Make Education a Race and the Learning is Destroyed

In this week's Sunday Times, Dr John Medina, Director of the Brain Centre for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, ended his article with “Make education a race and the learning is destroyed.”  I believe this statement will resonate with many educators and parents.  Our schools started off with the aim to provide our children with knowledge and skills so that they can function as contributing beings in the future.  Along the way, somehow, someone decides to make our education into a race where students and schools are ranked.  Nowadays, even teachers and principals are ranked so as to “motivate” them to inspire our children to do even better in school.

What exactly are our children inspired to do?  Many educators will agree with me that our children are not intrinsically motivated, but they are pushed to the limit to excel in quantifiable results such as their examination scores.  This method of measurement is the fastest and most efficient way for a system to rank huge number of people.  How about diversity and creativity?  Educators know that these two characteristics are important and will be the deciding factors between a “Good” and an “Excellent”.  However, how do we teach and can we really measure diversity and creativity?

I once asked my professor at Harvard University – the West is looking to the East in their implementation of high-stake testing so that educators can ensure that at least some knowledge has been passed on to students.  The East, on the other hand, is looking to the West on the way the students are being encouraged to think independently and to have creativity and confidence in their work.  How do we know we have reached the optimal balance?  His answer was simple; “it depends”.

Giving up totally on our current high-stake testing system will not be wise.  Continuing with it will be foolish.  In our well-oiled education system, can we find a space where some form of messiness is tolerated, where in this small space, educators can finally nurture our children’s innate uniqueness and creativity?  The input to this space will be difficult to create and the output from this space will be hard to measure, but it will be a start; and a good one.  Let’s do it!