Archive for the ‘Book Review’ Category
17 August 2011
The socialization of indifference
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review.
TALK TO ANY SCHOOLTEACHER and pretty soon you’ll hear how kids today are so difficult to teach. Sometimes it’s the 
issue of discipline, but mostly it’s about how disinterested they are in learning. “They just don’t care,” said a secondary school teacher to me once. “Nothing in school really interests them – all they want are tips to pass exams.”
So universal is this lament, the solution to disengaged students is practically the Holy Grail of education reform. Indeed, in his book Beyond the Classroom, Dr Laurence Steinberg offers a summary of data that confirms a large number of teens place school low on their list of priorities, with up to 40% just going through the motions in class. A third admitted to inattentiveness, mind-wandering and lack of interest, while another third said there’s nothing much worth learning, that they got by goofing off and fooling around.
When Beyond the Classroom was published in 1996, research led Dr Steinberg to declare that alienation of youngsters from learning was becoming ‘chronic.’ It appears others share his bleak outlook as well.
What has happened in the last decades to make students view school as a nuisance? Why has the value of learning – and doing well in school – taken such a beating? What can we do about it? Dr Steinberg offers a different perspective by arguing that we first have to pay attention to factors outside the classroom that influence attitudes, behavior, and performance in school:
“No curricular overhaul, no instructional innovation, no change in school organization, no toughening of standards, no rethinking of teacher training or compensation will succeed if students do not come to school interested in, and committed to, learning.”
In one study, foreign-born Asian teens outperformed native-born Americans on virtually every factor correlated with school success. Even American-born teens whose parents were foreign-born outscored those whose parents were native-born Americans. 
There is something in the environment in and outside school that pours scorn on learning and Dr Steinberg calls it the socialization of indifference. I believe the package of traits common among American youths – academic indifference and disengagement – is increasingly present here in Malaysia. I once explained to a colleague that one reason our kids were homeschooled was we wanted to be their primary influence, and not their peers. As everyone knows, what’s happening in our school isn’t a pretty sight, I said. “Yes, but they won’t get to socialize with others their age and miss learning what’s good from their friends too,” he replied.
There’s a good reason why Dr Steinberg termed school disengagement an adolescent malaise. “Whoever walks with wise people will be wise, but whoever associates with fools will suffer,” says a proverb in the Bible. If a child spends an average of 6 hours in a class of 40 kids 5 days a week, it’s going to add up to a lot of foolishness in a a year. And that’s not counting the number of hours spent on tuition with more kids every week. (Plus the number of hours immersed in recreational media and hanging out with friends online and off ).
When everything around you is about dumbing down and just getting by, it’s hard to see education and self-mastery as worthy pursuits. When apathy to learning is perpetrated by the friends your kids socialize with and in the media they consume, good luck if you think all this is not going to make a dent on your son or daughter.
By educating our children at home, homeschoolers are standing up to the insidious socialization of indifference. I know it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. But given the current depressing statistical findings and the educational alternatives available, I am convinced homeschooling is the way to go.
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This post is the third in a series on Laurence Steinberg’s book, Beyond the Classroom. Read the previous posts here:
The Glorification of Stupidity
Another shot at school reform
2 August 2011
The glorification of stupidity
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review.
Laurence Steinberg’s Beyond the Classroom offers a very disturbing look at the state of education in US schools. I think we can agree with the author that before we start fixing school, we ought to think about forces outside the classroom that’s contributing to the decline of student achievement. He lists three, but we’ll look at the first.
Top on the list is what is termed the glorification of stupidity. We’re living in an age where foolishness is the defining characteristic trait of our heroes and it’s having a profound but unhealthy impact on our kids. Think Wayne’s World, Dumb and Dumber, Beavis and Butt-head, TV’s long-running series The Simpsons, to name a few. What is it about stupidity that fascinates us and our adolescent children in particular?
