3 July 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
Two vicious cases of school bullying have got everyone talking. Both cases -one involving boys (Kota Tinggi), and the other girls (Miri) – were recorded on phone videos and widely circulated on the internet (on YouTube too, until it was removed!)The Malaysian Psychological Association wants to propose the implementation of a bullying intervention programme developed by Dr D. Olweus. “The programme attempts to restructure the existing school environment to reduce opportunities for bullying. We have submitted our proposal to the ministry (of education),” said Malaysian Psychological Association council member Datin Dr Noran Fauziah Yaakub.
The programme has met with success in schools where it is used in Scandinavian countries as well as the US. Basically it’s all about increased supervision, more parent-teacher interaction, a curriculum of courtesy and respect, and sanctions for aggressive behaviour (which I imagine are all a given in the first place). Schools are also expected to do the following:
- Place primary responsibility for solving the problem with the adults at school rather than with parents or students.
- Project a clear moral stand against bullying.
- Include both systems-oriented and individual-oriented components.
- Set long-term and short-term goals.
- Target the entire school population, not just a few problem students.
- Make the program a permanent component of the school environment, not a temporary remedial program.
- Implement strategies that have a positive effect on students and on the school climate that go beyond the problem of bullying.
Anyway, I say go ahead and give it a shot. What piqued my interest however was the first point - we’re to expect adult teachers at school to deal with bullying. The programme assumes that if bullying occurs, very likely the parents of victim and aggressor are not informed, or do not recognize the signs. That’s when schools step in to talk to all parties involved. There’s some merit in having an outside party to take charge, but it won’t amount to anything if the student and his/her family do not also take as firm a stand as schools.
I think it all boils down to character, which in the final analysis, is best inculcated at home. Why then are parents failing in their job to instruct their kids in basic decency and respect? Why do we keep hearing about the importance of ‘socialising’ when the only social skill kids are picking up at home and school is to ‘look out for number 1’? When a cynical media in an indifferent society displaces the basis for values and virtues, we should not be surprised when our kids turn violent. We make the world what it is today.
I can almost hear you ask: what if the parents are unable or will not do their job?
18 May 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
C.S. Lewis was an unhappy victim of public schools and he said so in his autobiography Surprised By Joy.
“If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different.”
You can see I am a pessimist by inclination. Unlike my friend – let’s call him Bob – who thinks one can’t possibly maintain sanity in Malaysia without a modicum of hopeful thinking. It’s easy to walk away, he says, but you can still make a difference if you work at it, try hard enough, push the envelope. I have had dreams too, if not for present realities that have all but convinced me that one ought to work towards change. So I’ll be working harder on alternatives. It’s one of the primary reasons I homeschool.
28 March 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
[As if to underscore the perplexing state of education in the country, here's an email sent to Malaysiakini, dated 28 March].
After failing to receive a reply from the Education Ministry, the mother of an autistic student has turned to the media to get the attention of the authorities.
She made an appeal to Education Minister Hishamuddin Hussein to allow her son Yuri Azzari to sit for the PMR examination in stages over two years.
Che An Abdul Ghani said the relaxation of the rule would enable her son to sit for four subjects in 2006 and the rest in 2007.
She said Yuri Azzari suffered from autism, a condition characterised by abnormal mental activity, and could not take the whole examination at one sitting.
The appeal was made after she consulted her son’s teacher in the special class at the Putrajaya Secondary School at Precinct 11 (1) and the views of a psychiatrist.
“My son lacks focus, is hyperactive, and cannot focus on his studies at school or his revision at home,” she told Bernama.
“This is not a question of postponement (in sitting the examination). This is a question of the boy’s inability to sit for the examination. I know he cannot do it even if he takes five years to study,” she said.
Asked why she was making the request through the media, Che An said she had failed to get any result through other means including approaching the Special Education Department last January.
She also did not receive a reply to the letter which she sent to the education minister’s office on March 19.
Che An also asked the ministry to review its system on providing education to problematic children because the children are required to sit examinations together with normal children.
According to the report, during the interview with his mother, Yuri, 16, who is physically normal, was engrossed in singing without heeding the presence of the reporter in his house.
27 March 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
It’s a pity that despite the stated intentions of our Education Ministry to promote ‘world-class’ education, innovation and progress are not its best-known traits. For instance, homeschoolers in the country have resigned to any headway in discussing the merits of alternative education and seeking for accommodation in the present national system. In fact we have stopped pursuing dialogue. Compulsory education is the 800lb gorilla that is being fed a diet of race and politics, rendering it unresponsive to alternatives that challenge policies. So, how to talk?
Take the issue of facilities for children with special needs. While the government insists that children with special needs should be enrolled in conventional schools, very, very few schools have trained/qualified special needs teachers or facilities to be of any help. Some years ago, one mother I know went from meeting to meetings with the Minister himself seeking permission to enroll her autistic child in an international school, only to be turned down – this in spite of supporting medical reports and the fact that the international school (generally closed to locals by law) had the necessary resources her child needed.
