How would education in Singapore look if there were no need to educate?

The aphorism among optimists these days is that we should never waste a good crisis. Covid-19, the circuit breaker measures and full home-based learning should give us time to think about things we take for granted. In this spirit, this is as good an opportunity as ever to reconsider schooling.

We in Singapore are fond of our comparisons, and so it should be to nobody’s surprise that when the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) found that Singapore students’ fear of failure was higher than their international peers, it became a recent topic for parliamentary debate.

For me, thinking about failure in schools gives us an opportunity to think more deeply about the purposes of school, as merely one institution that is part of the holistic education of persons. 

At this point, it is useful to make a distinction between education and schooling, in the way that Mark Twain supposedly said: “Never let school interfere with your education”.

Education is a lifelong quest, the result of which should not be limited to economic pursuits in our lives. While we are economic beings, if all that results of our schooling is the formation of self maximising rational actors, we will be truly sorry for that result. 

The manner in which schools organise knowledge often does not resemble how it is used in practice, leading to what has been termed the theory-practice divide.

People can be good at school, but not good in practice. Conversely, later in life, many discover that they are better in practice than they are in school.

Unfortunately for many who are not good at school, they do not even get the chance to attempt to practise. This is even despite the many feel-good stories of people who made it — their stories would not be newsworthy if they were in fact commonplace.

The judgement of schools can seem authoritative and final to young impressionable students, thereby affecting their attitudes towards lifelong learning and preparing for the future. 

This cannot continue to be the case.

If we are serious about human resource being the only resource that our country possesses, we should examine the different ways in which schools not only enable ambition in some, but also potentially clip the wings of others. 

The Ministry of Education has already started to address these problems.

The Applied Learning Programme brings practical scenarios and real world applications into the classroom, and makes the often abstract school knowledge come alive.

The recent emphasis on the joy of learning is a step in the right direction.

Most significantly, changes to formal assessments that reduce the amount of stress students experience will improve the schooling experience. 

For instance, changes to the Primary School Leaving Examination scoring system promise to remind everyone that excessive stress for the single digit edge in T-score over their peers can have diminishing returns.

Yet more can be done.

All of these policy changes are not likely to amount to much if parents and other interested parties continue to think in zero sum terms.

As a means to think differently about education and schooling, it will be useful to consider a thought experiment.

If we could consider a situation where there was no need to educate, would we still do so? If so, how would we do things differently? 

Certainly, the answer for the first part must be in the affirmative.

If there is no economy to prepare for, no high stakes zero sum game to compete in; we might realise that people will still want to go to school, but this time, only for the pure pursuit of one’s passion. 

Philosophers have distinguished between instrumental and intrinsic goals for education.

For instance, an instrumental goal could be: Learning how to use Newton’s equation for gravitational attraction to pass an exam and qualify for university admission, as opposed to the intrinsic goal of understanding gravity.

While the instrumental rationale can provide strong stimulus to performance, it should be clear that the student seeking to understand is involved in a potentially lifelong quest — it is not clear when one truly understands gravity.

Is it when one can calculate the gravitational interaction between the sun and the planets? Or is it when one can make inferences about black hole behaviour? 

When one takes up an intrinsic orientation to learning, making mistakes and failing will then be welcomed for what it is: An opportunity for us to discern valuable information about our deficiencies so we may understand better.

On the other hand, through the instrumental orientation, failures reflect a reduction in  academic performance and are to be avoided at all costs.

If we want students and stakeholders to change their minds about failure, it seems to me that we should be changing our minds about our orientations to education instead. 

My colleagues and I studied a group of Secondary 3 students preparing for a physics tournament, and found them putting in much more effort than what might be expected.

They were struggling through the difficult mathematics in research journal articles, and persisted despite failure upon failure in getting their experiments to work.

Yes, this was an optional programme, which therefore attracted only the motivated. But this is precisely the point: These students had no need to learn. They were not coerced, cajoled, or otherwise coaxed into this competition.

When students want to learn, there is little that can stand in their way. The converse, as many teachers will recognise, is sadly also true.

How might we convince students to desire to learn?

Finding meaning and purpose in the interaction of education will be the key to this problem. Teachers deal with human beings, not computing hardware.

Teaching is not simply installing the correct software version. Students can exercise their human ability to refuse.

One possible approach is for teachers to model a life lived with meaning and purpose driven by the intrinsic pursuit of knowledge. But for students who have been persuaded by societal pressures to value instrumental outcomes, this intrinsic approach can feel irrelevant.

As with many life-long ventures, schools can only do so much; families and societies need to value intrinsic orientations rather than privilege good school qualifications. 

We can try to preserve the innate curiosity of young children by regularly asking them, as equal partners in their education, what it is they would like to learn, instead of insisting that they need to learn based on our designs on their lives. 

Most importantly, the short term results of learning for intrinsic goals or for instrumental goals can be indistinguishable in terms of measurable outcomes.

Focusing on intrinsic goals for education can cost very little, provide the same short term results, and provide the added bonus of a population that remains curious and desirous of learning in the long term.

All it takes is for us to collectively reconsider why it is we want students to learn, and to expand our perspectives about the goals of education.

There is room in the system, and in our mindsets, for a little educational passion.

Perhaps it is time for us to collectively decide to take that risk?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Michael Tan is a Research Scientist at Office of Education Research at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.