22 Feb
Don’t feel bad.
It’s not just here in Indonesia that the ujian monyet exists.
[In the USA and Canada], students entering university can’t read and write properly and are often required to take extra curricular courses during the freshman year of university in order to make up.
…… the system [in the UK] is unsatisfactory. The student may reach twenty years of age and has only been expected to increase his memory. He is not required to think until attempting a Masters. It seems a bit late in the day unless all we are trying to do is provide accountants, engineers, etc., for the commercial system.
That these comments are from an article in the UK Guardian is of little comfort because I do feel bad.
As a parent here in Indonesia, I have to help, and pay for extra help, so my 13 year old son can master test skills, to memorise irrelevant ‘facts’ decreed by bureaucrats in their offices rather than his teachers at the black or white boards; they are akin to front-line infantry troops who bear the burdens of ‘failure’ master-minded by armchair generals.
Our Kid’s best ‘scores’ come in unquantifiable ‘arts’ subjects, Art, Music, and languages (inc. Sundanese) which, apart from English and Indonesian, are not part of the national exams, so he isn’t going to become an accountant or engineer.
Most students don’t. Or can’t.
Many graduates in the UK and here fail to find work in their chosen disciplines, or are ‘forced’ to work as unpaid interns for ‘trial’ periods with no hope of permanent employment.
As I and countless others have written, learning how to ‘pass’ a test is the underlying fault. The tests are made by humans yet are set purely for their ease in marking – by computers. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ is an expression not heard much since the early days of personal computing, yet it has never been truer than now.
This trend has its roots in mid-70′s at the dawn of the ‘free trade-globalisation’ era, with the primary aim of turning us all into consumers. Conglomerates are robot tradesmen which aim to sell to ever younger purchasers of their products. (There was a time when comfort was more important than style, so why does Our Kid scorn Adidas trainers in favour of Reebok’s?*)
Conformity may have a value in societies governed by rigid, authoritarian regimes, but Indonesia is suffering the growing pains of an emerging democracy with the freedom to express opinions and has no need of mechanised, roboticised, lobotomised ‘norms’.
Now that the internet offers boundless information as ‘facts’, it is little wonder that, much as it may be criticised, plagiarism plagues universities and schools.
Teaching for computerised tests does little to encourage originality of thought or action. Personal experience is a major key to critical reasoning and forming judgements, yet school children are not expected to assume individual responsibility for their actions. They are too busy memorising largely irrelevant information with little context in their daily lives or, indeed, their futures.
Current teachers and bureaucrats were students during Suharto’s New Order when dissent was actively discouraged so, although some do, most cannot (yet) be expected to expand and enhance the mandated curriculum, much as they may wish to.
So what is the alternative?
Simply put, it is for society to recognise the freedom to be different, to explore and to be creative. After all, we have different aptitudes drawn from our genetic sources and (hopefully) fostered through our home environments.
In 1983, Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University, developed the theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be adequately assessed by standard psychometric instruments (i.e. tests).
He originally proposed seven intelligences, later adding ‘Naturalist’, and more recently a ninth, Existential (‘reality smart’ – the ability and tendency to pose and ponder questions about life, death, and ultimate realities, generally first manifested among teenagers in their search for identity.)
I’ve added the possible careers of those folk whose strongest intelligence is as indicated.
- Linguistic (‘word smart’ – writers, public speakers, teachers, and actors):
- Logical-mathematical (‘number/reasoning smart’ – scientists, computer programmers, lawyers or accountants)
- Spatial (‘picture smart’ – builders, graphic artists, architects, cartographers, sculptors)
- Bodily-Kinesthetic (‘body smart’ – athletes, surgeons, dancers, inventors)
- Musical (‘music smart’ – composers, singers, songwriters, music teachers)
- Interpersonal (‘people smart’ – peacemakers, teachers, therapists, salespeople)
- Intrapersonal (‘self smart’ – philosophers, psychiatrists, religious leaders)
- Naturalist (‘nature smart’ – environmentalists, botanists, farmers, biologists)
We each have all intelligences but no two individuals have them in the same exact configuration – similar to our fingerprints. Hence the need for schools, charged with fostering future generations of useful citizens, to accommodate differences and to enable each student to discover and to reach for his or her potential.
A major overhaul of school curricula is required, rather than piecemeal tinkering. I can therefore only offer faint praise to SBY’s newish Minister of Education, Muhammad Nuh, who has talked of introducing an entrepreneurship-based curriculum for the 2010-2011 academic year.
He said that the substance of the entrepreneurship-based curriculum would be included in the curriculum of each level of education. [It} would not overhaul the previous curriculum but an entrepreneurship substance would be included in it.
Basically the entrepreneurship curriculum was aimed at instilling entrepreneurship characters to students, including flexibility to think, creativities (sic), innovation and sense of willing to know.
“The first thing that has to be formed with students is flexibility in thinking because this will generate their creativities. One will not be creative if he or she is rigid in thinking.”
I’ll leave it to you to work out which ‘intelligence’ is manifested by most bureaucrats.
