By OECD’s Director for Education & Skills Andreas Schleicher
I joined last week’s Behavioural Exchange conference in Abu Dhabi, and the one remark that made me stop and think was when Minister Shamma Al Mazrui said “for a long time, we focused on making choices easier, now we need to focus on making people stronger”. She reflected on public policy interventions that had sought to help people make better choices, only to find people bounce back in their behaviour rather than grow forward. Public initiatives such as the piano staircase (turning stairs into a giant piano keyboard to encourage people to use stairs) or the interactive trash bin (to make recycling more appealing) were popular and fun “nudges”. However, when the interventions stopped, people had not changed identity in a way that outlasted the campaign, the minister explained, as would have been needed to move from behavioural change in a moment to shift in character and ownership for life.
This offers powerful lessons for education too. Over the last decades, we have seen countless educational interventions trying to adapt educational activities to the interests, dispositions and backgrounds of different learners. These efforts aimed to foster motivation and engagement, often prioritising momentary student well-being over long-term achievement. However, results from OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that, across OECD countries, neither overall levels of student outcomes nor social disparities have improved over the past twenty years.
What is clear is that many of the countries with the strongest and most equitable learning outcomes in PISA have rigorous and universal standards and exams, and they respond to students with greater needs not with lowered demands, with diverting focus from achievement, or with tracking them into programmes with lower performance expectations, but by redoubling teacher support. PISA also shows that the highest performing education systems tend to foster a growth mindset among students. In these systems, students believe that success is the result of effort and aspiration, rather than innate intelligence. This mindset contrasts with that of education systems with poor outcomes, where success is often seen as a result of the intelligence that children were born with and where learners are given signals that there is nothing they can do to change this.
Struggle seems the architect of resilience. Many of the educational interventions that make things easier for students with learning difficulties don’t build capacity but rather create dependency. Sometimes when we remove the friction, we strengthen dependence. Genuine support for students is not what gets them to do something once, but what changes who they become; not what shapes actions or moods in a moment, but what builds ownership and capacity for life. Success in equity and inclusion will not be measured by how accommodating we are in the short-term, but by how many students from disadvantaged backgrounds reach high standards of excellence, who act wisely when no one is watching, and who stand stronger when the ground shifts.
In this time of accelerations, where the scaffolding and the defaults are fading, the resilience to live in this volatile and imbalanced world will become key. In this time, the nudges that provoke reflection and foster understanding — those that teach rather than simply prompt — will hold far greater value than lessons designed just to elicit quick reactions. And the education that shapes character, values, and identity will prove far more enduring and impactful than education that merely reduces cognitive effort and simplifies content.
