Reflections on Educational Reform – Some unconventional thoughts

BY R. Chandrasoma-June 5, 2018, 9:42 pm 

There is much anxious pre-occupation across the globe over the education of the young and the problems entailed are particularly intractable in the poorer parts of the world. Knowing the pivotal importance of good education for the advancement of peoples and nations, vast sums have been spent and budgetary resources strained to provide good schools for those in their formative years. Sri Lanka is no exception – indeed that valiant effort of this poor country to provide egalitarian access to primary and secondary education has won plaudits from reformers everywhere.

What, then, is the harrowing problem that blights this great enterprise? As I see it—based on over three decades of teaching in schools of diverse kinds in this fair Island - the malaise that acts as the great retardative force in the school system of this country can be described in just one word— inefficiency. The emphasis so far in our country has been on programmatic reform (curricular changes, for example) in the vulgar belief that it is what is taught that is important – not how it is taught. Let it be made clear that inspiring instruction in any subject has very high educational value while the most a la mode is worthless if badly taught.

Suppose we compare the school system of this country with a great factory turning out a specialised product that is in high demand but which needs great finesse and skill to produce. Such a factory will prize efficiency as among its most precious assets. If the machinists are clumsy, if the material inputs are coarse and the managers lack insight into the true problems encountered on the factory floor, the production will be below par and the customers will complain.

Machinists

This model is a close analogue of what we see happening to education in this country. Take the teachers – ‘machinists’ in the ‘school ‘factory’. If they are recruited from the desperately unemployed, see themselves as failures in the great rat-race of social success, are paid miserable salaries and have to bear the taunts and torments of an aggressive student population that delights in ‘mocking the pedagogue’ then great efficiency in the classroom cannot be expected. (Here I exclude elite schools for the rich – albeit the elite schools I taught in were no exception to the general rule outlined above.) What is the upshot of this ‘failure’ on the part of the pedagogic machinists? Not a total breakdown, of course, but what can be done in a few hours of dedicated teaching takes days and weeks and is ill-assimilated if learnt at all by the majority in the class. Far from being inspiring, pedagogy is often reduced to a ‘mission impossible’ involving a sterile contest between fractious pupils and dispirited teachers.

Even more damaging is the disaffection of the ‘differently gifted’ children who quail before the challenge of mastering something new and challenging in a learning environment that favours the adoption of pre-fixed models and stereotypes in the categorization of pupils. (‘The good, the bad and the ugly’) 

A great failure, then, is the brushing aside of idiosyncratic talent and enterprise - where marching in step is seen to be more important than the awakening of genius. Needless to say, the ideal of individualized instruction is staggeringly difficult to achieve given the poverty and overcrowding of most schools in our country. The sheer fatigue of sitting for hours on hard benches adds to the woes of the pupils. Classrooms and schools in Sri Lanka are ecologically unfriendly. Dour, noisy and cheerless classrooms, ill-disciplined hordes that meander through the school attending to ‘extra-curricular’ festivities in defiance of basic routines laid out in time-tables, boisterous classrooms without teachers, class rooms with teachers unable to bring a semblance of order within, and to cap everything, school heads – inured to this noise and confusion - who find all this a kind of ‘machine noise’ of a great factory in full production that they must perforce bear with.

Exemplary Teacher

Let us inject at this point a few words about the school head. Plain reason suggests that he must be an exemplary teacher and scholar if he is to win the respect of both teachers and pupils. In the schools I had the good fortune (?) to be a member of the teaching team, the school head was generally pushy, talkative and politically smart but displayed an astonishing antipathy to books and learning. Needless to say, not one of them was an inspiring teacher.

Is it not most strange that Head Teacher is like a Hospital Superintendent who oversees but is an outsider in the principal business of the enterprise he (or she) leads? The post of School Head should go to the senior and most accomplished of the teaching fraternity. Does this ever happen? It is not denied that most principals are former teachers but their elevation to this high office depends on considerations that are remote from the business of teaching.  If the Principal is scholarly and saintly – admittedly this is, in a sense, reaching for the stars – the pupils will be moved by example rather than surfeited by hollow moral discourse. Let us turn to pupils – the most important ingredient in the mix.  The first (painful) admission must be that pupils differ widely in innate ability (imprecisely measured by something called IQ) and the education offered must match the ‘cerebral capacity’ endowed by nature at birth. 

