Children without childhood

Children without childhood
24 April, 2008
By Stan Yee, Kota Kinabalu

If we can turn our attention away from politics for a moment, there is a lot for us to worry about elsewhere. The state of our education, for instance. Our exam-oriented system is cause for grave concern because it has got the whole nation fixated on a concept of “academic excellence” as defined by exam results. The students’ scholastic performance is no longer a function of what the school can produce, but rather largely a result of performance enhancing private tuition.

What is intended to benchmark our educational standard relative to comparable countries abroad, and a means of gauging our teachers’ level of competence, the public exams have now become annual inter-school high-jump contests in which doing well is not good enough. The quest is for the highest number of ‘A’ passes.

To achieve the optimum performance many students go to private tuition classes that cumulatively add up almost as much time as the school hours they spend at school every day. On their part some schools pick and choose their students to make sure that the weak ones will not spoil their percentages. The old idea about going to school to learn to be a well rounded person seems to have been thrown out the window.

Each time our public exams turn out brilliant results the crossbar of the standard of excellence is moved yet another notch higher, never mind that these results have been induced by the tuition steroids that have been pumped into our children.

Some kids attend one tuition class after another after school everyday. As if that is not bad enough, now their time is going to be even more constricted by the new national programme known as the Integrated Time-table for Secondary School (Jadual Bersepadu Sekolah Menengah or JBSM) in which some selected schools operate from 7am to 3pm to integrate the normal curriculum with co-curriculum periods.

If I understand the situation correctly the proposed integrated school time-table is still at its pilot stage to test the system and the reaction of the school community throughout the country. As such the programme will only serve its trial purpose if the local directors of education understand its trial nature and provide an honest feed-back to the Education Ministry, and not a glowing report unrelated to the true situation just to please the bosses in KL who conceived the JBSM idea.

At first glance, two days in the week for such an integrated school schedule should suffice. Anything more will overburden both the students and teachers alike. We should not emulate Japan whose schools finish at 3 every afternoon. They have all manner of facilities and extra-curricular programmes to engage a wide range of interests among the students. Even so the rat race there has driven many a young person to desperation. We do not want that to happen here. Already, we have had an increasing number of suicides in this country. Just recently one child jumped off the 5th floor of his school building here in Kota Kinabalu, which partly prompted this article.

Many fear that if the new schedule is accepted it will intensify an already suffocating daily regime for our children, and will lead to even more stresses and strains and a worsening mental health situation. There is a real fear that for some this may well be the last straw.

Apropos the exams, one wonders what good it will do to our education system when the authorities read more than they should into exam results that have been artificially enhanced by factors with little to do with what our schools are capable of producing.

The escalating pressure on the school population is exacting a heavy price on our children and begs many questions.

Is getting a good number of ‘As’ so important that we can disregard everything else that children enjoy doing, like being with friends, playing sports, spending time with the family or just ‘stand and stare’ and be children?

Will the exam results that benchmark our educational standard serve the purpose to the extent they are touted to represent? And what glory can our schools honestly derive from the high percentages that their students achieve when they know that without tuition the results may have been very different?

What price do our children have to pay to satisfy this standard of excellence to which their schools do not measure up but which they have to forfeit their short, priceless childhood to win for the glory of the school and perhaps to satisfy their parents’ ego?

How many hours can we expect children to work in a day and how many days a week?

We bemoan that our young people do not read. How can they when they get stuck all day with those boring textbooks that they lug around in their school bags? How can they not be sick to death of books?

What about character and personality development? Character does not grow out of a massive dose of maths or science or BM or English or loads of textbooks or even religious or moral instruction classes. If anything these can even stifle character development.

There is something quite ridiculous about the way moral instruction is made an examination subject. Kids swat up the moral values presented in a cut and dried fashion to pass the tests. They do not necessarily live up to or even believe in the values that they are taught. They swat up whatever they think the examiner wants. Few think things through for themselves and relate them to real life situations where right or wrong does not always present itself in black and white clarity. They memorise words but do not necessarily internalise skills and values.

Children learn to relate to the world from social interactions with other children, from lessons learned in normal conflicts and perhaps a fight or two, from adults around them, from literature and good movies, from sports and some of the foolish things that adults look back on and laugh about. Anything short of these may turn children into insipid introverts with very little imagination, personal initiative or drive and ability to work independently.

While some children do need tuition to help them catch up on weak subjects, it should not be a substitute for the normal learning at school. They should receive their staple diet of education at school. Tuition is just a supplement to make up for the shortfall at school.

Unfortunately as the demand for tuition increases so will the likelihood of some teachers’ ethical standard and professionalism going the other way.

But, all said, the main culprit is our over-emphasis on using exam results as the yardstick for our schools’ scholastic worth. Periodically we should re-calibrate the benchmark to accord with what the system can produce unaided by extraneous factors.

As matters stand, the present one-size-fits-all approach is woefully out of sync with the realities on the ground. It gives the Ministry of Education a bloated idea of the country’s educational standard.

Stan Yee is a retired government officer and a columnist