Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Reimagining Schooling” with Finnish education icon Prof. Pasi Sahlberg

Transcript

“Reimagining Schooling” with Finnish education icon Prof. Pasi Sahlberg · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans.
• 0:04
  Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:08
  What if we are educating children all wrong?
• 0:12
  President Trump has likely been floating the idea of abolishing the Department of Education
• 0:17
  in the United States, and indeed in the US and many countries, test scores are either
• 0:23
  stagnant or they're going backwards.
• 0:26
  These in particular are falling behind, there are more and more attention, deficit issues
• 0:30
  in the classroom.
• 0:32
  We seem to be testing a lot, and not necessarily going anywhere.
• 0:36
  Today's guest has a completely revolutionary idea about how we should be educating children.
• 0:40
  He's from Finland, which as you may know, is the world's best country when it comes to
• 0:45
  student test scores, and it largely got there by not testing children relentlessly and
• 0:51
  not focusing so narrowly on academic achievement.
• 0:54
  But by trying to think about what school is like from the perspective of the child.
• 1:00
  When you think about it, the way that we arrange schools in most of the Western world is
• 1:07
  inherited from a kind of industrial revolution era when everybody went to work in factories
• 1:12
  and we started funneling children, the ones who could afford it at least, into classrooms
• 1:16
  that looked and behaved and smelled a little bit like factories.
• 1:19
  Can we churn out these widgets called children to become productive workers for essentially
• 1:25
  an industrial economy?
• 1:27
  We now live in an information economy.
• 1:30
  We now live in a world that's a lot more complicated, where the careers that children are going
• 1:34
  to have are going to be a lot more uncertain and require a lot more nimbleness.
• 1:39
  Are we setting them up for success?
• 1:42
  Pazzi says no.
• 1:43
  He says we're educating children all wrong.
• 1:46
  He himself is an educator.
• 1:48
  He's a teacher.
• 1:49
  He's also an author.
• 1:50
  He ran Finland's Ministry of Education and Culture.
• 1:54
  He then went on to work for the World Bank as an advisor on education in Washington, DC.
• 2:01
  He moved to New England to become a visiting professor at Harvard University, a little
• 2:06
  educational institution that you may or may not have heard of.
• 2:10
  And his book entitled Finish Lessons.
• 2:14
  What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?
• 2:17
  The Gromire Award in the United States for an idea that has potential to change the
• 2:22
  world.
• 2:23
  I think it's time, while we're debating the utility or otherwise, the abolishing the
• 2:27
  Department of Education in the United States to step back and go, what is education for?
• 2:31
  How could we reform it if we were thinking in a truly blue sky way?
• 2:35
  Please enjoy as much as I did.
• 2:37
  The one the only Pazzi stopped it.
• 2:39
  How do you think you're a different father than you would be if you weren't an academic?
• 2:46
  I think probably the most important thing is that I really do understand first-hand how
• 2:51
  damaging it can be if the parents are like expecting too much from the kids.
• 2:57
  All the kids are very different and they grow up in different ways.
• 3:02
  And without my work and education, I'd be working with thousands and thousands of kids
• 3:06
  that I really understand that thing.
• 3:11
  I had quite high achieving parents and so I'm always torn between me and my spouse about
• 3:16
  how higher expectations ought to be.
• 3:19
  Do you mean if the report card comes home and they're not scoring well or do you mean
• 3:24
  in more?
• 3:25
  Yeah, especially when it comes to schooling today because when you went to school, I went
• 3:28
  to school.
• 3:29
  The world was very different.
• 3:30
  Well, you're a Massey Younger than I am, but still when you went to school, you could
• 3:34
  kind of go to school boy and that gave you good things in your life, but it's less
• 3:39
  and less so anymore, partly because the school has changed.
• 3:43
  Most schools are still expecting that, you know, doing the similar things that they did
• 3:47
  30 years or 50 years ago will give you a good place in the college and decree and then
• 3:51
  work, but as you know, it's not that anymore.
• 3:54
  And that's why for me, it's more important than my kids that they truly follow their
• 4:00
  passion.
• 4:01
  And they have one thing that they said that I do passion at the park, can be anything.
• 4:05
  What about things like sports, sports and so on and so on?
• 4:08
  It's the same thing.
• 4:09
  You don't hold high expectations for them.
• 4:10
  No.
• 4:11
  For me, it's more important that the kids say that, you know, I really love to do this.
• 4:15
  Right.
• 4:16
  Because I have a lot of parents here who kids tell me that I really don't like this
• 4:19
  footy or rowing on these things.
• 4:22
  That's just because my parents and what about the expectation that many parents have and
• 4:27
  I include myself in this, that if they say that they're going to do something, they
• 4:30
  should follow through for, you know, at least a semester or a term or something.
• 4:34
  They should give it a shot rather than giving up after three weeks because I think there's
• 4:39
  a good thing.
• 4:40
  That's where the parents are needed.
• 4:41
  I don't need it.
• 4:42
  It's kind of like I'm calling that.
• 4:43
  I feel the same way that sometimes learning, when you get, try to get into something, it
• 4:47
  takes time.
• 4:48
  Yeah.
• 4:49
  So how do you identify, I mean, one of the challenges for having young children is you
• 4:51
  don't know, of course, when they're born, what their passions are going to be.
• 4:55
  And some things, I mean, I play piano and I speak your second language.
• 4:59
  And beginning to do either of those things was a tremendous tedious chore because, you
• 5:05
  know, until you're good at something, you can't feel the vibe and the fun in it.
• 5:09
  Yeah.
• 5:10
  So how do you expose your kids to enough things for long enough that they can find where
• 5:14
  the passion is?
• 5:15
  Ah, that's a good, that's a good, good question, but it's not, it's not only that they have
• 5:20
  to do long enough things before they realize that this is not my thing or this is my passion.
• 5:25
  It's also being open to all kinds of things, you know, just doing things that you like to
• 5:31
  do can be a good thing.
• 5:32
  You never know.
• 5:33
  Right.
• 5:34
  That's the thing.
• 5:35
  That's what I've learned.
• 5:36
  I do less of these things that I used to do by saying that, you know, you have to do
• 5:40
  same things that everybody else, you have to be good in this and then you have more options.
• 5:45
  I don't believe in that anymore.
• 5:46
  I think it's much more that you grow up feeling that you do something that you really love
• 5:51
  to do.
• 5:52
  Something that gives you pleasure and satisfaction and answers to your questions.
• 5:57
  So, is that a virtue, obviously that's a virtue in and of itself because it creates
• 6:03
  a pleasure or pleasurable, full-filling life, but does it have other knock-on effects beyond
• 6:09
  its own utility?
• 6:12
  I think you know, these days we speak much more than we used to about how important
• 6:16
  well-being is, the kind of your sense of well-being of young people and happiness 30 years
• 6:21
  ago, you were really hippy if you say that, you know, happiness is the kind of a call
• 6:25
  of education.
• 6:26
  Now, it's a common thing.
• 6:27
  You know, happiness comes from real things that kids do that they feel like, I'm in charge,
• 6:34
  I have the kind of agency and you know, I can do my things and get the best out of that.
• 6:38
  And that's what gives you happiness and often well-being as well.
• 6:41
  And those other things that crawl at the same time as, you know, things crawl in your
• 6:47
  knowledge and mind and other things.
• 6:49
  Yeah, I mean, you say that we care more about happiness now than we did a generation
• 6:54
  ago and we certainly talk as if we do, but we are also much more cautious about giving
• 7:00
  kids the autonomy that they would need to flourish independently of ourselves.
• 7:05
  So, talking about parents or parents, yes, we spend a lot of time corralling our children
• 7:11
  into different experiences and not nearly as much time as when I was young, I've just
• 7:15
  kicking them outside and hoping that comes with a high cost.
• 7:20
  Yeah.
• 7:21
  And there's a colleague of mine in Boston actually called Peter Kray who has been researching
• 7:27
  his medical doctor and science, researching play and kids and you know, how they grow
• 7:32
  up for a long time.
• 7:33
  And they came up with a paper, a research paper a couple of years ago where they basically
• 7:38
  they argue and show that there's a causal connection between decreasing autonomy kind
• 7:44
  of what they call it.
• 7:45
  This child's independent mobility so that they can move around and call places without
• 7:49
  the adult or parents and the declining mental health of young people in general.
• 7:55
  So basically what they argue is that because since we are keeping in schools and at home
• 8:00
  kids more and more kind of a close to us, that this space where they can move freely
• 8:05
  and and go is kind of a shrinking or shrinking, that that's trying to get snuts.
• 8:10
  I remember seeing kids I was traveling in Africa a year or two ago and looking at how independent
• 8:17
  children who look like they're four years old are walking down the street where you
• 8:20
  know, doing work and being constructive and maybe you can go to Africa, you can go to
• 8:24
  Nordic country still.
• 8:25
  Yeah.
• 8:26
  Is it like that?
• 8:27
  Any Nordic country is the same thing that kids walk to school, yes, everywhere in Helsinki
• 8:30
  and Tumberin and Stockholm and as soon as you start schooling like 67 and you come home
• 8:38
  from school like this and you go to your training, football, whatever you do by yourself and
• 8:43
  you go to see dentist when you're nine by yourself and so it's like it's still a very
• 8:48
  different society.
• 8:49
  It's changing a little bit in some of the lots of cities because of the crime and violence
• 8:54
  but it's still like we assume that when you ate, you should be old enough to do the
• 9:00
  cross-risk for me in a post.
• 9:02
  Yeah.
• 9:03
  But here it's like unheard, like totally and when you say that it's changing because of
• 9:07
  crime and violence, is it changing because of the actual risk of crime and violence or
• 9:12
  because of the fear of crime and violence?
• 9:13
  No, it's just a matter of whether it's actually a...
• 9:15
  No, it's probably more about fear of something happening.
• 9:20
  The bit we have, adults are much more and more cautious, especially in schools like schools
• 9:24
  are crazy in this kind of overprotecting this kind of everything.
• 9:29
  There's a long list of things that you can't do and this is the last thing that kids
• 9:33
  want to hear when they go to school.
• 9:34
  They want to see the kind of things that we're kind of amazing things happening but yeah.
• 9:38
  But that's...
• 9:39
  And I agree with Peter Kray and they're finding this idea that you are never in charge,
• 9:48
  that you're never in kind of controlling your own things, that it can be harmful for
• 9:55
  kids and it is actually this is what the research is showing.
• 9:57
  I mean, quite apart from anything, just the physical geography of a school, it's now behind
• 10:03
  bars, schools in Australia at least are behind bars.
• 10:06
  My kid's school is the entire city block is high bars with locked gates.
• 10:11
  I mean, when I went to school, you wandered off the street into the school grounds and there
• 10:16
  was a sense of openness and a sense of connectedness to the...
• 10:19
  Yeah, in Melbourne here, we still have schools with that kind of a gates and fences and
• 10:25
  others, but Sydney, where we lived, every school, the somebody is one of the premieres
• 10:30
  sometime ago.
• 10:31
  Right.
• 10:32
  It's a slightly different thing, I guess.
• 10:35
  Yeah, but you know what they realized, and I spoke with Chris Mince about this just
• 10:39
  before the last election.
• 10:41
  He was the premier of New South Wales in the most populous state, yeah.
• 10:44
  Yeah, he's the least.
• 10:45
  Yeah, and so he said that when this fence is game around, the school used to be places
• 10:51
  where kids can go and play ball and play and hang around, they started to destroy the
• 10:56
  neighborhoods, paint and just simply break things, which is again the kind of a sign of the
• 11:03
  kids showing that there's not a right.
• 11:06
  And so I think it's a really important question these days, how much we adults could tolerate
• 11:13
  like a reasonable freedom or autonomy for kids, and I'm not talking about allowing them
• 11:18
  to call somewhere Friday night or Saturday night, but just like going about normal, sensible
• 11:23
  things in life behavior.
• 11:25
  And I lived in a number of cities around the world in the US and England and here, and
• 11:31
  I consider this as a safe, like a mellum and Sydney, a considerable kind of a safe place
• 11:38
  is in the middle of the day or afternoon, certainly, yeah, yeah, it's not like in some other
• 11:45
  lots of cities where I wouldn't do these things, but he is a different.
• 11:48
  I heard about a survey of parents, and this was in the United States, I won't remember
• 11:54
  these specifics exactly, but it was along the lines of they had done a survey back in
• 11:58
  the 1980s about how old would your child have to be for you to be comfortable parking
• 12:03
  your car and having them go out and go into a supermarket and purchase a small item by
• 12:08
  themselves and then come back and they're out of sight, right, so you can't see them.
