Uncover the plague of modern education system in PNG
By Ian D. Hetri
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| UPNG students |
Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public
education. There are two reasons for it. The first is economic. People are
trying to answer the question, how do we educate our children to take their
place in the economies of the twenty first century. How do we do that, given
that we can’t anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of the next
week? The second is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to answer the
question: How do we educate our children so they have a sense of cultural
identity that enables us pass on the cultural genes of our communities while
being part of the process of globalization.
The problem is we are trying to meet the future by doing what we
did in the past. On the way we are alienating millions of children who don’t
see any purpose in going to school. The story is just the same. Go to school,
earn a degree and get a well-paid job. Parents unknowingly kill the creative
genius and the future of their children well before they become part of the
modern education system that even does more damage to their creative genius. As
a result, PNG Universities creates tens of thousands of graduates every year
that are nothing but simply EMPLOYEES
of the poor government and rich multimillion corporations here and abroad. Our universities should be creating more EMPLOYERS instead. Only then, will we
achieve true economic independence.
“Go to school, get a degree and earn a well-paid job”. To which I
say wake up and smell coffee PNG! Many of our children don’t believe that and
they are right to by the way. “You are better having a degree than not, but it
is not a guarantee any more, particularly not if the route to it marginalizes
the things you think are important about yourself. Every academics in all
universities around PNG are saying we have to raise standards as if this is a
breakthrough. And yes we should - why would you lower them?
The problem is the current system of education was designed,
conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the
intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of
the industrial revolution. Before the middle of the nineteenth century there
were no systems of public education, though you could have been educated by
Jesuits if you had the money. Public education paid for from taxation,
compulsory for everybody and free at the point of delivery was a revolutionary
idea.
Many people objected to it. It is not possible for many street
kids and children from working class backgrounds to benefit from public
education. Many thought their children were incapable of learning to read and
write, so why spending time on them. There were a whole range of assumptions
about social structure and capacity built into this thinking. It was driven by
an economic imperative of the time, and running right through it was an
intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the enlightenment of
youth intelligence. Real intelligence consists of a certain type of deductive
reasoning and knowledge of the classics, what we have come to think of as
academic ability.
Deep in the gene pool of public education is that there are two
types of people - academic and non-academic, smart people and non-smart people.
The consequence of that is many brilliant
people think they are not, because they have been judged against
this particular view of the mind.
Twin
pillars, economic and intellectual
We have twin pillars, economic and intellectual. My view is this
model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It has been great for some: many
people have benefited wonderfully from it, but most people have not. Instead
they suffered what I term the ‘Modern Education Epidemic’, which is as
misplaced as it is fictitious. This is the plague of the current modern education
system. I am not qualified to pass judgment on the modern education system but
I do know a great number of Melanesian thinkers Like late Dr. Bernard Narokobi and
as well as Dr. Steven Winduo and Sakarepe Kamene of UPNG have disused this a
great deal in their writing.
What I do know for a fact is the modern education system is not an
epidemic. All I can say is that our children are being medicated as routinely
as we have our tonsils taken out. On the same whimsical basis and for the same
reason - medical fashion. Our children are living in the most intensive and
most stimulating period in the history of the earth. Dr. Robert Rosen described
this economy as young and borderless in his book Global Literacies. Our children are being besieged with information
and calls for attention from computers, iPhones, advertising hoardings and from
hundreds of television channels and then being penalized for being distracted.
These are distractions from the most boring stuff - at school for the most
part.
It seems no coincidence to me that incidences of the modern
education system have risen in parallel with standardized testing. Unfortunately
and quit logically, true intelligence has no tangible standard of measurement.
It helps to note that most of the very successful people in the world have
never completed their college education. Are their lessons to learn from these
genius lot?
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| Settlers at Morata Settlement |
Metaphorically speaking, our children are being given Ritalin and
other quite dangerous drugs in order to get them focused and to calm them down.
The Arts in particular are victims of this mentality, though it is also true of
science, language and math. The Arts especially address the idea of aesthetic
experiences. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating
at their peak, when you are present in the current moment, when you are
resonating with the excitement of this thing you are experiencing - when you are
fully alive. An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself
to what is happening. A lot of these drugs are an anesthetic. We are getting
our children through their education by anesthetizing them with the
standardized education system. We, the parents and even the ill-informed
teachers from play school up to university professors are telling misguiding
our children by telling them “To be successful in life, you must pass the exams
and score good grades”. This shallow and stupid advice, however, has become
generational.
Instead of anesthetizing them with the prospect of well-paid job
which turn out to be a pay check to paycheck struggle for most of our children,
we should be waking them up so they can see what is inside themselves. I am
talking about self- awareness or self- realization, a subject which is less
well taught by the Buddhism religion and poorly taught in our education system
as and even our churches. Children of this age are more informed and display
greater creativity and talents.
The million dollar question to the Government of PNG is; HOW DO WE HARNESS THESE CREATIVE POOL OF
GENIOUS AND TURN IT INTO A NATION BUILDING VEHICLE?