Tabula Rasa

It is widely believed that the growing child’s mind is a tabula rasa on which education of any and every kind can be successfully imprinted. This is a deception and fallacy that has done incalculable harm to education not only in this country but globally. The uncomfortable truth is that pedagogic recipients – pupils – enter school with both endowments and limitations that critically shape their educational potential. This is well known to practicing teachers but is religiously ignored by the politico-managerial establishment that dictates policy. It is comforting and nobly egalitarian to say that ‘all are equal’ but is destructive when applied to the education of children in their natural state. 

Assuming a Gaussian (Bell-shaped) distribution of innate IQ, about 50% of all pupils admitted to mainstream schools lack the intellectual wherewithal for the pursuit of ‘higher’ studies. It is a horrendous waste of educational resources to use the ‘O’ and ‘A’ level exams as a sieve to reject these misfits. The word ‘misfit’ is not used pejoratively – it is used to cover the uncontested fact that most pupils will not benefit from abstract studies in Pali, Algebra, Ancient History or the Chemistry of Organic Substances. After nine years of general schooling, this ‘mediocre mainstream’ must be shunted into trade-schools and prepared for life as honest toilers in the social milieu to which they belong.

Filtering

The ‘O’ levels should see a further ‘filtering’ of the moving stream of pupils. Let it be said very plainly that the ‘ordinary level’ of the School Certificate marks a basic level of education that is more than enough for the pursuit of professions of any and every kind – be it in politics, law, the engineering trades, business management, etc. This is not to say that education comes to a full stop with the acquisition of the ‘O’ level Certificate - it points out the sufficiency of this foundation on which self-effort and strong will erects a great superstructure of practical expertise. Let us turn to the ‘A’ levels. The bedeviling feature of higher education in Sri Lanka is the entrenched belief that all school-goers must have the opportunity to have a ‘go’ at the A-level exams. An ‘elite’ is supposedly filtered off to proceed to higher studies and the ‘learned’ professions.

This is entirely wrong-headed. The selection is for those with a flair for academic work – this is not the same as the selection of the best. It is a tragedy that doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc., are chosen on the basis of cramming-skills at an examination held directly after the completion of school studies. Genius is rarely revealed by examinations of this kind. Yet the entire state apparatus of educational management is based on the supposition that by examining ‘scores’ obtained under the most artificial conditions, students can be ‘channeled’ into professions and life-styles best suited to them.

Judgment of human potential is extraordinarily difficult when the subject is a teen-ager. To hold an ‘artificial’ exam based on the rote-learning of facts and procedures that have no direct bearing on subsequent professional activities and to proclaim ‘winners’ who take all is absurd in the highest degree.

The ‘A’ levels should be a very limited ‘exam’ or ‘stream’ for those bent on academic work for its own sake. Thus those who show great promise in language ability or mathematics in school may be allowed to take special post-certificate exams for university admission. The latter – university admissions – must be removed from the direct purview of the monstrous ‘examination department’- that dinosaurian organisation that churns out marks and results that are an affront to sane education. Universities must rely on interviews, ‘O’ level results and school assessments in order to select their clientele. The chaos prevailing in Universities will be redeemed to some degree if this new procedure is adopted. No longer will a pupil secure admission to a university because he has a tally card issued by the examination authorities with a suitable ‘score’ marked on it. Needless to say, the attitudes of parents and the public at large must change. A child who fails to get good marks at school is regarded as a fool and a failure by his parents and there is no doubt that this score-based and judgmental approach to learning warps the psyche of the victim at a most vulnerable period in his life.