And to this day, parents intending to homeschool have been rejected for no reason but that it’s the law (how some parents resist official decree is another story for another time). Yet, homeschoolers constantly make the headlines, even here in Malaysia. The most recent being Yao-ban Chan (see March 11 post) whose family, by the way, is no longer resident in the country.
Now we have math whiz Adi Putra, the seven-year old kid who fascinated everyone with his 12th grade mathematical ability. His parents dutifully sent him to a conventional school amidst great fanfare and pledges from the Education Ministry who promised support in cash and kind – you know, the usual platitudes. But he’s one sad unhappy kid.
On Friday, papers reported that Adi had been cutting classes because he was bored. To his parents’ consternation, Adi has been threatened with expulsion.
The parents of the seven-year-old boy have received show-cause letters from his school, SK Jalan Matang Buluh in Bagan Serai, warning them that he could be expelled for cutting classes too often.
His mother Serihana Elias, a former teacher, said her son was reluctant to go to school because he was bored with the basic syllabus of reading, writing and counting (mengira) laid down by the Education Ministry.
Adi Putra, who could read newspapers by the age of four, had told his mother that he would prefer studying at a school like Sekolah Islam Antarabangsa in Kuala Lumpur.
What was the school thinking?
Anyway, there’s good news for Adi finally. Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin said yesterday: “The ministry has organised some programmes for him but we are not forcing anyone to do it. If his father wants him to change schools, I have no problems with that. Just send in the application and I will approve it.”
That’s commendable. It’s a concession that’s reluctantly made, apparently, if you read what Perak Education Department director Mohammed Zakaria Mohd Noor had to say (Adi comes from Perak). The department director was reported to have said they would have “preferred Adi Putra to complete his national primary school curriculum so that he could become a well-rounded individual.”
You know what they say about schools dumbing down on real education? It’s true, and it’s happening. Here.
11 March 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
Melbourne University’s youngest-ever PhD graduate is a homeschooler
Achievers who are homeschoolers are not unusual and scores make the headlines every year. But when Melbourne Uni reported that its youngest ever Ph
D grad was a homeschooler who was born in Malaysia ( his family lived in New Zealand since he was three and later in Australia when he was 16), lots of people here sat up and took notice.
WHEN he was 10, while his peers swung from monkey bars and charged around with rugby balls, Yao-ban Chan sat year 12 exams in statistics and calculus. He scored 91 and 90.
It is such a mind-boggling accomplishment that it almost makes his latest achievement seem commonplace.
At 21, today he becomes the youngest-ever PhD graduate at Melbourne University.
“I always liked maths, I always found it fun,” Mr Chan said with trademark understatement from his office in the university’s mathematics department yesterday. Mr Chan, who was born in Malaysia and raised in New Zealand, was largely home-schooled by his mother Peck-Woon, a microbiologist, and father George, a director with Heinz.
(Read the rest here)
According to the 2001 Newsletter of the New Zealand Mathematical Society, Yao-ban was also an accomplished pianist who studied piano performance (passed LTCL last year) and was a regular accompanist and singer with his church choir. At home, he played computer games and table tennis. He also read extensively and wrote fantasy stories and had s put up two origami exhibitions and conducted a demonstration class.
Way to go Yao-ban!
21 January 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
“If it is our schools which are ‘teaching disabled,’ the symptoms of this lack would still be visible primarily in the students and not necessarily in the schools or teachers. When a doctor is incompetent, it is the patient who dies” (The Paideia of God, Douglas Wilson).
19 January 2006
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
I had previously posted about 12-year-old Malaysian autistic savant Yeak Ping Lian so it was good to read that he’s in NY participating in an exhibition, Autistic Savant Artworks: Don’t ‘dis’ the Ability at the Henry Gregg Gallery in Brooklyn on Saturday. Ping Lian’s work is being shown together with 2 other well known autistic savant artists Richard Wawro of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Iranian-born Christophe Pillault of Olivet, France.
Autism educator and networker Dr Lawrence Becker of Creative Learning Environments, Austin, Texas, praised the trio saying they embodied the “quality and persistence of the human spirit.”
I was going to say that ‘persistence’ was also a quality that Ping Lian’s mom possessed in spades, because she believed in him enough to put her own interest second to her child’s. Ping Lian could never quite fit in conventional schools so his mother Sarah Lee had him homeschooled, supplemented by additional special needs tuition, and especially art.
22 December 2005
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
Adi Putra Abdul Ghani, a six-year-old mathematics prodigy from Perak is drawing attention from government types. Minister of Education Datuk Seri Hishammuddin is impressed. “He sat on my chair just now. He looked so comfortable there that I started to worry that I may lose my job to this brainy boy,” joked the Minister.
