A few months ago, I wrote about the importance of balance in education reform. Since then, I’ve become increasingly troubled by what I’m seeing across Aotearoa and in other parts of the world. Not only are we struggling to sustain balance, but our current way of talking about education almost guarantees we’ll lose it.
The pattern is familiar – we identify a problem, find an evidence-backed solution, implement it with zeal, then set the stage for the next pendulum swing. We’ve seen it with innovative learning environments, child-centred learning, and now with the renewed focus on structured literacy and knowledge-rich curricula.
What’s driving this isn’t just the pace of reform, but a deeper issue – binary thinking. This is when we view things as two opposite extremes, such as good or bad, right or wrong, ignoring the “shades of grey” that exist in between. We keep reducing complex ideas into simple opposites: phonics or whole language, knowledge-rich or child-centred, academic or vocational. These false choices make education sound like a zero-sum game rather than the deeply human, complex enterprise it really is.
Lately, this binary mindset has hardened into something even more troubling – what I’d call binary positionalism. In today’s policy environment, particularly in New Zealand, debate has become fiercely positional: for or against the government, with us or against us. The result is an increasingly combative tone that makes it difficult to argue for a balanced view.
Those who try to occupy the middle ground (e.g. those who dare to say “yes, but…” or “both, and…”) risk being dismissed as fence-sitters. Yet this is exactly where the important work of education should happen: in the nuanced space between extremes, where evidence and experience meet, and where different perspectives can inform each other.
Why Binary Thinking Fails
The key issue here is that education deals with complex, not complicated, problems. Complicated problems can be solved with rules and recipes. Complex ones can’t. They depend on relationships, context, and human judgment. Yet so often our reforms treat learning as if it were predictable and controllable: find the right method, train everyone to follow it, and measure consistency.
Consider the following chain of thinking for example:
Or this one…
Each of these steps sounds reasonable, but together they create rigidity where responsiveness is needed. The evidence on phonics, for instance, is strong – but when “maintaining fidelity” becomes more important than meeting the needs of actual children, we’ve lost the point.
As Yong Zhao reminds us, decades of standardised reforms have failed to lift student outcomes across the OECD. It’s not that evidence doesn’t matter – it’s that good teaching depends on knowing when, how, and for whom to apply it.
Moving Beyond Either/Or
Real balance means both/and thinking: structure and flexibility, phonics and meaning-making, knowledge and creativity, explicit teaching and inquiry. It’s about building teacher capability, not just enforcing compliance; designing policy with teachers, not for them; and trusting professionals to make sound judgments in context.
When we lose that balance, we see predictable consequences: pedagogy narrows, professionalism diminishes, the curriculum compresses, and wellbeing slips down the list of priorities. And it’s often the students least well served by previous approaches who are most affected by the new ones.
This isn’t about rejecting structured literacy or knowledge-rich curricula. It’s about rejecting the binary thinking that forces false choices and creates conditions for the next pendulum swing.
We need structure without rigidity. Evidence without dogma. Knowledge with experience. Accountability with trust. Academic content alongside creative expression, physical literacy, and polymathic thinking.
We need teaching that combines clarity with curiosity, research with reflection, explicit instruction with inquiry-based learning – all deployed strategically based on professional judgment about what students actually need.
Most fundamentally, we need policy designed with practitioners as partners, not for them as implementers. Built on both evidence and trust. Recognising that sustainable improvement comes not from implementing the right programme, but from building system-wide capacity for responsive, sophisticated practice.
The balance we need isn’t a compromise between extremes. It’s the recognition that education’s complexity demands both/and thinking. That knowledge AND experience matter. That structure AND flexibility are essential. That we can be rigorous about evidence without being rigid about implementation.
Our students deserve education that prepares them not just to pass tests, but to think across disciplines, solve novel problems, and thrive in uncertain futures. That requires moving beyond binary thinking to embrace the messy, complex, deeply human work that education actually is.
We have to get the balance right. Not by choosing between false alternatives, but by refusing to accept that choice as necessary in the first place.
For more read my previous posts:
One reply on “The Rise of Positionalism”
Hi Derek. This binary approach is straight out of the neo-liberal play book. Turning teaching (or any public service) into a production line and then you dont have to pay them so much