On the one hand, I learnt a lot of interesting things while helping the kids with their schoolwork. On the other hand, there is just so much of it (and this in the “international” system), and it all comes to a head during tests.
I am the bookish sort, so I don’t remember wondering too much as a kid (or maybe it did, but the validation I got from studying prevailed) whether what I was studying was useful. But now it strikes me that this is the kind of education that future monarchs received – because they were expected to rule countries and hold their own with the monarchs of other nations.
It’s important to understand how the world around us works, but what kids are studying seems to go way beyond that. And the quantity and complexity of information seems to have only increased.
Today, we seem to be cramming information with a high level of detail into all children on the off-chance that some of them will specialise in one of those subjects.
I also wonder whether schools are just including all this material simply to justify their existence. There is no end to things that could be learned, but should they be learned? A geek like me would say bring it on, but not everyone is a geek.
The result is essentially a wastage of some of their best years for many, trauma for some.
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In Hong Kong, many children were effectively kicked out of the school system after nine years; only those who were seen as good enough to continue to university stayed on for the remaining three years. I thought that was shocking, but really how much book knowledge does the average job need? And couldn’t you learn on the job? (Apparently, Google and some other tech firms agree, and don’t require university education for many jobs. They have developed their own in-house training and certification).
Mainland China is currently running a similar system, where 50 per cent of students are streamed into vocational high schools, with only the other half attending academic schools that feed into university. The country’s leaders have realised that the glut of graduates is not helpful. But the result is an even more competitive system with parents desperate to get their kids into the right 50 per cent.
My sister, however, pointed out that pushing kids out of the system too early is cruel. She herself hit her academic potential only in the tenth standard.
I’m not one of those willing to countenance the possibility of my kids not going to university shut the gates on university education so early, either, for all my talk. I’m coming around to the idea that university is not the only way, and I’ve long felt that most people in university probably shouldn’t be there, but our kids are so unformed, they probably need a few more years before being released into the real world. Maybe if they were so released, though, they might grow up faster, and learn useful and practical things on the job.
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Not only is the information taught at school excessive, because of the testing process that eventually determines university admission, there increasingly is a fair amount of memorisation involved. Many parents choose the international school system to avoid this, and while the sheer amount of information is reduced and there are some interpretation questions, at the end of the day, if you have to produce work in a limited amount of time, you kind of have to memorise a good chunk of it.
If you expect a student to write a page-length essay in a fixed time period, they cannot do it without having memorised enough material to fill that page quickly. Ideally, the essay has to already be organised in their head. An extensive maths portion will require extensive practice, more for some kids than others. Building vocabulary in a new language will require memorisation of lists of words and verb conjugations. There may be fun ways to do this, but when there is a lot of material to cover, the fun styles of teaching will inevitably take a backseat.
The best universities in the US are flooded with Asian kids because these kids learn the old school way – in school or outside – and then they ace tests. The tests are probably checking understanding, but if you have only two hours to demonstrate your understanding, it has to be almost a reflex, and that comes from memorisation.
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Is memorisation useful beyond acing tests though?
My mom, who taught primary school, believes that learning poems and nursery rhymes teaches kids to memorise. But should they need this skill, especially in an age when you can basically look anything up on the internet quickly?
I’m undecided on this point. There’s increasingly this funda of “learning to learn”, but I am coming to feel that there’s something to be said for people who just know things. And some of this knowledge comes from experience, but some of it comes from, well, having memorised it. Like the great poets and the dates of the major events in history and the square roots of numbers and chemical formulae.
MinCat feels that the more you do a thing – and you would if your job required it – you’d automatically remember it. But I guess the people I respect are repositories of different kinds of knowledge, and a good chunk of this is memorisation.
If kids didn’t have to memorise for tests, I wonder, would anything at all stick? And if it didn’t stick, what’s the point of learning it at all?
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All the above is moot though. Many international school teachers in India seem to have graduated from the local system and old habits die hard. Therefore, we have a fair bit of kids being asked to regurgitate some arcane information (made worse when the teacher is not a subject matter expert and doesn’t know what’s important and what’s not).
The flip side though is that there are textbooks. The information in a textbook is vetted, unlike that which a teacher might glean, with varying skill, from the internet. A textbook can make up for a bad teacher, or a child who is not great at note-taking.
In the kids’ school in Hong Kong, there was much more hands-on learning, but I found a mismatch between teaching and testing. The testing required the child to have memorised some material, but in some classes there was no material to memorise from. And I suspected the need for kids to practice, study, revise just like we did, to do well on tests would only grow as they got older.
My niece is in the California public school system and my sister’s pet peeve is that there are no textbooks, no powerpoints, no material from the teacher’s end for students to study from, but the tests require that kind of studying.
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International school teachers in India remain smug in the belief that they have created some kind of no-stress utopia. Which is why we have two units tests a day, during a regular school day, which leaves us a couple of hours in the evening to revise if the kids sleep at a regular time.
From the school’s perspective, they should have prepared in advance, and have been revising in school. Unfortunately, the nature of tests requires revision before the test. There’s no way someone can remember that much stuff without it.
One day a week, the kids come home even later due to some extracurricular club activities, that continue through the unit tests. This made more irritating by the fact that the kids find them pointless. (“Why do we have to stay an extra hour of school for this nonsense?” Nene once asked).
When I grumbled about this, one parent’s view was that this is training for life – exams and work – when there will be bigger stressors. Is the solution to life’s future stress, though, to frontload stress?
My theory is that Indians – and East Asians – of our generation are doing so well overseas because we went through an educational system that was so harsh that everything else the workplace threw at us seemed to pale in comparison. But I don’t think that the rigours of our schooling, a schooling I excelled at even though I was bored by it, is a price worth paying.
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I asked the school if the kids could skip the extracurricular club that evening and was turned down.
“Why couldn’t we leave?” Nene said, when they came home that evening. “It’s like prison.”
Well, schools were modelled on the military and prisons, and while some things have changed in international schools, the essentials – structured “periods” which follow each other in strict succession, teachers who hold most of, if not all, the power – remain.
My colleague in Hong Kong told me her nephew back in Singapore loved online schooling. “School is prison, man,” she said. Her nephew is in a local school in Singapore, and I told her my kids in international school didn’t feel that way.
But I realised that they did. We send kids off for seven or more hours a day to do activities not of their own choosing. We hope all this learning is fun, but is it?
It was around this time that I began to feel extremely sad about having brought two children into the world. I pay through my nose to give them the happiest possible school experience. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s still school, and after that there’s work, which is another eight hours of doing what you may or may not like (usually the latter) in order to earn money to just keep going. Why did I think it was a good idea to sign anyone else up for that, except for my own silliness and ego?
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What if kids spent one third of the school year on academic knowledge of increasingly complexity, one third on practical things that they are actually very likely to use in life*, and the final third on creative stuff and physical education?
*How to stitch, cook, do simple electric, plumbing and carpentry work. Financial planning. Media literacy.
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What if universities only accept students who have been working for three years – like MBA programmes do at the moment – so that the young people have tried a few things and figured out what they want to study further, or even if they need to?
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I’m nowhere near opting out of this rat race though. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. So onwards.
for whom the bell tolls 