Dr Steinberg does not say that students have become less intelligent, but that they have become less interested in being educated than they were in previous generations. While he does not offer hard data, he believes the widespread popularity of these characters at a time when intellectual achievement is especially low does not appear to be a mere coincidence. “Never before have so many lead characters been defined by their lack of knowledge, their disdain for education, and their limited intellectual abilities. And never before have characters like this served as role models for so many young people,” he adds.
Bart Simpson’s dysfunctional family and lazy, ignorant dad Homer may be a bag of laughs, but the joke’s on us when we ignore the message these characters send, that stupidity is, uhm, kewl? You can say the same for the animated series South Park (which the author does not name), with its crude language and dark humour. South Park was written for adults, but it has a massive following among teens who are outside its intended audience , and you’ll be hard pressed to find a teen who doesn’t know Kenny and his maladjusted antisocial friends.
Perhaps you might be wondering if I’m making too much of an American issue (“Hey, Malaysian students doing well, what. Look at the number of straight A students in our SPM!”) It’s very simple – I believe there is a great commonality to human ill. With wealth and a growing middle-class, come the same kind of problems confronting the first world and pretty soon we too will have to pay the social cost of unrestrained capitalism, rapid urbanization, and the loss of a moral centre. Sure, go ahead and reform school, but it will go nowhere if everything outside the classroom undermines it.
Dr Steinberg’s book is a view from the frontlines. The broader issue of schooling has lessons for those of us who want to do better at homeschooling our own kids, so it’s important to understand what we are up against. Please note that homeschooling is not about isolating our kids. It’s insulating them with habits of heart and mind so they can tell the difference between what’s good, and what’s crude and rude. And isn’t that one of the things education seeks to accomplish?
Next post:
The socialization of indifference.
20 July 2011
Another shot at school reform
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review.
A lot of discussion regarding the state of education in the country tend to focus inordinately on systems, curricula, methods, standardized tests, teacher training, etc – which is well and good if we’re talking about trying to prop up an institution. Hence pronouncements like the one recently made by our DPM and Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin. A massive overhaul is in the works we’re told, aimed at promoting a global mindset: “We need to review the entire system in line with the changing times to promote world-class thinking and in-depth learning,” he said.
Reading what the DPM also said – “(S)ome people are also not aware of where our education system is heading, as we have the national system, the vernacular schools and international schools” – I feel a sense of dread at what’s implicit in that off-the-cuff statement. Pity the school kids (and their family) who’ll have to put up with all these too frequent and painful revamps.
I’ve been reading a book called Beyond the Classroom by Dr Laurence Steinberg which examines the results of an extensive research on American education conducted over a period of ten years. 20,000 teenagers from nine high schools were surveyed and hundreds of parents and dozens of their teachers and school administrators were interviewed. Although the book came out in 1996, I suspect most of the findings are just as valid today. Indeed there’s much that speaks to our bog standard Malaysian education, and why an overhaul however well-intentioned, may not be enough.
A single article won’t do it justice so I am planning a couple of posts in the coming days. But if you want an elevator pitch of the book, its subhead says it all: Why school reform has failed and what parents need to do.
Surveying the numerous studies and attempts at reforms in the US, Dr Steinberg has this to say:
“Our findings suggest that the sorry state of American student achievement is due more to the conditions of students’ lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls. In my view, the failure of the school reform movement to reverse the decline in achievement is due to its emphasis on reforming schools and classrooms, and its general disregard of the contributing forces that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are probably more influential.”
In short, school reform is not the solution. Dr Steinberg is not suggesting that schools should be abandoned; he believes we’re spending money fixing the wrong things and overlooking the one place that matters most, which is the home. Not a forehead slapping revelation, I know. Note that the book isn’t at all about homeschooling and neither does it advocate homeschooling in the least. But you can guess why such a book appeals to the homeschooling advocate in me.
For sure, the book has its detractors and some reviewers say the author isn’t saying anything new. Nevertheless, if schools have lost the plot and if attempts at reform are destined to fail, an education at home is a no-brainer and a perfectly viable option for our kids. Now if the thought of homeschooling your own children scares you, imagine entrusting your children into the hands of our Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin.
