Memo to the new education minister, pt 2
Opinion |
Azly Rahman
Published: |
Modified:
COMMENT | I have a suggestion for Malaysia to consider, as a continuation of my previous memo.
Today’s schools need to be cognitively architectured and grown anew, and made to start at year zero of a new education revolution. This revolution should rest on of the idea of singularity and complexity, and the multiplicity of knowledge that is fluid and evolving organically.
This philosophy of education is yet to be conceived and crafted, even as the nature of the human self and the mind is being reconstructed, leaving behind the legacy of the paradigms of industrialism, post-industrialism, and quantum physics.
Schools will one day respond to these mega changes and cease to exist in its current shape, form and purpose.
They will one day replace institutions of power and knowledge controlled form above, such as ashrams, madrasah, abbots, convents, and kibbutzim. These are prison-houses of mass indoctrination, of monocultural cognitive linearism for the state to mould children into citizens obedient enough to be slaves to the power elite, new global imperialists and newer mandarins.
Essentially, in this post-industrial social design called ‘instrumental education’, today’s schools are mere factories producing an unthinking citizenry living in a matrix of absurdities.
But what would be among the most compelling transformational uses of technology seen in schools of today, given that we are living in a deeply mediated technological world?
It would be an entire school using the philosophy of project-based learning – students beginning their day with ‘playlists’ as learning objectives, going to their collaborative stations; teachers as tech-gurus and chief researchers, utilising only primary sources; in a research-driven and stress-free school which is aimed at using technologies of the future purposefully, and to nurture scientific, artistic, philosophical, and global thinking.
It is a redesign of instruction that Socrates would have insisted upon and Elon Musk has shown, but informed by the wisdom of Howard Gardner. That would be my idea of a democratic academy, one that Henry David Thoreau would approve of.
Using technology to transform
I saw this idea of a digitally-driven, project-based learning concept in schools in New Jersey and in New York, through the School of One initiative.
National education leaders and ministers – once they become skilled in conceiving the relationship between human beings, technology, culture, and schooling – should explore cutting-edge ideas for using technology in more transformational ways.
This includes writing, reading, thinking, and creating. Virtual reality, big data historicising tools, GPS-type systems, and 3D printing technologies are emerging as potentially transformational tools of collaborative learning.
I grew up in a village in Johor Bahru, like Mowgli in The Jungle Book. I saw the first computer – perhaps an IBM 036 – in an office which 12 human beings had to share. That was in the early 1970s.
I have used technologies of learning such as the ‘tablet’ (a green alphabet and numbers writing pad used with chalk), learned to use the ancient typewriter, then the need-to-boot floppy-disc computer, and other tools to work and learn with the progress of technology.
Today, I am fortunate to be able to even design an entire Master’s curriculum using collaborative technologies and smart tools. I know I will continue to evolve carefully with technologies, without the fear of being turned into a robot and thinking like one.
Technological advances
There are advances in technology I foresee in the near future. I see virtual and augmented reality as technologies of the future that will redesign schooling altogether, only if these are to be used purposefully and democratically, and made available to children in impoverished countries.
The underlying principle of learning is not to showcase gadgets and turn children into techno-zombies, but to develop minds to be more humane and emphatic – more human – and to understand and manage an increasingly complex world in which information has become a commodity, and where knowledge and understanding, let alone wisdom is absent.
We are at a critical juncture of perhaps a third digital revolution, after the computer and the internet. We are moving into a phase of transhumanism, with its attendant dangers and inherent contradictions.
I see global education, learning, and cross-cultural perspectives in urban-international education as the new frontiers for any education consulting company to be venturing into.
‘Summerhill’ of love
My passion about education could be traced as early as I started thinking what my ‘existence in school’ means. I wanted to know more about how my teachers and my principles thought. I read book on educational philosophy, at quite an early age.
One book that had a profound effect on the way I think about the world and my place in it was AS Neil’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, published in the ‘hippie’ 1960s.
I read the entire book in 1975 when I was 14, in an ‘experimental American high school’ in Kuantan. I was chosen to be sent to the school based on my academic achievements and my parent’s poverty level.
Its model was based partly on the Bronx High School of Science in New York, as I found out while preparing my PhD proposal for the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
The Bronx High School of Science produced eight Nobel laureates in science and six Pulitzer Prize winners, two of the world’s most prestigious awards in those fields.
So, in that boarding school, I was bored. I read many things. Neil’s book was in my school library – meant for my teachers, I suppose.
I love the way the children were treated in the titular boarding school, Summerhill, in Neil’s book. They could come to school whenever they liked. Learning in that one-house school happened as democratically as it should be in the ‘Summer of Love’ sixties.
The best thing is that, according to Neill, the school’s founder, the children did not turn out to be criminals.
Maybe deep inside I was trying to understand why I was put in that boarding school in Kuantan, sent there at 13, hundreds of miles away from my village, and missing my mother every day.
It was an experimental American high school, and I was there as the government’s guinea pig, as we were constantly told, happily, by our teachers. I am writing my memoir on those days of schooling.
But back to my memo.
I want to suggest the new education minister read up on essential works by major authors on school reform, so that he/she could do the best job producing the best and brightest of our nation.
I recommend works both of the traditional and modern authors: Socrates, Gardner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, Carl Perkins, and even sci-fi writers talking about scenarios in education.
Let us help the Education Ministry conduct a total revamp: from philosophy to paradigm to practice and people, as well as products.
We have a set of pillars of a major shift to erect. It is a new beginning requiring careful and intelligent steps, in a world of alienation, unemployment, technological determinism, underrepresentation, and increasingly violent racism and religious intolerance – the excesses of predatory local, national and global capitalism.
But most of all, we must move forward gracefully, for the future of all the Malaysian children, hungry for knowledge, understanding and wisdom, to function as good and thinking citizens in a truly multicultural society.
AZLY RAHMAN is an educator, academic, international columnist, and author of seven books. He grew up in Johor Bahru, and holds a Columbia University doctorate in international education development and Master’s degrees in five areas: education, international affairs, peace studies communication, and creative writing.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
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