• 12:12
  And in the 80s, it was something like seven years old or something, and now it was 15.
• 12:18
  It's like a total mindset shift.
• 12:20
  Do you know why?
• 12:22
  You know, the parents say, I've done a little bit research and I've written about these
• 12:27
  things in my books as well, and often parents say that it's simply this kind of a safety
• 12:34
  that we are concerned that something might happen, but why they can turn now and they
• 12:37
  won't 30 years ago.
• 12:39
  You know, this is one thing that I see Australia is doing very differently than probably even
• 12:45
  like the United States or some of the other countries that you open your TV in the prime
• 12:49
  time evening, whatever channel it is, most news you hear about all these horrible things
• 12:54
  that happen to one individual somewhere.
• 12:57
  And you know, you see this every day in and out as a parent, you have these little kids
• 13:01
  growing there.
• 13:02
  The most likely you say that, you know, I never want to have this to happen to my kids
• 13:05
  and let us just begin to protect.
• 13:08
  So I think the media is one thing, social media certainly is one thing.
• 13:11
  My wife is very active in the kind of a neighborhood neighborhood happenings where the in a Facebook
• 13:18
  or those platforms, parents share about things.
• 13:22
  And you know, her world about the safety is completely different than mine because I don't
• 13:25
  do that.
• 13:26
  Right.
• 13:27
  Like she hears everything that something happens, somebody you know, breaking to your
• 13:30
  garage or stall your bike, it's all there.
• 13:34
  And it's every day like all the time.
• 13:36
  Yeah, yeah.
• 13:37
  But since I don't know about those things and I don't see it, it's an availability bias,
• 13:42
  isn't it?
• 13:43
  Psychologists say your brain just goes to the things that are most commonly, you know,
• 13:46
  and I try to tell her that to stop doing that because it's really poisoning, you know,
• 13:52
  your mind and thinking about what this around, if you know everything that happens around
• 13:56
  you, you've got crazy.
• 13:57
  Yeah.
• 13:58
  And it's not even happening around.
• 13:59
  I mean, you know, I use this metaphor, we lead one year in another New South Wales, just
• 14:04
  the Queensland portal with a full of snakes and spiders and all this deadliest animals
• 14:08
  in the world.
• 14:09
  And as you know, if you knew what's around you, if you're sleeping there, you're walking
• 14:14
  it up, you know, what's around, you wouldn't go there.
• 14:16
  Yes.
• 14:17
  But since you don't know, you're just going to mention what's around.
• 14:19
  That's right.
• 14:20
  And it's fine.
• 14:21
  Not.
• 14:22
  Yeah.
• 14:23
  And it's the same thing that you don't need to know all these things.
• 14:24
  It can be safe.
• 14:25
  You should make it safe.
• 14:26
  Because these guys who've got this shark drone, which they fly over Sydney's beaches and
• 14:31
  they start to, they take photo photos and videos and they're trying to help people understand
• 14:35
  where the sharks are.
• 14:37
  But the problem is now that everybody can see how close great whites are to surfers on
• 14:41
  Sydney's beaches, it's freaking everybody out.
• 14:44
  But for me, well, nothing's changed.
• 14:47
  They were always there, right?
• 14:49
  You know, the rate of, yeah, the rate of shark attacks is going to remain unchanged, whether
• 14:53
  there's a drone showing us footage of a scary shark nearby or not.
• 14:56
  Obviously, the sharks, you know, are doing, are interested in other things if they're
• 15:00
  not constantly eating us, they touch wood.
• 15:03
  Yeah.
• 15:04
  So, answer to your questions.
• 15:05
  I think it's about that we just know so much stuff that we wouldn't need to know
• 15:10
  around what's happening around us.
• 15:12
  Yeah, right.
• 15:13
  It's just making, you know, it's not blaming parents or adults about this, but it's
• 15:17
  kind of a natural reaction.
• 15:19
  I want to keep my kids safe.
• 15:21
  I want to keep my students safe and, you know, just lock them in so that nothing happens.
• 15:26
  And when it comes to schools and policies and politicians, there may be a phenomenon
• 15:32
  of the loudest voice in the room becoming being the most noticed.
• 15:35
  And so the most, I don't want to say hysterical parents, but the most, let's just say the
• 15:39
  most agitated or enthusiastic parents about safety may be the ones who have the ear of
• 15:46
  principles and legislators more than usual.
• 15:50
  Yeah.
• 15:51
  And it's also about the media and how media in different countries is treating education
• 15:57
  in general.
• 15:58
  And you know, better than I do here, and I experience the same thing in the United States
• 16:04
  that, you know, if the school, if something happens to the school, it's a, it's a first
• 16:08
  kind of a thing in a, in a newspaper or media and principles and teachers just simply
• 16:15
  don't want to do that.
• 16:16
  So that's why they're kind of a perfect thing of, you know, putting all these things.
• 16:19
  Yeah.
• 16:20
  And we're working into one, I visited one school in the, in the US a few years ago.
• 16:24
  And I was sitting there in the principal's office and he has this beautiful telephone
• 16:29
  with all this speed dial thing saying, I said, what's the, what's the number one day in
• 16:34
  the speed dial thing?
• 16:35
  It's my lawyer.
• 16:36
  Oh, I said, why is that?
• 16:39
  When something happens here, here's the one, first one I call, like what should I do?
• 16:43
  Wow.
• 16:44
  So that's a, yeah, that's a kind of a level of, like, how concerned, and I fully understand
• 16:49
  the school principles and teachers' lives that they live in, in schools around the world
• 16:52
  now that, that that's, that's what it is these days.
• 16:55
  And that's why, you know, you know, you, you want to make sure that their rules and gets
• 16:59
  a kept in a classroom and it's always somebody watching all of them.
• 17:03
  I've heard you say that in Finland, there is much more time for play and that little things
• 17:09
  are taught certainly to younger students through play.
• 17:13
  When you help me understand what that means, because I don't understand, I'm so indoctrinated
• 17:17
  by the Anglo way of teaching kids that I can't imagine how you would teach them to count
• 17:23
  or read through play.
• 17:25
  No, it's, it's not about teaching, you know, the, the different things is that you try
• 17:30
  to teach kids something through play and that's what we hear in Australia and many other
• 17:37
  countries we often think that that's the, that's a kind of a miracle in Finland that
• 17:40
  they kids, they just hang around in the sand books and they don't, they magically learn
• 17:45
  to read.
• 17:46
  It's not that, because learning through play is one thing and that's a, that's a kind of
• 17:49
  a fine and quite complicated bit.
• 17:51
  I got you that technique that you plan into your, when you teach like complicated things
• 17:56
  like reading or spelling or mathematics or those things, very few teachers actually
• 18:00
  can do that well.
• 18:03
  But then the other thing is just a, let children play for free when they're in school and
• 18:07
  that's what naughty countries are doing.
• 18:10
  And the point is that we are not trying to teach them anything.
• 18:13
  No, I understand.
• 18:14
  But just to, just to pause for a moment on the pedagogic possibility of play and we'll
• 18:18
  get to the, you know, the sort of utility of play as something that fosters growing up
• 18:23
  and even in the absence of, of learning.
• 18:26
  But what would it look like if the world's greatest teacher of teacher through play was
• 18:32
  teaching children through play?
• 18:35
  Again, it depends on what kind of a level stage or how all the kids are because it can
• 18:41
  be.
• 18:42
  Obviously play looks very different if you look at the high school kids or primary.
• 18:46
  But, you know, in a primary school, it would really look like something that you create
• 18:50
  a context for learning through play, like you can create a kind of idea of kids imagining
• 18:57
  something that they are doing something that they are not doing like outside of the classroom.
• 19:02
  And then they need to, they will do something that requires the need to read, for example,
• 19:09
  understand the words or be able to make the sentences.
• 19:12
  And then you, you kind of teach while you, while you go through this kind of, so we might
• 19:17
  have an imaginative pirate ship battle, but you need to identify the pirate ships by
• 19:22
  the words or something like that.
• 19:23
  Yeah.
• 19:24
  And that's the, you know, that's a big question in this global reading was that we have
• 19:29
  still here in Australia and England and the United States is that what is the best way
• 19:33
  to teach kids to read that they're those who say that most children have a kind of a natural
• 19:40
  way of learning to read.
• 19:41
  If they realize that they need to, I need to, you know, understand what this sentence
• 19:45
  says.
• 19:46
  And that kind of a trick is a need to learn to read, you know, go this words and do it.
• 19:51
  Then they'll also say that it doesn't happen that way that you have to like systematically
• 19:56
  teach children the process of coding and decoding words and do these, these things.
• 20:01
  I think the unfortunate thing here is that there's no one single truth in that that both
• 20:07
  of those things would benefit the kids if they were doing, if they were done like a, like
• 20:12
  a masterful experienced educator and better cock, but that's the, you know, learning through
• 20:18
  plague and manifest itself in so many different ways that it's difficult to say exactly what
• 20:25
  it would look like.
• 20:26
  No, you've given me a rough snapshot.
• 20:28
  But, Joseph, I think that the other important thing that we still around the world, I would
• 20:32
  argue, don't quite accept and understand is this importance of free unstructured outdoor
• 20:39
  play for kids in a school when they're in school.
• 20:42
  And that has, most people here in Australia think that that's a waste of time.
• 20:46
  I've been doing this work since I came here six years ago and I still have to answer
• 20:51
  these questions that how do you make up the time, you know, if the kids are playing an
• 20:55
  hour during the school day, it's just freely outdoors.
• 20:58
  How do you make that make up that hour afterwards so that they don't get left behind?
• 21:04
  And you know, the Nordic lessons from all the Nordic countries is that these 15 minutes
• 21:08
  in every hour that we have in Finland, when the kids can do their own things outdoors
• 21:12
  and play or actively move or do whatever they want to do, will be paying back during the
• 21:18
  course when they are learning.
• 21:19
  That is actually the learning process when you try to make sense of a kind of a mathematics
• 21:25
  that you don't quite understand and you can climb the tree or do the monkey bars or play
• 21:29
  with somebody else and then you realize that's the way it goes.
• 21:33
  But we still don't, we still don't, people don't see that enough as an essential part
• 21:39
  of learning.
• 21:40
  As we adults, like when we learn something, you try to study something for two hours and
• 21:45
  then you realize, you're bloody, how you know, understand this and then you have a walk
• 21:49
  or, you know, have a cup of coffee or do something else and then everything comes kind
• 21:54
  of a place.
• 21:55
  And that's exactly the similar process that kids need to have and we have taken that away
• 22:00
  from them systematically in most of the education systems during the last 25 years.
• 22:07
  It sounds almost like sleep.
• 22:09
  Absolutely.
• 22:10
  Yeah.
• 22:11
  And kids sleep less and less these days as well.
• 22:12
  So they don't even have that benefit anymore that they would have a good high quality sleep
• 22:17
  enough to make sense of these things, that they sleep less and eat worse food and you
• 22:21
  know, all these things that you used to make you and me like a relatively healthy and good
• 22:27
  learners and people, these your kids and mine have less and less these days.
• 22:32
  And that's why the, you know, how we think about education and how education could compensate
• 22:38
  some of those things is so important conversation.
• 22:41
  Just to clarify, in Finland, you'll learn for 45 minutes if you're in primary school and
• 22:46
  then you'll have 15 minutes of what's just going outside and running around or I suppose
• 22:50
  it depends on the season if you're in Finland, but no, it doesn't really you're outside
• 22:53
  and there's still the rule, when I would just call this a rule that's, you know, if the
• 22:57
  temperature drops below minus 18 centigrade, I don't know what is in foreign, I think it's
• 23:03
  about the same.
• 23:05
  I think that's about where it crosses over Fahrenheit and Celsius, yeah, I can tell you
• 23:09
  it's mighty cold, it's about as cold as you open your freezer in a hole and you consider
• 23:14
  being there for 15 minutes, but it's more than that, you know, because I think, again, you
• 23:19
  know, this is part of this conversation that we need to have here and in the United States
• 23:25
  is that, you know, I often ask, what rights do kids experience that they have in their
• 23:32
  lives or in the school, like a human rights?
• 23:36
  I ask this question, but what do you think your rights are?
• 23:40
  And they don't, you know, most kids don't kind of understand the question that what do
• 23:43
  you mean?
• 23:44
  No, I'm a kid.
• 23:45
  I don't have any rights, but they actually children do have rights and play is one of
• 23:49
  the, the right that we have all signed into the international declaration of the right
• 23:54
  of the child.
