Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, was infamous for his obsession with numbers. He believed that if you could quantify something – if you could track it, measure it, put it on a neat spreadsheet – you could control it.
The war became a numbers game.
Body counts went up, therefore McNamara could argue America was winning. Never mind the fact that these figures had little to do with the actual conditions on the ground. Never mind that the metrics were meaningless in the grander scheme of war and politics. If the numbers looked good, the system must be working.
Of course, it wasn’t.
This brings me to what I call the McNamara Fallacy of Education.
Measuring the Wrong Things
Schools today seem obsessed with measurable outcomes. Standardised tests, ATAR scores, ranking systems – these numbers drive decision-making at every level. If a school’s scores are high, it’s seen as “successful.” If a student’s marks are strong, they’re “achieving.” But much like McNamara’s numbers, this data only tells part of the story.
What’s not (usually) being measured? Well, among other things…
- Students’ curiosity about the world.
- Their sense of connection to others, their empathy for others, their ability to see themselves in community – in relationship – with others, their sense of justice.
- The development of students’ sense of ethics, responsibility, sense of duty to contribute to making the world a better place.
- Students’ development of wisdom – not just doing things right but doing the right things!
- Students’ agency – Their growing willingness and ability to act with courage and humility, shape their communities, and the world beyond them, for the better
- Their love of learning as a process of personal growth
None of these fit neatly into a spreadsheet. They are extraordinarily hard to measure so they’re ignored or sidelined. Instead of measuring these markers, we get a performative system – one where students learn to play the game of schooling – rather than engaging in deep learning.
We can do more in education. We can aspire to be more. We can move beyond the measures of education’s McNamara Fallacy.
So much of what we desire for our young people can be developed through historical pedagogy. We need to place them at the core of the process of historical learning.
The Hidden Curriculum: Learning to Perform
I see it every day. Students, teachers, families, tutors, administrators, and politicians aren’t thinking about understanding learning – they’re thinking about what will get them marks. (Some perhaps aren’t thinking at all.)
We tick off checklists, hit word counts, and tailor responses to assessment rubrics (some built upon existing models of pedagogy such as the historical thinking framework)… and sometimes we don’t think about learning at all! Often our focus isn’t on intellectual growth but on meeting criteria efficiently.
Let’s not point the finger of blame at students for this!
From an early age, students have been trained to see school as a production line – a system where their goal is to get through the process rather than learn.
Well-meaning families and teachers have reinforced this mentality:
Start early. Get it done. Stay on top of deadlines. Make sure you’re writing to the marking guide. Follow the structure. Here’s the ATAR cut-off – make sure you hit it.
rather than
Take your time. Reflect a bit longer. It’s ok to be confused. Give it a try. Maybe you’re not quite ready to start yet. There’s more than one pathway to getting where you want to go. This grade doesn’t define you. Take a risk. Challenge yourself.
The result? A functionalist approach to education that sees students as products of a system, as future workers, rather than as individuals, thinkers, citizens, or changemakers.
What Should We Measure?
If we really want to assess the success of our education system, we need to rethink what matters. Instead of reducing students to ‘numbers’ (both literally and metaphorically), we should be asking:
✔️ Are students curious about the world?
✔️ Do they have a healthy sense of connection to others?
✔️ Are they people of justice? Are they empathetic?
✔️ Do they define themselves as individuals who with responsibilities in community – in relationship – with others?
✔️ Are they ethical?
✔️ Do they have a sense of responsibility, a sense of duty, to contribute to making the world a better place?
✔️ Are they developing as people of wisdom?
✔️Can they act with agency, with courage and humility, to shape their communities, and the world beyond them, for the better?
This is not an exhaustive list. Much more can be developed – and should be developed – in our history classrooms. But it’s a start.
History pedagogy must seek to ‘do more’ and ‘be more’. It must move beyond the trap of educations McNamara Fallacy. The historical thinking framework is about much more than creating a rubric of assessment descriptors that can be ticked off for the purposes of a grade.
None of this is easy to measure, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. In fact, at the end of the day, perhaps these are the most important things we could develop in education.
The problem with the McNamara Fallacy in education isn’t just that we measure often measure the wrong things. It’s that, by doing so, we slowly erode the very purpose of education itself.
Disrupted History 