Two “leading” countries in education, Singapore and Finland had a head-to-head of sorts with regards to how they perceive and take care of their teachers. At the Global Education Competitiveness Summit, a representative of the responsible departments for education in the two countries presented their approach to maintaining the well-being of teachers.

A snapshot of Finland

Low Khah Gek, the Director of the Curriculum, Planning and Development Division (CPDD) of the Ministry of Education represented Singapore’s approach while Timo Lankinen, the Director General of the Finnish National Board of Education represented Finland.

It is interesting to note the differences in approach to teacher welfare and teacher selection. According to Low, in Singapore only the top third of the graduating classes are selected to be teachers. She also mentioned the pre-service and in-service training training that teachers in Singapore are expected to undergo, mentioning the hours of training. She also described the career track of those in the education service adding that the jobs of administrators is the “pinnacle of education service” because of their influence over instruction and the school environment. She also talked about the performance bonuses of between one and three months pay that teachers can get.

In contrast, in the Finnish system, Mr Lankinen says that in Finland they only have a “very limited” performance pay. For him what is more pressing is “how to maintain good working conditions in school” as Finland’s leaders feel that such good conditions are essential to luring talented people into the classrooms and retaining them there.

In response to a question about America’s current pre-occupation with NCLB and testing, he said that Finland only tests representative samples of students, primarily as a way to gauge trends in school performance and teachers routinely assess students’ progress in class in order to improve instruction. According to him, to the Finns, “having well-trained and educated teachers” is more important to raising student achievement. He says in Finland, “people dream to be teachers.”

I cannot help feel that in Singapore the approach is to see teacher welfare as just a case of paying them and they will keep quiet about the working conditions. Bear in mind also the civil service code in Singapore of not criticizing the service in public. The Singapore approach is very impersonal. It is all about numbers. Tests are the norm in Singapore schools because the only measure of student achievement are written tests. They didn’t mention what Singapore’s representative means by performance bonus for good instruction. It usually means how well the students do on high stakes examinations. Singapore also harps on numbers in terms of hours of teachers training. It is numbers and numbers and more numbers. From this love affair with numbers you can see that Singapore’s approach is very administrative and seldom from the teaching point of view. It is therefore no surprise that someone high up in the administration says that the job of administrators is the pinnacle of the service.

Maybe another statistic is worth mentioning. According to a Straits Times report, teachers form the highest proportion of patients at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) in Singapore. Of course, this wasn’t mention at the summit.

So which approach do you think is more enlightened?

Just a link to an article which I think expands on the theme that I have been writing about, that is, the need for a serious reconsideration about what the whole schooling experience in Singapore is about.

While changes are being made in Singapore, notice that the changes of this nature are usually reserved for the top schools. It is as if there is almost an unstated assumption that only the academically bright should be exposed to the “new education” What about the rest of the masses?

Have the policy makers considered that such things may actually be more meaningful for the not-so academically inclined? For many of these, I suspect that “disconnect with schools” that I had written about has already taken place. The cure is not more homework or extra classes. Though the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore has introduced the positive step of industrial or job attachment schemes for the students in the Normal (Technical) stream students, they should go one step further and actually introduced those initiatives at the top schools for the average or even below average students. Now, for the “less academically-inclined”, they are already being channeled to jobs at the lower end of the economic ladder. Stratification starts very early.

Think about it. This is the age of Multiple Intelligences. Yet we are still focused on those with the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligent people who have already been catered for in the current school system.

There is an interesting article in the Straits Times today, 1 July 2009, by Dr Lee Wei Ling, the Director of the National Neuroscience Institute, Singapore. She was giving her views on “herd mentality” and “free will”.

In her article, she gave the current measure of taking temperature to screen for the H1N1 flu virus as an example of a herd mentality. Her argument is that despite evidence to show that it has not worked well citing Japan as an example where such measures were taken and yet it has the second highest number of confirmed cases in Asia despite its efforts at temperature screening. She reminded us that even without a temperature, a person can be carrier of the virus and such people would think they are healthy when in fact they can be dangerous transmitters of the flu.

In the educational field, the clamor for international examinations like the IGCSE, iPSLE or IB has never been louder. This is especially true in the Southeast Asian region where Singapore’s neighbors have been envious of Singapore’s reputation for an excellent education system. Many have seen Singapore’s reputation as due to its known reliance on examinations from international examinations syndicate like UCLES or the CIE. Many schools among Singapore’s neighbors now want similar examinations because of the prestige that such examinations can give to them. They feel that if they have international examinations, then they can be become “good” too.

In this rush to get themselves accredited to international examinations, few actually ask if such high stakes examinations can do what they should be doing, which is, whether it can assess students learning well. The assumption is that these established international examination syndicates know what they are doing as they have been in the business for a long time. But do their clients stop to think what IS BEING assessed in such international examinations? What kind of learning is being assessed? Is the area of learning being assessed just a narrow spectrum of skills and abilities, and intelligence?

Many educational experts have decried the dependence on such examinations to assess learning. This is because there is so much learning to be assessed and the different kinds of learning cannot be assessed in a one-size-fits-all way, that is through largely written examinations. Yet schools are rushing to get into the high stakes international examinations bandwagon.

Like the temperature-taking measures for the H1N1 virus, high stakes examinations are a very ineffective way of measuring what it is supposed to measure. It doesn’t take into account too many aspects of assessment in learning. Worse, it is also like the same example cited by Lee, it is also dangerous. It is dangerous because those who do well in such examinations will think they are intelligent and those who don’t will think that they are not when in reality many of the former are just examinations-smart and the latter are not.

It is also dangerous because it doesn’t assess people for the skills and knowledge that is required for adult life. The economy for example gets conned into accepting people who are examinations-smart as good and suitable workers. The loud complaints of employers about the quality of workers they get from schools and universities tell us the real story.

Dr Lee also had this conclusion about “free will”. She said:

“…the option to make a decision unconstrained by any circumstance. In many situations we cannot expect total free will. But where decision-making is constrained by mere social convention, we do have the choice to ignore conventions. More importantly, when decision-making is influenced by herd mentality, we should consciously avoid following the herd and make decisions based on logic.

If we fail to do so, we risk making the wrong decisions, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.”

I feel her conclusion should also be useful warning for all schools in the region about adopting the herd mentality with regards to the adoption of international examinations. The adoption of international examinations is not a silver bullet or panacea. It can actually be a trojan virus in disguise and undermine much that education really stands for. Instead of education, this virus will change the programming to give you examination-preparedness instead.