Today’s schools are blessed with connections to the outside world. Where at one time, the only connection a school had was perhaps the telephone in the administration office, today students and teachers can even have access to the internet to connect with the world. Yet, schools today, especially in Singapore, are perhaps one of the most disconnected places to be.

The disconnection stems not from the lack of physical infrastructure. It is actually, in spite of the availability of good communications infrastructure. Much of the disconnection is of a human nature. At the intellectual level, the “learning” that takes place is often devoid of connections with true deep understanding. Superficial knowledge is the norm as that is what is required for the written examinations.

The disconnection in school is especially true with regards to the meaning of the school experience itself. School by definition should be a place where learning takes place. But what is the meaning of the learning that takes place for the students themselves. One is reminded of this funny graphic below:

While funny, yet if we are to look at it seriously, how many of our students in our schools understand the full meaning of it? How many of them understand the real meaning of the equations that they have been asked to solve? Here, I do not mean just their being able to solve the equations because the equations can be solved merely through knowing the mechanical routine. What do they really mean for these students? Students routinely solve equations and other problems in school without understanding the meaning of what they have learned (except that they are needed to do well in the high stakes written examinations)? Little attempt is made at meaning-making. This disconnectedness is not limited to just Math.

Is it a surprise then that many students do not “connect” with the “learning” that goes on in the schools. Often we say many of these students chose to disconnect and begin to become “problem” students but the reality is that perhaps little is done in schools to make that connection for the students. The students’ decision not to participate in the “learning” in school is precipitated by the teachers not making great effort to make that connection for them. Far too often they are told that they need to “learn” so they can get a “good job”. Very uninspiring isn’t it?

For the teachers, the disconnection is from their own traditional role as curriculum directors and developers. Teachers too find little meaning about what being a teacher entails. Some (many?) live the lie that they are preparing their young charges for the workplace but then again as I have indicated in my other posts, this is far from true as the skills taught and pushed for in schools today is rarely consistent with what the employers want.

So what we have in schools today is a disconnect that is all too often unnoticed or ignored. Yet today, we want our schools to be connected to the world through the internet when perhaps the most important connections should be within the more intimate confines of the schools themselves.

The foundational element in effective work systems is self-correcting, self-managing, self accountable, self-governing behavior. Energy spent on monitoring and attempting to affect the behavior of team members or other entities from the outside is energy wasted and energy that could be better expended on improving the business and the capability of people. The critical element is to increasingly create self-governing capability.

-Carol Sanford, “Myths of Organizational Effectiveness at Work”

A modern day school examination

Many schools in Singapore and the rest of the world are caught in the pursuit of high stakes examinations. In such schools, it becomes near impossible, to use the words of Costa and Kallick (2004), to  “embrace and sustain curriculum and instructional strategies designed for individual meaning-making and personal self-directed learning.” Costa and Kallick are of the opinion that if we want prepare our students to be able to resolve “the ambiguous, paradoxical, and dichotomous problems and conflicts they will encounter in our increasingly more complex society”, schools must put to the forefront of their agenda that is teaching for meaning and fostering self-directed learning.

Self-directed learning has become more important because of the increasing complexity of society.  The need for self-directed learning has been given an economic face when business leaders repeatedly warn that the workforce must undergo a radical change as the nature of work has changed to the building of values, attitudes and skills in a world of reduced job security and a more loose work structure, and multiple job changes.  In such instances, the worker would have to rely on his own self-directedness or or self-reliance and initiative to survive and thrive.

Self-directed learning is in fact a natural tendency in man. As Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers (1998) pointed out:

Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself. Identity is the filter that every organism or system uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships, changing environments – all are interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency towards self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.

Allowing students therefore to be self-directed learners is acknowledging this natural tendency to self-manage and self-regulate. The traditional school system where much of the thinking and decision-making with regards to learning is done by the teachers, does not encourage students to take on these responsibilities which should inherently belong to the latter. The students’ minds and capacities to learn becomes dull and their learning becomes externally motivated and “other directed”. Perhaps the only ones we know who are the exception to this rule are the peak performers. They have this trait where they have this strong belief that they are going to succeed. Even then, it can be argued that they do so not because of the traditional school system but it is in spite of the school system.

A painting of a Chinese Imperial examination

The traditional school system pays little attention to whether a student possesses self-directedness or not. The high stakes examinations and assessment that is usually done does not measure this. When high stakes examinations become the agenda of the school, everything else is pushed aside. It is in this light that perhaps it is unfortunate that Singapore’s “successful” educational system is being highlighted and even imitated with little consideration of what is taking place. Many schools in Southeast Asia are adopting the Singapore model for schools. In fact, many of these adopters of the Singapore educational model, may not have realized that the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore, is trying to make the changes to fit the school-going population to the needs of the future workforce that is required by Singapore.

But inertia at the ground level (the schools) and a reluctance to give up the very same high stakes examinations system which has given it its “success” means that Singapore schools are still very much a high-level examinations pressure cooker. Many Singapore school principals who in public declare their agreement to the need for change, at best, pay lip service to this need for change. Teachers in Singapore are still reluctant to give up their hard earned experience in teaching to the examinations. This is partly due to the fact that many Singapore school principals still evaluate teachers’ performance based on the examination performance of the students. Teachers are seen to be hard working when they have extra classes to prepare students for the examinations. The paradigm shift has obviously not taken place at the ground level. But as Singapore’s leaders have realized, the need for change here has become paramount if Singapore is to remain competitive in the global arena. They too have realized the need for more self-directed people in the workforce. They need to prod the schools in Singapore harder to move in this direction. Teacher training should also pay greater attention to this need for change in approach.

Schools, therefore, have to prepare students for self-directedness. Students who are self-directed would have to display self-management, self-monitoring and self-modification (Costa and Kallick, 2004). Clearly these are skills which are currently not emphasised in school yet. They are also skills that emphasise the need for thinking to be at the forefront of a school’s agenda. Schools in Singapore are moving to alternative modes of assessment, but the high stakes examinations remain the primary mode of determining the success of a student, and the school.