'Process over content' has weakened secondary education, academic says

Secondary schooling has suffered because the sidelining of knowledge has reduced its status and that of those who teach it, says Elizabeth Rata, academic at Auckland University's faculty of education and former secondary teacher. We look at her ideas.

Since the 1970s, education has turned away from the so-called 'transmission of knowledge' approach, to the inquiry approach that is promoted with great enthusiasm today. This has seen content replaced by process as the focus of teaching and learning. Knowing how to gain access to knowledge is now more highly valued than content-knowledge itself. Yet the separation of content and process is flawed, Dr Rata said.

"What we learn and how we learn are two sides of the one coin. Content and process are, or should be, inseparable. We forget this at our peril."

In the shift to process over content, and to student inquiry over teacher transmission, secondary teachers no longer taught subjects such as English, physics, classical studies, mathematics, Maori and history to students. They now taught students.

The subject and its content had been sidelined, peripheral to the all-important teacher-student relationship, and the teacher's ability to relate to students was more highly valued than the teacher's subject knowledge.

This shift had huge consequences. It had weakened the secondary sector. It affected New Zealand's capacity to become a first-class knowledge society, Dr Rata said.

"Content is the raw material of thinking. To teach children to think without an extensive treasure trove of raw material is to ask them to work with and recycle the poor-quality, inadequate resources of limited knowledge that in time becomes well-honed ignorance and reinforced prejudice."

Dr Rata said one way to help turn this around was to reward teachers for their knowledge.

"Secondary teachers provide knowledge at an advanced level to our young people. To do so, these teachers spend three to four years majoring in a specialist subject. They are specialists and their knowledge deserves recognition and respect. Let's reward them with money and status."

Dr Rata's full article on this topic is at this web page.

More information on Dr Rata and her research.

An Education Forum hot topic on teacher pay.