I have just written about flash mobs and creativity and schools. That was a reaction to a post on Facebook by a friend of mine on a video of purported flash mob scene in Singapore. It depicted a highly rehearsed flash mob doing a dance sequence smack in the middle of Raffles Place. Of course it was not a flash mob in the true sense of the word where almost total strangers congregate together almost spontaneously to do something on a mass scale. This, it seems, was a rehearsed advertisement for a a phone company. Just a few days prior to this event, the local daily, the Straits Times featured an article on flash mobs being used by commercial or business entities.

Education and flash mobs have a lot more in common then we normally think. Today, both are being taken over or hijacked if you like by business considerations. The result of these hijackings is a well-run and structured activity that has lost its way.

Only for those are unaware, will see the activity as true to its original intended purposes. Today, behind flash mobs you see a business motive. The same is true of education. Business motives run education. While this is perhaps true of mass “education” since the start of the Industrial Revolution perhaps even more so today we have lost sight of what education is truly for. For the individual it is seen as the passport to the acquisition of material wealth. For the businessmen, it is to teach the populace to be just skillful workers of the 21st century. While this is important, shouldn’t education have other and more important goals?

What we see instead are statements of intent that will actually narrow the goals of education even further to that of the business world. In the US, the Obama Administration panics and its education goal is to prevent America from being left in the dust economically by its global rivals. Hence the Obama Administration’s emphasis on Math and the Sciences. To drive home the importance of it, it intends to link teacher pay to teacher performance which everyone knows is an euphemism for linking teachers’ pay to their students’ test scores. School districts get money if they toe the line. In Singapore, even the madrasahs have to adopt the national curriculum  so that its graduates are economically more viable. Getting funds for the madrasahs from the governing body is easy as long as you participate in the economy-centered new madrasah syllabus. In addition, “philanthropists” like Bill Gates have also linked funding from his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to linking test scores and teacher pay.

The result is that education becomes a “bottom line” endeavor just like businesses. Education is reduced to numbers and statistics, just like businesses. Education will be ever changing depending on the trends in the market place, just like businesses dance to trends in the economy. The people involved in education like the teachers and students will become just digits, just like the way businesses treats its workers. A humanizing endeavor has been reduced to just cold economics. So while outwardly, education appears to be taking place in our well-planned and organized schools, the reality is that education have surrendered even further perhaps to the demands of businesses just as flash mobs are increasingly tools of businesses too.

“In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours.”

- John Lennon

I have just read a book called “The Outliers: the story of success” (click cover on the right), written by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is a study of success. The writer tries to zero on the factors that leads to success. One of these factors is what he calls the “10,000-hour rule”. In his book, he quoted neurologist, Daniel Levitin, who said:

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being world-class expert – in anything…In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.”

Levitin was again quoted to say:

“…no one has yet to found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

The Beatles, perhaps, the greatest band the world has ever seen, paid their dues in the strip clubs where they played for hours on end. John Lennon described this in an interview:

“We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Pete Best, who was the Beatles drummer at the time, was quoted as saying:

“We played seven nights a week (emphasis mine). At first we played almost non-stop till twelve-thirty, when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.”

The last word perhaps about the effect of their time in Hamburg is from Phil Norman who wrote their biography, “Shout!” He wrote:

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back….They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

What about Bill Gates? He started doing real-time programming since he was an eight-grader back in 1968. Gates said this about that period:

“It was my obsession… I skipped athletics. I went up there (Information Services Inc.) at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.”

By the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates had been programming non-stop for seven years. As Gladwell puts it, “He was way past ten thousand hours.” We all know who Bill Gates is today.

What about Singapore schools? We make our students sit quietly for hours for much of the school year. We discourage them from asking too much or being curious for most of their time in school. We also teach them to wait for notes and answers. We also trained them to work for individual success. We drill them fully for the examinations for hours. We do these for at least ten years until they are sixteen.

We all know how well our students do in examinations and international surveys like TIMSS!

But, with the ten thousand hours spent on such things, will the Singapore student be able to acquire the soft skills required for life? Will they be creative problem-solvers? Will they be able to learn independently? I believe we know the answers to these questions.

Seems like Marshall McLuhan is right. “The medium is the message”. But at least we have something in common with the Beatles and Bill Gates.