Principle 9

Background

The number of students who participate in home-schooling, and do not attend a school in person, has escalated in Australia and around the globe, especially since COVID.  For example, in Queensland, between 2021 and 2025, the number of students who are registered as homeschooled has more than doubled.   

Parents choose to homeschool their children because of many reasons.  For example, these parents may believe that homeschooling

• can accommodate the disabilities, physical health concerns, or mental health concerns of their children better,
• can accommodate the learning style, progress, or preferences of their children better as well as provide better learning opportunities,
• can accommodate other challenges, such as remote locations.

Although homeschooled children must be able to fulfill the learning goals of the Australian Curriculum, parents can diverge from the curriculum and implement a range of strategies to achieve these goals (for a taxonomy, see Neuman & Guterman, 2017).  These parents might attempt to emulate a typical school day, replete with whiteboards and textbooks, or expose their children to an array of other educational activities and experiences.    

Benefits and complications

Generally, homeschooling does not impair the academic or social development of students and, in many instances, may benefit these children more than would conventional schools (for a review, see Kunzman & Gaither, 2020).  Although reassuring, parents, regulators, and other authorities need to be aware that

• few studies on this topic have controlled all relevant variables and, therefore, the results over an extended period cannot be regarded as definitive,
• few studies have explored whether the variance in academic or social development across students is more pronounced in homeschooled children.

Indeed, the existing rules and regulations do not preclude a problem that may be prevalent and significant: the possibility that a small, or even a sizeable, minority of parents who choose to homeschool their children may be narcissistic.  To illustrate

• narcissistic people are often unduly confident in their capabilities (Meisel et al., 2016) and thus might assume they can impart knowledge better than can teachers,
• narcissistic individuals frequently experience paranoia (Fanti et al., 2025)—and, for example, may believe the school could brainwash or harm their children,
• yet, these narcissistic parents—parents who may gravitate to homeschooling—are the very individuals who are most likely to behave abusively towards their children (Wiehe, 2003),
• in contrast, humble parents are more likely to be effective teachers, enhancing the motivation, engagement, and learning of their children (Zou & Chen, 2025).

Accordingly, governments should consider a policy in which parents, before they can register to homeschool their children, may need to complete some modules or activities that have been shown to foster humility and thus prevent these problems.  These changes could significantly enhance the benefits of homeschooling while decreasing the complications. 

Overview

Since the Australian Citizenship Act was introduced in 2007, to become an Australian citizen, applicants must complete a citizenship test that assesses whether they espouse Australian values. However, this test does not accurately predict the likelihood that individuals will exemplify these values or choose courses of action that benefit the nation.  Instead, to achieve this goal, citizenships should complete a module that fosters humility and complete a test that measures their humility.  

Background

Specifically, the Department of Home Affairs now administers a test to applicants, comprising a series of multiple-choice questions. Applicants must correctly answer questions that are designed to assess an understanding of Australian values.  Furthermore, to be granted citizenship, applicants must supply evidence of good character and pledge commitment to the nation.   

Unfortunately, applicants who answer the questions correctly may be no more likely than applicants who do not answer these questions correctly to exemplify these values or enact behaviours that benefit society.  To illustrate, people who exhibit the signs of narcissism, rather than humility, can thrive on tests of knowledge (e.g., McManus et al., 2022) but are often

• inclined to violate rules and laws, such as exceed speed limits (Bushman et al., 2018) or perpetrate sexual assault and rape (Bushman et al., 2003), often because they feel entitled to disregard regulations,
• intolerant of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, or demographics (Schnieders & Gore, 2011),
• unconcerned, rather than compassionate, towards people in need (Salazar, 2016).

Accordingly, people who exhibit various facets of narcissism will often pass the citizenship test but demonstrate the very behaviours the test is designed to prevent. 

Solution

To address this problem, an obvious solution is that applicants must complete a module that is designed to foster humility and complete a test that assesses whether they have completed this module or whether they exhibit the hallmarks of humility.  The benefit of this solution is that, as research has revealed

• when people develop the features of humility, the adverse effects of narcissism dissipate significantly (Rong & Hu, 2023),
• short workshops, when designed appropriately, can greatly enhance the humility of participants (Harmon-Jones et al., 2025),
• some tests that assess whether individuals have developed humility are valid and cannot be readily faked (see this webpage).

The underlying problem in Australian public hospitals

In an intriguing report, entitled “Smarter spending: Getting better care for every hospital dollar” (Breadon & Baldwin, 2025), the Grattan Institute unearthed the hefty sums of money that Australian public hospitals squander.  To illustrate, some inefficient hospitals spend $10 000 more than more efficient hospitals on specific procedures, such as a knee replacement, even after controlling demographics. If these inefficient hospitals spent the median amount on these procedures, governments could save about $1.2 billion a year. 

