12 May 2009

11 years in prison

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Education; Public Schooling.

While the MOE dithers on the English-for-Science-and-Math issue, our political scientist and columnist Umapagan Ampikaipakan wades into the debate with his latest post in the NST headlined, Master English by learning English, not others. He argues against the current arrangement and you can read what his counter proposal is. There is an undercurrent raging against English for Science and Math and there are similar sentiments shared by the ruling party UMNO. Well, all this flip-flopping is enough to drive parents up the wall.

However what’s emasculating the education system in the country goes beyond the language debate. Let Mr Ampikaipakan tell you what school was like for him. If it sounds familiar it’s because it is so true for so many of us. Indeed, it’s an indictment against every educator who believes schools are what our kids need:

But there is more to the problems that plague our education system than just the language in which we are taught. It is merely a distraction from all that really ails us. Our system is broken, in that it fails to educate our youth, let alone inspire them. We are shut up in our schools and in our colleges for years, and come out in the end with little else than a brief grasp of language and some memory of the thoughts of other men.

For 11 years, I, too, was held captive, cold irons bound, in the claustrophobic confines of the Kurikulum Bersepadu. My dreams tortured by the spectre of Afonso de Albuquerque. His disembodied head, muttering in Portuguese, insisting, over and over again, that his name is in fact pronounced: “Al-Buh-Kur-Kee”.

I can barely call to mind all the things I was taught in school. I remember being bored. It is the one compelling memory of those days. I remember being bored and I remember being sweaty.

I remember being cooped up in a little room with rickety chairs and a squeaky ceiling fan. I remember 44 other people. I don’t remember their names or their faces but I remember their smells. I remember that cleaning the blackboard after class would give me an asthma attack.

I would sneak storybooks into school, hiding them between textbooks, in those small spaces underneath those rotten wooden desks. I would read them, surreptitiously, while the rest of the class struggled with the base six number system. They were my only escape. The only way I could endure my sentence. Year after year, with no early reprieve for good behaviour.

I remember being taught to pass exams. I remember being taught the importance of the almighty “A”. I remember being taught to memorise facts. I remember being taught. I do not remember learning. I do not remember having to think. I do not remember why.

It is an unfortunate truth, but our education system gives birth to drones. Human computers that are able to regurgitate, with great efficiency and accuracy, everything that has been fed to them. And little else.

Therein lies our greatest failing.

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28 April 2009

Are schools the ‘only’ place for a complete education?

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Public Schooling.

When I first read what a certain head of a private school said about homeschooling, my first reaction was disbelief. And quite disturbed too, that an article on homeschooling should end with such an ill-informed quote by a school head on schooling and education.

I think I can live with people who do not buy into homeschooling or who say that homeschool is not for everybody. But it is hard to accept that this educator believes schools in this country are the “only place where a child can experience a holistic and complete education.” Saying that schools are the best place for education is like saying a bus is best or the only vehicle for transporting a lot of people. The question educators have to ask themselves is, where is the bus taking all these people? What are schools supposed to produce?

In the first place it goes against common wisdom that education and schooling are two separate things. It was no less a personage than educator and philosopher Mortimer Adler (he also served on the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Board of Directors) who once said that schooling is not education, that “no one has ever been or can be educated in school or college.” It all has to do with one’s philosophy of education, and this coming from a man who first dropped out of school at 14 before becoming the brilliant scholar known the world over, makes good sense.

Secondly, such a stoic defense of our schools goes against the clamour about the state of our education system – many parents are voting with their feet, like homeschoolers, deserting our public schools for alternatives and options elsewhere. Not a day passes without a media report about how our schools are failing. The amount of statistical evidence and research findings pointing to Malaysia’s deteriorating school performance and university ranking is too much to reference. In a talk delivered at the 12th Malaysian Education Summit 2008, Hanif Merican said:

“The undeniable truth is that we have allowed the education policies of successive governments since 1969 to divide our country racially, religiously, culturally, linguistically and economically in the name of nationalistic jingoism and communalism – and, ultimately, more for the protection of the party political elite than for their constituents….Meanwhile, as each year slips by, the end products of our education system move further and further from the ideals we espouse in our mission statements.”

Now if you read his whole address, you can see where he’s coming from. Let me say it’s not a pretty picture.

Thirdly, in spite of the grand vision of providing the one place where children can “learn holistically” and “gauge” their performance, the reality is tragically lost in translation, as they say. Almost every parent I have ever spoken to has despaired that our schools so highly esteemed by its educators have failed their children. Yes, they may say one or two things that are positive, but the test of the pudding is in the eating. I happen to agree with Willi Schohaus (Dark Places of Education) when he wrote that, “The most elementary, the most obvious condition which the school should achieve is that the children will want to go there.” Now isn’t that true? Just try asking any kid if they would go to school if given a choice.