24 February 2011
Malaysian History for homeschoolers-Pt 2
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review; Malaysian History.
IF YOU CAME HERE AFTER READING MY PREVIOUS POST, you would have noticed that the books I am reviewing are hardly primary source materials or politically correct texts. Neither do I pretend that they represent some kind of syllabus content to help a student better prepare for an examination. As I said, they’re to help homeschoolers (and their parents) develop an appreciation for our history. Sure there’s lots of Malaysiana in these books.
But the main reason these books are on my list is because they make the events of the past fascinating and compelling. You could say these books fling open the windows of politicized history, and open my eyes to histories that were made by people who inhabited shared space. No apologies for my selections then. I picked these books because they were captivating. And fun. They transported me into another world. Reading them I felt Malaysian. I hope your children will feel the same when they pick up some of these books to read.
Malaysia: A Pictorial History 1400 – 2004 by Wendy Khadijah Moore
This coffee table book is a beautiful record of everyday life seen through the eyes of photographers and artists. The dust jacket says the more than 1,200 images took two years to collect; many of these rare photos have never been published before. There are early black and white photos dating back to the mid-1800s by well-known Danish photographer K. Feilberg and others that capture the scenes of early Malaya so vividly it’s hard to put the book down. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and so the author has wisely kept the text compact and precise. Several photos were colourised. I’m not sure if that was how the publishers found them, or if they did it for the book.I would be disappointed if it were the latter.
But I do have a bone to pick. After that pleasant foray into a monochromatic past, the colour photos and political photo-ops in the last chapter (A New Identity 1970-2004) seemed jarring. Then there’s a huge section devoted to the Mahathir years (Dr Mahathir’s first day in office, raising Tun Mustapha hands to mark UMNO’s entry into Sabah, Dr Mahathir and Mandela, Dr Mahathir in tears at the UMNO general assembly, etc), followed by photos of Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in a section sub-headed ‘Power Transition/2004 Elections”. Any indication that Malaysia is a lively democracy is represented by 3 modest photos (smaller than a MyKad) of Wan Azizah, an unnamed DAP candidate, and a PAS procession. Very telling, but that’s a slight irritation in an otherwise visually informative book.
The Kampung Boy (1979) and The Town Boy (1981) by Mohammad Nor Khalid, more popularly known as Lat
Shame on you if you don’t know the titles I’m referring to. I’m not sure if these two books would ever qualify as history, but why not? Lat’s books are great companions for lazy afternoons, but Kampung Boy is also a classic and a genuine keeper.There’s so much life in his lines, and so much heart too. Here is Malaysia’s beloved cartoonist Lat’s autobiographical account of childhood in a kampong sketched in a sensitive mix of zany exaggeration and a wonderful eye for detail. Brilliant!
Some may chafe at his brand of Malaysian English but you can’t fault its authenticity. Kampung Boy is easy reading, providing snapshots of characters we can identify, bantering in syntax we are more than familiar with. This is precisely the appeal of Lat’s books. Together with Town Boy, his sequel of teenage years and his friendship with Frankie, the pair of graphic novels are perfect bookends to an innocent time now lost. Those were days sometimes referred wistfully as the ‘good old days.’ Lat’s genius at transcending culture and stereotypes reminds us how they can be good again.
The Land of the Sultans: An Illustrated History of Malaysia by Ruud Spruit
The author is the former director of Westfries Museum in Hoorn, which is Malacca’s twin city in Netherlands. Now this is an interesting perspective on Malaysian history written from the viewpoint of the Dutch. You can tell I like this book already, and it’s not because it has a better spread of great photos and drawings (which it has). After a brief intro on Malaya’s Hindu-Buddhist past, we’re given a tour of the Malay Chronicles, the founding of Malacca, Parameswara, the arrival of the first Arab seafarers, the coming of Islam, and the Siamese threat, et al – all in the first 20 pages. The third chapter titled, The Portuguese, wastes no time to tell us in the opening sentence that, “Suddenly the Portuguese appear….”
