Our daughter is approaching her fourth birthday and it has been occupying our minds about the education options for her. We considered various choices and none of them look palatable to us. It is especially vexing for my wife and me who have put in a lot of thinking, online research and discussions, just like any other parent who has strong commitments to dreams for their offsprings. What we want for our daughter is also driven very much by our values and what we believe our role, including that of our daughter, should be in society.
We eventually fell upon homeschooling but there is a long thought process behind it, which I would like to share with you. In the process, of course, we encountered much of what we see is wrong with the education system we did not wish to participate in but this article is in no way a critique of every individual involved in the education system. The difficulties I outline here should be testament to the challenges those valiant individuals face while trying to reform the system from the inside. Indeed, I hope this article will go some way to articulate what they feel.
Kindergarten
My wife is an early childhood educator but we quickly agreed that we will not be sending our daughter to kindergarten or childcare nursery. The main reason was that the industry is really based on low-cost labour. Many staff, though not all, were just earning a salary and thus, were seeking to get through the day with the minimum of fuss to themselves. Most have no qualification and are equipped only with childcare practices handed down from their parents, much of which are no longer relevant in the modern world and more importantly not consistent with the values that my wife and me hold.
Many kindergartens work on the basis of the lowest common denominator. If you were to get through the day with the minimum of fuss and cost, procedures have to be standard and cannot be customised for any individual child. As such, procedures would have to work for all children, which would practically be for that one child who lags furthest behind. For instance, if one child has difficulty eating whole foods and can only take porridge, the entire class would have to eat porridge as it would not be efficient or cost efficient to cook porridge for one child and whole foods for others. Allowing parents to customise what their children get would have worked but would have complicated logistics beyond the capabilities or energies of staff seeking to minimise their fuss at work. So, the entire class end up moving at the pace of the slowest child, be it dietary needs or learning skills.
Kindergarten as business entities are intended to be efficient at the lowest cost. This often means staff are not able to tend to the individual child if the activity is best done with the group as a whole. Using the example of meal time again, many kindergartens we come across choose to feed the children rather than let them feed themselves. This is to ensure every child finishes at the same time instead of complicating the schedule with a staggered finish time, as children eat at different paces. And of course feeding the children rather than letting them feed themselves mean there is less mess. So, many toddlers do not get to learn to feed themselves at meal times as early as they could have.
In Malaysia, we we do not have watershed bedtime for children as children sleep at the same time as adults. Malaysian children supplement their sleep in the afternoons. This is encouraged in kindergartens, as it gives the staff a break time and woe betide any child who deprive the staff of their break time by staying awake. Also, it is common practice for nursery staff to turn on the TV or any other screen to entertain children without regard to the contents. Our daughter unfortunately does not fit into this pattern as she does not take afternoon naps and watches only content we have curated. She feeds herself and is very independent, choosing to do things herself instead of being assisted. As a result she isn't exactly the most popular child among nursery staff when we drop her off on those few occasions when we needed a babysitter.
Evaluating the options
State run schools were easily discarded as an option as they do not provide the level of quality we seek. The exception are the elite schools for which you either need connections to get in or have a long track record of academic achievement in the state run school system anyway. In any case, the values taught in the Malaysian state run school is not exactly those of ours.
Private and International schools were generally of good quality but we were concerned about habits and values we were not comfortable with, which our daughter may pick up through peers from income and class backgrounds that we do not share. We understand that in private schools there will always be tension between the school that sets the rules & methods and the parents who pays the fees. This leaves us in much uncertainty over the running of the school if it is constantly subjected to this pull and push between parents and school. (Somehow there seems to be less of this tension in tertiary institutions, where parents play a smaller role in monitoring the running of the institutions that their children attend. Wonder why?)
Chinese medium schools were long considered in Malaysia as providing reliable education at affordable costs but eventually we also discarded that option. While they do have a good track record of academic achievement, our daughter has long taken charge of her own learning even at this early age and, if this continues into her schooling years, it will probably not sit well with a didactic method of teaching common in Chinese medium schools anywhere in the world. For a while I thought to let her go to a Chinese medium school to understand that there are other ways of education but concluded that this is going to be too traumatic for both the child and the teacher for very little narrow learning benefits.
