This Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 6 | February 28, 2025
Perhaps, schools have become factories of performance, where measurable results matter more than curiosity, critical thinking, or intellectual growth. If so AI might do more than threaten traditional assessment models. Maybe it’ll also exposing an even bigger flaw in education: what if schooling itself has been performative all along? Perhaps AI isn’t the problem – perhaps it’s the opportunity we need to finally rethink what education should be.
The challenge to ‘do more’ and ‘be more’: Performance in Assessment vs Deep Learning?
Week 5 marks the midpoint of the term, and for my Year 12s, that means they are deep into their IA2 independent source investigations (ISI). At this stage, they’ve chosen a topic, are engaging with secondary source readings, and are curating primary sources in preparation for analysis and evaluation.
At least, that’s the idea.
What I’ve observed over some years in my classroom practice is something more concerning. Rather than immersing themselves in the historical thinking process intended in best practice pedagogical approaches, many students seem fixated on completion rather than inquiry – rushing through research, “skipping the thinking” in a race to “get the job done”.
When faced with the choice between ‘completing the task’ and ‘thinking’, students seem to tend to choose the former. When faced with a choice between deep and authentic engagement with the historical thinking process, on the one hand, and the performative requirements of a high stakes assessment environment, on the other, students tend to choose the latter.
I find this choice sad. I believe this choice is detrimental to both the welfare of students as individuals and to our society more widely.
To be clear, this isn’t a problem created by students. The choices made by students in high-stakes assessment environments are understandable. They are not about bad study habits or poor time management. This choice does not reflect a student lack of curiousity of desire to learn.
It reflects a much deeper issue.
The Industrial Model of Education, Assessment, and the School Experience
There is something deeply industrial about what I’m seeing in my students. They move through their tasks in a linear, checklist fashion, aiming not to think deeply but to complete efficiently. This reflects, on an individual level, what many scholars have identified as the industrial model of education – one where schools function like factories rather than communities of inquiry.
In the industrial model, students become workers on the educational production line, churning out assessments, not to cultivate understanding, but to produce grades. Their performance is measured, sorted, and ranked, with the ultimate goal being not learning, but economic utility – university entrance, job prospects, and quantifiable achievement. Teachers in the industrial model do not act as facilitators of learning. They are co-opted into the role of manager, assessor and overseer. Some are conscious of this, some are not.
This mirrors the neoliberal and economic rationalist shift in education, where schools are framed less as places of intellectual growth and more as sites of economic productivity. Success is measured narrowly by ATAR results, university acceptances, and employment outcomes, not by curiosity, deep thinking, or personal transformation. (See my comments on the McNamara Fallacy in education in This Online Reader’s Digest: February 17 – 21, 2025).
This explains why students, even those who are capable of deep, reflective thought, struggle to break free from this functional mindset. They have been taught, over years, to see their schooling as a means to an end, rather than an intellectual pursuit in its own right.
Rather than being complicit in such a system, teachers and families have a duty to ensure that their young people are not enslaved to this system. It is incumbent upon teachers and families to serve their students’ best interests in both the long term – to walk a balance. A balance in which students both achieve the grades that they hope to, as well as to be fully formed citizens who are curious, socially engaged, connected and agentic. Deep and authentic ‘life-long learners’.
What Gets Measured Gets Valued – But Are We Measuring the Right Things?
The issue isn’t just that students prioritise performative efficiency over deep learning – it’s that the system rewards them for doing so.
Is this by design, or an unintended consequence? Either way, it reveals a fundamental values choice at the heart of education.
If, as a society, we truly value intellectual and social development, then this model of senior secondary schooling is a failure. But if the primary purpose of Year 12 is simply to act as a tertiary entrance sorting hat, then it is working exactly as intended.
And that raises uncomfortable questions:
- Has deep learning become incidental rather than central to senior assessment?
- Is the hidden curriculum of Year 12 more about ‘how to get good marks’ than critical thinking, ethics, and agency?
- Are the societal costs of industrial-model schooling worth their benefits – especially in the age of generative AI?
- If AI threatens performative assessment models, does it also expose the even larger weaknesses of educational systems that rely upon performative assessment rather than deep learning?
Critics of AI in education often argue that it undermines critical thinking, yet many of these same voices rarely challenge the rote, mechanistic schooling systems that have been eroding critical thought for decades. Perhaps AI isn’t the threat – perhaps it’s the opportunity we need to rethink schooling altogether.
Maybe this is the moment to reimagine subject-specific pedagogies, to move beyond McNamara’s Fallacy of Education, and to stop mistaking measurable outputs for meaningful learning.
Maybe it’s time to rejuvenate our schools, not as factories of performance, but as spaces where pedagogies that emphasise curiosity, inquiry, connection, and deep learning actually matter.
Disrupted History 