Of course the coming of the British has its own chapter, nevertheless most of the focus is on the Dutch East Indies Company and their exploits in Malacca and the conquest of Batavia (Jakarta). For a relatively slim volume of 144 pages, Mr Ruud covers a lot of ground – ships, trade routes, battles, flags, guns, armoury, the Stadhuys, the Christ Church, the Chinese, UMNO, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and Merdeka. The author is a historian and the book has a workmanlike style, so you know he’s not Tunku Halim. Language and vocabulary more suited to 12 years and older (but don’t let that stop your kid even if she’s younger).
Land Below the Wind by Agnes Newton Keith
Books about Sabah and Sarawak do not automatically come to mind when we talk about Malaysian history, and we are the poorer for it. Agnes Newton Keith (1901 –1982) was an American writer who spent five years in Sandakan after moving to North Borneo with her English husband Harry Keith the state’s Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture. Her three autobiographical accounts of life in North Borneo (Sabah) have been very well received, but it is her first volume that I have. It is an amazing account of a woman who lived and grew to love her adopted home, and it shows. Lots of humour, jungle anecdotes, and for want of a better word, charm. The book won the 1939 Atlantic Monthly Non-Fiction Prize, and deservedly so.
Mrs Keith writes of her ignorance of Borneo’s existence and their arrival at this outpost of the British empire in the Far East, and discover that swimming costumes are ill-suited for this conservative land in spite of the sweltering heat and inviting beaches. She recounts awful nights awake with “damnable pig ticks” in bed, cradling dying infants, her first encounter with an amok who had killed two constables, Chinese women kulis who carry her barang, and in the final chapters, thinking sadly about the beginnings of the Japanese War and the end of an idyllic passage. When she writes about a year-long home leave occasioned by illness, there is a certain poignancy: “We wanted our leave and we knew that we needed it. But we felt that night when we sailed from Borneo that we were not going on leave, but we were leaving our home.” I was delighted to know that Agnes Keith’s house is a tourist destination today.
25 May 2010
Talkers, Watchers, Doers
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review.
PEOPLE LEARN IN DIFFERENT WAYS. When Howard Gardner introduced the world to his theory of multiple intelligences, he got us all spouting tongue-twisting jargon that famously represented 9 types of intelligences.
The jury is still out as far as his novel conception of intelligences is concerned, but it seemed to make sense to many parents and educators. For thousands of parents it gave a new handle on an old problem of teaching children to their ability and pace. It also meant a child could be expected to perform better if and when a learning style was adapted to her intelligence type. Or so it was implied.
If I may be allowed a bit of hyperbole, I must say a broader view of intelligence is as big a shift as the Copernican Revolution. It is assuring to know that a person who didn’t make it past high school but who’s good with his hands – say, fixing electrical equipment – is not necessarily less intelligent than someone with an IQ of 160 who doesn’t know how to change a light bulb to save his life. They’re both intelligent in different ways.
If Gardner’s books are too challenging a read, you might find Cheri Fuller’s Opening Your Child’s Nine Learning Windows a good alternative. Fuller’s other book Talkers, Watchers, and Doers: Unlocking Your Child’s Unique Learning Style takes you down the ladder without dumbing down, and this is a good place to start on the subject of multiple intelligences.
“Learning differences are not just liabilities, as we tend to think of them. They are pathways to the great potential that lies within,” writes Fuller. She helpfully skips the big words and reduces learning styles to 3 major groups: talkers (auditory), watchers (visual), and doers (kinesthetic). She does point out that while most children have a dominant style, a combination of styles is not uncommon.
Fuller goes on to say that, “Discovering children’s learning styles is not a panacea for all learning problems, but even students who have been labeled “learning disabled” can compensate for their weaknesses and achieve more when we discover and use their skills and talents.”