• 23:55
  Every child has a right to healthy play every day and we adults that we have to protect
• 24:00
  that right.
• 24:01
  So that's why what all the newly countries are doing is that we take the, you know, the
• 24:06
  60 minute lesson that we hear, spend on instruction.
• 24:10
  So we try to teach these kids 60 minutes, some, some do it more kind of intensively, the
• 24:14
  others don't, others kind of plan some play and other things there.
• 24:18
  But we teach our kids when they, before they come to school, it's that you have a right
• 24:22
  to have 15 minutes of every hour for yourself.
• 24:26
  You can spend it as you like, you need to go outdoors, you can, you can play with other
• 24:30
  kids.
• 24:31
  If you want to, you can have a walk around the school by yourself, you can sit down or
• 24:34
  it's after you.
• 24:35
  Well, and, you know, when you grow up in this thing and I've been trying to explain this
• 24:39
  like over and over again, you know, in different places, like why that makes such a big difference
• 24:47
  that when you grow up into this type of idea, since that, you know, this is my right.
• 24:52
  I have a right to, you know, take care of myself that it pays off many fold when we are
• 24:58
  trying to teach these kids and say, you know, this is what we need to do.
• 25:00
  So, so it's a different, and you know, this goes back to this conversation again that
• 25:06
  we, we need to have more here and everywhere is that when we think about the purpose of
• 25:12
  education, is it more about, is it more about the right, human right for people to have
• 25:19
  a right to learn, or is it more of a duty?
• 25:23
  And during the last 25 years, we have seen this big shift from learning and education
• 25:29
  as a right to learning and education, lifelong learning, particularly as a duty.
• 25:37
  That is my, it's my like a thing that I have to do rather than it is a right that I have
• 25:42
  and I can exercise for myself.
• 25:44
  Very, very interesting.
• 25:45
  I mean, I feel like the, the dutification psychologically has extended not just to children
• 25:54
  and school, but throughout so much of our lives, like more than ever, I find culturally
• 25:59
  people are talking about, oh, so much to do.
• 26:02
  So busy.
• 26:03
  I mean, I once had a therapist say that you should really think about your, have to do
• 26:08
  as get to do's, like, oh, I have to go down to Melbourne, I'm going to be talking to
• 26:13
  Pazie, I have to do two podcasts today, then I have to fly back to Sydney.
• 26:17
  No, I get to do this, I get to talk to you, I get to talk to another interesting person,
• 26:22
  I get to go on a plane, I get to come home and hug my kids, like, I'm not down a mine.
• 26:26
  It makes a big difference.
• 26:28
  Yeah.
• 26:29
  So I wonder is it, I wonder what direction the, this thing is going?
• 26:33
  I mean, is it coming from a broader culture into our thinking about education rather than
• 26:38
  the other way around?
• 26:40
  Why we, why we see this, why we see the, yeah, why we see school as being a duty, a
• 26:44
  set of duties.
• 26:45
  Right.
• 26:46
  It's been a big agenda in some of the key international organizations, like the OECD,
• 26:53
  that is the organization for economic cooperation and development for the wealth rich countries,
• 26:57
  yeah, club of rich countries.
• 26:59
  Yeah.
• 27:00
  And so, because they see education as a building human capital for the economy initially,
• 27:05
  OECD has done a lot of good things in education and C's education also brought in that.
• 27:12
  But when it comes to, when it comes to this purpose, like what is the purpose of schooling,
• 27:17
  it's often these international organizations except the UN, the UNESCO, for example, the
• 27:22
  United Nations educational organization that they see education as a kind of a means
• 27:29
  to promote to economic prosperity and how this translates in the national level, like
• 27:37
  here in Australia, for example, that education is seen as a, that is everybody's duty to
• 27:42
  contribute to the economy and well-being and it's an investment.
• 27:46
  Yeah.
• 27:47
  And, and I mentioned the UN, the UNESCO, the United Nations educational, scientific and cultural
• 27:54
  organization that has been doing the same work about this purpose, like what is education
• 28:00
  for, and they see education in a very different way.
• 28:03
  They see education as a right, it's a right, it's just like you explain that what difference
• 28:09
  it can do when young people would engage in education as a right rather than that this
• 28:14
  is what I have to do for something that I don't quite realize, sometimes even not agree
• 28:19
  with that I have to be part of contributing to wealth or somebody else rather than seeing
• 28:25
  education as a right to develop myself as a best person of myself.
• 28:29
  And I suppose a building block to that is another thing that you talk about, which is
• 28:33
  that the, that school really should be the most fun place for a child to be.
• 28:38
  It shouldn't feel like a place that is full of duty and obligation.
• 28:41
  Yeah, and that's a, that's another kind of a shift that we have seen.
• 28:45
  Like, you know, when I went to school, it was almost a crime to say that school is a fun,
• 28:50
  nobody asked me whether school is fun because I can't be fun.
• 28:53
  You have to suffer and sweat and you know, push yourself through.
• 28:57
  And now we see education, even at the level of the policies and, you know, the minister's
• 29:02
  system leaders saying that, you know, these kids need to be happy in the school.
• 29:07
  They need to experience this kind of fun, positive things.
• 29:11
  And it's, I think, partly because of this overall declining mental health and, and health
• 29:16
  overall around the world, the kids, and you, and you think that's wise to, to emphasize,
• 29:22
  emphasize fun.
• 29:25
  Not only that is wise.
• 29:26
  I think it's wise, but it's also necessary to do because otherwise, we're going to continue
• 29:30
  seeing this kind of exodus of kids that we have seen everywhere after the pandemic away
• 29:36
  from formal school systems and being homeschooled, or going to alternative places.
• 29:42
  That's a massive, but is that because the kids don't aren't having fun or is that because
• 29:46
  the parents object to a certain rigidity or moral looseness or whatever it might be in
• 29:53
  the curriculum?
• 29:54
  No, I think because we are mostly looking at the older kids when they already have probably
• 29:59
  enough agency to decide what they do.
• 30:03
  Like in the mid teens or 15 or late teens, the kids just basically don't go to school
• 30:09
  because they don't have fun anymore.
• 30:11
  And fun, I think we need to redefine fun, it's not fun like you're kind of entertaining
• 30:15
  yourself.
• 30:16
  But it's like, it's like you get the positive emotional experience being in a school.
• 30:21
  You know, many young people, they, they said a fun thing is to do something when you can
• 30:26
  do something, you're kind of a close to your, like what's certain, Robinson called
• 30:31
  the element that you kind of have realized that you're doing something when you're in
• 30:35
  a flow, and that's a fun thing to do.
• 30:38
  But you can work hard, you can really put everything on yourself, but it's a fun thing
• 30:43
  to do because it's rewards itself.
• 30:46
  And this is what we experience around the world in schools now, that they're more and
• 30:51
  more young people who don't feel that they think that school is outdated and I have
• 30:57
  to do things that doesn't make any sense to me.
• 31:00
  And you know, the AI is now something that my kids and many others are just living and
• 31:04
  you know, doing things with the artificial intelligence.
• 31:07
  And many of the schools are still kind of trying to figure out that how should we use
• 31:12
  AI?
• 31:13
  And I think this whole word of whole thinking of using AI is something is wrong because
• 31:18
  it's more about working with, working with a smart machine.
• 31:24
  And that's the, but then I also do think that the schools are making a major mistake
• 31:31
  everywhere, trying to maintain, keep there, I call it the crammer of schooling unchanged.
• 31:39
  And then grammar of schooling.
• 31:40
  Yeah, like this, all this purpose, what happens there, who is the power and those things.
• 31:44
  And then just try to see that how do we, how do we embed this new thing called AI into
• 31:49
  what we already do.
• 31:50
  And the thinking should be that we have to, we have to put most of these things that we
• 31:54
  have believed in as a function of the school aside and start to think about how this AI,
• 32:00
  how the machine will change many of these things that we do in the school.
• 32:03
  And that is a big conversation, nobody really knows exactly what's going to happen because
• 32:08
  we simply don't know what's, what's happening next in this, in this artificial,
• 32:14
  intelligent virtual reality space.
• 32:17
  But we do know that it's going to change everything we do in school.
• 32:20
  It is interesting, isn't it?
• 32:21
  My partner is going back to university and doing a masters at the moment.
• 32:24
  And so he was sort of looking at the various policies that the universities have brought in
• 32:31
  surrounding AI.
• 32:33
  And it did strike me that AI is going to make it impossible to test children on
• 32:41
  wrote learning, essentially.
• 32:43
  They're not going to be able to take home anything that could require not just wrote,
• 32:48
  but even sort of simple or basic or uncreative tasks, which may be an opportunity to completely
• 32:56
  rethink the existence of wrote teaching or wrote instruction and find ways of incorporating AI
• 33:04
  in experiences that are more stimulating and more playful and more joyful and more creative.
• 33:10
  So that students want to engage with the AI and it's still giving them something stimulating.
• 33:15
  I can't imagine yet what that is, but do you need to, like, is this going to be a revolution
• 33:21
  as big as the sort of industrial revolution era in position of schools as places where people
• 33:27
  sit at in desks and look at a teacher and wrote learn things if we can no longer.
• 33:31
  Yeah, no, I think eventually it's going to be bigger than that.
• 33:34
  It's going to change everything.
• 33:39
  You know, most of the universities here and everywhere that don't quite know how to handle this.
• 33:45
  There's one university in Australia at the moment.
• 33:48
  I think it's the University of Sydney that has openly kind of opened doors for students to.
• 33:54
  Yeah, that's where my spouse is and they have different.
• 33:56
  Yeah, there are some classes which are full AI.
• 34:00
  Like, do you're allowed to use it as long as you don't?
• 34:03
  Yeah, but don't pretend that you're not using it.
• 34:04
  Please don't use the word to use it because it's a word.
• 34:06
  Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's just a word, but it changed the way people see
• 34:12
  this thing. It's because, you know, what is in the AI?
• 34:16
  What is there is it's just kind of a product of the thousands of millions of people's thinking.
• 34:22
  So you actually collaborate with million people on your assignments and try to create something
• 34:27
  rather than use the machine.
• 34:29
  And as soon as people begin to think like this, it's really working with just like I work with you
• 34:34
  here. If I make anything out of this, I always I have to make a reference that, you know,
• 34:39
  how did you contribute to my thinking or writing or works?
• 34:43
  And it's the same with the AI that people need to kind of realize that it's not it's not
• 34:48
  it's not the tool that you use for like a like a cool or wet processing thing or some other things.
• 34:56
  It's a collaborator.
• 34:56
  It's a collaborator.
• 34:57
  Yeah, and then because then come with that comes the ethical questions as well that so how much this
• 35:03
  end work is actually my work and how much there is a contribution from somebody else.
• 35:08
  I regularly write papers for journals and books and other things with other people.
• 35:12
  And this is one of the key questions we when we've done something, we sit down and said,
• 35:16
  so how did we do this?
• 35:18
  What's your role and my role and how do we share this thing?
• 35:21
  And it's a same thing in the future with this smart learning machines.
• 35:26
  It's the same thing that we have to we have to teach people how to collaborate with this new thing.
• 35:32
  And how do you get the best how do you maximize your human capabilities that the
• 35:37
  machine still don't have?
• 35:39
  That's a very interesting switch.
• 35:41
  I like that that rhetorical shift into working with it because in many almost all creative
• 35:50
  pursuits in my previous job as a radio broadcaster, I have a team of producers.
• 35:56
  If I'm interviewing the prime minister, I'm not going to go in blind.
• 36:00
  They will provide me with a bit of background, some briefing.
• 36:04
  Here's something that I should be aware that he said the other day.
• 36:06
  Here are some suggested questions that you might want to ask him about such and such.
• 36:10
  But if I got chat GPT to do it, I would feel a little bit dirty in a way that I don't,
• 36:18
  if a team of five producers do it.
• 36:20
  But there's no reason for that once we stop thinking of it as being a cheating mechanism
• 36:24
  and start thinking of it as being a collaboration between him and things.
• 36:27
  Recognize the contribution of these who has helped you to get your things done.
• 36:34
  That's interesting right now as we speak that most of the universities are kind of
• 36:39
  struggling. How do they deal with these things with the students?
• 36:44
  One thing that is happening is that these traditional assignments that students are
• 36:50
  seem to do as part of their studies, writing a 3,000 word essay, these things are gone.
• 36:57
  Because nobody will sit there and write 3,000 years and try to figure out everybody's going
• 37:03
  to acknowledge some more than others. I was creating 45 students in the last term.
