Mulla Nasrudin stood up in the market place and started to address the throng. “O people! Do you want knowledge without difficulties, truth without falsehood, attainment without effort, progress without sacrifice?” Very soon a large crowd gathered, everyone shouting: “Yes, yes!” “Excellent!” said the Mulla. “I only wanted to know. You may rely upon me to tell you all about it if I discover any such thing.”
~ “The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin” by Idries Shah

Sometimes when I think about Indonesian schools and their attempts at improvements, I am reminded of this story. Too often schools want quick ready made solutions to launch them into the world. Often also they think that to become a Sekolah Bertaraf Internasional (SBI) all you need to do is shop.

And all too often, there will be snake oil peddlers promising them this! Today, the snake oil that is being peddled to Indonesian schools include “Singapore education” or “Singapore syllabus”, “ICT”, “English language” and “international examinations”. Indonesians will do well to heed Mulla Nasrudin.

For more Mulla Nasrudin stories that gets you pondering, click on the book cover.

I will start off with some definitions of the word “chimera” that I have found from some dictionaries:

“1. a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a vain or idle fancy

2. a fanciful mental delusion or fabrication

3. An imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts”

I often get visitors coming to my blog because they have searched for the key words “Singapore education syllabus” or something similar. From the numbers who did that and have arrived at my blog and also from the newspaper reports, we know many people are interested in the Singapore education system. Many are so interested that they have bothered to look up Google or Yahoo! to find out about the highly acclaimed “Singapore syllabus”.

Quite frankly, I am usually amused by it and usually feel it would have been easier for them if Google or Yahoo! had automatically diverted them to the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) syndicate instead of my blog or some other website. What many of these people don’t know is that in Singapore the examinations is the syllabus! The whole teaching is centered on what will appear in these high stakes examinations jointly conducted by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) and the CIE (Addition: or rather UCLES). Strange but true! One would have expected that an independent syllabus for the schools would have been designed first and then the examinations will be set according to what the syllabus desires to achieve. In Singapore, it has been (as someone I know who was told by her professor recently) that it is actually a “case of the tail wagging the dog”.

Visitors and observers of the “Singapore educational system” have been paying lots of visits to Singapore and websites to find out the secret of Singapore’s successful “educational” system. There’s no secret. All they have to do is teach to the examinations. All the wonderful things that may have been conjured in their minds about the possible reasons for its success are just chimerical, a “delusion”, “fabrication” or a “vain or idle fancy”.

For many who have gone through that system it is also a “monster”. Many have undergone this monstrous system that  calls for only “one right answer”, regurgitation of endless meaningless factlets in a high stakes game of Trivial Pursuit, and routine mechanical operations. Is it a coincidence then that the monster (the chimera) is also supposed to have, according to these dictionaries, the head of a lion, the very symbol of the Lion City?

Have you looked lately at the way that teachers in schools have been using presentation software for teaching? Do most of them look cluttered and uninspiring? Do they look like nothing more than just digitized notes instead of paper notes with the occasional graphics thrown in?

In my view, when you see a lot of this, then it is not only because the teachers do not know basics of good design but it reflects a deeper affliction among teachers in schools if you like. “Death by PowerPoint” is really the result of how teachers see teaching and learning.

The fact that their presentations usually bear a  lot of text is a reflection of the state of mind of the teachers doing them. In their mind, they see teaching as just the delivery of information. Since the examinations-based syllabi that they probably based their teaching on is heavy, the information that present tends to be overwhelming too. Just get it through and “cover” the syllabus hence we see the piling of information on single slides. What you see on screen are likely to be just rehashed versions of the textbooks. There is little time for concept building or to linger on big and important ideas.

On the other hand if the teacher is concerned with the teaching of concepts, the slides would appear differently. You are likely to see more thought put into the slides and their arrangement. The teacher would be aware that they should be communicating what Nancy Duarte (2008) says are ideas rather than just slides. They will know that their presentation is to get their audience thinking. With that in mind, the teacher will try and build concepts using multiple slides. The teacher will used meaningful and effective graphics. Text used will be very selective and impactful. Teachers must not allow themselves to become cicumscribed by the tools they used. If teachers allow their pesentations to be more deaths by PowerPoint then they have, as Thoreau says, “become the tool of our tools.”