The tone of her book will appeal to lots of parents, I’m sure. She offers some tips, but if you have older kids, you’ll find the book less useful. The point is, don’t tie yourself into a knot trying to unravel your child’s prevailing learning style. There’s a certain plasticity to our brain and personality make-up. Children change. Age, circumstances, the influence of peers – all these are no mere bit players in the script of life.
The worse thing you can do to yourself and your child is to pigeonhole the poor kid and shut the door to new experiences and opportunities. It is so easy to yield to learning styles to excuse a child from experimenting, or taking a chance on new ways of doing things. A big part of learning is really trying, failing, and then picking yourself up. So be careful there.
Knowing something about multiple intelligences is invaluable and Fuller’s book is an eye-opener if you’ve never thought about learning styles. As she admits, it’s not a panacea to all learning problems. But harnessing intelligences and equipping for the inevitable seasons in a child’s life is the way forward. Now, knowing how to do that will require ‘intelligence’ as well as wisdom. The wise parent will make sure to add a large dose of compassion too.
(Follow Cheri Fuller by visiting her website and blog)
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23 July 2009
Why you should know Charlotte Mason
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review; Education.
Charlotte Mason (1842 – 1923) was a British educator and a remarkable woman whose ideas were undoubtedly ahead of her time. As the only child she was largely educated by her own mother who I believed, influenced her advocacy for home education and to view children with greater respect than was fashionable then. She loved children, enjoyed them, and delighted in seeing them accepted as persons with a capacity to learn in ways adults denied them.
It has been said that her ideas would have been lost to us today if not for Susan Schaeffer Macauley who drew attention to Mason’s holistic ideals in Macauley’s own book, For the Children’s Sake. Incidentally Macauley’s book was my introduction to the Charlotte Mason method. ( Over 15 years ago, a US homeschooler I barely knew mailed me a copy of For the Children’s Sake after a brief email correspondence!)
Today Mason’s ideas and philosophy have become a major influence in the global homeschooling movement. I don’t think she started out to enact a programme for homeschool per se, but as an adjunct to children’s education – she was concerned how poorly children were raised and taught (either by their own mothers or governesses) that she began to put her own thoughts in writing.
In 1886, her book Home Education – which eventually grew into volumes! – was published with a prescient observation on education in the preface (“The educational outlook is rather misty and depressing…”) that it could almost have come from our own newspapers. She went on to write that,
[But] we have no unifying principle, no definite aim; in fact no philosophy of education. As a stream can rise no higher than its source, so it is probable that no educational effort can rise above the whole scheme of of thought that gives it birth; and perhaps this is the reason of all the fallings from us, vanishings, failures, and disappointments which mark our educational records.
In short, any educational enterprise must be founded on a philosophy that seeks to develop a whole person, to assist in “…the production of the latent good in that being, the dissipation of the latent evil, the preparation of the child to take his place in the world at his best, with every capacity for good that is in him developed into a power”. As you can see, absent are the soul diminishing end of ‘self-actualization,’ the flaccid leveling demanded of politics and ‘nation building,’ and the utilitarian anxiety of being properly equipped for the job market! 
There’s so much online about Charlotte Mason and her methods and books , so I shall skip the details. Let me share a few things that influenced our family and the way we homeschooled. The value of a stimulating atmosphere. By this she meant that we should never underestimate what a child picks up from the environment he is raised and taught in. The habits, the values, the priorities enunciated or displayed by parents and that surround a child are imbibed long before formal instruction takes root. She may not have used the term, but modern educators now refer to this atmosphere of influence as “socialization.”
And oh yes, Mason believed – and how she believed – in healthy unstructured play and nature walks and the outdoors. Lots of it, preferably in the mornings! Read her books and you’ll see abundant references to art, music, dance, and a wholesome attitude to life and learning. If she can only see how our kindergartens have been reduced to exam factories, Mason would turn in her grave.
