Scaling

Today, at work, I’ve been charged to read about and think about New Zealand education and keep “fresh eyes” to notice differences between what I see here and what I see in the US. That’s not hard. I’m starting with reading the draft of the New Zealand national curriculum. I’m really impressed with it, am trying to track the qualitative differences between what I see here and what I experience in state-wide curricula in the US. There are some pieces of what they do in NZ that I think are obviously what we should do in the US. For example, here one of their core principles is that: “All students experience a curriculum that reflects New Zealand’s bicultural heritage and its multicultural society.” Why don’t we do that in the US? Why don’t we think of ourselves as a bicultural, biracial country with a multicultural population? Our history is so affected by the black/white issue, and our present is so affected by the incredible diversity of the country (especially around the borders). Yet we're afraid to address these issues head-on in schools, and so we inch our way around, perhaps believing that if we don't talk about it, maybe the issues will go away. It hasn't worked for the last 250 years, but hey, there's always the chance things will change.

The NZ curriculum is also much more values centred, and the values are not always the same ones that I’d expect to see in an overall description of a national or state wide curriculum. You expect "responsibility" and "integrity" and those are there, but there are others that seem unexpected. For example, “curiosity” is a core value as is “care for the environment.” This feels quite different from the values I've seen in equivalent documents in the US.

So, to check these assumptions, I started to play with the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) curriculum, which is the one I know best. There the difference started to pop out even more. The SOLs are much more tactical, much more connected to specific hard goals. There’s talk about being best in the country, best in the world. None of that “best” talk exists here in NZ; although they aim for “excellence”, it’s not a comparative excellence, not excellence versus someone else’s excellence. That’s interesting too. The arts focus here is about stimulating “creative action and response” and “celebrat[ing] artistic and aesthetic expressions of self, community, culture, and our unique environment”. In the SOLs, where the arts are included (with a small self-congratulatory passage about how forward thinking it is to think of the arts as a part of the curriculum), they’re about enhancing critical thinking and getting to be smarter, better, etc. Creativity is mentioned in passing. Enjoyment is absent.

Each of the SOL goals is future-focused in an achievement kind of way. They’re about getting students to be at the top of their game, to be competitive, to be successful. The NZ goals seem qualitatively different. The “vision” is to have young people who will be: “confident, connected, lifelong learners, and actively involved”. Those are almost quality of life issues—as though the schools here are about raising happy people and not just successful workers. Interesting.

But then I worried about comparing apples to oranges, a national curriculum to a state curriculum. Maybe at the state level you have to be more tactical, more comparative, because of the smaller scale. So I poked around with scale issues. The medium state of Virginia has about 1.5 million children in its schools. New Zealand has 760,000 children. Massachusetts has almost a million students. California has 6.3 million students. That means that California has more than 2 million more students in its schools than New Zealand has people of any age living here. That’s astonishing.

I think I’m just beginning to understand these issues of scale, just beginning to get a sense of even what scale means at this level. I look out my office window at a busy, bustling city. The tall buildings (as tall as the buildings in DC, certainly), poke up from this central district, and houses climb the hills around me until the land falls away to the harbour. The city sidewalks are packed with people with briefcases, young children holding hands as they venture out on a field trip, elegantly-dressed young women sipping coffee and flipping through fashion magazines. If the buildings were taller, it would look like New York City, only with more hills and better views (New Yorkish people in a Seattle-like setting). But the buildings aren’t taller, and the downtown is walkable in an hour or so, and from my window I can see where the buildings end and the single-family homes begin. All scaled down.

What becomes more possible at this scale? Is this kind of educational system that is about caring for people’s lives (rather than prepping for the harsh realities of a job force) possible here because of the scale? How about the lack of high stakes standardized testing? What becomes less possible here because of the scale?

Last difference to note today. The core curricular areas of the NZ national curriculum are arts, health and physical education, English, learning languages, mathematics and statistics, science, technology and the social sciences. Of all of these, health and physical education is the one I’m likely to be least attracted to from my background. Check out the “four interdependent concepts” which are “at the heart of this learning area” (here I'm quoting)

• Hauora—a Mäori philosophy of well-being that includes the dimensions of taha wairua, taha hinengaro, taha tinana, and taha whänau, each one influencing and supporting the others*
• Attitudes and values—a positive, responsible attitude on the part of the students to their own well-being; respect; care and concern for other people and the environment; and a sense of social justice.
• Socio-ecological perspective—a way of viewing and understanding interrelationships that exist between individuals, others and society.
• Health promotion—a process for developing and marinating supportive physical and emotional environments that involves students in personal and collective action.

* in this learning area…Haurora and well-being, though not synonyms, share much common ground. Taha wairua relates to spiritual well-being; tahah hinengaro to mental and emotional well-being; taha tinana to physical well-being, and taha whänau to social well-being.

(ok, not quoting anymore)
Here every aspect seems to be about raising well-rounded people, about raising thoughtful, respectful, healthy people. From the arts to physical education, from English to maths, the whole educational system seems to be about raising people to be happy contributing members of the society. We've got to find a way to make that scalable.