I just got home from a polyclinic in the northeastern part of Singapore. I had sent my mother for her regular medical check-up. Her appointment card stated clearly she had an appointment today. When I arrived there we dutifully went to the an automatic registration machine to register our presence for the appointment. The machine announced that we didn’t have an appointment. The duty officer also said we had no appointment and we had to wait in the queue for one hour to get “an appointment”. When I asked why I had to do that, her answer was a flippant, “Oh the system has changed!”

Later at the registration counter a staff member asked me if my mother had an appointment to be at the clinic. I asked her, “When is an appointment and appointment since the machine said we didn’t while my mother’s card said we did?“

A similar thing can be seen in the Forum Page of today’s Straits Times. The Assistant Director (Media Relations, the Singapore Police Force), was replying to a query from a reader who had asked why his diploma which was not from a local polytechnic, was not accepted for his application to a position in the force while that of the five local polytechnics was accepted.

The reply from the Assistant Director was:

“The entry requirement for diploma positions in the Singapore Police Force, like the rest of the Singapore Civil Service, is a polytechnic diploma.

For the purpose of recruitment, the diploma qualifications from our local polytechnics are used as a benchmark for assessing the standard and rigour of other diploma programmes.”

The Assistant Director is clearly only engaged in bureaucratic babble. First he passes the buck and says it is standard practice in the Civil Service. Then he says that the diplomas from the local polytechnics is the benchmark to compare other diploma programmes. Has he answered the initial query?

At first glance, it is as if he has, but surely anyone can see that the initial query is about why the Singapore Police Force only used the local polytechnic diplomas as the standard? To put it in another way, the job applicant was asking why his diploma was not good enough. To answer that it is not good enough because it doesn’t meet the benchmark is certainly an example of circular reasoning.

Furthermore, to say that the five polytechnics are used as benchmarks does not explain whether that particular job applicant’s diploma has met the benchmark or otherwise. The Singapore Police Force wants us to infer from this statement that the other diplomas (and therefore the issuing institutions) are of inferior quality. They won’t say it for legal reasons perhaps. It is left to the readers to infer. So when is an answer an answer?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

- Albert Einstein

How often do teachers allow students to ask questions in school? Not very much actually. Studies have shown that teachers usually do most of the talking. Most teachers don’t even practice “wait time”. A constant droning of the teachers seems to be the norm in most classrooms. Many teachers will disagree but as Betty K. Garner has pointed out in her book, Getting to “Got It”, most teachers are surprised to see that when they have been videotaped, that they are the ones doing most of the talking in the class and they are also the ones who answer their own questions.

The rush to complete the syllabus doesn’t allow for much reflective thinking on the part of the students (and teachers too). Yet getting students to ask questions is an excellent way to gauge how much learning has taken place. As Garner said:

“The true level of understanding is evident in the kinds of questions students ask.”

Teachers therefore should model asking open-ended questions. The concomitant side of this is of course to give students time to think about these questions, and better still, ask further questions about what they are learning. Unfortunately, the only kinds of questions that seem to be prevalent in the classrooms are the kinds that we see being given as part of the homework or written assessments so common in schools of today.

I am currently reading Bill Bryson‘s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It is a funny and wacky look at Science and other human discoveries. Such books are not new and I do enjoy reading them despite my Humanities background. What I do remember when I first started reading such books was why was my experience with senior high school, Science such a boring one? I remember feeling uninspired when learning about Newton, about light or Planck’s constant and others. I didn’t see much meaning in what was taught and I suspect that if I had asked why I had to learn all these, the answer would be “because it is in the examinations, stupid!”

It got so bad that when I had a chance to go to the university, I went to the Arts Faculty and studied History and Political Science among others. It was after I left the university (the learning wasn’t very universal then…still is?), that I started reading again about Science. I read books about evolution, physics and general science topics. I even read about the history and philosophy of science. I found them fascinating because the authors were writing in a very fascinating way. Reading them, you felt that Science was a human endeavor with heroes and villains, and humor too, as Bryson has shown.

It is not just about rote-learning. It is not just about knowing how to calculate and getting the correct answer to an examination question. I wanted to know more because it was interesting and it was interesting because a context was given to the information that was there. When the context is given it made more sense or meaning for the learner. At the end of the day, knowledge is about making sense or meaning of the information that one receives.

It is perhaps for this reason that Neil Postman, argued in his book “The End of Education”, that it is important for schools to teach narratives. Teaching and learning has to go beyond the mechanics of passing the examinations. Much of the disconnect that happens in schools today is mainly because of this mechanical approach to school and “learning“. Students and teachers are cut off from the “story” of knowledge. That story is very much a human story. When the teaching and learning is cut off from the human story, school becomes a dehumanizing experience.