• 37:11
  I was creating their papers. Most of my students are native English speakers,
• 37:17
  so they have this kind of like I do a little bit like how to work on this language.
• 37:24
  But everyone has used something. And I said, that's okay, but you need to declare and explain
• 37:30
  how did you work with this something. But then there are these platforms where the students submit
• 37:38
  their works, they have already all these kind of identification tools there that do what
• 37:43
  proportion of this text is AI or copied from somewhere they internet. But at the same time,
• 37:50
  students have software that are able to turn you off. You can just see it BT to write your
• 37:55
  3,000 word essay on any topic and it does it in five seconds. Then you can run this your essay
• 38:02
  through another software that will AI that will turn it into a human-like thing with a kind of
• 38:09
  simple. So that the AI catchers can't catch it. Yeah, you can say that write it in a kind of a
• 38:13
  tiny Chinese accent. Wow. And it gets back to you's thing. And you do it multiple times,
• 38:21
  so there's no way that anybody that anyone would catch it. Yeah. But so we are in this kind of a game
• 38:28
  with the students and not only university, it's the same in schools that we kind of assume that
• 38:34
  you're going to do all these things yourself just, right? But we all both know that you're
• 38:39
  never going to do it anymore. Right. But how do you then if you're not with the 3,000 word essay is
• 38:45
  out the window and wrote learning and recitation or obviously out the window, what is the measurement?
• 38:54
  Well, I think we need to go back to where we started education in that sense. If somebody wants to
• 38:59
  do that, personally, I think that 3,000 word writing a 3,000 word essay is not something that many
• 39:07
  people will use in their lives. But most people need to do is to write a 600 word block or op-ed
• 39:13
  piece. Right. But isn't the argument for the 3,000 word essay that it's a good way of training
• 39:18
  people to think about the structure of a good argument? Yeah. You begin with the introduction,
• 39:23
  you flesh it out, you conclude it. In undergrad, and in high school, you know, you used to do those
• 39:27
  things. You learn those kind of a basic thing is how to do it. Oh, you're talking about in a
• 39:31
  university setting. Yeah, but university settings, I think it's more about, you know, what I would love
• 39:36
  to do if I had all the power to, you know, to sign the assessment policies for my students,
• 39:43
  I would spend the time that I now spend on marking reading these papers that I'm mostly
• 39:47
  written by machine. I would spend it on something like this. So you write me a 1,000 word thing
• 39:53
  doesn't matter how you do that. But then we're going to have half an hour and talk about it.
• 39:57
  So I read your piece and we have a conversation about that. Yeah, that I think could be the kind of
• 40:03
  a civil aligning of this AI thing. If the university is thinking that way in schools that we go back
• 40:09
  to, back to this kind of a deeply human way of trying to make common sense of things that we
• 40:16
  almost like as a critic sort of thing where there's a dialogue. Yeah, that's interesting.
• 40:22
  I do remember that when I was in high school, I was very good at writing those essays.
• 40:27
  And my English teacher decided that there really wasn't much point in my writing those essays
• 40:33
  anymore. But I also really liked broadcasting and I liked television and radio and movies.
• 40:38
  And so I asked her if she wouldn't mind if I made a short film about the book that we were
• 40:43
  supposed to write the essay about. And I submitted maybe like eight or nine of these things over
• 40:48
  the course of the year or two. And she allowed me to. And I went back to visit her a few years ago
• 40:53
  just to see the school and say hi to some of my old teachers. And I thanked her for doing that.
• 40:58
  It was such a great blessing. And she said, I wouldn't be able to do it today.
• 41:03
  They wouldn't let me. There's too much accountability. People would say, what are you doing
• 41:08
  allowing this kid to make a, you know, why isn't he just writing more essays that he's great at?
• 41:13
  Yeah. That's that's that's that's what it is this. Yeah. How did that happen?
• 41:21
  No, I think it's just this kind of an industrial way of seeing education as a production
• 41:29
  and, you know, standardizing things and standardize assessments in many places.
• 41:34
  The final exams that used to be there, but in a different different way that I think that
• 41:39
  that just has driven, driven many schools, certainly here in Australia to work much more
• 41:46
  in the kind of a culture of compliance that you need to tick the box and say that, you know,
• 41:51
  I've done these things rather than use your own mind and sense with individual students,
• 41:56
  like, you know, just doesn't need to do this anymore. I'll give you credit to do instead.
• 42:01
  I mean, do we need a standard, there is a, there is a logical appeal to standardizing things so
• 42:07
  that you understand where you are and whether you're going forward or backwards. I mean,
• 42:10
  probably the first time I was ever aware of education policy was when I first went to the,
• 42:15
  to the US for any prolonged period of time and it was George W. Bush's presidency and he was
• 42:21
  introducing no child left behind, right? It was this great standardization of, I suppose,
• 42:25
  American testing. A complex failure. Total failure. But, you know, make sure that everybody is
• 42:32
  hitting these metrics and we're going to be rigorous and so we'll be, we'll put on the hats
• 42:37
  of sort of engineers and we're going to like, I don't know, Elon Musk our way out of this.
• 42:42
  What's wrong with that? I think there's nothing wrong in this idea as you describe it. Just,
• 42:48
  but I think in education, most of this, this great idea is like here that we can talk about
• 42:53
  these things. When you start, when you ask this question, how do we implement that? What,
• 42:56
  what would it look like in practice? Like what the no child left behind came with was this massive
• 43:02
  standardized testing assessment thing, not just in the federal level in the US, but also in a state
• 43:07
  level that gets where tested all the time, often using not so high quality assessments and there's
• 43:14
  nothing worse in education that you're testing. Having a high stake testing, that is low quality
• 43:22
  on important things that kids should learn and then everything goes wrong. That gets where
• 43:28
  and still are taught to take the test and if there's a low quality test, they learn a kind of a low
• 43:33
  app and a low level intellectual skills just to manage and handle the test taking situation
• 43:40
  and the learning of these beautiful things that you describe doesn't happen. So it's often I think
• 43:46
  there's a big gap between having a good idea. Like when the no child left behind started,
• 43:52
  one of the few kind of a bipartisan laws in the United States education where everybody was,
• 43:58
  I think there's one senator who was against everybody else, it is great. But it starts with the
• 44:02
  sense, like, do you want to, are you against this idea that we should let no child leave children behind?
• 44:10
  Yeah, somebody said, yeah, I think it's okay. Those people know, not there. But then when you start
• 44:16
  to break it down, like, what would it look like? And in the end, like, what does it look like?
• 44:22
  What does it mean for schools? And then in most cases, most of these types of ideas and reforms
• 44:26
  and laws, they turn into something very different. And that's exactly what happened in the US.
• 44:32
  So just the United States needed a Department of Education at a federal level?
• 44:35
  Do they need? Yeah. Well, I mean, I can imagine someone who's taking this very sort of
• 44:43
  Nordic idea and being like, if we're going to, if we're not going to have a standardized bureaucratic
• 44:47
  behemoth bossing everybody around, then why not devolve west to the states and allow local communities
• 44:52
  to do? You know, first of all, I think we need to say a few things about what's the role of the
• 44:56
  Department of Education in the United States? Because the education is funded over 90% of the total
• 45:05
  funding of school education in the US comes from states. Yeah. And they through constitution states,
• 45:10
  other ones that implement the education. So one might say that, you know, this eight, seven,
• 45:16
  eight or nine percent of funding to educate doesn't mean anything. So we can get rid of this thing.
• 45:20
  Yes. And this is important for Europeans to understand, because I think sometimes when they hear
• 45:24
  about, you know, Trump wants to abolish the Department of Education or something, they think that
• 45:27
  that means abolishing schools. Yeah. So schools are a state matter in Australia and in the United
• 45:32
  States. Yeah. So the US Department of Education doesn't run in schools. So schools are run by the
• 45:37
  states. But then the question that what, so what's the role of this, this remaining funding,
• 45:44
  what do they do? And you know, most of the work that the Department, the US and Washington does
• 45:49
  is to focus on those kids who would be otherwise left behind in the school system. So it's the,
• 45:58
  you know, funding the special education, special programs for kids who really need different,
• 46:03
  different things in schools. So that's mostly done by the departments funding that they,
• 46:09
  and that funding is then dispersed through the states for them to allocate. They go through
• 46:14
  different types of programs that are now under undergun in the US. They're kind of shutting down
• 46:19
  some of those programs that they, some people, they think that are not, not, not needed. But without
• 46:25
  the good question is what would happen without the department, even if the money would go to
• 46:30
  the states. I think that many of the states probably wouldn't spend the money on things that the
• 46:35
  federal government does it depends on who's who's in the leadership. But I think that in the end,
• 46:43
  this will be a massive question of equity or inequity in in the US education. When it comes to
• 46:50
  the role of the, if the, if the department will be a polished, it will make the work in kind of
• 46:57
  more equitable and fair education in the US much more hard. Some states will do it like
• 47:03
  big states like California and many of the other states in Minnesota and New York,
• 47:08
  New, whole New England, they, they probably will do that anyway. And some of the states are already
• 47:13
  in a situation where they would say that we don't really need that, that money we can run the
• 47:18
  system without the federal government. But this is, this is the, the most of the states,
• 47:22
  particularly south in the, in the US is the one that really needs the department and needs, needs,
• 47:28
  these programs and funding to make sure that each and every, every child will be, you know,
• 47:35
  going through the school and, well, it wasn't California in New York that voted for Donald Trump.
• 47:39
  So this house will get what they, what they voted for to some extent. Yeah. I mean,
• 47:44
  speaking of equity and inequity before we leave this topic of the American, the crazy American
• 47:49
  education system, I mean, I could not believe when I first moved there to learn that schools are
• 47:54
  funded from local taxes. I mean, if you needed to devise a better way to keep poor people poor
• 48:02
  and rich people rich, you would educate their children using the resources of that community
• 48:07
  instead of on a needs basis from a national or statewide pool. What impact does that have?
• 48:18
  To have the property based. Yeah. Like in my common sense world, my brain thinks that that must be
• 48:24
  catastrophic. In reality, it may not be. There might be other ways that they get around it.
• 48:30
  I don't know. How do other countries fund their schools?
• 48:32
  Well, there's no there's no one kind of a global way of funding schools that in some places like
• 48:40
  again, I know the Nordic country is very well because I was born and raised there that we have
• 48:46
  really strong local governance like in the United States. They have 14,000 different districts,
• 48:50
  but similar like a district level thing. But then the funding will come through the
• 48:56
  through the district taxes. And then they are responsible of making sure that it's an every
• 49:04
  school gets what they need. But in the US case where the school is the wealth of the school depends
• 49:11
  on the economy or the wealth of the parents who happen to live in the catchment area. And that's
• 49:17
  a different and when you say a district in the Finnish sense, is that a larger geographical area
• 49:22
  than a school catchment in the United States? Yeah, it depends on the in the Finnish system,
• 49:29
  it depends on the size of the what we call the municipalities. Right. And the municipalities
• 49:34
  like Helsinki, for example, Tampere, the big cities, they are broken down into kind of a
• 49:39
  catchment area. But that's still quite small. That's still quite a localized funding stream for
• 49:43
  local schools. Yeah, but they're the school funding doesn't depend on who happens to live in
• 49:48
  this catchment area. Oh, I see. So if you have Helsinki, for example, it has 600,000 people
• 49:53
  and 300 schools, 350 schools in there. So they have the education budget and they fund their schools
• 50:00
  regardless of where the schools are. But then every school has or clusters of schools, they have
• 50:05
  a kind of a catchment area where the kids come from. But it doesn't it doesn't matter what type of
• 50:10
  families are feeding in these kids into that school because the funding is the same,
• 50:15
  follows the kind of a same structure than the city of Helsinki. But is the funding derived from
• 50:20
  local taxes or from national taxes? It's, you know, the wealthy municipalities of districts in Finland,
• 50:28
  they basically fund 100% of their own schooling. What the state government is doing is they kind
• 50:36
  of compensate those municipalities of districts who are not able to do that. That's interesting.
• 50:42
  So that's a kind of a level is actually a little bit like the federal government or department
• 50:46
  of education in the US, making sure that this equity and fairness will happen regardless of whether
• 50:52
  kids call the school. But in the US, because as you said, the funding of this school here depends on
• 50:59
  the wealth of the housing and the families there. And you can still be in the same county or
• 51:07
  same district than other schools, but it just happened to have like a rich families. Yeah,
• 51:13
  so that makes this equity work really hard and difficult. I mean, every time I think about education
• 51:20
  and what we can learn from different countries, I feel like we're caught conversationally and
• 51:28
  psychologically between these perfect aspirational, very different cultural ideals that exist in places
• 51:36
  like Finland where Americans might look at Finland and go, yeah, I get it. We should pay
• 51:42
  teachers enormously more. Teachers should have more status. You know, teaching should be the
• 51:47
  profession that students all want to do when they leave school. Yeah, sure. Okay, we should all be
• 51:53
  finished. You know what? We're not. We're not culturally. I don't know how to make those changes.
