Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr Rosemary Hipkins – emeritus researcher at NZCER, former science teacher, teacher educator, and one of the sharpest minds I know when it comes to thinking about education and the world it must prepare young people for. Rose has just published Lifelong Learning for a Post-Truth World, and our conversation left me with the kind of unsettled feeling that only comes when someone names something you’ve been circling around for years but haven’t quite landed on. So in this post I thought I’d share a few of those moments – not to summarise the episode, but to give you a taste of why I think this is one of the most important conversations we can be having in education right now.
We are hardwired for binary thinking – and we’re doing almost nothing about it
One of the things Rose said that resonated strongly with me (as I’ve written about previously) was her perspective on how we use binary thinking. Rose confessed she didn’t encounter a serious challenge to her binary thinking until she was in her late 40s, doing postgraduate study. Her late 40s. And she described sitting in the garden for a few hours afterwards because the realisation that the world wasn’t simply made of opposites – right/wrong, knowledge/skills, good/bad – was, in her words, a personal paradigm shift.
That’s a confronting statement for anyone who works in education. We are living in a moment when binary thinking is being weaponised – politically, socially, algorithmically. And yet, as Rose put it, we’re not teaching students young enough to even recognise it, let alone interrogate it.
I’ve been guilty of it myself. My early enthusiasm for digital technology in education was, if I’m honest, a kind of binary optimism – all upside, transformative potential, the democratisation of learning. What I’ve had to reluctantly accept over the years is that when you add human psychology into the mix, it’s never that clean. The same platforms designed to connect and inform are, by design, built to pull us into echo chambers, to confirm what we already believe, to simplify what is genuinely complex.
Post-truth isn’t just about fake news – it’s about the conditions we’re failing to create
Rose draws a useful distinction in her book between disinformation (deliberately created falsehood for the creator’s benefit), misinformation (well-intentioned spread of things that aren’t true), and mal-information (deliberate harm aimed at an individual). These aren’t new phenomena, but they’ve been turbocharged by the internet’s removal of the checks and balances that once came with formal publishing.
The question she raises – and it’s not a rhetorical one – is whether we’re equipping young people with the tools to navigate this. Not to be cynical about everything they read, but to develop the kind of epistemic trust literacy that lets them ask: who should I trust on this, and why?
That’s not a simple skill. It’s a disposition that has to be cultivated over time, woven into how we teach, not bolted on as a digital citizenship unit at Year 9.
The knowledge vs. skills binary is one we need to stop having
One of the most practically useful threads in our conversation was about the curriculum debate that’s playing out in Aotearoa right now. The framing – that we’ve tilted too far toward inquiry and competencies at the expense of knowledge – isn’t wrong in its diagnosis of what’s happened in many classrooms. But the cure being offered, a pendulum swing back toward precisely defined content, risks making the same mistake in reverse.
Rose put it plainly: it’s perfectly possible to design an engaging curriculum that weaves important content knowledge and selected competencies into a rich tapestry. That’s not a new idea – NZCER has been doing that work for years. But it hasn’t become the norm, and part of the reason is that the binary framing keeps reasserting itself. Knowledge or skills. Facts or thinking. As if developing one necessarily crowds out the other.
If you’re in a position to influence curriculum design, school leadership, or professional learning, this is worth sitting with.
We keep pushing the impossible back onto the individual teacher
Perhaps the thread that ran most consistently through our conversation was this: we ask teachers to do things that the system doesn’t equip or support them to do, and then we’re surprised when it doesn’t happen.
Rose spoke about professional learning becoming increasingly generic – one-size-fits-all delivery, often without ongoing support, at precisely the moment when teachers need something far more specific and sustained. She described a group of teachers who’d had a half-day workshop on Universal Design for Learning and were then expected to embed its principles into assessment design. Of course their attempts were superficial – not because of any failing on their part, but because half a day is nowhere near enough.
And there’s something fractal about this problem. The same dynamic that we describe in classrooms – where a student can’t exercise genuine agency because the system doesn’t create the conditions for it – applies to teachers too. We can’t ask for agentically empowered learners from teachers who are themselves disempowered.
What would Rose’s hopeful future look like?
I asked Rose, as I try to do with everyone on this podcast, where she finds hope. Her answer was characteristically honest – she hadn’t deeply pondered the specifics. But what she did offer felt right: a system that removes unhelpful binaries (and she named the academic/vocational divide as one of the most stubbornly persistent), that treats professional learning for teachers as genuinely important rather than something to be paid lip service, and that recognises learning as a truly lifelong endeavour – not as a slogan, but as a structural commitment.
“Anything we say we need for our young people,” she said, “we need for all of us.”
That’s the kind of elegant simplicity that only comes from decades of thinking carefully about something.
This episode is for anyone who’s ever felt the frustration of working in a system that seems to resist the very changes it claims to want. Rose doesn’t offer easy answers – and I think that’s what makes the conversation worth your time. She asks better questions instead.
Listen to the full episode below, – or access the full series on my Youtube channel here.
