Challenging Students

I just read this article in TheStar today, where our DPM (and soon to be PM) openly questioned the quality of the Malaysian education system. Quoting the article, our DPM said that: “Our education system must change. Our children are just not curious enough. They must be curious about the world. They must ask questions.”

This brought back memories of the time when I was training to be a lecturer. The professor that I was under, was telling about how we need to challenge our students to think. As my task at the time was to design a series of experiments for the students, I had to make sure that the experiments had a purpose and that the questions raised during the experiment would force the students to think and constantly question the theory that they were taught in class.

In the end, I ended up designing experiments that seemed to show that the theory was consistently wrong (didn’t matter how many times you repeated it). Instead of getting the result that they expect, they would consistently obtain results that were significantly different and cannot be attributed to simple experimental error. Then, I would ask the students to suggest reasons why the results were the way that they were.

At the meeting where I presented the draft copy of the experiments to the professor, even he had some trouble figuring out the reasons until I pointed out the trick to him. The trick that I used was to move the problem from the theory, to the underlying assumptions. So, the student would not only have to question the theory involved, but work their way back to the basic assumptions.

University education should never be about rote learning but this brings back another memory. During one of my tests for a humanities subject, I actually wrote down, “I know that you expect the answer to be XXX but I disagree and think that it is YYY because of …”. In the end, the lecturer gave me the mark but told me under no uncertain terms, that I should refrain from doing such things during exams and stick to the answer script.

I do agree with our DPM that our education system stresses too much on rote learning, and needs changing. Students need to be challenged to think and the easiest way to do it is to ask them difficult questions. However, the problem would be with the teachers who will have to evaluate the students’ answers. If the teachers themselves are only capable of rote evaluation based on a specific scheme, they would need to adapt to an entirely new style of teaching, which isn’t always easy.

A teacher must be fully versed in his/her subject area in order to be able to handle anything that the students are able to dish out. Otherwise, the teacher will often end up looking foolish in the eyes of the students. This challenges the established power structure and may make a lot of teachers uncomfortable. Considering that our teaching profession is staffed by many people who generally took up teaching because they had no other choice, this doesn’t bode well.

We need to do what Obama promised to do in the US. We need to hire new teachers, pay them better wages, and demand for higher standards and accountability from them in return. However, this raises a big budget problem for the government. The teaching union is the largest work force organisation in the civil service with about 150,000 members. So, I don’t see this happening anytime soon, particularly in the present global economic climate.