Competency-based learning | Dan Mikhaylov
Delivering his remarks at the Foundation for Education Development (FED) summit this month, Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, presented the Conservative government’s blueprint to “deliver the equality of opportunity and realise the potential of every child” in the United Kingdom. To facilitate the education sector’s transition to the bright post-lockdown future, he promised to provide £502 million to primary and secondary schools on the Prime Minister’s behalf. The longer-term national priorities evinced comparable optimism and ranged from cultivating “good behaviour” in students by promoting school-parent collaboration and establishing a £10-million network of the so-called behaviour hubs for schools to share best practices to expending £2.5 billion on the National Skills Fund to support vocational training programmes.
While these policies are unmistakably conservative, Williamson’s list left no room for the most conservative of all educational principles: learning for learning’s own sake. Quite strikingly, the notion that education should nurture critical thinking and prepare for a lifetime of learning was absent from the discussion about Britain’s future.
Evidence speaks for itself; the state is reluctant to address some of the most profound problems of modern education with structural change. Students graduating without even a foundational understanding of economics and history that might deter them from subscribing to radical movements, and 44% of them dismissing science as irrelevant to society and with child literacy in nationwide decline, is hardly a reason to raise alarm from the state’s viewpoint. Nor does the government seem to worry about the burgeoning university dropout rates and the fact that more than 50% of higher education graduates are employed in those sectors that have little or nothing to do with their degrees.
Certainly, it is much easier to reprimand our institutions for misdemeanours that most of the public agrees upon: anti-Semitism, suppression of free speech, and the Marxist bogeyman gradually devouring our universities. Herein, we by no means intend to criticise the Conservatives for standing up for ordinary people and confronting them. Thus, many of us at Orthodox Conservatives celebrated its request that universities embrace the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, and we believe this was a good starting point to deracinate hate crimes and foster the cross-communal dialogue that could improve social cohesion up and down the country. However, the government should do more. Platitudinal though it sounds, a structural overhaul of the education sector must be on the agenda in the name of Britain’s prosperity and cohesion.
Our proposal is simple: the government must incorporate into its educational agenda provisions to teach students to learn, think critically, and eloquently articulate their thoughts in such a way that would mitigate the currently dominant competency-based learning. We insist on two further points. Firstly, we regard this reform to be a necessity.
Without it, we are poised to nurture more and more generations, ill-prepared to contribute to our collective development to the best of their intellectual potential that the existing system has lamentably failed to harness. Secondly, we maintain that this transposition must involve both schools and universities, since they are enveloped in a relationship of interdependence and their genuine transformation cannot be accomplished by extricating one factor and leaving the other behind.
Demotivated students reflect a structural problem in our education
It is indefeasible that the educational system in the UK is facing problems. Traditionally, many schools have been understaffed and underfunded nationwide. In urban areas, some were metamorphosing into incubators of extremist and antisocial behaviour, with more than 40 universities being likewise implicated in this by the press. In the meantime, other schools have sought to outsmart their counterparts by including bizarre- and often undeserving of inclusion- ideas in their curricula, but ended up doubting Britain’s cultural and historical foundations until there are no more role models to follow and uncensored books to pursue.
Now that schools are reporting substantial downturns in children’s attainment owing to the coronavirus pandemic and the concomitant restrictions on in-person teaching and school closures, the situation is even worse. Following the summer lockdown alone, academic performance across English primary schools had plummeted by between 5% and 15%. Undoubtedly, further restrictions- such as the November lockdown and the abysmal state of affairs that is reminiscent of nothing less than a strict wartime curfew and that we have had to endure since winter- will make the educational crisis all the more visible upon our return to normality.
Explicating this recent drop in student attainment, many scholars have resorted to stressing the importance of human interaction as conducive to better information absorption and motivating students to learn and put in the needed effort in an atmosphere of friendly competition with their peers. According to one McKinsey survey, educators themselves have found online teaching a deeply problematic environment that was but half as effective as in-person instruction. However, even this is ironic.
