Towards an education that develops the capacity to care

In a recent Facebook Live session titled After the Pandemic: Reimagining Education, Minister for Education Lawrence Wong made these concluding remarks on what education is about:

“(It’s) that learning can be for good. We also want to learn to be better human beings, to be better husbands and wives, to be better fathers and mothers to our children, and to just lead more fulfilling lives.”

Or as he put it, a “higher-order goal”, the achievement of which depends not only on the education system but also parents and students playing their part.

Mr Wong’s remarks seemed jarring, since he spoke at an abstract and metaphysical level that is quite at odds with the non-abstract, practical and operational challenges that education leaders have to deal with, and all the more so in this time of maximum uncertainty.

In fact, it is not jarring at all, nor does it need to be.

The Ministry of Education’s mission statement, “Moulding the future of the nation”, does not speak exclusively to the technocratic imperative, nor preclude the existential and moral aspects of education that Mr Wong’s remarks hinted at.

It is simply that, because of Singapore’s modern history and the need to ensure its survival (defined primarily in economic terms), we’ve had to adopt a more practical and instrumentalist approach to education.

And hence, we have an education system — one that is widely admired, I might add — that is also impatient with metaphysical ruminations on questions of higher purposes and abstract ideals.

However, this practical approach is not sufficient for a society that has to grapple with emerging complex issues such as social justice, ageing, climate change, identity, gender equality, technological disruptions, and so forth, all of which have no clear-cut, uncontested answers.

Such an approach now seems overly-modest when juxtaposed against the ministry’s expansively inspirational mission statement.

Acknowledging the excesses of an education system that simply produces economic agents ready for work and recognising that “learning for good transcends every job”, as Mr Wong puts it, is a good first step.

The need for education to make students fit for the world of work should not result in a narrow focus on work-driven outcomes, nor cause the teacher-student relationship to become a vendor-client one. However, it does raise some very important and vexing questions.

For example, is it even the role of the modern schools and universities to attempt these lofty transcendental goals?

Perhaps it might have been the case for the so-called metaphysical university from 2,000 years ago, in the classical Greek, Chinese and Indian traditions, to which students were drawn to learn their place in the cosmos. To learn how to “be”.

Contrast this with the modern incarnation of the university, which is pragmatically focused on how to “do”.

Furthermore, even if universities embraced once more their original moral purpose from antiquity, the notion of “good” needs to be unpacked.

How it is defined, by whom, and what criteria we use to assess the inevitable competing notions of “good” — these are all questions to which there are no easy answers, if any at all.

And of course, the question of how to teach people to be good in our modern context, is one that needs to be answered.

Perhaps the answer can be found in the turn towards interdisciplinarity in Singapore’s higher education landscape.

By itself, it already constitutes a radical shift — or at least a brave attempt at such a shift — of a system designed with disciplinary specialisation in mind.

In “The Aims of Education”, the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead called for the eradication of “the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum”.

He further argued that “there is only one subject matter for education, and that is life in all its manifestations”.

Unfortunately, instead of this unity, schools teach a range of subjects with little to no attention paid to how they all hang together.

The strength of interdisciplinary learning lies in synthesising different bodies of knowledge and fostering that higher-order understanding in the very being of the learner.

In exposing the learner to life in its multi-faceted and irreducible complexities, we begin to conceive of new ways to be — dare I say, be good — in the world.

As Whitehead put it, the essence of education is that it is “religious”. He does not mean religious education or moralising, but that education should cultivate a sense of one’s duty towards and reverence for the world.

Through the coherentism and sheer breadth of interdisciplinary learning, one cannot help but foment a sense of wonder at the world, to appreciate the different perspectives that can be brought to bear on it, and to acknowledge that ours is just one of many.

Out of this sense of wonder at the world emerges a duty of care for it.

Yes, Covid-19 heaped great misery on top of the human suffering already long in our midst. But equally, it shone a bright spotlight on the taken-for-granted work of our first responders and care-givers.

In a world of possibly recurring pandemics and other crises, we are surely going to require a lot more empathy, compassion and co-operation to help us cope. What could be more practical than to ask how education can develop the capacity to care?

Reframing education to incorporate, explicitly, care for the environment, for others, and for self, even as schools and universities struggle to ensure that students have industry-relevant skills will be the “grand challenge” for educators and policymakers everywhere.

But it is one that has to be confronted, and we can no longer afford to feign ignorance of the former by cleaving to the latter.

An education that prepares students to contribute to the world in economic terms, but neglects and even erodes their capacity to care, is hardly worth the name.

By speaking of transcendental “higher-order goals” and “being”, the Minister for Education risks plunging educators and students alike into questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers, only contested and tentative ones.

But how welcome and appropriate for the Minister to raise these inconvenient notions. After all, isn’t that the point of interdisciplinary learning?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Adrian W J Kuah is Director of the Futures Office at the National University of Singapore. These are his own views.