The underlying problem, according to this report, is a sequence of events that commences with unfeasible budgets.  First, because of various dynamics—such as the attempt of governments to demonstrate fiscal responsibility—the budget that is imposed on hospitals is usually inadequate.  Second, because hospitals frequently need to exceed this inadequate budget, usually by about 6%, governments need to offer bailouts from various sources, such as contingency funds or supplementary appropriation bills.  Third, to offset these bailouts, governments impose even tighter budgets.  Fourth, in response to these tight budgets, hospitals are unwilling to invest in initiatives that could improve productivity, exacerbating these inefficiencies, and amplifying this cycle of problems.

Potential solutions

The Grattan Institute report proposed a coordinated sequence of changes that may alleviate this sequence of events.  For example

• to set hospital budgets, governments should utilise more sophisticated models that predict the expenses of these hospitals from data on growth in population, disease prevalence, technology, wages, and other parameters (e.g., Penno et al., 2013)—while also forecasting and deleting avoidable costs,
• every month, state health departments should monitor the financial performance of each hospital and assess compliance with recommended practices;
• hospitals that fulfill these targets should be prioritised when seeking capital to fund innovations, 
• hospitals that are not fulfilling these targets should contact state health departments and work collaboratively to address these concerns,
• if targets remain unfulfilled over a prolonged period, state health departments should replace boards, replace CEOs, or consider other reforms, such as amalgamation of neighbouring networks,
• state health departments should check and enhance the governance and management capabilities of hospitals,
• state health departments and relevant agencies should supply more guidelines on how to improve productivity, rather than merely safety, including detailed case studies on how to implement these changes, as well as encourage hospitals to learn from one another (Duncan & Sayers, 2020),
• state governments should strive to reorganise existing surgical centres so that each hospital specialises in particular operations—operations in which the number of patients is high (for evidence, see Kugler et al., 2022),
• some hospital networks, especially in Victoria, could be amalgamated to diminish the duplication of some administrative procedures, such as payroll, and to reduce competition to attract staff and other resources (Prager & Schmitt, 2021).

Impediments to these solutions

The states implement a subset, but never all, of these recommendations already.  Yet, despite the utility of these recommendations, this approach may only marginally improve the health sector in Australia, unless governments can address another insidious obstacle: the hubris, arrogance, or narcissism that pervades some boards or executive teams.  Narcissism is more prevalent in senior levels of management than in other staff (e.g., Ahmetoglu et al., 2016).  Yet, this narcissism, if unchecked, can nullify some of the recommended changes to improve Australian hospitals.  Here are some illustrations:

• Even if they utilise sophisticated models, governments must be granted some discretion to decide whether to prioritise health over other competing interests and can thus reduce hospital budgets. Unfortunately, when the individuals who reach these decisions exhibit narcissism, they tend to overestimate their capacity to control or to influence the efficiency of hospitals (see Watson et al., 1991) and thus will often impose unnecessarily tight budgets.
• The notion that more capital should be directed to hospitals that fulfill targets, although appealing, can be counterproductive.  When CEOs are narcissistic, their firms are more likely to fulfill targets, especially if this performance is publicised widely (Wallace & Baumeister, 2002). But, these CEOs are also more likely to invest in risky and inappropriate initiatives (e.g., Khoo et al., 2024),
• Sometimes, when state health departments choose to replace boards or CEOs, the managers who are assigned the duty to endorse replacements are narcissistic.  In these instances, the choices of these managers are often inappropriate because narcissistic leaders often prefer inexperienced replacements, arguable to maintain some control over these individuals (Kruse et al., 2025).
• In response to challenges or failures, narcissistic individuals are seldom motivated to learn from other people (Liu, Li, et al., 2019).  Hence, the suggested initiatives that are designed to promote learning—such as guidelines on productivity, opportunities to listen to the insights of other hospitals, and specialisation in surgical centres—are not as likely to be effective.  

The role of humility

Therefore, embedded in these recommended changes should be initiatives that foster humility, and thus diminish the adverse impact of hubris and narcissism, in boards, executives, and other relevant managers.  To illustrate

• these managers should be compelled to complete modules that have been shown to foster humility (e.g., Harmon-Jones et al., 2025),
• likewise, governments should evaluate the degree to which managers participate in activities that epitomise humility; for example, CEOs should receive data that displays the performance of their hospital on relevant practices and then attend workshops to address shortfalls—such as listen to CEOs who have thrived on these practices,
• if managers of hospitals demonstrate the requisite humility, they should be more likely to receive budgets that last three years and capital to fund investments.