The Mound - #19 - The Worst Kids in the World
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According to the OECD’s disciplinary climate index - an indicator of students’ experience worldwide - Australia’s classrooms are among “the most disruptive and disorderly in the world”.
In response to coming 69 out of 76 school systems, Australian kids said, “Ha! Nice.”
But Glenn Fahey, program director in education policy at the Centre for Independent Studies, is slightly less enthused. (Glenn wears glasses by the way.)
To fix what he’s dubbing “the crisis in school behaviour”, Glenn says we must set a corrective path across three areas - those being the promotion of better practice, better information and “better supports” (for teachers, presumably).
Later in the Op-Ed he then details some evidence-based strategies for improving classroom management but we won’t bore you with that because a) we don’t go in for that nerd shit and b) Glenn is wrong.
Here’s how we fix it:
In a classic example of bad strategy, Glenn has chartered a course of action in response to just a singular data point. He has quite literally taken a one-dimensional view of the situation, allowing the word “rank” to dictate our desired future state. You see, implicit in his response to this situation is that Australia should want to produce the best behaved students in the world. But when you prod the data a little bit, another story unfolds…
When you line up the OECD in order of market sophistication, Australia comes 9th.
(If you’re confused about us coming 69th out of 75 when there are only 38 OECD nations, the rank spoke to school systems, not nations. If you want to know how many systems belong to each nation - just shut up, will you? Quit being such a Glenn Lahey.)
Now, I am of course a product of my environment (i.e. a raucous, crisis-ridden degenerate) but it would appear to me that the story here is a little less clear than Glenny-boy would have us believe. In fact, if we add another column, showing the differential…
… Suddenly the behaviour of our students starts to make me, I don’t know, swell with pride? Going down the line of our ranked economies, you don’t actually see a worse behaved country than Australia until you hit… Columbia.
Adding more interest to the story, let me now list for you the best behaved countries in the world…
Finland
Norway
Denmark
Switzerland
Luxembourg
It’s almost as if there are some (mono-) cultural factors at play here?
Those nations have, frankly, too many things in common with each other - just one of which happens to be that they separate Australia in this table from the United States and the United Kingdom, two nations whose classrooms mirror ours in terms of diversity and volume.
TLDR; Diverse nations kick economic ass - and their students make noise.
The strategic danger here is that policy-makers like Glenn would have us direct great resource to improving our rank in the world (as it pertains to classroom management) without questioning the system to which we are attempting to adhere - without appreciating how we achewived this rank in the first place.
The truth is that the design of our classrooms was largely informed first by the military and then by the factory floors of the industrial revolution. With the rate of technological change only increasing, maybe it’s not the kids we should be changing. Maybe - just maybe - the very best thing the next generation could be is a little suspicious of authority and a little better at living and learning in a world that is loud, lewd, and looking to start a fight.
You’re welcome, Australia.
