John MacDonald: Battery-farm schooling needs its wings clipped

Modern schooling is almost unrecognisable to many parents and grandparents. Photo / Peter Meecham

OPINION

Can someone send some morning tea to the New Zealand Initiative please, because we finally have an outfit calling out the disaster that is "the modern learning environment".

If you've had a child or grandchild go through school here in New Zealand anytime over the past 10-or-so years, you'll know all about the modern learning environment.

Massive, barn-like classrooms with bean bags and tents where the kids - or "the learners" - get involved in "self-directed learning". It's where the teachers don't teach anymore, because they are learning as the kids learn, apparently. And where you once might have had one teacher for about 30 kids inside a compact classroom - you now get a couple of teachers trying to keep a handle on about 80 kids inside these massive spaces.

If I'm sounding a bit dismissive of the whole thing, it's because I am - and I have been for a long time. This is why I'm delighted that the New Zealand Initiative - which is one of these think tanks with some pretty impressive people on its books - has called out the Ministry of Education big time.

People like Dr Eric Crampton and Des Gorman - they're a couple of names you see in the media all the time who are part of the New Zealand Initiative.

And I am delighted that it has come out today and said that these modern learning environments that schools up and down the country have been implementing are based on nothing else but ideology.

This is nothing new to me because I spent about six years on a school board when the kids were younger - it was at their primary school - and it seemed back then that every weekend the caretaker was doing overtime knocking out walls between the classrooms.

The modern learning environment was the way of the future and we had to get on board, is what the principal kept telling us at board meetings. And I didn't swallow it for a minute.

I had no time back then for massive classrooms with 60-to-80 kids, all doing their "self-directed learning". And I said so too.

But I was a bit of a lone voice and so the walls kept getting knocked out. In fact, I was surprised the place stayed upright, there were so many walls being given the heave-ho.

Then came the earthquakes in Christchurch and the Ministry of Education rolled into town and announced it would rebuild everything. And what did it want to build? It wanted to build classrooms that looked like an old-school tavern.

Cavernous things to give the kids - sorry, the learners - a sense of space, freedom, wonder and exploration.

And every time it came up at the board of trustee meetings, I just kept thinking to myself that it was nothing more than an experiment driven by ideology and nothing else.

This is why I am so delighted today that the New Zealand Initiative has come out and said exactly the same thing.

And it's saying it because the Ministry of Education has not been able to provide the big brains at the New Zealand Initiative with any data or information to show whether this ideologically-driven experiment has actually worked.

Dr Michael Johnston from the Initiative went to the Ministry wanting basic information such as the number of modern learning environments in schools in New Zealand, the cost of setting them up and how effective they've been.

And do you know what? The Ministry couldn't provide it because it doesn't have it.

The Ministry of Education spent billions of dollars on modern learning environments but did no research on their effectiveness before spending all that money and forcing schools to get with the programme. And it's done no evaluation since to find out whether they're working or not.

Which actually doesn't even make it an experiment, does it? Because if you do an experiment, you gather a whole lot of data and information and find out if there's any change.

So it's just ideology gone mad.

Which is shameful. And I'm not just saying that because I've thought all along that this modern learning environment concept is a disaster. I'm also saying it because how the Ministry thinks it's okay to spend billions of dollars without no research beforehand and no evaluation afterwards, I'll never know.

And instead of spending billions on modern learning environments - which the Ministry of Education has no idea are working or not - it would've been much wiser to spend that money on actual teachers because they are what make the difference for our kids.