I have this habit of making inferences about what I have observe and what I have read. I do that all the time because that is part of critical thinking. Here I  do not mean critical just in the negative sense. I draw conclusions as best as I can. Most of the time, in life, you cannot wait for someone to appear and tell you what events mean. Of course, my conclusions can be wrong but then again just tell me why. That is fine with me.

What in my view is sadder, is that people do not want to or are reluctant to infer. Worse, some don’t seem able to make inferences. Someone, once told me how she had gathered a group of parents to teach them about reading to their children. She told me she held one of those “big books” and sat in front of the parents and asked them what they thought the book was about. All of them said they didn’t know and one explained that they wouldn’t know because both she and the parents had not read the book. She pointed out to me that the book that she was holding had a beautiful cover illustration and of course the title. She was amazed that the parents could not make any inference about the story by looking at the cover and the title.

This little anecdote illustrates a few things. Oops! I nearly told you what they are. Perhaps, you will like to make your inferences about what they are?

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?

“Students can read a typical high-school “history” book from cover to cover without learning that real history emerges from the examination of evidence and the exercise of reason. Students can read a typical book from cover to cover without learning that the construction of real history involves a lot of detective work — e.g., the appraisal of claims and counterclaims, the separation of supportable assertions from superstitions and folklore, the scrutinizing of documents and other kinds of evidence, the detection of counterfeit documents and artifacts, the resolution of conflicting interpretations of evidence, the rejection of unjustified inferences, and the demolition of unwarranted generalizations”

- from “Good Stuff for History Teachers” by William J. Bennetta

There is a need to take another look at the teaching of History in Singapore. This is because most of the time the teaching of History is very much textbook-bound. Teachers tend to just explain what is already in the textbooks and get students to refer to the textbook as almost the undisputed master of information and opinion on historical events. What is of greater concern in Singapore is that while there is a shift in emphasis in the History paper for the high stakes examinations in recent years, the shift in the manner that History is taught has been far from revolutionary.

While there has been an emphasis on the higher order thinking skills and the need to interpret historical sources in the examinations, the way that History is taught in Singapore schools seems to be very disconnected from the way the students are assessed. While the current History syllabus in Singapore requires students to demonstrate an ability to think, and perhaps to think like a Historian would, teachers in Singapore do not teach students to think for this purpose.

Usually any thinking skill teaching done in a typical Singapore school History class is done only to teach students how to answer the examination questions which have been set to ensure that students demonstrate thinking skills. In other words, in the course of the lessons, thinking skills is not emphasized. Teachers would still dish out their notes or just “cover” what is said in the textbooks. What is said in the textbook are “givens”. They are taken to be facts.

Teachers only go through the thinking process with their students only because it is a requirement of the examination paper. Even then the manner that it is done will be very mechanical and little thought will be given to the need for the transfer of those skills to other situations other then through some invisible osmotic process. In other words, thinking is taught but with a spirit which is contrary to the whole purpose as to why these thinking skills were introduced into the syllabus in the first place.

This happens mainly because of the heavy examination orientation of the Singapore “education” system. Teachers know that, in Singapore, only the examination grades matter despite some recent pronouncements from up high to move away from that.The content heavy syllabus, which is based on the examinations requirements, has seen numerous reductions over the years but it is still a lot to cover. This has led to teachers still teaching rapidly to “cover” the content. There is little time for serious teaching for understanding. Very rarely will you see a teacher who actually uses mainly primary or secondary sources to teach History so that students have a more profound understanding of the learning of History as a process of learning that involves “the examination of evidence and the exercise of reason”. Little is done to show that History is:

“the appraisal of claims and counterclaims, the separation of supportable assertions from superstitions and folklore, the scrutinizing of documents and other kinds of evidence, the detection of counterfeit documents and artifacts, the resolution of conflicting interpretations of evidence, the rejection of unjustified inferences, and the demolition of unwarranted generalizations.”

If some of the above skills or processes is done in Singapore schools, it is done only when the teachers teach their students to answer the so-called source-based questions for the high stakes examinations. What this leads to is a cynical inculcation of thinking skills. The approach only teaches students to think that the thinking skills only makes their life harder and see no other application of the skills in the rest of their lives. Worse, it does little justice to a very interesting subject and students will continue to believe that History is nothing more than the learning and regurgitation of facts. Unfortunately, for too many in Singapore’s education system, it does not matter because students still ace their examinations.