Britain leads the world in the quantity of teaching months lost to COVID-19 by November- nearly three in our country, compared to 1.9 worldwide. Although we agree with academics that in-person learning is the irrefutably most significant contributory factor to this predicament, the issue could have been partially mitigated, had students been equipped with a better mindset for independent study.
Naturally, as soon as they were deprived of valuable contact with instructors and friends and compelled to read textbooks in such an environment that they would not customarily associate with learning, they lost the incentive to learn. Albeit tragic, the extent of this loss was dictated not by the teaching format disruptions but by structural factors, one of which is the conspicuous lack of predilection for acquiring new knowledge and processing complex information among British youths.
We hold our education system responsible for this. Studies demonstrate that schools frequently serve to suppress curiosity by prompting their attendees to ask fewer questions. This is, in turn, why many students instinctively respond to unfamiliar and challenging ideas with askance and proceed to question their relevance to their everyday life or their career aspirations. Worse still, researchers have noticed a multigenerational diminution in the cognitive ability of existing generations of students. In simpler terms, the average capacity to think abstractly and visualise, construct written arguments, and spot logical patterns in texts and within vast numerical datasets has been deteriorating in Britain with every year group that graduates from school.
At university, there is much left to be desired. In the last three years, two-thirds of our nation’s finest establishments of higher education recorded at least a 5% rise in the number of students, who chose to interrupt their studies or abandon university entirely. Although the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) is correct to suggest that not “all instances of dropping out are bad” and that Britain “has the lowest drop-out rate in the developed world”, the trend’s consistent growth makes it worrisome.
It is in both the government’s and the public’s interest to nip this issue in the bud. One of the reasons why the UK does not observe the 25% university dropout rate registered in Germany is because our higher education is not free. Because parents see a price tag attached to their child’s degree, they are more inclined to either talk the child out of going to university in the first place or encourage the child to complete the entire programme and obtain the university qualification for which they effectively paid.
By removing the price, we would eliminate the incentive for people to get their money’s worth in higher education. Yet the government student loan scheme lets some borrowers off the hook by relieving them of their burden to repay, if they earn less than £26,575, and periodically forgiving student loans altogether under public pressure. This is where the taxpayers whose money contributed to said loans should start to question the system. As for the government, the fact that almost 50% of graduates do not work in their area of study is sufficient vindication that the state does not receive the specialists, whom it sponsors to train and become certified.
Even worse for both state functionaries and the average Joe is the ideal-typical career-switching student’s predisposition to reduce university education to a series of assignments and divorce the content of the discipline in question from the analytical skills accumulated through reading and evaluating academic literature about it. While the latter, in the mindset of many young people, represents a useful asset for future employment prospects, the former more often than not ends up redundant.
Down the line, failure to perceive education as a means to broaden horizons and garner superior understanding of the world surrounding us will stick in the craw of employers. After all, someone with little interest in the subject they are reading at university could be more prone to cutting corners on the job. Moreover, such a person could easily have outsourced their coursework to essay writing services or plagiarised material in their preparation for their essays, which calls into question not only the individual’s qualification, but also the ability to conduct, evaluate, and present information and capacity for creative thinking. In turn, this threatens to imperil Britain’s overall development to the detriment of all Britons: young and old, rich and poor, politicians and voters.
Blame competency-based learning
At the core of these problems resides our competency-based approach to education. According to it, competencies and skills must be prioritised in teaching over nurturing cognitive ability and instilling self-discipline for independent learning. The rationale behind this arrangement is that a student must be capitalised, i.e. converted into an asset with a particular estimated value. This presupposes that education is inherently an investment in one’s future, destined to deliver some material returns, and encourages students to participate in extracurricular activities, savour new subjects to venture out of their comfort zone, and hone their entrepreneurship and versatility.
However, every approach has its side-effects. By prioritizing skills and equating learners with tradable goods and services, our education sector has elevated this attitude to its absolute form; Students now partake in those activities not out of genuine interest, but in an extraneous bid to construct a Potemkin village of themselves to entice future employers.