The boy’s father Abdul Ghani Abdul Wahid is a Tenaga Nasional Berhad officer while mother Seri Hana Ilias teaches English in a school. News reports said Adi who was taught at home (he was never enrolled in a kindergarten is what they mean) surprised everyone with his grasp of algebra, trigonometry and indices. Meanwhile the Terengganu State government announced that it was adopting Adi, and that educational expenses and training programme of the math genius would be borne by the State government.
But what caught my eye was what Hishamuddin said next.
According to Hishammuddin the ministry was looking into ways to promote a more flexible education system which could be equally accessed by all students regardless of their social backgrounds. “We don’t want to see any students in rural areas, who are poor, handicapped or smart like Adi Putra, to be marginalised or deprived of access to education,” he said.
Although I suspect homeschooling was not on the minister’s mind when he talked about a flexible education system, wouldn’t it be great if the MOE start looking at it as an option - and not just for rural kids?
3 December 2005
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
I get nervous with all the hype over preschool. California’s initiative in pushing for the Preschool for All Act, if successful, could help make Universal Preschool a reality. The fact that advocates are talking about compulsory preschool for 4-year olds as if it would solve social ills and correct educational deficits, is disturbing.
Here in Malaysia, the education ministry too harbours similar ambitions but infrastructure and funding at this moment are major obstacles in the way. I’m glad for that. Some zealous educators point to Head Start as evidence that preschool works. Wendy McElroy sounds the alarm in an article in Foxnews titled, Will Universal Preschool Give All Kids a Head Start? and points to new studies that show otherwise:
[T]he DC-think tank Cato Institute observes, “The most comprehensive synthesis of Head Start impact studies to date was published in 1985 by the Department of Health and Human Services. It showed that by the time children enter the second grade, any cognitive, social, and emotional gains by Head Start children have vanished … The net gain to children and taxpayers is zero.”
McElroy also has this to say about government’s dangerous presumption:
This is the great danger: the presumption that government can raise children better than parents. If universal preschool is voluntary, then it may merely create another massive and ultra-expensive bureaucracy that accomplishes little.
If it is compulsory, then universal preschool will extend the government’s usurpation of parenthood so that all 3- and 4-year-olds are under state supervision.
I understand there is a place for preschool, but I certainly don’t see why the state should usurp the role of parents and take over their kids at such an early age or at any age. Compulsory preschool! This then is the bigger issue and it is utterly appaling to me. Is not the damage done to families by state-sponsored schooling already self-evident?
29 November 2005
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.
“All that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
C.S. Lewis
Detractors sometimes accuse homeschoolers of abandoning convention for fear of losing out. Homeschooling parents want so badly for their kids to be No. 1 their competitive streak is symptomatic of an adult kiasu* mindset, so they say. They insist that these same parents have turned their homes into a hothouse and their children into trophies to show off.
Yet few parents, if any, expect nothing but the best from their children and that is not necessarily a bad impulse. I happen to believe that they are poor parents who do not encourage their children to aim higher or do better when they have the means and resource to do so. It is a great disservice when we are too easily pleased, delight in low expectations, and excuse mediocrity as spiritual contentment. No parent ought to stand for laziness, and neither does our heavenly Father.
But ambitious children may be shortchanged if we do not also teach them that capabilities or qualifications by themselves do not translate into more usefulness. The Bible records individuals whose ambitions were thwarted (by conflict, injustice or moral failure) although that did not stop God’s will from being done. It goes against the grain of common understanding but Paul reminds us that the foolish, the weak and humble, remain God’s favourite subjects to further His greater glory, for their boast would not lie in their abilities but God’s enablement (1 Cor 1:27-31).
It pays therefore to remember that the desire to excel, like all other passions of the flesh, is similarly tainted by the Fall, making it a vehicle that either draws a person towards God or away from Him. Ambition becomes selfish when we define ourselves according to achievements instead of character, or when our sense of worth is tied to a pat on the back or a framed certificate on the wall. So Paul’s letter to the Galatians warns against selfish ambition, which is another way of saying that neither ambition nor its attainment is to be sought as an end in itself (5:20).
John Sung (1901-44) on repenting of his backsliding threw his diplomas and awards (he had 3 academic degrees) into the sea and became one of the greatest evangelists China had ever known in the last century. Like Paul before him, he counted all his achievements as a liability compared to the greatness of knowing Jesus.
The lesson here is not that ambition or the pursuit of excellence are incompatible with being a Christian, but that they need to be redeemed and placed under the lordship of Christ if they are to mean anything. It starts with recognizing that we are no longer our own. We belong to our Creator; our gifts and potential are a trust whose use their Giver will hold us accountable. It’s not that we have arrived - how well we run the race matters just as much. At the finishing line, the ultimate honour is hearing God say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
* local Hokkien dialect meaning,”afraid to lose”