Arrogance and Ignorance go together like conjoined twins, but there isn’t a brain between them. We’ve seen it recently in the student lead climate protests. It’s a feature of our education system. We teach children that they are at the centre of the world, that they are so creative and smart and their generation will end bigotry and save the planet. And yet we would struggle to find a more woefully ignorant generation.
Some time ago I had the opportunity of seeing some results for a TIMSS trial in New Zealand. The school whose results I saw was an independent school. Their results far exceeded the national median. In fact, for Mathematics, the mean (of 2-3 students) from each of the five different test versions was significantly above the upper quartile (75th percentile) of the NZ wide results.
But what was striking was a section of the TIMS trial that asked questions about how children perceived their ability in mathematics. The children at this school did not perceive themselves to be good at mathematics in comparison to the New Zealand average. On average they rated themselves lower on statements like “I usually do well in mathematics”, “I learn things quickly in mathematics” and “I am good at working out difficult mathematics problems.” This despite the fact they were actually in the top quartile of New Zealand. Moreover, the students rated their teacher more highly in statements like “My teacher is good at explaining maths” and “My teacher is easy to understand”.
So here we have a group of children who are very skilled in comparison to the average New Zealand child. They rate their abilities lower than the average New Zealand child, and they rate their teacher higher than the average New Zealand child. In other words, they have a lower estimation of their own ability and higher estimation of the teacher. These are children ready to excel. They understand their limits and recognise in age and experience someone who can benefit them. Their less successful New Zealand counterparts, despite being objectively worse at mathematics, esteemed their abilities to be higher and their teacher’s abilities to be lower. An attitude of arrogant ignorance, which our public schools encourage through their child-centred philosophy, will hold these children back from true excellence.