• 52:00
  These are pie in the sky things. So what can we do at a very nuts and bolts level to improve how
• 52:07
  children are educated in the real existing United States instead of the United States that we might
• 52:12
  want it to be? You know, this is one of those uncomfortable conversations about during the last
• 52:17
  20 years since I lived in the US and then back in Finland so many times. And you know, my response
• 52:25
  in the beginning, I tried to kind of defend my position as a fin and say that, you know, come to
• 52:31
  Finland. I'll show you what it is and so that you can really understand that it's not just about
• 52:35
  education. It's about the whole culture and the society and that's sometimes it helps, but most
• 52:40
  of the time it doesn't because people call back to their rabbit holes exactly as you say that, but
• 52:44
  you know, we are not fins. We are America and we are very different. But then I started to
• 52:48
  realize that I can tell people that, you know, if you don't, if you really don't like Finland and
• 52:54
  the whole idea of becoming something like Finland or Denmark or Sweden doesn't kind of excite you
• 53:02
  at all, go to Canada. Because you know, the Canadian way is a very similar to what it is in
• 53:09
  the Nordic countries of Finland. Some of the some of the provinces like Alberta, for example,
• 53:14
  British Columbia in Canada have very kind of a similar priority. It is exactly those that you
• 53:19
  mentioned, you know, care about the teachers, you know, give them autonomy, you know, focus on the
• 53:24
  kind of a whole child, holistic education, rather than standardized things, very similar to what
• 53:29
  they are in Finland. And then, you know, this changed the whole conversation because people,
• 53:33
  you know, Americans, everybody knows Canada and now they want to have the 51st state over there.
• 53:39
  But just go there and see how different just across the border, different the thinking and the
• 53:44
  culture of school can be and the way what is what is the role of education in society. And many,
• 53:49
  you know, many people have done that and they come back home and they realize that, you know,
• 53:53
  there's a different way of doing it. Even if the kind of a culture is pretty similar, you know,
• 53:59
  they they drink the same bourbon and what's the same TV shows and try the same cars.
• 54:06
  But you can do things in a different way. So I think it's good that you raised this point about
• 54:14
  you know, finding finding yourself different from Finland or Singapore or Shanghai or
• 54:18
  when it comes to education. But, you know, there are those very very much more like you are.
• 54:24
  If you if I speak as a American, they are doing things in a different way. Just have to find
• 54:29
  how people think differently about these things. But the thinking differently is precisely the
• 54:34
  challenge, right? And so does the thinking differently in Alberta arise organically from the
• 54:40
  culture? Or is it a rise as a result of some specific policy changes or, you know, provincial
• 54:47
  conversations that are initiated by a governor? Yeah, I think it's probably a acute combination of
• 54:53
  both of those things. Now, I must say that today what the Alberta is doing is not what it used to do
• 54:57
  when it comes to education. But the last, you know, starting from early 2000s for the
• 55:03
  the first two decades, it was very much a kind of a combination of opportunity to turn around
• 55:09
  some of the things that they were doing. They're realizing that it doesn't, it doesn't probably
• 55:15
  going to make education system much much more better than it is already. We often use the I often
• 55:21
  use the the metaphor from sports. Remember the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City in the high
• 55:29
  champ? No. And there was, there's one, there's one, it's really interesting that there's one guy
• 55:34
  who was using completely different style. And he, his name was Dick Forsbury. All the others
• 55:40
  were when you do high champ, they kind of roll around the bar. And they realized that
• 55:46
  220 is about the limit that you can do. It doesn't matter how, how much you train or how big you are,
• 55:52
  that 20 to 20 is about the 20 centimeters. Yeah, that you can kind of pass. And then
• 55:57
  trying harder doesn't help. You have to change the style the way you jump. And what Crick,
• 56:03
  sorry, Dick Forsbury did was that he kind of jumped the bar like he's back first,
• 56:10
  a completely like a crazy looking thing. But he won the gold medal,
• 56:14
  224 in Mexico City. And after that, everybody started to jump. Yeah, that's how it's done. And
• 56:19
  now the world record is about 240 something. And, but you know, you know, if you said that,
• 56:26
  so what does it mean for education? It's the same thing. And this is what this will happen in
• 56:30
  Alberta. This will happen in Finland as well in education. But we realized that just by doing this
• 56:34
  same thing like teaching kids and you know, bringing them to school and raising their parts,
• 56:39
  doesn't, doesn't take them there that we have to change the way we do these things. Right. And
• 56:43
  what the Canadians or Albertans did that they created this thing that nobody had really done
• 56:50
  like that before. They kind of a local what they call innovation networks that the government
• 56:55
  invested like heavily on the collaboration of the schools and teachers to figure out the new ways
• 57:01
  to jump high jump. And all of us it went on there for 10, 12 years. And all of a sudden,
• 57:08
  you know, things started to rise only because the change the way from away from the kind of a
• 57:14
  government mandating how to do things in a school to trusting people and giving you know,
• 57:21
  giving them resources to collaborate and figure out the better ways to do this. So not a top
• 57:26
  down bottom up. Yeah. And that was, you know, that's something that you can you can find these things
• 57:31
  in the United States as well. But in a much smaller kind of pockets and scale often within the district
• 57:37
  or sometimes a kind of a cluster of schools doing these things. But what Albertan did and Finland
• 57:41
  isn't people with the whole system in the kind of this thing. And that's that's something that's
• 57:46
  one of these big takeaways that you can you can see that you need to you need to kind of a step
• 57:52
  out of your comfort zone if your education leader and say that how can how can we do these things
• 57:57
  differently. Right. I mean, I can certainly imagine that principle and I want to get to some of
• 58:03
  the brass tax about what reforms you would advocate being applied to marine county or park slope.
• 58:12
  Right. Where, you know, people are up for innovative ways of thinking and they have enough faith
• 58:16
  probably in their local school district school boards and schools and teachers to believe that they
• 58:22
  can participate in fostering some kind of a better educational environment. But at a baseline level,
• 58:29
  your slightly below average school, if you throw a data dartboard somewhere in the middle of
• 58:36
  the country, some school in Alabama. Is it going to yield great results if you empower teachers
• 58:48
  who are underpaid, frustrated, have problematic student bodies, problems at home, not enough,
• 58:57
  you know, assistance from therapists and outside social workers. Like I guess a part of the sense
• 59:06
  of being stuck in America probably stems from a sense of like things have been pretty broken for a
• 59:11
  while and empowering local communities might just be like giving homeless people cash and they
• 59:20
  don't really know how best to use it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a great question. And I think one thing
• 59:26
  we've learned over the last 50 years of efforts to try to reform different systems is that if you
• 59:32
  have a system, if you spoke about individual schools, just if you have a school that is let's say
• 59:40
  a more performing school for any reason that you know, the results are not there. It's not, you know,
• 59:44
  happy with what's going on that they've come to classrooms. Definitely what you need in the
• 59:49
  beginning is to kind of a more control. You need, you need like a more mandates from the top
• 59:54
  from the system, you know, set the kind of a perimeters and and and the kind of the thing
• 1:00:01
  so that they start moving. But then you have to realize at some point and good that you chose
• 1:00:08
  Alabama because Alabama has done exactly this thing. At some point you need to be able to relax
• 1:00:15
  and you know, give more autonomy and more freedom and do what the Canadians were doing.
• 1:00:20
  That you know, invest in, oh yeah, what is Alabama doing? I pulled it out of my bum for no reason,
• 1:00:25
  but it must have been floating around in my head because I do remember hearing a story or reading
• 1:00:29
  a story in the New York family and I got something about it. Yeah, there are some of the southern
• 1:00:32
  states like Alabama, I said good example that they they started systematically to build because you
• 1:00:37
  need to build this kind of a basic base first in a school. So system that some things are working.
• 1:00:42
  Otherwise, you know, it doesn't it's a very empowering dysfunction. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
• 1:00:48
  But you know, what most most system leaders have not been able to do that they kind of
• 1:00:52
  continue with the same paradigm, same way of leading when things are improving, particularly when
• 1:00:57
  you have schools that are already there and like that they would be ready to go to the next level
• 1:01:02
  and do these things. And that's the kind of art of leading educational change is that you realize
• 1:01:06
  that when it's the right time to relax a little bit and rather than you know, me leading from the
• 1:01:12
  top is to support and help. So it's a phase down. Yeah, and this I don't know about the details
• 1:01:18
  currently. There's actually a larger group of people from Alabama coming here to see me on June.
• 1:01:24
  Oh, cool. And I'm I'm going to be much much more in the kind of a listening mode, you know,
• 1:01:29
  what they have done than you're not telling them what we do here. But that is the that is the thing
• 1:01:34
  that that find a way to make this poor car moving first. Yes. And when it's giving the capacity
• 1:01:43
  when people have capacity, give it more and more. Exactly. When teachers realize that, you know,
• 1:01:47
  we can do this and things are getting better that then and and you know, listen, listen to them
• 1:01:53
  and hear what they what they kind of say is needed next. And that's the art of thing. But in
• 1:01:57
  most cases, you know, history is full of these things that there's a there's a kind of a good start
• 1:02:02
  and things start to improve usually things improve very quickly when you start from there. Yeah,
• 1:02:07
  you see like a massive improvements when you start very low. Yeah, but then you realize that
• 1:02:12
  things are not changing this, you know, this happened in England in the late 1990s when Tony
• 1:02:17
  Player came with the this education education education idea that things improved fast on
• 1:02:23
  Terry had the same thing. And then all of a sudden there's no improvement. And then
• 1:02:28
  then what the system often tries to do is to just, you know, tighten the creep and say that,
• 1:02:32
  you know, unless you improve, but it's going to happen when they should relax and see that how
• 1:02:37
  much more we can get, you know, from the system by doing things differently. That's why this high
• 1:02:43
  jumping example is so interesting. Yeah, I see. But you have to realize that when when we need to
• 1:02:48
  change the style to jump, if we want to get get kind of a higher. Yeah, right. And simply
• 1:02:54
  turning the screws and requiring accountability and testing more and holding the
• 1:03:00
  holding threats over school districts. If they don't perform or achieve certain metrics,
• 1:03:04
  it only has a limited utility. Yeah. So let's talk about brass tax and like nuts and bolts.
• 1:03:10
  We've mentioned that you would give students 15 minutes of play in between or 45 minutes of
• 1:03:16
  learning. What other reforms do we advocate? The structure of the school day?
• 1:03:22
  That is a structure of the school day. That is it. Yeah. What about the duration of the school day?
• 1:03:27
  Then we're doing that right? In general, or in general, in Australia, in America? Yeah, you know,
• 1:03:33
  the school days are very look very different depending on where you are. Like here in Australia,
• 1:03:39
  we have the longest school days in the world. Is that right? Yeah. So if I simply take the,
• 1:03:45
  tell you what, feels pretty short as someone whose children went from daycare, which was like 10
• 1:03:50
  hours to school day of six hours. But you know, the question is what happens within the school day?
• 1:03:56
  Because I'm talking about the formal instruction. Like how many hours children here in Australia are
• 1:04:03
  expected to receive formal instruction during the school day? Here in Victoria, we have a, we have
• 1:04:10
  a sort of 300 teaching standard a day. So all the kids from early years to all the way to
• 1:04:18
  in the high school must have 300 minutes, meaning five full hours instruction every day.
• 1:04:26
  And that's a lot. That's a lot of like if the school doesn't, you know, think different ways
• 1:04:33
  to spend the time. If it's all about instruction, it's far too much for young kids. So in Finland,
• 1:04:40
  for example, the, the total instruction time in primary school, primary and junior high school,
• 1:04:49
  the first nine, 10 years of schooling is about 40% less than is here, about 30% less than it's in
• 1:04:57
  the United States. Right. So that's why your question about what the school, other school days,
• 1:05:02
  like well, well, organized, it really depends on where you are. But my, my overall view is that
• 1:05:09
  in many countries, including here and in the US, that we are probably spending too much time
• 1:05:17
  within this formal instruction on very young children. Then we shoot, you know, given the
• 1:05:25
  expected outcomes, what the kids are getting, you know, out of that. And that we could actually
• 1:05:33
  probably run these systems also cheaper. Or if we had, if we had the system like many other
• 1:05:40
  countries have the most, the OECD countries that there's a, in the primary school, the school days
• 1:05:45
  are shorter and they're more play and time for kids to do that we probably would also have healthier
• 1:05:50
  kids in the system and better learners as well. So there's no like our studies have shown that
• 1:05:57
  there's no, there's no kind of a connection between how much instruction kids have
• 1:06:03
  when they're in school and what what they get out of the school. Whether we look at the well-being
• 1:06:09
  or academic results that there's nothing, the correlation is actually a little bit like negative.
