Some Comments For and Against OBE

In the light of what I have read perhaps I may be allowed to offer a few comments which might be of interest to teachers whether they be for or against OBE.

To the best of my knowledge debate about how to structure school courses, what to include in them,  and how to assess them has been going on ever since the advent of universal secondary education which in most western countries dates from the end of the Second World War.

Regardless of which 'system' teachers support there is one factor that has remained CONSTANT. Teachers may or may not like it but it is a fact of life that the schooling system (I deliberately refrain from calling it education) is expected to SORT children on the basis of ability as an indicator of their future value to society or, to use the jargon, as human capital. Of course any teacher worth his/her salt finds this function highly dubious, even appalling, but there is no way of escaping this function in the world as we currently know it. Moreover, the Commonwealth's current emphasis on schooling providing children with the knowledge and skills TO GET A JOB endorses the time honoured sorting function of schools (and universities).

If schools must sort - and I do not realistically see how schools can escape that function short of some 'brave new world' still to be discovered -  it follows that their reporting on students must give parents an accurate assessment of their 'progress' in a form that they can readily comprehend. This might be relatively straightforward but for the fact that access to the so-called 'good life' is HIGHLY COMPETITIVE. Try getting into the Medical School at UWA or the Vet. School at Murdoch with poor school grades! Of course not all students aim that high but even basic entry to many universities is highly competitive not only because there is a shortage of places available but also because universities have to set basic standards of entry if they are to maintain high standards of graduation or well-qualified human capital. LIKEWISE employers want to recruit what they consider the best staff available. When confronted with 100 school-leaver applicants for a job they will naturally employ crude screening methods, the first of which is often an applicant's school record. They don't want a mass of details - they haven't the time, knowledge or interest to sift through endless detail. They want a rough assessment of ability and this generally means academic or intellectual ability - you know, the criteria teachers work with on a daily basis regardless of all the interminable arguments about what it is and how to measure it. Put crudely it adds up to the Commonwealth Minister's A.B.C.D.and Es.

Competition for entry to universities and jobs means that fine judgments have to be made. For example, the assessment of students for entrance to many courses at UWA often involves minute percentages. Of course it is educational 'mystique' but if you have 100 places to fill in a course and 500 applicants and you must be seen to be objective and fair to all, how else can you select other than on some essentially school based record of achievement?

The sorting function and the need in many instances for fine judgments appear to drive the schools and what they do. If you eliminate the sorting function of schools then society will have to invent another device to sort school leavers. No matter how much political correctness is spouted there appears to be no way around that problem. Many years ago primary schools had to sort children when there was competitive entry to secondary schooling. Once that was removed they could free themselves from the tight straightjacket of the 3Rs and all that that entailed but the secondary schools are still held to account by the business world and society in general, and to put it crudely, there is no escape.

Another point that I think is worth making in the OBE debate is to identify the essential problem of MASS SECONDARY EDUCATION. Nowhere in the world to my knowledge has any country been able to solve the basic problem of offering a worthwhile educational experience to ALL CHILDREN at the secondary level. Many attempts have been made but none has succeeded, including Western Australia. We had the junior and senior leaving certificates after 1945. They were replaced by the Achievement Certificate which, in turn, gave way to the Unit Curriculum, and now we are about to enter the brave new world of Outcomes Based Education. I have been studying change in school systems for too long to have any confidence that OBE will be any more successful in solving this key issue than any other system that has already been tried. I am not a defeatist, rather a realist. Free secondary schools from their selective function by all means but before you do so spell out clearly just how students will proceed to university and other careers.

OBE makes much of the fact that there is no set syllabus in the traditional sense. Perhaps it is pertinant to ask why school work was traditionally governed by a set syllabus. You may not like the answer but it was originally devised in the mid nineteenth century in the UK, and thereafter adopted in Australia, as a safeguard against POOR teachers. The elementary schooling of the masses in the nineteenth century was to be cheap and efficient. Most elementary teachers were TRAINED but not well educated. There was one way to teach and a set body of knowledge to be mastered. An old friend of mine, now deceased, was for many years Director of Education in NZ. He often spoke of the poor overall quality of teachers and how children had to be protected from them! One hopes that the overall quality of teachers is now higher BUT many good teachers still leave teaching for better paid employment and universities certainly do not recruit the most able graduates or school leavers for a career in teaching. To give ALL teachers the high degree of freedom  to teach what they choose as advocated in an OBE approach is to run a potential risk from the viewpoint of school administrators and many parents.
The French traditionally had a common syllabus on the grounds of equality - the same for all - but I doubt that would find much support in Australia.

In my experience of studying wholesale change in the way schools function internally, three, if not four conditions, need to be met if a major  change is to succeed.
1. Teachers need to comprehend fully what it is intended to change and why. This is not as straightforward as it seems. I suspect that many WA teachers could not write you a page summary outlining CLEARLY what is entailed in OBE and why it is needed.
2. Teachers need not only to understand the proposed changes but TO EMPATHIZE WITH THEM. In so many instances of previous attempts to introduce change the operation was a top down one i.e. the Education Department or Ministry dictated the change regardless of the feelings of the teaching profession as a whole. Officials will claim that teachers were consulted - whatever that means - but it is manifestly clear that they were not or that they were simply told what to accept. Rarely, if ever, were they asked for their views and given genuine proof that their views were taken into account. Administrators and politicians can dictate all they like but when a teacher shuts the classroom door and is alone with the children what they achieve is a measure of what THEY believe to be worthwhile and not necessarily what some educational expert tells them to believe. Teaching is not unlike being a minister in a church. If you teach with CONVICTION it is instantly recognizable and most students respond positively. If you are merely going through the prescribed motions they equally quickly pick you for a fake.
3. Even if teachers both understand and empathize with proposed changes they must be provided with the wherewithal to implement new ideas. So often governments fail to provide the essential equipment and back-up services. One of the essential truths of education is that BETTER EDUCATION ALWAYS COSTS MORE.
4. Ideally, any wholesale change should be properly assessed after a period of say a decade to see how successful it has been and what needs to be improved. This is never done to my knowledge because by then another new set of educational ideas has been generated and another political party is probably in power. A minister of education has only a short time between elections so change has to be rapid if any lasting impact is to be made. This whole scenario runs counter to another essential truth about educational change - that LASTING EDUCATIONAL CHANGE REQUIRES A LONG LEAD TIME.

I don't doubt for one minute that the OBE approach to schooling has much to commend it - most educational ideas and philosophies do - but I think the debate in the national press and maybe on your website has so far failed to identify the real underlying issues that need to be debated across the nation. They are complex and not given to 30 second sound bites on television and rarely does the national press choose to engage in really serious and ongoing debate about schooling.

I will resist commenting on the specific material on your website except to say that scoring cheap points by either side (for or against OBE) is a poor substitute for serious educational discussion. One last point I will make, however, because I think many current educational commentators are presenting a misleading view of the past. I was educated in the United Kingdom and New Zealand in the 1950s and I was not subjected to dull teacher dictated formalism. I had my share of teachers that inspired me and others that didn't but just as there never was a golden age of schooling fifty years ago, nor was there a dark ages that we escaped in the 1960s and thereafter. In the 1950s secondary schools were concerned principally with the intellectually bright in the upper school - the rest left in droves when they turned 15. A decade later children were staying longer at school and secondary schools were grappling with what to do with those not destined for university or white collar employment. I know because I was a teacher in that decade. The 1970s was a decade of growing concern about the quality of secondary schooling in the UK and Australia as progressive or child-centred theory took hold at the secondary level. The rest is contemporary history.

Congratulations on your website.

Clive Whitehead

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