News this week revealed that a full three-quarters of Australian high school students admit they aren’t “fully trying” in their Pisa tests. File this under the category of water being wet or the Pope’s Catholicism not being much of a shock.
The Save Our Schools Coalition has surveyed the year 9 students about shared attitudes towards the “Programme for International Student Assessment” exams that are taken annually. The tests exist to create international ranking tables for reading, science and mathematics. The idea is that national education systems can have some means of benchmarking to establish if their educational policy and investment is yielding comparable results with the rest of the world’s.
In reality, these tests create a data set that provokes a lot of media jingoism on an educational theme if countries do well and hysterical condemnation if they don’t of 1) government incompetence, 2) bureaucratic failure, 3) wokeist teacher-activists introducing cultural Marxism to young minds through SECRET MIND TUNNELS, 4) teacher unions or 5) kids today being lazy, lacking gumption. Tick own box, yell loudly.
The latest Pisa scores were released in December. Pity the poor reactionary, rightwing columnists at other publications who were instructed to manufacture a crisis from the contradictory news that Australia’s year 9 students had climbed into a top 10 Pisa ranking among OECD nations (hooray!) while managing to simultaneously continue in a longer-term trend of national decline in terms of our scores (boo! It’s political correctness gone mad, or diversity policy, fire every teacher immediately!).
Personally, I think the most meaningful information to come out of the Pisa assessment is this revelation that Australian kids don’t give a shit about it. Yes, there might be a bureaucratic appetite for data, stats, rankings, comparisons and tables to prove, argue or reject the policy prejudices of the day. Fortunately, Australia’s students have correctly identified that these tests are not really about them as they are the jockeying circle jerk of distant adults and they should all be congratulated for responding with appropriate disdain. Full marks from me.
Anyone surprised that kids deprioritise, mock and scorn those things they’re obliged to do that they do not really value should spend more time with kids. Or remember their own Australian teenagerdom, beyond the retrofitted image of respectability confected around it just to be judgy about the rising generations.
This Pisa story appealed to me as a reminder of my own year 9 when my best friend and I competed to come last, absolutely last, in the school subjects we found boring as a show of joint resistance to a selective school competitive culture we found oppressive and unbearable – ah, I tangibly remember the true sense of achievement I felt when I beat her, four to three.
I also smiled remembering the kid who wrote “FISHBONE” in the band’s signature font on the paper where there was supposed to be an essay about the Peloponnesian War. There’s an apocryphal story that one of my public high school’s finest moments was the year – unwisely, in the 1990s – that a new uniform code was introduced, banning the boys from having long, Cobain-like hair. The boys responded with a mass head-shaving and the aggressive-looking crops ensured that such a code was never mooted again. There is, and has never been, anything worse than being a try-hard.
It’s also worth remembering the life-changing moments when one of those damned commie teachers draws on every ounce of their training and remaining physical energy to get a kid to understand how a set of information is, actually, relevant to their lives. The joy in the staffroom at the school where I was working on the day when a desperately damaged kid suddenly worked out being good at maths would help him better pursue his dream of selling cars. That moment when last-in-four-subjects Van Badham was told even she could make a career of writing if she developed the discipline to master an essay. My best friend who turned a penchant for dressing up in visual art into an extraordinary career as a costume scholar.
These trajectories of education, experience and enlightenment don’t offer metrics assessed by Pisa tests. And perhaps the question should be raised if the opportunity for international benchmarking might be more sensibly invested in comparing national capacities for addressing the problems all the world’s teenagers share. Like learning how to handle rejection. Or regulate their emotions. Or resist disinformation.
These are daydreams. We will be stuck with relentless assessments of no meaning to their participants as long as the assessments have meaning to the adults around them. Even so, I think there’s cause for national pride in our true Pisa results after the Save Our Schools survey’s revelations.
Are our kids underperforming alone? No – it’s curious to note that in their similarly prosperous sovereign economies, the Danish, Swedish, German, Swiss, Belgian, Norwegian, British, Austrian and Singaporean teens are also not so much falling behind as phoning it in. The cultural contexts for why this is certainly deserve assessment of its own.
Locally, perhaps, we may make a well-informed guess. Our kids might be brilliant, they may be contrarian, they may be dopey; likely, all three. But in a country where self-effacing mockery of establishment anxieties is so ingrained a part of the national character, we have – thanks to Pisa – the powerful suggestion they may, indeed, be Australian.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