• 1:06:17
  Right. That if you, the more formal instruction, the worst day. Yeah. So if you flexible statistician,
• 1:06:22
  you would say that the more we try to teach these things, the less they get harder.
• 1:06:27
  Is there a gender breakdown here? I just know from my personal experience and anecdotally,
• 1:06:33
  there seems to be a sense that boys find it, especially young boys, really hard to focus for that
• 1:06:38
  long in the kind of context that we are requiring them to focus. And so then we send them to therapists
• 1:06:44
  who diagnose them with attention disorders. And then we try to figure out what to do about that.
• 1:06:48
  And then, you know, it's hard to, in my case, I feel like we're fixing a problem of our own
• 1:06:55
  creation through we're sort of medicalizing a problem of our own creation. So how old are your
• 1:07:00
  kids? My kids are seven. Okay. And neither of them has a formalized, diagnosed condition in this
• 1:07:07
  space. But it's obvious that because it's a boy and a girl, the boy finds it much, much harder
• 1:07:13
  to focus. So what do you, if I may ask you a question, how long do you think you're
• 1:07:18
  seven-year-olds? Good, reasonably focused on task when they're in school. That would require
• 1:07:27
  like demanding mental cognitive processes, being reading a mathematics study. I mean,
• 1:07:36
  I think about 40 minutes is probably a pretty good yardstick, right, about a little more than
• 1:07:40
  half an hour would make sense. Yeah, super kids. Well, I think if they, I'm assuming that they like
• 1:07:45
  it. If they hate it, one second. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be really in kind of a kind of a
• 1:07:53
  general situation. But they will sit and read for 25 minutes, not get bored, right? But reading
• 1:07:58
  is different because it doesn't, it depends on what you would like to hear if they've been. But
• 1:08:02
  if I, if I, this mathematics to you and I ask you as a seven-year-old to really think about
• 1:08:08
  hard about this question, to get it done, because you know, we, there's a lot of studies that
• 1:08:12
  indicate the, what we call it, the attention span, like how long the child can stay forward on
• 1:08:20
  the task that she or he is doing. And in a primary school, it's usually about 10, 12 minutes.
• 1:08:27
  It has been like this. But now, you know, because of this media and gaming and entertainment,
• 1:08:33
  all these things, it's been going down. So it's quite rare actually that you have an individual
• 1:08:38
  child, 70-year-old, who could remain 10 minutes really focused on something and think hard.
• 1:08:44
  Most of the kids will give up and they kind of start to think about something, something else.
• 1:08:49
  Yeah. But so do adults, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But how productive are any of us when
• 1:08:54
  we're at work? I don't know if you heard about this. Microsoft, did you study, classic study
• 1:08:59
  a few years, probably 10 years ago, where they were asking the same things that how long
• 1:09:04
  teenagers can stay on task, like focus on things, you know, keep in all the technology and
• 1:09:10
  stuff they have. And the outcome was kind of a well-known because of this, is that the attention
• 1:09:17
  span, attention span of the typical teenager today or that time, it's worse today, is shorter
• 1:09:23
  than that of a cold fish, because they usually call fish as like, how long cold fish can I
• 1:09:29
  kind of pay attention to your fingers and these things before? It realizes there's nothing
• 1:09:33
  happening, it's boring. So it's about eight seconds. But this is, there's something wrong with
• 1:09:39
  the whole way this whole thing is framed, I think, because it's so contingent on the type of
• 1:09:46
  pedagogy that you're talking about and the type of interest that the, I wanted to say the child,
• 1:09:52
  but really any person has. I mean, there are days when I spend a long time slogging through my
• 1:09:59
  work and every word that I have to write is like pulling teeth and it's very hard for me to focus.
• 1:10:05
  And then there are other days when I'm in what you were alluding to earlier, the flow stage
• 1:10:09
  or something like that, right? There are times with my children where they can be doing highly
• 1:10:13
  cognitively demanding tasks like maybe playing a board game that requires strategy or constructing
• 1:10:19
  something with Lego that's complicated or reading a book aloud and then they'll be able to go for
• 1:10:25
  quite a long time. If I'm trying to get them to listen and pay attention to something that they
• 1:10:30
  have no interest in, then it's vanishingly small. So it feels a bit like how long is a piece of
• 1:10:35
  string? Like they'll play at hard things for hours, right? It just depends how we're constructing
• 1:10:44
  the teaching. Yeah, but you know, this is exactly the the harder the issue and the debate that we
• 1:10:52
  have had recently, particularly now in the post COVID, that what is the best way to teach kids,
• 1:10:58
  you know, in general, the question is, what is the best way to teach children important things in
• 1:11:02
  school? And they're those who say that we need to have more explicit instruction like just tell kids
• 1:11:09
  directly what they need to learn. And you just sit there and practice and do these things as long
• 1:11:15
  as you need to do that. And then there are those who think otherwise that it's an alternative way
• 1:11:20
  to do that. Kind of a try to help kids come into this situation where they realize that, you know,
• 1:11:27
  this is actually a cool question. And I want to do this. I want to kind of get into this. That
• 1:11:32
  is much harder to do, you know, directly instruct kids. It's the easiest thing to do. You just need to
• 1:11:37
  be a good instructor in a way that you know how to how to organize stuff and then you teach kids.
• 1:11:43
  It's much harder to work with the kids. You have 25 kids in a classroom. They're all different
• 1:11:48
  in a way that they would get into the space that you were talking about. Actually, I want to learn
• 1:11:53
  this. I want to do this. I understand why I do this. It's much harder to do it that way.
• 1:11:58
  I mean, yes, it comes back. It's doable, but it's a much harder to do. Yeah, it comes back to what
• 1:12:04
  you were saying earlier. I think about we've thought of fun as being the opposite of hard work,
• 1:12:13
  but it's not, right? That's a mistake. In the sense that the most fulfilling experiences we ever
• 1:12:19
  have are usually demanding as well. And pure hedonism is rarely the peak. It's rarely one of your
• 1:12:27
  peak experiences, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think it's not probably fully appropriate if any teacher
• 1:12:33
  would say that, you know, learning is fun in my class has come here. We make it fun because people
• 1:12:38
  understand it in different ways. It's equally wrong to say that, you know, mathematics is not fun.
• 1:12:44
  It's a hard work and serious stuff and you need to do what I tell you to do. None of these things
• 1:12:49
  works in the school, but I think that there's a middle way of kind of an negotiating this fun,
• 1:12:54
  what does it mean? And try to help kids into this space that you were talking about that.
• 1:13:00
  I want to take the book and I want to do these things because I think that the deeper learning only
• 1:13:04
  happens that way that there's a certain degree of the learners or child's own agency there and will
• 1:13:12
  to say that I kind of accept and understand that this interesting thing and I'm going to do it.
• 1:13:18
  What do you say to the response to this, which says, look, it all sounds lovely.
• 1:13:24
  And I'm sure that you Nordic people have a great way of doing things and it's very hippy-dippy.
• 1:13:29
  But for centuries, people have been, you know, like learning and it's been tough and life was hard
• 1:13:37
  and you had to do the work and people got educated and whether it was Henry Ford or Albert Einstein,
• 1:13:44
  they had the whip and the cane and they had to learn their, you know, they had to learn their
• 1:13:50
  shit and then they graduated and they achieved great things. Like if it was good enough for
• 1:13:54
  centuries of great people at Oxford and Cambridge and the Soulbone and wherever else,
• 1:14:00
  why does everything have to be a walk in the park?
• 1:14:05
  Yeah, I think we are not living a time anymore that was the similar to Einstein or Ford or
• 1:14:11
  and it's partly goes back to the conversation about AI and technology.
• 1:14:16
  Kids can do so many things and you have 70-year-olds, they probably also realize that
• 1:14:20
  I can learn, you know, most of these things with that kind of school and it's fine and I think
• 1:14:24
  many of these ways are actually much more interesting and engaging than how they are taught in a school.
• 1:14:31
  This didn't happen in Einstein's time or even my parents when they had to go to school to
• 1:14:36
  get these things done or I had to go to school. There was no other way to, you know,
• 1:14:40
  get to the uni and get to know these things but not anymore. You know, my son is a 12
• 1:14:48
  and he's a fully competent with the chat GPT. It is in his iPad and phone and he's using it all
• 1:14:54
  of that. He tells me that, you know, I don't need school to tell me things. I need a school to,
• 1:15:01
  you know, help me to work with other people on ideas that doesn't exist and that's, I think,
• 1:15:06
  is a big change that we have for the first time. For the first time ever, we are in this situation
• 1:15:12
  where you know, most of these things that we did in a school can be done by somebody else and
• 1:15:19
  most of these things that we were teaching kids in a school in the past are not really necessary
• 1:15:25
  anymore. Do you see an analogy, though, to the technologies of our youth? I mean, I remember feeling
• 1:15:31
  the same way about maths when we had calculators and feeling the same way about some of the
• 1:15:36
  excessive analysis of English literature when, you know, we had movies and like, movie shows and
• 1:15:43
  like book, like, I just felt like there was often a sense in class in high school of like, why
• 1:15:49
  do I need to learn about all this math stuff if I'm not going to become a physicist? We have
• 1:15:53
  calculators to do basic maths. Why do I have to learn necessarily how to spell? We have spell
• 1:15:59
  check. Why do we have to, you know, learn whether or not the characters in some Jane Austen novel,
• 1:16:05
  like, are expressing some subliminal or something or other that maybe the writer herself didn't even
• 1:16:10
  think about when she was writing this thing. It all seems a bit kind of masturbatory and irrelevant
• 1:16:14
  to our real lives when we have so many great tools around us to help us through life. Is this not
• 1:16:19
  just another extension of that? I think in a way it is, but it's a very different extension. I think
• 1:16:25
  all of those examples that you mentioned from the past, and I've been through them myself as well,
• 1:16:32
  is that the big difference is that what we have now is the fully interactive space, like you can,
• 1:16:38
  you can soon, soon you don't need to type anymore, and it's that you can communicate.
• 1:16:42
  Already, I chat to chat JPT. Yeah, and it's only going to get kind of faster and more effective.
• 1:16:48
  You can ask things, as somebody to do things for you, unlike ever before.
• 1:16:55
  So it is a similar thing, the kind of a feeling that people have is that why do I need to do things
• 1:17:01
  because it's already there? Or where do I need this? This is a good question again.
• 1:17:06
  Where do I need this? Why do I need to know these things when there's something that can do
• 1:17:11
  it for me? And that's only going to get faster and bigger. Is there a problem with the question,
• 1:17:17
  forget about AI for a moment and just go back to my examples. Is there a problem?
• 1:17:23
  Is it a misunderstanding to say I don't need to know how to spell because there's spell check,
• 1:17:27
  and I don't need to know how to add up in my head because there's a calculator. I don't really know
• 1:17:32
  if there's whether to give that credence or not. Yeah, probably the reading experts would say
• 1:17:39
  that it's always a good idea to know how to spell and write. And I'm writing myself,
• 1:17:43
  so I kind of agree on that. And I'm pushing gently my both of my kids to get to that space as
• 1:17:50
  well. They're just going through this thing that why do I need to write these things?
• 1:17:55
  Because so I think it's a good thing. But in mathematics, I can say that if you don't have
• 1:18:02
  these basic mental mathematical abilities, you're going to be living and sleeping with these
• 1:18:09
  devices and using them for things that is completely unnecessary thing to do.
