In one of my posts, I highlighted Howard Rheingold’s post about the Amish and their relationship with technology. He suggested that instead of a mad rush to bring technology into our lives, we should have an ongoing conversation with technology. The cultural critic, Neil Postman, also has a similar view about technology. Postman in fact tries to make this conversation a little clearer by suggesting that we think about six questions that we should ask when a new technology is introduced. The six questions are:

• What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
• Whose problem is it?
• What new problems might be created by solving the original problem?
• Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?
• What changes in language are being forced by these new technologies?
• What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology?

In my view, the questions are meant to prevent us from rushing into implementing or using any new technology. In the field of education, these questions become all the more important because it is going to impact and area of human endeavor, that is, education, that is clearly supposed to be designed for the future. As an educator who had been part of Singapore’s well-known MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE) team, I have had an abiding interest in the use of ICT in schools. However, Rheingold’s and Postman’s suggestions for a conversation with ICT, have both given me cause to reflect on the use of ICT in education. I will be sharing my thoughts on the questions raised by Postman in relation to how ICT is supposed to be used in education. So do look out for them. In the meantime, click on the book cover to read Postman’s “Technopoly”.

Below are some quotes pertaining to the importance of numbers for our reflection. Have numbers distorted our perceptions of reality?

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(Francis) Galton is also known as the founder of “eugenics,” a term he coined, which means the science of arranging marriage and family so as to produce the best possible offspring based  on the hereditary characteristics of the parents. He believed that anything could be measured and that statistical procedures, in particular, were the technology that could open the pathway to real knowledge about every form of human behavior. The next time you watch a televised beauty contest in which women are ranked numerically, you should remember Francis Galton, whose pathological romance with numbers began with this idiocy. Being unsatisfied with vagueness about where the most “beauty” was to be found, he constructed a “beauty map” of the British Isles… If this was not enough, he also invented a method for quantifying boredom (by counting the number of fidgets) and even proposed a statistical inquiry for determining the efficacy of prayer.

~ quoted from “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” by Neil Postman

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Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s many recent visits abroad appears to have paid off – the 62-year-old ranked No. 32 in the inaugural list of top thinkers that mattered most this year in the latest issue of the influential Foreign Policy magazine in the United States.

~ quoted from “Anwar listed from among 100 Top Global Thinkers” by Debra Chong, The Malaysian Insider

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Rainer Kalb, a veteran writer who’s spent six years at kicker, once said: “The yearning for grades is a reflex to the debates about school grades in childhood. Now you can once again get upset about what you consider an injustice.” If that’s supposed to mean that the players secretly, subconsciously wish to be graded, it’s rather been my experience that it’s the writers who secretly, subconsciously react to a childhood experience. Now they wield the power to rate and grade and classify, now they are the teachers. WTF.

~ “Making the Grade”, Soccernet by Uli Hesse

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There is a sad joke about a fifth-grade teacher in a ghetto school who asked a grim Negro (sic) boy, during the course of a “science” lesson, “How many legs does a grasshopper have?” “Oh, man, he replied, “I sure wish I had your problems!”

~ quoted from “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner

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Schools in a nation are viewed as factories of one national industry that produces the product to compete with that of other nations’ education systems, and henceforth should be held to the same standards and produce the same values.Further, schools are considered as businesses and test scores on a few subjects represent their profit margin – the bottom line to judge their performance. As a result, it narrows the curriculum to a few subjects considered essential for competing with others.

~ “Global Competitiveness Reinterpreted: Homogenization vs Diversification” by Yong Zhao

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(Added on)

Singapore had the largest proportions of highly competent students who reached the advanced benchmark in Primary 4 Science (36%), Secondary 2 Science (32%) and Primary 4 Mathematics (41%). For Secondary 2 Mathematics, Singapore’s proportion was the 3rd highest (40%) (behind Chinese Taipei and Korea). [international medians: 7%, 3%, 5% and 2% respectively]

quoted from “Singapore Performs Well Again in Latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007, Press Release from the Ministry of Education (MOE), Singapore

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The top student in this year’s Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is a China national Qiu Biqing, 13, from  Qifa Primary School, who achieved an aggregate score of 290, with four A*s and a Distinction in Higher Chinese.

~ quoted from “Top student in PSLE this year from China”, the Temasek Review

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This post was inspired by my friend, Dennis, whose intelligence is not impaired by his O levels only qualification. He compared the Singapore school system to the English Premier League (EPL).

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.