golsby-Smith is a CPX Associate and the Deputy Principal at PLC Sydney. She has worked in boys, girls, co-ed, public and private schools. She has published on the Australian poet Gwen Harwood and has a PhD on how conversations in classrooms generate meaning.