28 March 2006
An autistic child’s dilemma
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: LD.
[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
Education for special needs
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Special Needs.
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.
22 December 2005
Whiz kid
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Special Needs.
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?
21 February 2005
Homework and Homeschool
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Education; Values.
An old photo of our two boys appeared in the Sunday Star recently. Taken 5 years ago when we were interviewed for an article on homeschooling, it’s now used to illustrate a story about the tyranny of homework. “Can we ask the papers to pay us for using our photo without permission?” asked Elliot. With a headline that screamed, Burden on Parent and Child, the article reported stress and anxiety among parents and school students brought about by excessive homework.
The irony isn’t lost on us because we homeschool to get out of the very system that’s being discussed here. A homeschooler once quipped that parents of children in conventional schools must believe in homeschooling – after all they spend so much time coaching and helping their kids with their school assignments at home. Of course mundane homework reportedly including “copying questions AND answers from workbooks”, rewriting ‘nicely’ a teacher’s notes” do not add to the pleasure.
In the report, one mother claims that she spends 3 hours after dinner every night going through her daughters’ schoolwork. And that’s not all of course. Students these days have to contend with tuition, which comes with homework as well. A father whose 7-year old son is registered for tuition in ALL subjects told me that although it appears stressful, his son is actually more motivated – he works harder on his tuition homework than the ones he brings home from school. So who’s to say homework is a burden?
The contentious subject about homework surfaced recently with the publication of an international survey by Australian psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg last July. In the report Malaysian students were found to spend an average of 3.8 hours a day on homework compared to Singapore (3.5), Russia (3.1), Australia and Canada (2.2) and Japan (1.7).
In a typical reaction, the Education Ministry pooh-poohed the survey then as ‘irrelevant’ but has since seen the light. Minister of Education Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein announced a set of guidelines to regulate homework, so that it would be “fun for students, focus on specific work and serve as learning aids.”
Dr Etta Kralovec, teacher and teacher-educator wrote in her groundbreaking book “The End of Homework” that homework does not necessarily make for brighter students. Instead homework can have a negative effect on children, families and communities. Subtly but surely, child-family time so necessary to build relationship is disrupted, time for leisure, music lessons, reading, or hobbies is curtailed, down time for relaxation and play is discouraged, and involvement in other learning activities (such as church, special interest groups, community clubs, etc) is sidestepped. Worse still, inability to complete schoolwork on time or to a teacher’s expectation may deepen frustration and lead to loss of love for learning and a desire to drop out of school altogether.
So does that mean schools ought to scrap homework entirely? I don’t know. Right now debate is raging over the form that homework takes. Yet not enough is said about how children learn, much less the contents in schoolbooks that ought to captivate, and encourage thinking and learning.
Certainly homeschoolers face a different kind of tension. Because homeschool derives its pedagogical benefits from a broader canvass encompassing formal and informal learning, all work is in fact homework. Sometimes parents confuse ends with means – the number of hours at the table, the number of books read, question of assessment and testing – and like other parents worry if their children are getting enough learning!
While education normally includes the mastery of facts, homeschoolers should aim higher. Win the National Spelling Bee. Be a champion orator. Go ahead, win awards. Be all your kids can be. But also work on attitudes such as self-sacrifice, readiness to serve, endurance, self-motivation, humility, adaptability, willingness to try new challenges, hard work, and a heart that’s tender to the things of God.
Above all, families should review their goals frequently so that whatever the aims, children should not forget their Creator in the days of their youth, and learn to “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccl 12:13). If these are lessons for a lifetime, the time to start is now.
25 August 2003
The Seduction of Sameness
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Malaysian schools.
It appears that the Ministry of Education is now ready to introduce significant changes (again!) to the Malaysian education system. According to a report in the STAR dated August 15, former education director-general Tan Sri Murad Mohd Nor, who heads a special committee said the review was meant to create “a national system, in which students in religious, private or national schools learnt the same things and shared the same philosophy.”
It was thought that a shared national educational experience was desirable, as it would enhance national unity. Now, what was our education system doing all these years since Merdeka, if not to provide a shared national experience? And look where it has led us all. Uniformity is not the same as unity.
While it is fine that all children should have equal and similar access to education, it is doubtful if cookie cutter education is the way forward.
For one, it assumes that everyone develops or possesses the intellectual-emotional capacity to learn at the same pace (and on cue), while ignoring the gifted and differently-abled. Worse, the state sells her people short when in the same breath we are urged to think outside the box, dare to be different (!), etc. Someone wrote that if you process kids through such a system, what you get are McKids, and not well-educated, resourceful, innovative adults suited to the competitive world of the 21st century.
Secondly, it overlooks the fact that similar sights do not produce similar thoughts. A case in point: 2 persons viewing say, the KL Twin Towers, do not necessarily ‘see’ the same thing nor form similar conclusions. One says, “Mammon!” while the other, “Mammoth!”
But there is certainly one thing that standardised mandatory public education will do: it will make our kids compliant conformists and therefore, more easily manipulated.If it seems like a moot point today, ask Hitler what he thought way back in 1933 when he seized kindergartens and schools, rewrote textbooks to emphasise Germanism “Blut und Boden” (Blood and Soil) and made membership in Hitler Youth compulsory:
“When an opponent says, I will not come over to your side. I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already’. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
How chillingly prescient theologian J. Gresham Machen was when in 1925 he wrote that, uniformity in education should be avoided as one of the ‘very greatest calamities into which any nation can fall’ (Reforming the Government Schools).
I am not convinced when politicians tell us they have only the best intentions in mind. I appreciate that running a country is difficult business involving complex and sensitive political realities. That is why governments around the world are easily seduced by the ideology of uniformity. But we should all be for more educational access, more diverse schooling choice, and not just improved (least of all, standardised) curriculum for all. Since that won’t come any time soon, count me out of the system. I’m taking ownership of my children’s education, and their future. Right now, my vote’s on homeschool.