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| Where is my future? |
We have a situation where education is modeled on the interests of
industrialism and in the image of it. For instance schools are still pretty
much organized on factory lines, ringing bells, with separate facilities and
specialized subjects. We still educate children by batches and by age groups.
Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing children
have in common is how old they are? It is as though their date of manufacture
is the most important thing!
I know children who are much better than other children at the same
age and different disciplines, or at different times of the day, or better in
smaller groups or large groups. Sometimes they just want to be on their own. If
you are interested in the model of learning, you don’t start from this
production line mentality. It is essentially about conformance and it is
increasingly about conformance when you look at testing and standardized
curriculums. Instead of it all being about standardization, I believe we have
to go in the opposite direction - that is what I mean about changing the
paradigm.
Divergent
thinking
There was recent study into divergent thinking. Divergent thinking
is not the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of
having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking is not a synonym. It
is an essential capacity for creativity. It is the ability to see lots of
possible answers to a question and lots of ways of interpreting the question. “As
Edward De Bono says it is the ability to think laterally – not just in linear
or convergent ways, to see multiple answers, not just one. For instance, how
many uses can you think of for a paper clip? Most people will come up with ten
to fifteen uses, while people who are good at these types of exercise might
come up with two hundred. They do that by asking, “Could the paper clip be 60 meters
tall and made out of foam rubber? Does it have to be a paper clip as we know
it?”
In a book titled, Break Point And Beyond, one thousand-five hundred kindergarten children were tested for
divergent thinking and if they scored above a certain level they would be
considered geniuses. Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally
recognized leader in the development of education, creativity and innovation posed
an interesting question about this test. He asked
“What percentage of the people tested for divergent thinking do you
think would return a genius score?” Amazingly ninety-eight percent returned a
genius level score. This was a longitudinal study, so the same children were
tested at a later at five-year intervals when they were aged eight to ten, and again
when they were aged thirteen to fifteen. Many readers will not be surprised to
learn that the results deteriorated as the children grew older.
Here is the critical observation: As the children grew older their education levels increased and they
were taught at school that there was just one answer to every question, usually
at the back of the text book - ‘but don’t look and don’t copy because that is
cheating.’
Firstly, outside of schools and in the real world, there are
infinite answers to one question. In the world of business, one can always copy
or duplicate a successful business concept or model as long as it fits your
situation. In the world of business, Law of Opposites come into play. That one
can challenge long held beliefs of wealth creation. For example. Buying a car
on loan for personal use is buying a liability since it takes money out of your
money through bank deductions. On the contrary, buying an investment property
on loan is buying an asset since it puts money back into your account when all
debts are cleared. Therefore you can say, then banks definition of a car being
an asset is a lie since it takes money out of your pocket for fuel, tyre
repairs and general running cost. Isn’t that simple enough to help you understand
the pitfalls of our modern education system?
It isn’t because teachers want it that way, it’s just because it
happens that way - it’s in the education gene pool. We have to think
differently about human capacity. We have get over this old conception of
academic, non-academic, abstract, theoretical, vocational and see it for what
it is - a myth.
Secondly, we need to recognize that most great learning happens in
groups - collaboration is the stuff of growth. If you atomise people and separate
them and judge them separately we form a kind of disjunction between them and
their natural learning environment.
Thirdly, it is crucially about the culture of our institutions,
the habits of our institutions and the habitats they occupy.”
Paradigm
shifts
A Paradigm Shift is a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a
revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen,
but rather it is driven by agents of change, such as: when hunter-gatherers
learned agriculture, the development of the wheel and of Architecture, the use
of currency, and the printing press, which enabled the Scientific Revolution.
These paradigms and the ones ushered in by Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, each progressively diminished our identity and at
the same time increased it. We no longer perceive ourselves as being the center
of the physical universe, and in fact there apparently is no center.
A paradigm gives way to another. Something is taken away and something
new comes into being, both are vital parts of the human landscape, determining
how we are identified--deeply affecting how we perceive who we are, and our
sense of entitlement.
The historian of science Thomas Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm
as: Universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide
model problems and solutions for a community of researchers," i.e.,
·
What is to be observed and scrutinized
·
The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked
and
probed for answers in relation to this subject
·
How these questions are to be structured
·
How the results of scientific investigations should be
interpreted
·
Alternatively, the Oxford English Dictionary defines
paradigm
as "a pattern or model, an exemplar."
Thus an additional component of Kuhn's definition
of paradigm is:
·
How is an experiment to be conducted, and what equipment
is available to conduct the experiment?
Paradigm
paralysis
Perhaps the greatest barrier to a paradigm shift, in some cases,
is the reality of paradigm paralysis: the inability or refusal to see beyond
the current models of thinking. This is similar to what psychologists term
Confirmation bias. Examples include rejection of Galileo's theory of a
heliocentric universe, the discovery of electrostatic photography, xerography and
the quartz clock.
Authors note: This paper was selected as opening address during the 2013 Literacy Conference hosted at University of Papua New Guinea, PNG.
More of Ian's work can be read here...