• 1:18:16
  I think that there is and probably continues to be certain amount of basic things and skills
• 1:18:22
  that need to be it's good to have that you have. But I think that we would be as educators,
• 1:18:27
  we should be careful in saying that just unless you learn to spell or do these mathematics,
• 1:18:33
  you're going to be ruined. There's nothing for you because there are a lot of people. There's a lot of
• 1:18:37
  people dyslexics who have gone far. Yes, it is proportionately maybe. Yeah, it's about 10%
• 1:18:48
  of kids. It probably even more dyslexics. And so they have difficulties in this kind of a basic
• 1:18:54
  basic things and people can do really well. But I suppose the challenge for someone who doesn't
• 1:19:03
  love maths like I do is that there's an opportunity cost in learning how to do
• 1:19:09
  multiplication in my head or learn my times tables because I would rather actually have been
• 1:19:15
  learning some kind of trade maybe. I'd find it more useful today if I wasn't such an ignorance
• 1:19:20
  about constructing basic things around the house or fixing my car. That would have been useful.
• 1:19:27
  I'm a mathematician so I did my master's degree in mathematics and I love math. But mathematics
• 1:19:33
  for me is it's almost beyond this idea that is academic subject or discipline. For me it's a language
• 1:19:41
  and a game. I still love to play with numbers and see how they go. I love to work with my kids
• 1:19:49
  homework, homework books because it's like for me it's not just a technical thing that you remember
• 1:19:55
  and remind something but you learn to learn new rules and see how they really work.
• 1:20:01
  I think you need a certain level of aptitude. That's like you're playing the piano or
• 1:20:07
  there are those parents who say that son you don't need to be good mathematics because I'm not
• 1:20:12
  the math person much. It's still a kind of a common way of saying tell your own children that
• 1:20:16
  don't worry. Your father wasn't the math person either and that's something that comes
• 1:20:24
  probably more about the parents idea what mathematics is or is not all about. And often the
• 1:20:30
  school mathematics is something that is not really like real mathematics. Because kids are still
• 1:20:36
  kind of practicing this automated processes of playing with numbers. But as soon as you go
• 1:20:42
  beyond that it's a fun space to be. I remember learning about derivatives and you know
• 1:20:49
  when you get to the highest level of algebra that you get to in high school and asking my least
• 1:20:55
  favorite teacher why we were doing it and I still remember her looking at me and saying because
• 1:20:59
  it's on the test okay. That's the wrong answer. What a terrible answer. I mean what an appalling
• 1:21:07
  answer. So who should become a teacher and how do we find them? In general. Yeah. No I mean
• 1:21:20
  you know obviously we need people to become teachers who are passionate about
• 1:21:25
  kids and working with children ready to take the challenge because that's the
• 1:21:31
  you know everybody understands that if you want to get rich and make a fortune
• 1:21:36
  very rare teachers can do that some some some some of them can do but I know I think we all
• 1:21:42
  assume that finished teachers and all the millionaires. No they're not that's a that's a that's a myth
• 1:21:48
  because they're making I think they're happiness comes from the fact that they can they can use
• 1:21:53
  their own ideas and what they've learned in in training 100% in the classroom and I think actually
• 1:22:01
  we would have here in Australia and the United States and many other countries we have a huge issue
• 1:22:05
  of having less young people today who put their hand up and said I'm happy to consider becoming
• 1:22:11
  a teacher after the high school and you know I don't blame them at all because they have seen
• 1:22:20
  first hand what it is to be a teacher in in the environment that we have unfortunately here in
• 1:22:26
  Australia and many parts and and most of the rest of the world that teachers are more and more
• 1:22:32
  as to just implement and comply with other people's ideas and plans who want to do that that
• 1:22:37
  but job and then you have all these management you know hurting these kids that are not always
• 1:22:43
  taking care of other parents and that it's like too much to to handle so I think that we would have
• 1:22:50
  more voluntary high school levers here and young people put their hand up if the teaching profession
• 1:23:00
  would look a little bit more as a profession and you sometimes hear people say you know what we need
• 1:23:06
  to invest so much in teachers salaries and in schools that you know only the smartest people in
• 1:23:12
  in society want to become teachers we would should select the crem de la crem as teachers they
• 1:23:18
  should be the smartest people in any class is it true that you want teachers to be the smartest
• 1:23:24
  people no I've written a lot about this in the past saying that that Finland for example people
• 1:23:31
  say that Finland does exactly this or Singapore it's a myth that they don't that you have you
• 1:23:36
  need to have you need to find right people to do the job that they that is a very demanding and
• 1:23:42
  complex in in our schools but but you know being the best this best and the brightest myth has been
• 1:23:49
  is it is a very kind of a deep in this conversation about teachers and the teaching profession what to
• 1:23:56
  do and I think the people people need people who think like this need to look closer how countries
• 1:24:03
  where the teaching profession is really held in a kind of a high high steam like Singapore or Canada
• 1:24:08
  Finland how are you doing that and it's a it's a very very careful selection to admit young people
• 1:24:16
  into teaching teacher education and a lot of the smartest applicants are not selected yeah that was
• 1:24:23
  and still is in Finland I remember you know sitting in these panels and we sometimes look at the
• 1:24:28
  candidate there and said at least and I think it's you're much better off in a law school so what
• 1:24:32
  did you do that and they often did that that's because of why that's because they there was not
• 1:24:38
  like kind of a real understanding or there was not enough evidence of a kind of a real passion
• 1:24:44
  to work with young people to really understand what it is and you know my classic story is my own
• 1:24:49
  knees who my sister's daughter who was like a he she grew up in in a family of etiquette her mother is
• 1:24:56
  is a teacher and I was and she wanted to become a teacher straight A student like really smarter the
• 1:25:02
  smartest and went to the where applied to the teacher education the University of Helsinki where I
• 1:25:09
  was teaching at that time and then she called me after the the exam I said I failed I said well
• 1:25:15
  happened and she said that I did everything else well but when they ask me why do I think I will
• 1:25:24
  be a good teacher I want to teach in the school the only thing that came to mind is because my
• 1:25:31
  uncle is a teacher and my mother and she was so really smart and good but she didn't have this
• 1:25:37
  kind of idea of why this is for me and you know if you have if you have a kind of a cohort of
• 1:25:44
  young people who all have this already this kind of a deeper understanding of what is teaching
• 1:25:50
  and why is it important and why do I fit into that you pretty well off and then you train them
• 1:25:56
  for four or five years to master's degrees and send them to primary primary schools and that's
• 1:26:00
  whether magic is done rather than you know just looking at the final examination results in a high
• 1:26:06
  school and get the best and the the brightest in the program only to realize that the kids would
• 1:26:12
  realize as they do in many places that you know this nobody told me that school is like this
• 1:26:16
  are the young people being like this I'd be a great teacher if it wasn't for all these
• 1:26:21
  stupid young people exactly it's a great job yeah I've also heard you talk about the
• 1:26:28
  the in addition to the the structure of the school day the fact that we have a different teacher
• 1:26:34
  every year other than Montessori schools or Steiner schools or things like that I don't know of any
• 1:26:42
  public schools that have the same teacher go with the same cohort of students from kindergarten
• 1:26:48
  up through the years should we consider it I think we definitely definitely should there are
• 1:26:56
  some schools but very small number here in Australia but in the United States this is one of those
• 1:27:01
  trends that we have seen in the US during the last 10 years that there's about maybe 15 or 20
• 1:27:07
  percent already of the public primary schools have moved into this what we call teacher looping
• 1:27:13
  right it means that the teacher travels with the same group of kids longer than one year
• 1:27:19
  and I think you know the early evidence it's difficult to research this because we we can't
• 1:27:25
  really compare this this looping arrangement to something else with the similar similar groups
• 1:27:32
  of people but the research from those schools in the US that have moved into this looping thing are
• 1:27:39
  fairly positive it mostly it mostly means that there will be much stronger and healthier
• 1:27:48
  teacher student relationships in the school and if you have if you have healthier better
• 1:27:54
  relationship between the teacher and the schools in a in a in a every class in a school it allows
• 1:27:59
  many other things to to happen and so that you can do them better better the other thing that
• 1:28:05
  happens in that looping arrangement is that these teachers can establish closer relationships with
• 1:28:12
  the parents and homes and learn more about you know what these kids need what happens in the
• 1:28:17
  home rather than that every year you need to get to know the new teacher your parents and you know
• 1:28:25
  I'm a huge fan and champion of this thing here in Australia because I see
• 1:28:32
  that this is one of those one of those things that we could do for free it doesn't cost anything
• 1:28:36
  it's just a school as a community principle and parents decide to rearrange a little bit things it
• 1:28:42
  takes a little bit more from teachers to say okay I'm happy to you know learn how to teach the year
• 1:28:48
  five after teaching 15 years year four and then teach year six but you know after those things
• 1:28:57
  you can you can expect outcomes and benefits that would have been very difficult to accomplish
• 1:29:04
  otherwise so I think and you're still only teaching twelve girls I mean it's not like you're
• 1:29:09
  teaching advanced Japanese or something you know to you don't have to understand how to fix
• 1:29:13
  yeah but you know I was when I was a teacher I was teaching mathematics and physics science in
• 1:29:18
  Finland for many years before I started to do these these things here I always I always looped
• 1:29:23
  with my students right when I started the year seven I had a group of kids I traveled to eight
• 1:29:29
  eight nine and often all the way until the end of the high school and I couldn't think I couldn't
• 1:29:34
  imagine any other way to organize teachings so that I know the I know my students well that's right
• 1:29:40
  I would imagine that if you've got 25 students you've got 25 very different creatures with very
• 1:29:45
  different learning styles and interests and just as the moment you get to to know them all of a sudden
• 1:29:50
  they're out the door and there's another new 25 you know nothing about those yeah it's like
• 1:29:55
  why do we do this and and is that what is the freedom so just thinking about these little pieces of
• 1:30:01
  the jigsaw puzzle here we have you know selecting teachers for their love for their maybe emotional
• 1:30:06
  intelligence and their love of children and teaching rather than on the basis purely of academic
• 1:30:12
  pursuits we have turning the volume down on standardized testing and up on empowering teachers and
• 1:30:19
  principals to be more innovative in how they think about teaching we have maybe introducing more
• 1:30:25
  play and more breaks into the school day are there any other is there any other low hanging fruit
• 1:30:30
  that we're talking about here where if you were emperor of the world and you could snap your fingers
• 1:30:34
  we would do it there are many Josh there are some at me one of the things that would be
• 1:30:41
  would be another easy fix and probably the most most powerful fix in in the
• 1:30:49
  context of many countries including here in Australia is to offer children free school lunch
• 1:30:57
  and that's something that you know the reaction here often is that now we don't have
• 1:31:05
  money to do that is too expensive some parents say that no no it's a parents right and privilege
• 1:31:11
  to decide what the but their children eat in the school but they don't eat but again the
• 1:31:18
  experience is in some other places where the school meals happen there like India is the biggest
• 1:31:24
  provider of school meals they they do more than 100 million free school meals every day
• 1:31:31
  100 million meals in Finland we have had free school lunches since 1940s for all the kids
• 1:31:39
  and we couldn't again we couldn't think about any other way to engage kids have many of them come
• 1:31:45
  to school when I went to school in high school people often asked so what are the best things for
• 1:31:49
  you in high school and said friends and me but it's like I often say that you know it's like a you
• 1:31:55
  know if you if you shop keep you keep a shop and you never get anybody indoors in in your shop you
• 1:32:01
  never sell anything you can you may have a beautiful window they all these things but nobody works
• 1:32:06
  in your shop never sell a thing it's the same in the school that you know you have to get these
• 1:32:11
  kids some of these kids in school first and so that they could realize ah there's some cool
• 1:32:16
  things happening and that's the power of school lunch especially if you combine that with your
• 1:32:20
  friends but you know here it's the interesting thing now is that the those those of you who are
• 1:32:27
  listening to this in in Australia you know that we have this historic funding deal just in place
• 1:32:33
  between the our federal government and the states and territory governments that will increase
• 1:32:39
  school funding over time significantly particularly in public schools this commonwealth
• 1:32:46
  share of the funding the extra additional funding to our public schools is about thousand dollars
• 1:32:52
  per student a year and this is about the amount that would bring free school lunches
• 1:32:59
  for every child every why is that the best use of that money because my in my brain a school lunch
• 1:33:05
  is a strange thing from America that I see on television sitcoms that I grew up watching
• 1:33:11
  and it's gruel and it's not nutritious and I've seen run-ins between you know with departments
• 1:33:19
  claiming that French fry is a vegetable and therefore and I just think if you want to do social
• 1:33:25
  welfare just give money directly to families to if they can't afford lunches then solve figure