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*Nike apparel is banned in Jakartass Towers until Nike unequivocally confirms that locally-owned factories manufacturing their products conform to the minimum requirements of Indonesian employment regulations.
OK, let me see if I got this right, the current education system in the UK is centred towards turning students into global consumers and is part of the free market plot started in the 1970's by, er, Harold Wilson's Labour government, is that it?
So all the evidence which points to British education policy having been dominated by trendy "progressive", liberal left, educationalists since at least the end of the Second World War are untrue and in fact teachers and teacher training colleges are cunningly disguised bastions of Thatcherite, free market, red in tooth and claw capitalism. Are we all on the same page here because something isn't quite right with that picture?
Have a read of this article.
"Schools are churning out the unemployable"
It's about what the British education system is turning out, you'll get an idea of what real life, actual capitalists, ie employers, actually think of British education standards, my favourite quote is:
"On top of that is the attitude of the staff themselves. I was visiting schools to discover why so many black Caribbean and white working-class boys were failing. One reason soon became obvious. Their teachers, middle class themselves, failed to pass on those very values that had allowed them to progress in life.
They viewed inculcating attributes such as lucidity, spelling, grammar, punctuality and manners as “patronising”. They feared anything that smacked of the didactic. “I am not a teacher. I am a facilitator,” said one teacher primly. The head of another school insisted she was a “head learner” rather than a headmistress."
"Head learner" instead of "head mistress", yup it sure sounds like the Right Wing has got a real stranglehold of British schools these days.
It's a long time since the 60's and I haven't said anything about teacher training colleges, one of which I was at for three years, rather than the one year post-graduate diploma which is deemed long enough to be able to cope with a bunch of students who are regularly told that they aren't good enough to have a future. Reread the article you linked to.)
Besides, Miko, central governments set the agenda, and the governments I'm criticising for the current malaise. That these governments are in thrall to the very employers who are criticising the schools is very much a matter of the pot calling the kettle black.
"There’s a big difference between people passing exams and being ready for work.”
That's precisely my point. The exams are crap, so it's time to move beyond the SATs, as they're called in the UK and elsewhere, and revert to the motivational courses which I was taught to teach.
Strange that it may seem, I agree with much of the article. However, unlike you, I wasn't trying to score political points, but suggesting that there is a positive way forward.
Furthermore, my focus, as usual, is here and the mess that is Indonesian schooling, much of it in the urban centres, which fixates on recruiting and then appeasing the parents who can afford the fees by displaying the 'trophies' won by the very few students they recruit with logical-mathematical intelligence.
Elsewhere, as in Lampung, South Sumatra, they've opted out of the Jakarta-centric botched national exams saying that they arw irrelevant to local culture and, indeed, needs.
BTW. Is the schooling any better in your country, Ireland?
Strange that it may seem, I agree with much of the article. However, unlike you, I wasn't trying to score political points, but suggesting that there is a positive way forward.,,
I think your discussion is hamstrung by political point scoring on both sides. J, there is some heavy ideology underpinning your approach to teaching. But even though you don't care to unpack them here (unlike Miko), they are clearly there.
Not 'political', Anong, but educational.
Mind you, when politicians try to subvert education to their ends ….
"Is the schooling any better in your country, Ireland?"
An excellent question J and the answer would be a most emphatic "yes". In the Republic of Ireland the education is dominated by the Catholic Church even today, although the number of priests and nuns in active teaching is negligible with comparison to earlier years the ethos remains. You can say what you like about the Catholic Church and believe me you won't say anything I haven't already said but by God they know how to teach. They totally resisted the dreary "Brave New World", trendy, progressive teaching ethos so grimly enforced by the educational establishment in the UK since the 1950's preferring a more traditional approach. The result? Well call me biased but it's long been my experience that the products of even mediocre Irish schools are light years better educated than their counter-parts being churned out of the bog (pardon the pun) standard British comprehensive schools.
In the light of the child abuse scandals in the Republic there is now a clamour to totally disengage the Church from education, the clamour is of course led by the same dim-witted knee jerk trendies that wrecked the British education and will inevitably have the same result.
In Northern Ireland the Catholic education system was undoubtedly the jewel in the crown of the Northern Irish Catholic society at a time when that community had bugger else going for it. Of course since Sinn Fein got control of the eucational portfolio they have tried to impose the same failed education policy so beloved of post war progressives and dismantle the Catholic schooling system in favour of the ghastly comprehensive which even English people are heartily sick of. Such a move would surely be the gravest act of ingratitude ever inflicted on any people.
No education system is perfect, they all have faults but I recall my own schooling at a not especially fantastic Catholic grammar school in Derry where children from all backgrounds, the leafy suburbs as well as the ghettoes of the Bogside and Creggan, could get a superlative education that was the equal of anything provided by the best public (ie "private") schools in England. That school produced two Nobel Prize winners in the last decade or so, somebody was doing something right and rest assured the teaching was most certainly not "progressive" but traditional with a capital "T".
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