Falling between the cracks

I think by now we've established the fact that I believe school is a good idea only for a minority of individuals who are born so well-adjusted and scholastically gifted but to parents who are incapable of providing them the kind of guidance they crave for. If we'd only recognized this fact, it would instantly dissolve the need for the tens of thousands of underqualified teachers we currently 'urgently need' to fill in posts in overcrowded excuses for cram schools. The school population would be reduced by at least half and the social crime index will begin to fall, hopefully.

Speaking of which, I would not have been one of those people who would've benefited from schooling : Schooling as we know it in the past century is fertile ground for characters who find comfort in conformity, the sort of people who are most likely to rebel one way or another in the end. I, on the other hand, was meant to use my flair for words to humour myself and those who share the same brand of humor I do.

Now, to the point I was going to make; Today's Star newspaper in the section, Focus, features an article about second-chances for juveniles to pick up the 3Ms. It highlighted some aspects of learning which I always knew to be some of the reasons why students are falling behind, suffering low self-esteem and eventually resorting to misbehaviour and social maladjustment as a consequence.

There are simply too many people who cannot perform in even a few rudimentary subjects who are subjected to the torturous, maniacal routine of schooling. You can add an unhealthy learning environment and unnatural social order into the mix and you get the dangerous concoction called schooling.

Because of a system and world we've found ourselves in which measured achievement and worth with words and numbers, so many individuals who could've led a successful, meaningful life are bound and gagged by labels that cause such great conflict with their nature. That is why I believe the work of Howard Gardner is so important in putting the foot in the door in acknowledging the validity that there are so many other forms of intelligences apart from the conservative belief we now hold.

When you have too many students in a burgeoning system and not enough professionals, you have no choice but to lower the standards in engaging teachers - and because of the low incentives and the nature of high demands and accountability in the profession, the most qualified have been magnetized to the draw of incentives in the concurrently growing private sector; which left only the mediocre but most sincere students finding steady employment through teacher colleges a rewarding incentive.

Enrolling thousands of people into a system which promised a 'better tomorrow' and measuring these new thousands using a mold that only suited a few is a sweeping task in breaking the spirits of people and destroying their compass of discovering their purpose in life. Somehow, nobody ever noticed the paradox that when everyone is gunning for the top paying jobs the decade before (engineers, IT people, managers, accountants, lawyers,etc)it will eventually create an efflux of 'qualified' people into the market causing decline in demand and payment, or, alternately and synchronistically, the rising costs of salaries demanded by these 'qualified' people will automatically lead to an inflation that eats into the disposable income anyway. More affluence but less wealth in the end.

Doesn't this kind of world create such great conflicts in a human? To be born a certain nature with innate qualities, but forced by fickle traditional expectations to race inside a machinery that will press and repress, mold and shape you into something you are not. To shape one according to a model which was pre-determined by a flawed society a couple of generations before, with flawed motives behind its visions which has now erected a destructive mechanism enforcing a societal structure which it will defend for as long as it serves the economic advantages of the powers that be. Is the purpose of being born to be fed into the machinery of economic civilisation dictated by a few? A model of economics designed before we were born which we fuel with a misplaced sense of duty dictated by misguided tradition and loyalty and obedience to that tradition?

The really bad good idea of edumacating a future pool of human resources (that's beginning to sound like a dressed-up version of subtle slavery) through a fixed type of learning has generated a whole new science of addressing learners with 'learning difficulty'. (Could it also be a case where it is the method of teaching and not the learner himself that is inadequate?)Fortunately for these juvies, incarceration's silver lining is a second chance at learning where the factors that cause failure in learning usually found in our schools have been removed. It was encouraging to see Malaysian Prisons' Department Academic Sector head Shamsuddin Mustapha make this statement : "When we first started four months ago, we only planned for normal education like those you get in government schools. But we noticed many of them could not read or write. That was when we started 3M classes."

Now why the heck didn't anyone think about that? What with all the automatic promotion of students, and revised textbooks and millions of dollars and environmental damage caused by workbooks and copyright-infringing tuition centre drill worksheets? So much time and resources is wasted on tuitionmania, preparing and competing in school and national exams (right up to the decimal point), UPSR, PMR, smart schools, vision schools apa-pun-ada schools when the solution is simply providing children with the rudimentary stuff, investing in the time and effort it takes for each learner to grasp the material before they move on.

Learning is not a race, it is in the act itself that gives them the fulfillment and self-esteem they are seeking from the idea of learning. If they can deny Time as the determinant of learning and to leave that push-ahead mentality outside and embrace language learning as personal development, there will be no such thing as failure in learning when looking back 6 months, 12 months, etc ahead.

For the full article, do read

BACK TO BASICS BEHIND BARS - http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/11/9/focus/2491471&sec=focus

and SLOW LEARNERS NEED HELP - http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/11/9/nation/2489945&sec=nation