• 1:33:30
  out a more parsimonious way of solving the problem of poverty and allow parents to give
• 1:33:35
  they kids yeah and I'm happy that you raised this this question just because I I think that
• 1:33:41
  school lunch is much more than lunch first of all I think it doesn't I'm not in favor at all
• 1:33:46
  of introducing universal school lunch if it's about chips and chicken nuggets and and stuff
• 1:33:52
  it has to be healthy like in France or Finland where the meal whether kids also learn about what
• 1:33:58
  a healthy meal looks like and they learn to eat healthy stuff like the biggest thing here in
• 1:34:04
  Australia for us my wife and myself with the kids is that they learn to hate vegetables
• 1:34:11
  just they just hate it anything is green they hate it and I kind of we kind of find
• 1:34:16
  anyways to get them to even taste any of these things that we think they should be eating every day
• 1:34:22
  but those things can happen in the school and not because of the you know teachers have the
• 1:34:26
  teachers you know this is a carrot you have to eat carrot but because there's always somebody there
• 1:34:30
  in the friends in a table where they're eating who is doing this and so I think that the school
• 1:34:37
  lunch is is it's probably 30 percent of nutrition you know feeding kids so that they're not hungry
• 1:34:44
  and it's 70 percent about all these other things learning about healthy eating learning about
• 1:34:49
  table manners when you have a conversation you know learning about these things that you and I
• 1:34:53
  we do when we add us you know we call our mates and we have a lunch and it's not just eating lunch
• 1:35:01
  it's about meeting stuff but we learn that by modeling off adults not by throwing a bunch of 15
• 1:35:06
  year olds around the table they behave like savages no they don't you know I'll take I'll take
• 1:35:11
  you to when you go to Tampa the next time okay go see one of these schools in Finland you'll
• 1:35:15
  be surprised but you know the fence to it from the eights of three so the kids are kind of a
• 1:35:21
  learning into this culture and that is one of these we spoke about the freedom they kind of
• 1:35:26
  rights human rights before yeah this is one of the like a the deep sense of
• 1:35:33
  healthy lunch and moment to have shared the lunch with somebody else is a is a deep kind of a
• 1:35:38
  manifestation of the human right and and that's why again you know we talk about the uncomfortable
• 1:35:45
  conversations I have had this uncomfortable conversations with many parents and politicians in
• 1:35:49
  apartments and the departments here exactly about this that what school lunch is and what it's
• 1:35:56
  not and we need to move these conversations beyond just you know feeding kids if it's about
• 1:36:02
  feeding kids it's easy you know we can continue with this lunch box and millions of parents are
• 1:36:06
  having headaches apart you know why you didn't you know didn't eat this apple and carrots
• 1:36:11
  or we can fix this with this thousand dollars that is coming now extra money additional money
• 1:36:16
  I mean I think for Australians because the the huge blazing orb of American culture
• 1:36:21
  loom so large you know consciousness the first step in this conversation is to say I'm not talking
• 1:36:27
  about American style lunches I'm not talking about that kind of nutrition I'm not talking about
• 1:36:32
  that kind of culture there's a whole culture around American lunches who sits with who and who's
• 1:36:37
  throwing food at who and like who's getting bullied by who and like that that is so that is
• 1:36:43
  ingrained in the way that I think Australians think about school lunches as this yeah for
• 1:36:48
  ordinary tacky bureaucratic response to institutionalized prison like school environment but that's in
• 1:36:55
  most countries that is not and I guess in in the in the places where that happens that you explain
• 1:37:02
  the the the education in that school has not been focusing on that particular area
• 1:37:09
  that is in Finland like it's educating people to respect and behave well it's it's it's one of the
• 1:37:16
  most important half an hour the moments of the day when kids learn to do and does the teacher eat
• 1:37:21
  with the students yeah as well so they're adults there yeah in most cases they they even may
• 1:37:27
  invite the teacher to join them in the table and so you can have this kind of a conversation so
• 1:37:32
  it's it's one of the one of the most beautiful elements of the Finnish school most often
• 1:37:36
  completely like ignored by those who have been looking at Finnish schools or Nordic schools that
• 1:37:43
  how beautiful it is when you see that young people in a primary school take the kind of a leadership
• 1:37:48
  in this moment and it's nice yeah I always thought the French do it because they're French you know
• 1:37:54
  they're obsessed with cuisine it's it's fundamental to their national character the
• 1:37:59
  the long male but it's interesting to hear about its importance in Finland as well yeah yeah
• 1:38:03
  there are many other countries now now fighting this there's actually a global school meal
• 1:38:09
  movement or campaign going led by the the United Nations and others are trying to kind of
• 1:38:15
  bless people to say that by 2030 every child would receive a healthy school meal during the
• 1:38:22
  Australia hasn't signed yet I think the United States is most of the European countries have
• 1:38:28
  themselves into this so so the it's happening and here in Australia I'm telling these people it's
• 1:38:33
  going to happen here one day but whether we want to be the last one in the in the line
• 1:38:38
  to admit that and say or not it's up to you guys right now and and there many many many state
• 1:38:44
  governments here like w a in Queensland and including here in Victoria have been political campaigns
• 1:38:51
  have now included this idea right like in Queensland the the green party there say a few years ago
• 1:38:57
  I'll say that if they're in a in a government they're going to turn the mining royalties they
• 1:39:01
  say about five hundred million dollars but I think this is part of the political impediment that
• 1:39:06
  it's associated by the center of the country as being a sort of a fringe lefty lovey duffy idea
• 1:39:12
  about helping poor people but you're talking about something different yeah but I think it's
• 1:39:17
  good to have this conversation sure but I think it'll get across the line in a country like Australia
• 1:39:22
  when conservatives can find the appeal in what you're talking about as being an opportunity for
• 1:39:27
  young people to be taught manners and dining and you know culinary moreays and tradition and
• 1:39:38
  and it's a sustainability aspect this there's a really big one that the kids learned like what
• 1:39:43
  happens to the the waste food waste like if I don't eat everything or you know if I have my milk
• 1:39:49
  or water in a plastic cup but what happens yeah yeah or where the food comes from so that's
• 1:39:56
  there's a lot of opportunities there that I we already have like composting at our primary school
• 1:40:01
  and chickens and things like that which is nice yeah to see it's cool it's oh I don't give it away
• 1:40:05
  but it's in okay you know the urban area of Sydney okay I'll tell you off the air okay do you
• 1:40:13
  want to give another couple of easy amendments that you would make if you could snap your fingers
• 1:40:18
  here in Australia yeah yeah music music education for everyone and that that's it's a it's a
• 1:40:24
  shameful in advanced education nation like Australia that we have two thirds of our primary school
• 1:40:33
  kids don't have a music teacher including us we don't and I think I think that's something that
• 1:40:40
  we could and should fix very quickly not only because of the music but because of the declining
• 1:40:46
  encasement in school the well-being and health of people we ever really knows the healing power
• 1:40:53
  that music and particularly rock music and I think music any music is good but you know I think
• 1:40:58
  is my thinking is more about rock and roll I was hosting the couple of years ago in the Sydney
• 1:41:04
  Opera House their evening called can rock and roll save our schools and we had a really deep
• 1:41:10
  amazing conversations about an example about how when the rock and roll enters the school primary
• 1:41:16
  school and the kids are engaged it changes everything and I think that's that's something and again
• 1:41:22
  I'm offering often the the Finnish model here where every primary school teacher in Finland is
• 1:41:30
  a music teacher you can you can qualify to teach in a primary school unless you are
• 1:41:36
  musical in the sense you need to be able to sing or most of them play on instrument piano guitar
• 1:41:42
  or multiple instruments and what happens in a Finnish primary school regularly is that when the
• 1:41:48
  mathematics doesn't go and the kids say I don't get it or this is difficult or put the books away
• 1:41:55
  and let's sing a little bit that's lovely and and that I think we have left music here in Australia
• 1:42:02
  to be mostly accessible the elite those who can like myself who can if I want I can pay for that
• 1:42:10
  but I think that nobody should be as money for kids to have access to rock and roll
• 1:42:16
  yeah so how am I could make it in in Sydney called Ricky Gradova is working with I think it's about
• 1:42:24
  three or four hundred New South Wales schools primary public primary schools where kids have never seen
• 1:42:30
  a music teacher before and he's bringing the the rock and roll to these kids and chasing lives of
• 1:42:36
  hundreds of thousands of kids fabulous and and that so that is something that again one of these
• 1:42:42
  uncomfortable conversations because it's about it's about money it's about priorities what we do
• 1:42:47
  but would be one of those things and you know if I had a power here I would definitely
• 1:42:52
  and it's also about winning an argument against traditionalists who would say that classical music
• 1:42:56
  has to take primacy yeah I have nothing I love classical music but it's not for everyone
• 1:43:01
  and it's it's not appealing for it's not appealing for young people like rock and roll is like
• 1:43:07
  rock and roll is not for everyone but it's for most people most people put their put their hand up
• 1:43:12
  when they when they see a guitar and they can be three minutes or a rock and roll star all right
• 1:43:18
  one last thing you want to throw into the mix as a reform no well I have have a number of things
• 1:43:28
  that I've been kind of thinking about but they're probably more about how do we do these things here
• 1:43:33
  rather than what should be the new things I think I've been thinking hard here how could we
• 1:43:41
  somehow mobilize the grassroots collaboration between schools and educators here in Australia as
• 1:43:47
  you know that we have and those who don't know the system here that we have eight states and territories
• 1:43:53
  here each one has three parallel systems the Catholic private and and government system and there's
• 1:44:02
  nothing no collaboration between those systems in this country and and that's something that I
• 1:44:07
  would love to so we have 24 systems that don't collaborate in a small country like Australia
• 1:44:12
  and in any any others these systems that we can see good examples and solutions often to
• 1:44:18
  many of these problems so what I would love to see happening here more I find a ways to
• 1:44:24
  truly energize the collaboration between the schools across the systems and between the systems
• 1:44:31
  within the jurisdictions and still I often say and there's no no way of criticizing anyone but
• 1:44:38
  Australia as a education environment for me is the place where there's less collaboration between
• 1:44:44
  schools than I've seen anywhere else and we have workplace schools and education compared to Finland
• 1:44:51
  or Singapore any other but not for everyone and they often in a kind of pockets of here and there
• 1:44:57
  in this beautiful country but there's there's very little sharing and learning from one another and
• 1:45:02
  really seeing education as a collective common good here for a lot of antipathy and and
• 1:45:10
  distrust as well between the different streams of education because public school families are
• 1:45:16
  resentful of the amount of money that private schools get from the government and private school
• 1:45:20
  families are you know look down their nose on public schools and then the Catholic schools
• 1:45:25
  their own thing there's it's not like we're all pulling in the same direction yeah it's a very
• 1:45:30
  complex education space we don't have you don't have public schools here we don't have private schools
• 1:45:35
  this is kind of a hybrid space of all kinds of money is coming from everywhere and people doing
• 1:45:40
  their own things and nobody nobody really collaborates you know shares about what they do and that's
• 1:45:46
  the opportunity we have for the future and there's the same opportunity everywhere to get into this
• 1:45:51
  space that I mentioned the Albertan this day initiative to improve schools to to systematically
• 1:45:58
  invest in collaboration and sharing because that's where the that's where the change happens
• 1:46:03
  and so last question what is school for in the 21st century so what is the purpose of the school
• 1:46:11
  yeah how should we think about what schools are for that is the that's another
• 1:46:20
  uncomfortable conversation because we quickly get into the debates about this and that but I
• 1:46:25
  think and you know it can mean different things for different people and you as a parent you
• 1:46:31
  probably want to think about the the schooling education for your for your twins and kids that you
• 1:46:37
  have a different view but you know for me as an educator and parent yeah I think for me at the
• 1:46:43
  heart of this purpose conversation is the the the power of education to help my kids to realize
• 1:46:51
  their talent and it obviously it's it's built on my firm belief that every every child individual
• 1:47:00
  has a talent somewhere there but it's often it's it's so deep in your it's like a human the natural
• 1:47:07
  resources that sometimes you have to drill deep or you know spend a lot of time finding something
• 1:47:12
  but when you find it they can change everything so for me it's this finding your passion your talent
• 1:47:18
  and education is the best equipped to do that and I'm saying this because I think that those
• 1:47:25
  individuals who have truly found their talent they can change everything they can change themselves
• 1:47:30
  and the people around them and and everything else and the other way around as well that if you don't
• 1:47:34
  know what you I could or what what you kind of are able to do then you continue you know trying all
• 1:47:41
  kinds of things and often often choose the wrong way and then it's too late so that's that's why
• 1:47:47
  I think the the education that the purpose is there to help obviously to learn about the world
• 1:47:54
  around you but also the explore the the treasure within. Pazzy thank you it's been great thanks
• 1:48:01
  thank you