The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the results of the 2022 PISA test this week and the news for Canada is not good.
PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is a standardized test used by many OECD countries to gauge how kids in their public school systems are doing in subjects like math, science, and reading. These assessments are not content-based, they are skills-based tests.
We have been told for at least a decade, and sometimes longer, that a fabulous new way of teaching called “discovery learning” was being introduced into Canadian schools because it would emphasize the learning of skills. It would replace the boring “drill and kill” approach associated with content-based education—you know, that old-fashioned method of education that says kids should actually learn stuff.
The effectiveness of discovery learning has always been a controversial claim. Or at least, it’s controversial among many scholars except for those who create the curriculum guidelines in provincial governments and among teachers’ unions for whom no amount of evidence against discovery learning is ever enough to diminish their confidence in this “new” approach to education. By the way, “new” is in scare quotes because discovery learning goes back to the 19th-century education theorist, John Dewey.
There’s actually nothing new about it, and, no, it wasn’t invented in order to tackle “the fast pace of change in the 21st century” or any other nonsense usually spouted by pedagogy “experts” and government ministers in order to sell this slick snake oil to skeptical parents.
Nevertheless, because PISA can only assess skills and not specific content—because how could the same test be used in Norway and Canada if the test was specific to the content learned in either jurisdiction—one would think that skills-based “discovery learning” would prepare our students to do especially well on precisely these international assessments.
But that is not what the OECD is reporting.
Canada’s overall score for math proficiency dropped 35 points between 2003 and 2022. There is a sharper decline since 2019 which may be attributable in part to the government shutting down schools in their attempt to deal with the pandemic. But that dip is only a steeper part of a continuous downward slope.
Critics of discovery learning, such as University of Winnipeg math professor Anna Stokke, have long argued that the absence of content leads to poor learning outcomes. In British Columbia, the 2014 curriculum redesign was all about pushing discovery learning into every grade and every subject despite the fact that experts like Stokke were ringing alarm bells that it wasn’t working in math.
And guess what? The PISA scores show a decline in reading skills and science, not just math. Reading scores have dropped 27 points since 2000. There was a slight uptick between 2012 and 2014, but since then—right about when B.C.’s curriculum reforms were introduced—Canada’s reading score has dropped precipitously by an additional 20 points in just seven years. Science scores have declined 20 points since 2005.
As economist Thomas Sowell points out, it is never the technocratic experts who have to pay the price for their failed attempts to socially re-engineer society in accordance with their theories. In this case, it is Canadian children who will pay the price in terms of future opportunities and careers closed off to them that might otherwise have been open.
As a professor, my colleagues and I are dealing with the products of this increasingly dysfunctional public education system. It is affecting our teaching, and it’s probably fuelling the mental health crisis among students who now arrive at university ill-prepared to do undergraduate-level work.
The decline in public school learning will also affect our democracy, economy, and our culture. As Canadian historian Hilda Neatby wrote, “Education supplies all other industries, including those concerned with the government and the defense of the country. If the educational industry falters it necessarily follows the whole structure of the nation is threatened.” I don’t know about anyone else, but having less competent people running our health-care systems, universities, and economy is not something I look forward to.
It’s time to end this experiment with “discovery learning.” It may also be time to end the monopoly on curriculum design by those who are advocates of discovery learning despite the undeniable evidence that it is ineffective and harmful.