The business world is unsurprisingly satisfied with this, since it renders the tasks of recruitment and induction in the firm much easier; the average Human Resources manager can use this metric to segregate candidates based on the value of their competency portfolios and take advantage of young hires, who skipped learning to cultivate the mind and headed straight to mastering Excel spreadsheets and churning out PowerPoint slides. The government is likewise complicit in this: functionaries deprive educators of their last remaining influence by pressuring them into giving higher marks to more people. Between 2011 and 2019, the number of first-class degrees awarded to students has skyrocketed by 80% and caused substantial grade inflation. At secondary level, this phenomenon could serve to explain the enormous disparity between pupil expectations and their eventual grades.
No wonder that young people, both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, are turning to freelance work as their default mode of employment, reflective of declining attention spans and capacity for long-term planning. This forestalls them from embarking on longer projects and planning ahead what they might read and learn to answer their intellectual demands. As soon as some new work assignment or a new job opportunity crops up, these plans are readily side-lined in favour of anything that could improve one’s market value, whether it be skills or work experience.
Worse still, this trend could further undermine the social standing of the teaching profession in society, for bright young minds would be scared away from a profession, where they cannot exert leverage on students and where much of what they will be consigned to oblivion by their pupils. Surely, the teaching profession- already suffering from subpar wages and work intensification – might not survive yet another blow.
Solutions
Having elucidated both the problem’s symptoms and causes, it behoves us to provide an outline for how modern education ought to be modified to accommodate the need to cultivate the mind. Structural reform will certainly not be a walk in the park. Many more scholarly articles would have to be written to sharpen and make more concrete any relevant proposals.
However, some measures already deserve to be absorbed into the government’s agenda. Firstly, we implore the state to mandate reading lessons in schools. Scientists have proven that literacy influences an individual’s cognitive ability and demonstrates a strong positive correlation with better cognition; whence we propose to retain reading books in schools, especially considering that reading not only expands vocabulary, but may also teach readers good behaviour by casting light on what good behaviour means in certain situations and illustrating with characters. Digital learning does not suffice as an alternative, having been linked to shorter attention spans and wider problems with long-term planning.
Secondly, we stress the significance of unidirectional education. In other words, education and socialisation must fulfil a single purpose and reinforce one another. Fortunately, the government has realised this too. Its mention of parent-teacher cooperation at the national education summit is a promising step in the right direction, but more needs to be done to revivify the traditional notion that teachers are mentors, rather than service providers. For parents and teachers to instil discipline and virtue in our youths, they must enjoy equal recognition as figures of authority and unite to train students to serve humanity, as opposed to transforming them into qualified personnel for sale.
This requires teachers to play a more substantial role in student upbringing by discussing what they read, watch, and encounter in their daily lives, and have the hierarchy at school shored up by parents at home. In turn, by having their voices heard, students will be stimulated to read and learn independently, such that they could contribute more to adult discussions and impress authority figures, whereas authority per se would discipline them and cement their commitment to behave in an orderly and productive manner.
Conclusion
In sum, one of Britain’s foremost brands and selling points- our cherished system of education- has quietly been hijacked by the neoliberal misconception that people amount to little more than assets, whose value is contingent on how much one invests and which are constantly traded in the labour market. In this article, multiple symptoms point to this malaise: declining cognitive abilities, growing university dropout rates, and widespread indifference. In effect, it seems that we forgot the very environment that birthed the prosperous Britain of today by teaching future entrepreneurs and inventors to think critically and creatively, visualise their material and abstract concepts, and convey all their nuance in writing and speech. By forgetting this, we risk being hoist by our own petard.
At last, Britain is waking up to this. Correspondingly, we call upon the government to undertake more audacious and comprehensive action. As a starting point for it, the state should restore the longstanding tradition of reading books in class and the school libraries, and partner schools with parents to ensure that education and domestic upbringing do not contradict one another. Education must supplement professional learning with initiatives to cultivate the mature mind and broaden one’s capability to pursue truth, and if the extant competency-based approach cannot deliver them, we cannot afford to entrust our lives and the lives of children to it.
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