On painkillers and vitamins

Education can learn a lot from other professions.

The airline industry can tell us a lot about continuous improvement. The health profession can tell us about evidence use but also the difficulty of implementation and fidelity. The marketing industry, in a unique funding landscape like the Australian one, can tell us a lot about strategic focus and how we present to the community. The analogy I’m going to use in this piece comes directly from the marketing world, and it concerns products as either painkillers or vitamins.

Painkillers address an acute problem that needs to be addressed with some urgency. We buy these products even when budgets are tight, because we need the problem to go away. They’re seen to be essential, and we don’t need a lot of persuading. An example might be business software when new compliance legislation is introduced or a Year 12 student who is at risk of failing and needs a tutor.

Vitamins, on the other hand, improve wellbeing, might give us pleasure, and are rarely urgent; they’re the ‘nice to haves’. They’re vulnerable to budget cuts and cost-of-living pressure. The main differences between painkillers and vitamins are the problem severity and timing.

Lately, it appears that schools are focusing more on vitamins and less on painkillers. The drivers are unclear. Could it be simple marketing in a competitive school choice landscape? Could schools be seeking a good news story in a world of bad news about education? Many schools (and even parents choosing an education for their child) seem to have shifted their focus away from needs and towards wants.

What prompted this piece? Three times in a few weeks, dogs stories have dominated my online and in-person news feed: a school that invited senior students to bring their dogs to school for the day, therapy dogs in schools (what’s the therapy dog there to treat? Aversion to school?), or my favourite, what we can learn about leadership from dogs. (A colleague learned very little about senior leadership from her day with a horse on a related but quite unbelievable note).

It begs the question about what people think schools are for. Call me the good news grinch, but it seems to be belonging-gone-mad. But let me unpack these two core ideas a little more.

Painkillers are essentials. Based on a critical problem to be solved. There are obvious parallels with the medical profession, where needs are addressed in the way that is most likely to lead to an efficient (quick!) and effective outcome. Most people would consider education a need, but where things get blurry is that we have students in our care for so long (a year with a class, 13 years in schooling), so it’s easy to forget the urgency of that need. The acute or pointy end of ineffective early reading instruction won’t be seen for many years, but the consequences can be catastrophic and life-altering.

While the AARE bloggers like to talk about “evidence” with mock bunny ears, a profession of maturity does not question washing hands before conducting surgery as being ideological. In our profession, evidence is derided by many education academics, and following the lead of more mature professions like medicine is seen to be a bad thing. I recently heard Paul Kirschner (on Anna Stokke’s excellent podcast) talk about seeking a surgeon for a hip replacement; he said that he wanted the surgeon who has completed the operation many times, who has engaged in plenty of “drill and kill”! A lot of research into how people learn is conducted in medicine (granted, with adults), because learning in that context can mean the difference between life and death. We treat learning very casually in comparison, encouraging teachers to teach according to preference.

Vitamins, on the other hand, are all the add-ons, often the marketing fluff. They’re feel-good distractions from the learning, where there may or may not be a good news story to tell. Entrepreneurial education falls into this category. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants to learn the deep and broad domain knowledge of entrepreneurs, we invite students to somehow think like an entrepreneur. This mirrors progressive curriculum reforms of the past that encourage students to think like a historian or scientist. How does one think like a physicist? Know a lot of physics!

Much like the wellness industry, these add-ons are unregulated, lack accountability and are supported by a shonky evidence base. Time-consuming, sometimes expensive, and often distracting, they often come at a high cost for gullible people: parents, school leaders who know little about how students learn, and ultimately, students.