A quick, and slightly tongue in cheek, response to Dr Nick Jackson.
Student Name: The System
Class: Education Reform – Ongoing
Date: April 2025
General Comments:
The system has a long and storied history. For over a century, it has played a central role in the delivery of mass education, contributing significantly to the spread of literacy, numeracy, and general knowledge. Its structure provides access to learning for broad populations and has traditionally offered stability and opportunity in times of great social and economic change. For this, it deserves considerable recognition.
The system has good and bad days. It shows some potential for growth but tends to underperform when a wide range of metrics are applied.
In its current phase, the system is showing signs of exhaustion. It continues to rely on outdated habits that no longer align with the needs of a diverse, digital, and rapidly changing society. Its strengths, though once vital, now risk becoming its blind spots.
Strengths:
- Demonstrated commitment to access and consistency
- Capable of delivering varying levels of standardised experiences to large groups
- Has played a crucial role in civic and social cohesion
- Historically dependable in routine and structure
- Has the ability to keep large numbers of children supervised while families engage in economic and other activities
Weaknesses:
1. Rushing Without Mastery:
The system tends to hurry from one year to the next without ensuring deep understanding. Work is often incomplete or only superficially addressed. Its conveyor-belt precision prioritises efficiency over mastery. There is little time for consolidation, and learning becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
2. High Stress and Imbalanced Focus:
The system consistently prioritises high-stakes outcomes, contributing to an environment marked by anxiety, fatigue, and burnout. The ‘curriculum straitjacket’ it wears has become too tight. Students under its care often experience a complex range of conditions. Symptoms of this weakness may include feelings of a lack of purpose or meaning, a sense of alienation or lack of connection, feeling dazed and drained, feeling trapped caught in a cycle of performativity or a calendar of assessment requirements.
3. Disconnection from Human Experience:
The system has become increasingly inflexible and mechanical, sacrificing the moments that build trust, identity, and personal growth. Authentic, relational, and slow pedagogical moments – the kind that shape young people’s sense of self and place in the world – are too often marginalised / sidelined / sacrificed / traded off / lost, seen as outside the system’s ‘real purpose’. The system focuses more on compliance and control than on building true experiences of connection, curiosity and creativity. There is a widening gulf between test scores and meaningful education.
4. Suppression of Voice and Agency:
Generally, this system makes little space for genuine student voice or civic imagination. The system tends to teach what is rather than what could be. It encourages passivity rather than participation. This leaves young people with few opportunities to develop leadership, creativity, or the ability to influence their world. The signs of this deficiency are increasingly evident.
5. Inflexibility and Resistance to Change:
Despite the emergence of new technologies and pedagogies, the system remains slow to adapt. It struggles to integrate digital tools in meaningful ways and continues to follow routines better suited to another era. Innovation is generally seen viewed as a ‘problem to be solved’, an optional extra, beyond systemic requirements, an inconvenient and unwanted disruption to comfortable practice.
6. Short-Term Thinking and Balance Issues:
The system places undue emphasis on short-term metrics at the expense of long-term goals such as equity, social justice, and holistic development. It rarely pauses to reflect, reassess, or realign with deeper human purposes. It tends to function well-enough in some environments while completing failing students and their communities in other. Imbalance issues seem worst when dealing with navigating socio-cultural, socio-political and/or socio-economic lines.
The system tends not to achieve highly in diverse regional, cultural or geographic settings. It tends to achieve best in settings where success has previously been achieved.
7. Declining Support and Resourcing:
The system’s ability to function effectively is increasingly undermined by inconsistent support and undervaluing from community leaders and families. Many of its efforts are weakened by a lack of informed engagement from those around it. Resources are stretched, and it can no longer reliably meet its obligations.
Summary Comment:
The system has served society well in the past, but it is no longer enough to simply maintain what has always been done.
Its weaknesses have been thoroughly documented over many years by numerous expert observers. It is noted that despite constant feedback, the system seems unwilling or unable to address criticisms fully or to rapidly changing demands upon it.
It must reflect on its current condition and consider a shift toward deeper, slower, and more human modes of learning. If it is to thrive in a future defined by extremely rapid and disruptive change, it must become more responsive, more equitable, and more attuned to the needs of both learners and the world they are entering.
The potential is still there.
But it must stop rushing, re-centre its purpose, and be willing to imagine something better.
Other:
The system should make efforts to listen to its teachers and students more.
The system would achieve more highly if it more closely engaged with, and took practical action upon, a full-range research.
The system should seriously consider its priorities and plan more effectively for future needs.
The system should be given greater resources. These resources must include time for teachers to take long-term meaningful and considered action in a wide variety of areas of urgent need.
Disrupted History 