As I listen to my brother’s tuition teacher guiding them in Chinese about how to write an essay in Malay, I wonder is this really the way to educate the young? It’s so formulaic, so redundant, so… banal. In my opinion, this is no way to show the young uns how to think creatively. How to think at all. 

There’s so many things I don’t understand about this tuition lesson. First off, why is it taught in Chinese? No wonder we can’t carry a basic conversation in Malay. (Heck I can’t, but I place the blame on not really needing to for the past 7 years.) But that’s a minor detail, I’m sure my brother would shut his brain down if this lesson was conducted completely in a language he struggles with. I guess it’s a nice compromise.

Secondly, I don’t see how mastering the format of writing a daily journal is essential to scoring an A. Is formatting really that important that it delineates the As from the Bs? Google was invented for a reason. In today’s Google universe, you can easily find the ‘right format’ online. Nothing a little creative problem solving won’t well… solve. If a formal letter was a cake, the proper format is the cake pan. Just go out and buy one. Oh sorry, can’t bake that cake now, the cake pan is 1 inch too long. 

Thirdly, there is no beauty in the writing. It’s a lesson on manual regurgitation. Place part A into part B, screw tight. Oil part C a bit. Actually, I realize now that I’m not really just talking about language. I can’t fault the system for trying to ease people into a foreign language. The end is sound, the means applied just seems a little off. In all subjects. There’s no experimenting, there’s no gray area. Everything is either right or wrong, and language is the very last thing on the planet that has right and wrong. Sure that’s grammar and spelling, but those are the lego blocks of language. Somehow all schools teach us to make say, a Lego cake, but you can do so much else with the blocks. So much.

It’s the same with Science, everything is words. Memorize this right way. Memorize that right way. I’m sure some smart person out there has said that there’s a bajillion ways to fail and only a handful of ways to succeed.

Learning through the memorization of successes… now that’s no way to learn and be interested and learn to think. We try to give the children as few ways as possible to fail, but failure is where we learn. “Oh your experiment exploded in your face? Now tell me where you went wrong.” Memorizing the way it won’t fail is okay, but it won’t stick. I will always remember the stories of how my experiments failed and why it did. I have completely forgotten everything I’ve memorized in Secondary school. 

It’s not like I have the solutions up my sleeve. Just observing.