In the USA, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act aimed to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students’ outcomes by mandating standardised tests alongside high benchmark attainment standards. The American philosopher of education and former teacher and public schools curriculum developer, Nel Noddings, explained in the introduction to Happiness and Education in 2003, that one motive for writing the book was that the two terms, happiness and education, seemed increasingly opposed in practice. When she told people about the book’s title, some responded ‘But they don’t go together’.
Noddings traced the emergence of the standards movement in the USA to the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, with its rhetoric of ‘failing schools’. In the early 21st century, she observed, ‘educational discussion is dominated by standards, and the reason given for this is almost always economic’. Aside from the question of whether schools should be blamed for undermining the economy, she wrote that we certainly ought to be ‘deeply troubled’ by the suggestion that we can reduce economic inequity by ‘forcing the same curriculum and standards on all children’. Economic aims are too narrow for education; as she succinctly summarised: ‘There is more to individual life and the life of a nation than economic superiority’.
As in the USA in the early 2000s, so it seems in Aotearoa in the mid–2020s. We introduced our Education Standards Act (and its accompanying concepts and vocabulary) back in 2001. We then narrowed the focus to ‘National Standards’ of expected reading, writing and mathematics outcomes in primary and intermediate schools in 2010. In 2024, the government initiated a plan to introduce a twice-yearly testing programme as part of its ‘doing the basics brilliantly’ mantra. On the electronic government tendering portal, GETS, it released a Request for Proposals from internationally experienced providers of systemwide testing regimes. The brief was to develop a single Standardised Assessment and Aromatawai Tool aligned to Years 3–10 of the refreshed national curriculum in reading, writing, mathematics, pānui, tuhituhi, and pāngarau for full implementation from the start of 2026 (1.6 million tests per year). From 2025, schools are required to teach ‘structured’ literacy and mathematics (one hour per day each of reading, writing and mathematics) as part of ‘a clear, detailed and knowledge-rich curriculum grounded in the science of learning’, in the words of the Minister of Education. Targeted supports for students not achieving at the expected standards and in the required proportions will ensure that this ‘relentless focus on the basics . . . . doesn’t leave learning to chance’.
This all sounds well-reasoned and intentioned until we realise that the children most likely to be affected (or disaffected) by such a relentless focus (day in, day out; term in, term out; year in, year out) are those who enter the system least well-equipped to even begin such structured programmes, and possibly least well-disposed to the idea of being ‘schooled’. They are our children who will therefore be most challenged to reach the desired national standards in functional literacy and numeracy, and who will be most likely to miss out on other learning, including learning by chance and teachable moments, because they are only ever being fed a thin, meticulously planned and scheduled curriculum gruel. The very real potential downstream harm is of ākonga, kaiako and whānau being ground down by, not just grounded in, the science of learning. These policies are also least likely to restrict the learning opportunities of the already most socioeconomically advantaged children in our society, most of whom arrive at school pre-literate and pre-numerate, with the ‘right’ cultural capital, and pre-destined to meet the prescribed standards at each curriculum and assessment milestone.
Nel Noddings’ underlying point is that the ways we commonly conceptualise, organise and design schooling opportunities for children in order that they reach economically driven common benchmark outcome standards, all too often result in distractedness, boredom and a loss of curiosity about the natural and social worlds. And sometimes to ennui, alienation, disengagement, and non-attendance. And sadly, for some, to lasting unhappiness or even misery. We certainly shouldn’t leave learning entirely to chance but there is much more to life and learning at school, than doing the basics, however brilliantly.
The reality is that, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas might have put it, the cognitively based (or biased) so-called ‘science of learning’ is only one of three forms of systematically produced knowledge about our human, natural, social and built worlds. The science of learning is a technical form of knowledge that treats the human and non-human worlds equivalently through observation, measurement and claimed objectivity. But, for Habermas, there are two other forms of legitimate knowledge interests that actively shape, in our case, schooling and other life long, life wide, life deep educational experiences: the practical or hermeneutic and the critical or emancipatory. The former knowledge interest concerns how people interact with and make sense of their natural and social worlds in concrete terms and in diverse ways; the latter how they come to understand and resist the cultural conditions that restrict their freedom and opportunity to lead an ethical life of their choosing.
In terms of practical or hermeneutic knowledge in education, we need look no further, perhaps, than our local examples of Elwyn Richardson’s In The Early World or Graham Nuttall’s The Hidden Lives Of Learners (both published by NZCER Press). In terms of critical and emancipatory knowledge, there is much that has been learned by working against the grain of Anglo-American education science orthodoxies of the time, through the culturally theorised and experience rich Te Kotahitanga (led by Russell Bishop, Mere Berryman and colleagues) and Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities (led by Bobbie and Jodie Hunter and colleagues) projects, and Ann Milne’s wonderfully staunch and provocative (in the best sense) reflexive account of her decades as principal working alongside her whānau community at Kia Aroha College, to develop a decolonised, culturally safe and inviting school: Colouring in the White Spaces: Reclaiming Cultural Identity in Whitestream Schools.
Nor, here, should we forget, for example, the metatheoretical insights of Brian Sutton-Smith whose 1997 book, The Ambiguity of Play, includes his metaphor of play as a fanciful and visionary social imaginary, one that affords children quite different, opportunistic and self-directed practical childhood learning ‘basics’, such as ‘creativity, art, romanticism, flexibility, metaphor, mythology, serendipity, pretense, deconstruction, the act of making what is present absent or what is absent present’, dreamlike images and the interplay of different points of view and languages to describe their shared social world.
Noddings comments that she has never encountered a child under the age of seven who doesn’t love poetry, but almost never a teenager who likes it. ‘What have we done in our schools?’, she asks. Her answer:
We’ve wrecked the experience of poetry. We have poisoned something that we say we teach because of the lifelong delight it offers. Whereas the best poetry connects us to everyday life, school-taught poetry separates us even further from it . . . . Do we have to give tests on poetry? When we say that we are offering something to children that should increase their lifelong happiness, we should take care not to destroy the possibility.
In their haste not to leave learning to chance, our governments must take care not to destroy its very possibility.