Perhaps our educators need to hear what our own school students and graduates have to say about their personal schooling experience? Here’s what one ex-student has to say about what school meant to him:

• Get up and 6am. Take our breakfast (Usually misses it). Go to school.
• If it’s early, we catch up with friends. Talk about soccer matches yesterday. Crap. Chelsea lost 1-0 to MU yesterday night. MU lucky only lah. Yeah right you losers.
• The teacher comes, we rush into the class. Greet the teacher.
• Take out our books and turn to page 69 and listen to boring lectures.
• Eagerly wait for the first break.
• Happy Hour Starts. Talk crap.
• Boring lectures continues…
• Eagerly waits for the second break.
• Happy Hour Take Two. Talk crap again.
• Boring lectures resumes…
• Eagerly waits for the 12:35pm “Go Home” bell.
• The bell rings. We go home.

For the whole painful post, check out what this blog has to say, and don’t miss the frank and amusing comments posted (last I counted there were 59 of them). Reads like some tragic comedy.

What I fail to understand is this: every other day we hear reports of school gangs and violence, school bags that weigh a ton, graduates who cannot fit, dropouts, unimaginative teaching methods, overcrowded classrooms, and under-qualified teachers, the rampant tuition culture, etc. Yet you get news about a family that homeschools, and somehow it’s bad for the child. All too often whenever students fail, parents are blamed. It is amazing that schools know how to point at parents, yet educators bear not an iota of responsibility when they fail students by the thousands. And when parents decide to take charge to be responsible and home educate, these same educators are up in arms.

“Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?” so writes Stephen Arons in his critique of compulsory schooling entitled, Compelling Belief. Never a truer word was spoken!

I am not saying homeschool is foolproof, or that it is somehow superior in every way. Admittedly not every homeschool child does well (measured against conventional standards), but it has a lot going for it that makes success achievable. To say that educating one’s own child is somehow illegitimate (unless one’s child is unable to attend school!?) or even incompatible with education is surely living in denial pure and simple.

Let me close this long post with a quote by my favourite educator and 3-time New York City Teacher of the year John Gatto:

Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and families — that is why it is compulsory. As a consequence, the school can not help anybody grow up, because its prime directive is to retard maturity. It does that by teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy even dangerous. School is the first impression children get of society. Because first impressions are often the decisive ones, school imprints kids with fear, suspicion of one another, and certain addictions for life. It ambushes natural intuition, faith, and love of adventure, wiping these out in favor of a gospel of rational procedure and rational management. [More]

So many of us parents lament the dearth of good schools, when what we really want for our children is a good education. The solution came after my wife and I decided to stop complaining and start taking control. That is why we chose to homeschool.

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17 April 2009

Why does school have to be like this?

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Public Schooling.

In the new issue of OFF THE EDGE (Apr 09 #52), Patrick Teoh tells of waking up at 5.57am to prepare his 8-year daughter for school. Driving along the MRR2, the doting father is asked by her sleepy daughter: “Why does school have to be like this?”

Oh-oh, the poor girl has got her dad started: “…it is because of our education system and that if we were living in another country with a mature and properly managed education system, it would be different…”

Patrick is railing again (like the rest of us dissatisfied taxpayers), and he knows that a short drive won’t be enough time to explain what ‘education’ is, or what a ‘mature and properly managed education system’ looks like. Much less to a little girl whose future is rather unfairly determined by the whims of politicians with questionable intelligence. This unhappy state of affairs isn’t about to be changed any time soon and Patrick rightly laments there is “nothing positive” to say about Malaysia’s education system.

Well, I know the feeling. In a sense, I’m glad we’re way beyond this troubling scenario now that our own boys are 19 and 17.

But, what goes on in the minds of parents faced with the heart-breaking prospect of leaving their school-going kids in the talons of Malaysia’s education system? I imagine any of the following 10 responses, or a combination of all, perhaps?

1. Schools in Malaysia are okay. After all aren’t we adults products of Malaysian education and we’re okay?

2. Schools in Malaysia become better with parents’ involvement. If I want change, my kids will have to be a part of it and I’ll help change it from inside. Like joining the PTA.

3. Education in Malaysia sucks, but some schools are better than others. I can pull strings, get my kids transferred to better schools.

4. Don’t register your kid with government schools. Luckily there are private schools (or Chinese-language schools, residential schools, international schools, etc).

5. Malaysian schools are bad but it’s all we have. So my child will have to bite the bullet and chalk up this nasty but necessary phase as part of life experiences and good for character building.

6. Anyway, it’s not all about schooling, but parenting. Statistics show that where home is secure and loving, and where parents are involved in their kids’ education and schools, their children grew up well-adjusted. So we’ll be okay.

7. Look, this is our lot. You don’t like this country, just leave. It’s our fate and we just have to live with it and make the most of it. Schooling isn’t the only thing in life what. God will take care of everything.

8. The future is overseas! If there is no future in Malaysian education, I’ll move to NZ or Australia for my children’s sake.

9. If we love our country, we must subject our children to national schools. For the sake of national unity – It’s the only way to be united as one people with one common language and aspiration.

10. Who says our schools are bad? We are not Zimbabwe. Anyway, the Government is rolling out reforms already, like teaching Science and Math in English.

My own response is simple. If the schoolbus is taking you places you’d rather not go, or if it keeps breaking down, get off.

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