To most children, the business of learning is hateful because it is seen as a cruel imposition – there is no joy in learning. The blame for this sorry state of affairs must be placed entirely on a philosophy of learning under compulsion to attain externally prescribed standards with parents and teachers acting as inquisitors. There is a more joyous kind of learning where the child explores the world with his loved ones by his side. The ‘public school’ is the very antithesis of this happy state. The world is explored with tedium and tears with heartless task-masters ticking off the ‘goalposts’ passed. It is a ridiculous race which exploits the helplessness of pupils to establish hierarchies that are socially destructive. How can this sad state of affairs be remedied?  Let it be acknowledged right away that collecting about 40 pupils of roughly the same age but very mixed in dispositions and abilities, thrusting them in a noisy classroom and getting a ‘teacher’ or ‘lecturer’ to belt out the basics of some academic discipline is about the worst way in which the young can be challenged to learn. Having a few dozen of such classes under the same roof and calling it a ‘school’ is a tragic joke. It must be confessed that such ‘schools’ develop a character of their own that is highly prized by some past pupils, but this (supposed) excellence is not educational but something else. Very little is learnt in classrooms.  If – as argued - ‘public schools’ are a failure and must be done away with, what must be their replacement? An analogy in medical practice can be usefully exploited at this point.

Today, ‘hospital medicine’ is the dominant form of medical practice. This is characterized by the treatment en masse of patients of all descriptions cloistered in large wards and overseen by busy specialists. This is a huge departure from the old system in which a ‘family physician’ cared for patients on a one-to-one basis. That the latter is the ‘natural method’ and the dethroning of this ancient system by ‘hospital medicine’ is an unwelcome aberration will be conceded by all. Analogously, the bulk of education at elementary and secondary level should be the prerogative of tutors and guides who form part of the extended family. Early education should be at home and in the hands of those who are close to the learners and who are disinclined to be punitive or judgmental. In later years, the pupil must be allowed the privilege of being instructed by teachers  of their choice – indeed, it is the pupil who should judge the teacher and not the other way round. That there are the irremediably ignorant, the obstreperous and the unteachable among the learners is not denied. This failure must be recognized as part of the human condition and dealt with humanely by special means – not by stigmatization and exclusion. The follow-through of the basic concepts outlined above will result not merely in a revolution in the treatment of the young in their formative years but will subtly reshape society as a whole. Currently societies worldwide are aggressive, acquisitive and pathologically intolerant of what is perceived to be ‘alien’ or ‘abnormal’.

The natural drive is to ‘reform’ others on the basis of what is perceived to be the ‘right way’.  This intolerance is the direct result of the inquisitorial approach to education adapted by schools worldwide – the approach that deems it imperative to test and direct the growing mind in ways that brain-washed elders regard as the road to good citizenship. This approach involves a clear distinction between the good and the bad – the failures and the leaders. There, surely, is another way to bring up the young where the role of the elders in helping those in their formative years is not abrogated in the slightest but is exercised with love and compassion – where the teacher – be he a parent or hired pedagogue – sits by the pupil as a compassionate helper rather than as the stern and unflinching instructor. Schools must cease to be hot-houses for forcible instruction along lines that a society - itself ridden with contradictions - deems to be right. We cannot abolish schools. There is a way, however, to revolutionize the ‘ethos’ of the school system that will make its existence a meliorative force in society rather than a breeder of iniquitous practices that actually harm society. Currently, cribbing and cheating at examinations, selfish – even boorish – behaviour towards fellow pupils, violence in interpersonal relations and naked hostility to teachers who refuse to cow-tow to base elements in the class-room are rampant in our educational institutions. Such pathologies of the existing school system can be eliminated only through a frame-shift in the approach to education at the school level. This will involve a system of nurturing the young that is radically opposed to the ‘straitjacketing’ currently in vogue. The basic innovation is the replacement of ‘directed teaching’ by ‘co-operative learning’. 

Education in the new system will involve the best students acting as the teachers of the weakest.  Learning will, among other things, entail the responsibility of passing on to weaker fellow-pupils the expertise gained. The current army slogan ‘Together for All’ is wonderfully evocative of the new spirit of learning The teacher will now play the role of a senior learner sharing his expertise with those less advanced in specific knowledge and thus initiating a chain-reaction of learning in a classroom where friendly interaction is the norm. This is a revolutionary step forward and the schools of the new kind will bear no resemblance to the cruel ‘training centres’ that pass off as schools in this country.