Education must prepare children to create the future, curriculums stifle pupil individuality, you can’t predict how a bird will fly, Pisa (the Programme for International Student Assessment) is the worst education invention of the 21st century and exam outcomes create “mediocre people and losers”.

These were just some of the colourful, intriguing and ear-catching statements made by Yong Zhao, foundation distinguished professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas and a professor of educational leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in Australia, during a session at the World Education Summit on Tuesday.

During the session, nominally titled Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All, Professor Zhao outlined numerous views that sought to challenge many of the assumed truths in education and get everyone in education thinking differently.

‘There is no future’

He started by outlining why he believes the idea often posited in education that we need to prepare children for the future is “meaningless” because there is “no future waiting for them”.

“We’ve been running schools for a long time and every school tends to have this view that we have to get our kids ready for the future…future readiness - but that is a lie: it’s impossible to get kids to be ready for the future. There is no future waiting for our children. Nobody is creating the future for them.”

He elaborated by explaining he does not mean they have no future but that we cannot hope to predict what that future will be. As such, we need to prepare them to be the creators of their own future.

He cited the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as examples of things that have occurred now and are rapidly changing the world but that a few years ago almost no one predicted and so we could never have claimed to prepare people for.

“The future is uncertain and our children are the creators of the future so we are preparing them to create the future, not to be ready for the future.”

He noted too that educators have a vested interest in getting this right because it is the current generation of pupils who will be the job creators and workers of the future that will create the world we all live in.

“That’s our retirement…if the future has too many battles, wars, declining economies, all these problems - if our children are not good at handling that future - your and my retirement will suffer because we will not leave in peace or prosperity.”

Predicting the flight of birds

Moving on, Professor Zhao said one of the big problems education needs to address is that curricula stifle the opportunity for children to discover their true talents by focusing almost entirely on trying to ensure all students are at a certain level by a certain time - something he said is “absurd”.

He used the colourful analogy of trying to treat children’s learning like the “flight of dead birds” whose trajectory can be plotted before being thrown.

However, children are not “dead birds” but in fact all individuals with their own talents, capabilities and interests. As such, it is more akin to throwing a live bird, whose path cannot be predicted.

“There is no way you can predict [that] but in our schools, we have a plan like this and national testing to make sure all the birds will meet the same point at the same time - if not you are a bad bird. It’s just a horrible idea.”

Yet, by pushing them all through curriculum systems with tightly defined success metrics, he says, we are depriving many children of the chance to truly discover what they are good at or have a passion for - whether within maths or music, robotics, science or art - and how this can then be harnessed for the future.

“If you don’t have access to music, how can you know you will be good at that? But in our schools, we got rid of those opportunities by focusing on reading and maths.”

‘Mediocre people and losers’

Furthermore, he argued that the narrowing of curricula has the effect of making a lot of children “mediocre” and manufacturing “losers” because the exams at the end of these curricula serve only to tell a select number they have “succeeded” - chiefly those who go to select institutions such as Harvard or Oxbridge while everyone else is seen as achieving less.

“Oxbridge can only take so many students so you have a pyramid system with most people below the average and a few people winning the system, and then you drive parents and students crazy, saying, ‘I have to be as good as them,’ but you can’t because that is how the system is defined.”

He says this is then held up as a meritocracy where, in theory, anyone can reach the top but in reality, the system is designed so that the same types of people reach the top and then the cycle repeats.

This focus on testing also led to Professor Zhao saying he believes the rise of Pisa rankings over the past two decades or so was “the worst invention in education in the 21st century” because it had made nations more focused on competing against one another than on what their children actually need.

He argued too that if the results of tests were a real indication of a nation’s prosperity then the US - for decades the biggest economy in the world - would have lost this power because its test scores were so much lower than other nations.

The fact that this has not happened shows that simply putting success down to one thing such as test scores ignores many other social facets, including confidence - but education policy has become so wrapped up in Pisa scores that it overlooks this.

Given all these concerns, Professor Zhao urged teachers and educators to do what they can to bring more creativity, flexibility and opportunity to school life for children by seeing them as real people with their own unique view on the world.

“Children have their own personalities and intelligence and experience - so how do we as educators invite children to become themselves?”