I remember that time when I was in still in Polytechnic. We learnt about providing quality education for children in third world countries to help them break out of the poverty cycle. Education – It was supposed to prepare us for work. It is to equip us with the skills to survive in the workforce. But why is it that instead of testing our ability to work, schools are testing our ability for memorization?
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’ve never understood the principle behind the type of examinations given to us. Isn’t the point of taking a module to understand the concept? What’s the point of me memorizing 17 chapters of information that I can find on the internet?
Our education system is weird. A student who can recite 17 chapters of information without any understanding will be deemed above average, while a student who grasps the concept of those 17 chapters but could not memorize them would be seen as ‘less satisfactory’ compared to the former.
What does it prove if I could memorize the structure of the cell? Anybody who did not take the course could Google search “structure of the cell” and get the information instantly. Is that the point of going to class? Because if it was, there is no point in attending classes. We attend classes to learn things that we can’t learn from the internet. We want to learn skills and not just theories. Sure, theories are important. It gives us the background of what we are learning. But if all we are going to learn are theories, then why do I have to pay so much school fees to learn them when I can learn them for free from the Internet? I would gladly study that on my own and pay for examination fees to prove my ‘understanding’ of the topic.
授之以鱼不如授之以渔
It translate to give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
You can give me the information and I will remember it for the semester. And what value will those knowledge have after the semester? It is basically worthless because everyone can read that online. Reading is easy. Memorization might be easy. But truly understanding isn’t.
Teach me how to critically analyze an information. Challenge me to something I cannot find online. Ask me “What could you interpret from this data?” instead of “List the steps of mitosis”. Don’t ask me to describe the process of renal reabsorption. My future employers would not ask me that. Ask me to “suggests methods to allow patients with defects in renal reabsorption live a normal lifestyle”. Give me access to the internet, let me read research papers, and force me to think ‘how did this happen?’, ‘how can we fix this?’. Even if it might not work, but it proves that I had the skills to understand the mechanism of the disease and how it will affect the patient. It shows that I am able to think of ways to correct the mutation.
New knowledge does not come from the textbook. It comes from people who think outside of the textbook. We can have 1000 people working on a problem that had never been solved, but if nobody is thinking outside the box, even the brightest brain would never solve it.
We read articles about how IQ does not affect school grades. If IQ is indeed a rough measure of our reasoning ability, high IQ students would have no advantage in our education system. Because we are not trained to reason. We are trained to memorize.
And if this is so, why push for education in third world country? Is it really necessary? Because instead of training them to be able to work, we are training them to memorize. How would memorizing skills help them to break out of the poverty cycle?
