Andreas Schleicher, a German, is a leading figure in Ireland’s education system, despite not holding an official position, teaching in Ireland, or having ever lived there. As a celebrated mathematician and statistician from Germany, Schleicher frequently finds Irish education ministers seeking his counsel on improving the nation’s education standards.
Renowned globally as an education expert, Schleicher has been termed “the world’s schoolmaster” by The Atlantic magazine, and Michael Gove, former British education minister, has honoured him as a catalyst of revolutions, surpassed only by Karl Marx among Germans.
Schleicher currently holds the notable–and rather long–designation of Director for Education and Skills and Special Adviser on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
Schleicher’s reputation is largely bolstered by his initiation of a worldwide education assessment in 2000, the Pisa tests (Programme for International Student Assessment). Conducted triennially, these tests assess hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds worldwide in reading, maths and science to evaluate their countries’ education standards.
Exam results usually cause students to be anxious, but in this case, it’s the Minister for Education who anxiously awaits to see how Irish pupils have performed. Past poor Pisa test results have triggered demands for reform and resignations.
However, the situation improved for the current Minister for Education, Norma Foley, when the results were last published in December. Irish 15-year-olds achieved the second-highest score globally in reading, a significant improvement from their eighth position in 2018. They also fared above average in maths and science, ranking 11th and 12th globally respectively, up from 21st and 22nd in 2018. Singapore surpassed Ireland in reading, with Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Estonia following.
However, despite these commendable strides, Andreas Schleicher appears less than impressed with the Irish education system.
The individual points out that our scholastic record is indeed a “genuine asset”, however, he cautions that our framework is excessively “mechanised”, where every person studies at a similar speed and utilises a uniform system of learning. He additionally mentions that we lack a substantial number of high-performing students in comparison to numerous competing nations, a consequence of our overindustrialised education model. This framework, he states, is designed for the average learner.
Notably, the amount of students we admit for tertiary education is one of the highest globally, which initially signifies progress. Despite this, he’s apathetic towards this achievement. With universities increasingly feeling the pressure of technological advances, he believes they mainly focus their efforts on content that can be easily digitalised and automated. He criticises the current success metrics used by numerous universities, as they mostly reward compliance and adherence to established cognitive frameworks.
By contrast, he praises Germany for its approach, where students get paid to attend university as they gain more practical and appealing vocational learning experiences by working alongside companies such as BMW or Siemens. In stark contrast, Ireland’s scholastic system often perceives vocational options as the last resort, despite these individuals often being better prepared for the future due to their experience handling real-world problems.
Additionally, he expresses significant concern about the emotional resilience and psychological wellbeing of Irish students, which is found to be below average. Reduced school belongingness also raises concerns about the quality of their social relationships and capacity to manage difficulty.
In the realm of Irish academia, there is an inherent, structural imbalance between robust cognitive outcomes and deficient emotional resilience, social interactions quality, and mental wellbeing, according to Andreas Schleicher. The Irish system stands in stark contrast to more balanced approaches observed in Finland or Denmark, and closely mirrors South Korea. The advent and subsequent proliferation of smartphones and social media over the last 15 years have significantly impacted children’s emotional resilience.
Schleicher suggests that technology might be a significant contributing factor to these adverse trends as it can isolate students, thereby undermining their social relationships. Nevertheless, he notes that countries like Denmark have successfully harmonised academic prowess with safeguarding students’ emotional health.
One key contributing method, he notes, is reinventing the educational curriculum to make it more pertinent to students’ lives, fostering an environment of positive student-teacher relationships. If students perceive that their academic learnings have real-world applicability and significance, they are less likely to retreat into the isolating world of social media. Conversely, if the education system fails to engage students sufficiently, turning to social media – which can further decouple them from the physical world – becomes an increasingly appealing option.
Schleicher also proposes that students’ engagement with electronic devices and social media in schools should be age-dependent. He asserts that it is essential to equip teenagers with the skills to navigate the unregulated frontier of social media, understand the effect of algorithms on public discourse, and differentiate between opinion and fact.
Schleicher is a firm advocate for reassessing how students are evaluated. He believes that exams marking the completion of compulsory education, such as the Irish “Leaving Cert”, are profoundly flawed, arguing that existing university evaluation indicators disproportionately reward adherence to established norms and modes of thinking.
Schleicher believes in a teaching methodology where the students’ ability to apply knowledge in diverse situations is put to the test rather than their ability to regurgitate information they’ve been fed over years in an artificial set up called “exams”. He criticises the current system that supports rote learning and argues that this has caused teaching and learning to be superficial.
Schleicher argues that accessing knowledge through tools such as smartphones during examinations should not be seen as a violation. Instead, the educational system should focus on fostering a conceptual understanding in students and teaching them how to apply this knowledge practically. In fact, students in vocational training who are accustomed to dealing with real-life situations may perform better than their counterparts in academic tracks who are not given this exposure.
He recommends revisiting the old style of apprenticeship-based learning approach paired with the latest technology. Schleicher suggests that this approach, which involves learning from actual people and dealing with real-time mistakes, has been proven to be effective.
Schleicher’s own experience has greatly impacted the way he views teaching and learning. Despite being the son of an education professor and a doctor, Schleicher initially struggled in school. He only began to thrive after switching schools in his last academic year, and even successfully won a national science award.
He attributes this change to being taught by engaging teachers. Schleicher went on to earn a degree in physics, and a master’s degree in maths, eventually moving into educational research. At the OECD, he convinced the organisation to gather deeper, more substantive data on school outputs. His influence led to the creation of the Pisa tests, a system that while influential has garnered criticism for leading to quick, temporary solutions for the sole purpose of climbing in global rankings and prioritising a narrow spectrum of the educational process.
Schleicher remains optimistic about what the future holds. The capacity of technology to more effectively engage pupils, relieve teachers from grading monotonous assignments, and prompt tutors to devise tests which evaluate a student’s thought processes, is apparent. This doesn’t symbolise the demise of teachers, but rather the discontinuation of a specific teaching approach.
He states, “If your sole responsibility as a teacher lies in imparting knowledge, AI will render you obsolete. However, if you function as a mentor, motivator, social worker or architect, it’s bound to be the most stimulating job you’ve ever held… AI won’t substitute teachers, but teachers competent in utilising AI will succeed those who fail to grasp its importance.”