Loved this article so much by Mathia Lee that I have to reproduce it for all to see. Because it is an issue that really touches my heart. The education system in Singapore, where we groom our future citizens (& PRs, & foreign scholarship holders who study for free) is seriously wrong. I swear I will homeschool my children next time if things don’t change and if I can afford it. See the article below and think whether you agree with it.
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Mr Alfie Othman threw 2 questions to the audience ( http://theonlinecitizen.com/2008/12/interesthink-3-gets-people-talking/ ):
How do we teach students to be creative? How do we teach students to be confident?
A few years back, I was teaching Sunday School in church. During the singing session, where the entire group of 3 – 7 yr olds gathered to have fun singing together, it was really easy to tell apart the 6 year olds from the 7 year olds.
Children 6 and below had a spark in their eyes, a joy in their movement. When they reached 7, this spark was gone, their movements muted.
What happened to them, that made them change so much in just one year? They entered primary school – that’s what happened.
Children who are in kindergarten or pre-school tend to respond freely to the Song Leader. They dance freely on their own accord, they sing loudly, they might run around a little, disturb their friends a little. When the Song Leader shouts a question out to the audience, they raise their hands, jumping up and down, shouting out their answers and opinions.
Meanwhile, the primary one group of students would be standing there, singing because they are supposed to, but they no longer jump up and shout out with enthusiastic spontaneity anymore.
They are the favorites of most Song Leaders, to be fair. They are the first group to respond when the Song Leader is trying to quiet the crowd, to get the crowd lined up into their respective age groups, or simply to respond to any instructions give. They sing when asked, stand when asked, answer questions only when called on and asked directly. Their answers are short, sharp and to the point, unlike the 3 year olds who tend to launch into their entire life history to explain their answer.
The Killing of Confidence and Creativity
What has happened here? Confidence has been killed, creativity has been killed.
In my view, children are born with a natural confidence and creativity. I’ll invite anyone looking for evidence to spend a day with a toddler. Ask the child a question, and she’s likely to give you all and any thing that pops into her mind without worrying if that’s correct or silly – that’s confidence. Leave a child alone at your work desk, and you’ll find him taking apart every gadget you have, or putting things together in the most unimaginable ways – that’s creativity.
So asking the question, How do we teach Confidence and Creativity ? , might be the wrong question to ask.
The question we need to ask is, How did we kill Confidence and Creativity?
And it’s so important to start with the right question, before we can get solutions that work.
So what killed confidence?
Here’s my take. When each test and assignment is graded, when students are separated into classes and schools according to their grades, it reinforces the message that “You’re not good enough” in EVERYBODY – yes, even that child who was second best in the whole country. Think about this, if your spouse told you, You are the second best in my life, or your parent told you, You are the second best child I love, would you feel happy that you are better than ten thousand others, or will you be devastated? How many test results does a child have to get back, before his confidence is shattered? Looking at the Primary One kids in my Sunday School, I’ll say, ‘Not many’.
How then do we assess students and motivate them to study? What other way is there?
I think the children have already given us the answers. Look at their games – their Xbox, their PSP. What motivates them to spend hours and hours on the games, ignoring their meals, their sleep, and everything else in life? The games that can be a much bigger challenge than Maths or Chinese or English combined.
I do find an addictive thrill trying a task again and again, till I’m good enough to advance to the next level, where I’ll try again and again to get to the next. I also know that if you put me at a gaming center, hired a tuition teacher to stand behind all of us, distribute big crosses whenever we make a mistake, constantly yell that’s not the right way to do something, distributed grades to all of us after each try, and gave us only 2 tries at most, I will never ever touch a game ever again.
I’m not an expert at game psychology, I can’t pinpoint an theories behind gaming motivation. But I suspect that we should get gamers and game designers into our education overhaul committees instead of educators, who are very experienced at killing confidence.
How about Creativity? What killed Creativity?
Coming from NUS Science, and being part of the emerging Life Sciences research industry, I’ve the privilege of saying that more than 50% of people are interact with are foreigners. The second most common trait (the first being apathy) that differentiates locals and foreigners is that locals are always looking for the “correct answer”. Have a discussion with locals about the education system, and half will be asking ‘ what is the right way to teach?’ ‘who knows the right way?’ ‘what are that person’s qualifications?’ – there is always this need to look at an authority to provide the answers, and there is always this need to look for a “qualified” person. The other half will of course tell you ‘I don’t know. No use one lah, cannot do anything about it anyway’. Foreigners on the other hand, will tell you their personal opinion, and the discussion will be about all the different opinions brought up, what their strengths and merits are. And all these locals and foreigners are your university graduates and PhD graduates.
I think an education system where there are answer sheets and model answers, where an answer is either right or wrong, and the teacher unilaterally determines the right and wrong, builds a culture where there is a “right” way for everything that is determined by a qualified authority. That is the antithesis of creativity.
You may ask, ‘Creative answers are possible for art and literature, but what about Mathematics? 2+2 will always be 4, there has to be a right answer!’
My proposal is this.
Stop setting questions that ask “ 2+2 = ?”
Instead ask “List 5 equations that give the answer 4”
Possible equations = 1 x 4 = 4 , 8 – 4 = 4 , 8 / 2 = 4 , 2+2 = 4, 20 – 16 = 4 ………. The answers are infinite….
Our grave need for an education overhaul
The need for an education overhaul that stops segregating students according to artificial measures of merit and that stops people from saying ‘No other way’ , goes far beyond education itself.
Our educational stratification and ways of selecting leaders from the elite has resulted in policy makers that see poverty as a number, a grade on their career exam sheet, and not the suffering and hopelessness that is the reality of 300,000 (Ravi Philemon, http://singaporesocialactivist.blogspot.com ), because they don’t have a single friend who cannot pass even primary school. The stratification has created a poverty trap as well, filled with the people who couldn’t pass primary school , and has not a single friend from the university to make them feel like that could be a possibility for them too.
Our education system that breeds a culture where there is a right answer to everything, and that right answer is determined by qualified authorities opens up a huge potential for abuse, where qualified authorities recommend policies out of their own self-interest, and no one questions them because of the strength of their qualifications.
What YOU , my reader, can do about this
My dear readers, if you have read up to this point, I want to go beyond thanking you. I want to ask you to take one more step, to share YOUR ideas. There are several ways to. The convenient way is to leave a comment, or email me privately at mathialee@yahoo.com . You can also give your feedback and suggestions directly to the government committee here http://app.reach.gov.sg/reach/Events/PRIMARYSCHOOLEDUCATIONREVIEW/tabid/149/Default.aspx .
But of course , you know the most important thing you must do : Stop killing the confidence and creativity of any child you might ever meet.
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