Now, I am by no means suggesting that there is no one out there who shares the same ideals and values that we do. Yes, there are many individual teachers who would seek to educate children the way we believe in, and I do respect their tenacity in following their ideals in school that may have other considerations. There may even be entire institutions which share these ideals but again they could be working with parents and a system that have different interests. I would find it hard to see how such individuals in Malaysia would be to able carve out a suitable niche in the Malaysian education system soon enough to serve our daughter. This is something, though which I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
The problem with education systems
I soon realised that the problem with most education systems in the world and especially in Malaysia is that they are geared towards mass education as required when the education system was first established back in pre-Victorian Britain. The education system we have today was designed to train entire corps of workers for standardised work in industrial factories. In today's world of diverse work requirements and methods, it is probably no longer fit for purpose. Especially when we want an education that is based on our personalised values and focused on diverse knowledge & very specific soft skills. The education system is not designed to be customised and any customised education would have been extremely expensive.
Education systems by their nature are mainly focused on teaching and not on the children's learning other than as an incidental result of teaching or at best, as a starting point to determine teaching methods. Teachers are there to teach: this is obvious in the name of the profession. This often means that teachers and teaching institutions are internally assessed within the system on how well they teach and the techniques of teaching, and teachers & institutions are never directly assessed by anyone outside the system. The key public measure would be examinations results, which education systems have evolved for comparisons within the system. I believe it is fair to say that the main beneficiaries of the education outcomes of students, the employers and the students themselves, do not directly assess the effectiveness of education system. The only exceptions seems to be training institutions set up by employers to provide the training that the education system is unable to deliver. One therefore has to question whether educationalists should be assessing whether their fellow educationalists are producing results expected by the economy and the society. Especially when there is no formal requirement to refer to the key beneficiaries of education outcome, other than an informal consultation process, often initiated by and using a process determined by educationalists themselves.
Teaching content in most education systems focuses on knowledge rather than skills. Students leave schools with minds cramped full of knowledge required for examinations but with little skills to survive in the workspace: this is a consequence of an education system designed by academically inclined educationalists, not by those who needed those skills in real life. There are little life skills taught in schools other than home sciences and the like, that are often taught in less progressive settings. In Asia generally, and in Malaysia in particular, students are not taught to analyse and think independently for themselves. This could be due to the nature of a conformist Asian culture that discourages out-of-the-norm thinking. Some political systems in Asia also seek to maintain a monopoly on the thinking of the populace for political reasons. Generally, skills beyond those directly required for examinations are not prioritised, other than incidentally by individual teachers or in extra-curicular activities, the step-child to the favoured curriculum . It is common for employers to have to re-educate their fresh recruits in the appropriate attitudes, mindsets and personal practices needed for recruits to successfully execute their work: initiative, thinking skills, people skills, punctuality, etc.
Teaching methods also focuses on the transfer of knowledge into the minds of students rather than how to use this knowledge. We were rarely taught why the knowledge is important in the first place; how to use it in different circumstances; when and where it would be useful; who would be most relevant to use this knowledge: we were only taught the what about the knowledge. We were taught topics like simultaneous equation and Maslow hierarchy of needs, all very useful things but never the real life circumstances and scenarios in which they could be used. Small wonder that most people forget what they were taught after the examinations. My lecturers in college told us that 90% of what they teach is not required in the working world and we would forget about them after the exams. I took great satisfaction in proving them wrong.
What we wanted out of education
Other than dealing with the shortcomings of I mentioned above, there is much more before we can consider an education system complete.