The importance of real books (or living books)and not twaddle. Mason disdained the way adults talked down to children and dumbed down books for their consumption. Workbooks, disjointed facts abridged into unstimulating textbooks were “twaddle” that dilute and weaken habits of mind and learning. “If a child talk twaddle, it is because his elders are in the habit of talking twaddle to him… On the whole children who grow up amongst their elders and are not provided with what are called children’s books at all, fare the better on what they are able to glean for themselves from the literature of grown-up people.”
The earth split, the clouds rolled away; I dare say, this twaddle comment marked a genuine turning point for my wife and I. More than anything else, it was this illumination that moved us away from textbooks, workbooks, etc, and led us to subscribe to a literature-based system (Sonlight) for our family.
The significance of habit. Despite Mason’s belief in the innate goodness of a child, she had no illusion that children have no “self-compelling power.” The building of good habits – moral, mental, physical (she was also concerned about diet, exercise, and posture) – the efforts of training and discipline to give a child “control over his own nature” so that the acquired good will like growing muscles “take form according to the action required of them.” The easy philosophy that says, “It’s ok, he’s still young” or “Don’t worry, he will know better soon enough,” is the way to shipwreck as far as Mason was concerned.
As a homeschool parent, let me say the training of habits is by far the most challenging part of education. If you are reading this and if you are a homeschooler or thinking about home education, the fruit of your labour will be even sweeter if you pay attention to the inculcation of habits.
Now you can see why educators and homeschoolers should get acquainted with Charlotte Mason. It is wonderful that although she was a devout Christian, her education philosophy has found wide acceptance across religious and cultural barriers (Eg: Check out this Muslim group for Mason). Her ideas moved a generation and continues to shape the modern home education movement today.
Note: Some of her references to race and civilisations were products of her era and therefore should not be held against her otherwise enlightened views.
Just a few links on Charlotte Mason:
Wikipedia
Simply Charlotte Mason – methods and curriculum
Who was Charlotte Mason? About Charlotte Mason’s methods and influence on homeschool
Charlotte Mason & Classical Education – a review on Mason’s views on classical education by Susan Wise Bauer
A Charlotte Mason Education – Homesite, and also read the article by Catherine Levison
Charlotte Mason Research & Supply Company Dean and Karen Andreola’s site
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20 September 2002
7 Habits of Highly Effective Families
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Book Review; Guest Writer.
GUEST WRITER: Celine Leslie
Some readers may recognise the author from his previous book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. This highly acclaimed and well-received management book contains in-depth insights into keys for more effective living. Although it was written primarily as a management tool, the principles outlined are applicable to people from all walks of life. In fact, most of Covey’s examples are from real-life family situations. It is therefore no surprise that he follows up with another gem of a book, this time directed specifically at family living.
Using the same seven habits of his first book, but applied to family life, Covey has created an inspiring, challenging and highly readable practical manual for developing and maintaining “highly effective” family living. While the definition of “highly effective” is not pursued rigorously, it is taken for granted that most of us, Christian or otherwise, desire strong, healthy, family relationships. Whether we live in a healthy family atmosphere or not, we instinctively know that the really important things in life at the end of the day have to do with building and maintaining lasting, strong, fruitful family ties. The book does not assume the background of the reader and applies even to singles who have not started their own family but wish to apply these principles to their adult family situations.
Each chapter is filled with real-life examples, many of them Covey’s own. He is down-to-earth and honest, never presenting the picture of that “out-of-reach” perfect family. His language is practical and sometimes humorous, almost always inspiring. His ability to “peel” and explore the depths of the principles (which at first glance, are obvious and indisputable), suggesting applications in diverse situations, is outstanding. At the end of each chapter, there are study questions for discussion with family members, with a section for those with young children.
While the market is saturated with books to help families, I don’t think I have come across a more readable, digestible, practical and challenging book that addresses many core issues of family living. Covey does not take an overtly Christian viewpoint, although he makes it clear that he is personally guided by spiritual principles. It is not obvious from his writings that he is a Mormon, but I don’t find anything objectionable in his book.
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