Curriculum Mindshift

I read with interest Tuesday's article in the main local English papers about how parents have turned to tuition centres to conduct tests and exams for their children and thus having exam-centred learning for primary one and two students when exams are soon becoming non-existent at these levels.

Such a change in the system shows a strong commitment by the government to implement more developmentally appropriate teaching and evaluation methods which at the general level of reflection in my limited knowledge of the field of education has been scientifically proven.

This brings to mind the complexity of curriculum innovation in relation to the community outside the school. You may get the go-ahead at the policy, administrative and teaching levels but you still need to convince parents and other role players.

Tuition centres, as commercial entities, can be a good indicator of what parents really think their children should get from their schooling. At this point, that seems to be , ironically, a scientific way of measuring their child's competitiveness. As pointed out by one of the interviewees in the article, students eventually after all have to sit for high-stakes examinations.

What I hope though is that this will not cause a turnaround in the government's policies towards implementing holistic changes in the system. It does have a trend
over the years of trying out new programs like SAIL, the initial SEED program, the 'freer' English syllabus in the 80s and eventually regaining control of the 'freedom' given in content and method to implement state level programs.

The difference I hope is that like other 'process' as opposed to these 'content' changes, the elimination of examinations at the foundation levels will, like the implementation of independent schools and 'alternative' schools and examinations like NUS High, SOTA and the IB, will see the light of day and not be buried under public pressure.

Maybe one way to do so is to convince the government of the economic benefits of a more holistic method of education (which I think they are already slowly warming up to as seen in the implemented changes)....that's a question the academics will have to answer. Although we can look at the Scandinavian countries and the United States, we can also question why we cannot follow Germany.

Then there's always the question of context. Education is seen as the labour producing machine of a country and we are always being told that we cannot afford to be anything but the best to survive as a small nation (although at this moment I wonder at this because we seem to be trying to fill our population to the seams with people of whatever educational level to satisfy the population ratio but that is another story) hence we must optimise every cohort that goes through the system.

As for me, I'm convinced that mass schooling in general is problematic and ,as can be seen in the 1001 policy changes, a reactive generator to the economic changes. In the end we have recreated society as it was before mass education and industrialisation in another form.

Now back to my domestic chores...