We would like our daughter to learn skills not just knowledge. And not just life skills which we agree are necessary: like cooking, first aid, basic hygiene and health and so on, but skills useful in living in a society generally, and in particular, skills useful in any career. The former includes skills such as reading people, communicating at all levels, working in a team and negotiation skills while the latter includes how to manage people, run projects, make decisions and analytical skills. Add to that, skills required by any person to find fulfilment: finding one's personal space to be alone, evaluating oneself objectively, developing one's values & staying true to them and personal resilience. And in an increasingly complex world, the skill to integrate information from all disparate sources into a single cohesion picture so that a considered decision can be made. These lists are of course not exhaustive, and as skill requirements are always situational, these lists will evolve but if she has the base learning skills, there should be no problem for her to evolve her learning until the end of her natural life.
More fundamental is the ability to learn and to unlearn. To able to learn is to be imbued with a sense of discovery, with which she now wakes up every morning and the respect for knowledge that knows no fear in being acquired, not merely limited to information that fits into one's own comfort zone. To unlearn is a fundamental skill in this ever-changing society: she will need to drop what ever skills that is no longer relevant in such volatile times, and not having her self-esteem dependant on the value of no-longer-useful skills gained in the past.
I realised in my career of training and developing developing young people, that I first need to teach people how to learn. It sounds odd and counterintuitive but I guess it is a result of an education system that has conditioned young people to be passive receptacle of teaching methods rather than active learners.
My daughter was born with an innate curiosity which leads her to discover things by herself and for her to choose what lessons she wants to learn that day. In some ways I am envious of her, because she wakes up every morning eager to embark on another adventure in learning. I would like her voracious appetite for learning to continue but it is not something that happens by chance. She has to be provided with the right environment for her to explore without the undue alarm that many parents experience on realising risks of certain unfamiliar knowledge: unlike many parents, we do not shy away from letting our daughter play in the rain, climb trees, cook or understand death at age of two. She also has to be free to make mistakes without fear of retribution or ridicule (that probably says something more about the lack of self-esteem of the person ridiculing). These are not conditions normally associated with schools.
Most importantly, we would like her to be equipped with the values that we believe are both self-fulfilling and necessary for our society to continue to survive and thrive. We would like her to understand the logical end-point of her values, which she will develop for herself, and recognise it when she gets there. We would like her to understand not just how society works, but what her role in it is and how she is to be an agent of developing society to a better place than she was born into. Basically, we would like to prepare for her self-actualisation stage in the hierarchy of needs. Schools teaches you to get to the top of the pile but it isn’t much use, is it, if the pile crumbles under you?
There are many who would say that much of the skills that we would like to like her to acquire are things that should be done at home and not part of the school education system anyway. To me it really doesn't matter where she learns or how she learns, as long as what she learns is complete in all the aspects that I mentioned above. The learning environment though should be integral. It cannot be that learning only takes place in a school, or that she only learns certain topics in school and other topics at home. All aspects of her environment should be fertile ground for learning, all always aligned with each other, much like we are always advised that both parents have to speak with a single consistent voice to the child. As it stands, there seems little coordination between the learning environment at home and in school, at least not as much as I would like it to be.
So what do we do
I realise that with the shortcomings I outlined above, in particular with regards to the education system that we have in Malaysia, I am unlikely to find partners with whom I can trust to facilitate our daughter's learning, trust both in content and in methods. This means we have to seriously consider sacrificing at least a part of our careers to be the agents of learning for our daughter. Practically, it seems that only home schooling would allow us to customise the education that my daughter would need to equip herself to be an effective contributor to and a change agent in society.
We recognise that we are one of the lucky few whose financial situation and work options allow us to realise our choice. We have never done this before and it will be a steep learning curve for us. Risk of failure is there but we consider the risk to be no higher than putting her through an education system that will only hold her back. I hope that parents who share our views but are unable to practically follow our choice are at least able to supplement the education diet of their children in ways relevant and valuable to them.
I expect that one day, society as a whole would be able to evolve the education system from its pre-Victorian roots to one that can support a spacefaring society. Much as it took the better part of two centuries for it to evolve to the state it is today, it will take the better part of two centuries to evolve the education system to the state it needs to be. Just that it will not be happening fast enough for us.
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