Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Building character in the classroom


The Straits Times


www.straitstimes.com

Published on Sep 26, 2011




Editorial



LAST week, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat announced the introduction of a new Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) curriculum which will promote a 'student-centric, values-driven education'. He cited an ageing population, more educated parents and the breakdown of traditional social structures as factors which call for the country's young to have a solid foundation in values and what it means to be a Singaporean. While Civics and Moral Education classes exist currently, the CCE will pull together the disparate modules under one dedicated unit in the Education Ministry.

This move certainly marks a change for Singapore's education system, which has always tended to emphasise quantifiables over qualitative factors. Grades, ranking and streaming have dominated the landscape for a long time. Certainly, they have gone a long way towards making Singapore's education system one of the best in the world - so much so that many have taken them for granted.

By default, the remarkable financial progress that Singapore has seen in the last few decades has also contributed to an unhealthy focus on materialism. Many have lamented the lack of compassion and of public spiritedness, and the unhealthy focus on individual success. What Mr Heng is calling for in the school curriculum therefore, is a nationwide reminder of the basic principles which have made this small nation great.

Ironically, Singapore's success and increased affluence have also led to a generation of coddled children who may not have had to learn the hard lessons of struggle. Indulgent parents who constantly shield their children from suffering or criticism inadvertently prevent them from developing emotional strength and character.

It is oft said that values are caught, not taught. Teaching true grit, therefore, will be much harder than improving academic excellence. It calls for a revolutionary approach and visionary educators who must be given some flexibility to implement their ideas. They might find some worthwhile lessons in the experiments of David Levin, the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York City, who successfully implemented a values programme and grading system in his schools, which were documented in a recent New York Times article by Paul Tough called What If The Secret To Success Is Failure?

The title of the article says it all. Recalibrating the education system towards values requires a leap of faith and a willingness to fail. It remains to be seen if Singapore can rise up to this challenge.

Copyright © 2011 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Homing in on homework


Many say children's workloads should be made more manageable

By Leow Si Wan & Cheryl Ong
HOUSEWIFE Christine Tan's son spends two hours on homework and online assignments daily - and he is all of seven years old and in Primary 1.

She said of her other son, who is in Primary 4 and attends the same school as his younger brother: 'He spent most of the June holidays doing more than 50 multiple-choice questions for each of his subjects.'

The 45-year-old mum said she supports Education Minister Heng Swee Keat's call for schools to establish a policy on homework.

Mr Heng had urged this of schools at his ministry's workplan seminar last week, saying that schools should look into their students' needs and ascertain the amount of homework to be given at the different levels.

This way, parents can have clearer expectations about this longstanding bone of contention.

Madam Tan is not alone.

About half the 20 parents interviewed by The Straits Times expressed concerns that their children were given too much homework.

While most of those with children in the lower primary levels said they felt the amount should be more manageable, they also expressed worry that the step-up in workload may be too sudden when their children move into the upper primary levels.

Madam Lilis Sim, 39, is one parent who called on schools to calibrate the rate at which homework is increased as the pupils move to higher levels. Her son in Primary 5 became very stressed when he was suddenly given much more homework this year, she said.

Parents also raised the issue of the tight deadlines their children are given to complete assignments.

Madam Tan said: 'Sometimes, teachers give a piece of project work and want children to hand it up the next day. Parents end up doing the work. There are also parents who get tutors to help out.'

Pre-school teacher Serina Cheah, 43, said she hoped that schools would distribute the amount of homework fairly over the course of a week.

She noted that her Primary 5 son has none on some days, but on others, he would be snowed under with half a dozen assignments, all due the next day.

And some of these seem to be pitched above his level as well, she said. 'Some questions are so tough that parents ask one another to find answers. Other questions seem to only test exam techniques, so what are we teaching our children?'

Other parents, such as housewife Selena Kaur, 43, whose daughter is in Primary 3, also want schools to keep to a reasonable homework structure to guard against the children being burnt out.

'The kids are young and tire easily. They don't have time for other interests or to develop other talents,' she said.

Educators interviewed noted that the benchmark for what makes for a suitable amount of homework is subjective.

South View Primary principal Jenny Yeo said: 'In the same class, you can have parents saying different things; one might say 'Too much homework', another might say 'Too little', and some parents add to the workload by sending their children for tuition.'

Some schools are already monitoring the workload of pupils, even before Mr Heng's call for a homework policy.

In South View Primary, teachers note down the homework given for the day, either in a book or on the whiteboard, so the class's other teachers will know how much pupils already have on their plate.

Counsellors say homework stress is one of the most common complaints among schoolchildren here.

Ms Goh Li Shan, a coordinator of Tinkle Friend, a hotline for troubled primary schoolchildren, said the helpline receives more than 500 calls a year about homework- and exam-related stress. This makes up 15 per cent of calls in a year.

Counsellor Raymond Cheong, who runs the Children/Youth Learning & Counselling Clinic, said it is better for children to gain knowledge progressively.

He said: 'Children develop their cognitive abilities in stages. It's important that we nurture in them a desire to learn.'

He said, however, that it is hard to pin down the 'right' amount of homework, as it depends on what the child requires. Balance is important, he said.

'Schools must change their mindset and stop focusing too much on achievements. Children may be good at doing homework, but suffer in other areas such as social skills or aesthetics,' he said.

Corporate trainer Jerry Tan, a father of two girls, one in Primary 2 and the other in Secondary 4, also sees the need for balance when it comes to homework.

He said: 'Homework is not a bad thing. Hard work counts towards success, but we should also remember the well-being of a child. Having so much homework to do that they lose out on their childhood is going too far.'

siwan@sph.com.sg

ongyiern@sph.com.sg
Copyright © 2011 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

Sunday, Sep. 25, 2011

By Amanda Ripley / Seoul

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. (See pictures of Seoul, the world's most connected city.)

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in violation, not you. You can go home.'"

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins. (Read about South Korean schools going paperless.)

South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."

In Seoul, legions of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based (diabolically enough) on students' test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation's top three universities. (Read "Asia's Latest Miracle.")

From a distance, South Korea's results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. (Since 1962 the nation's GDP has gone up about 40,000%, making it the world's 13th largest economy.) But the country's leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall — and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system," Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.

The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.

See 10 things to do in Seoul.

Koreans have lamented their relative inefficiency for years, and the government has repeatedly tried to humanize the education system — simplifying admissions tests, capping hagwon tuition, even going so far as to ban hagwons altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under a dictatorship. But after each attempt, the hagwons come back stronger. That's because the incentives remain unchanged. South Korean kids gorge themselves on studying for one reason: to get into one of the country's top universities. The slots are too few — and the reward for getting in too great. "Where you attend university haunts you for the rest of your life," says Lee Beom, a former cram-school instructor who now works on reform in the Seoul metropolitan office of education.

But this time, the administration argues, its reforms are targeting not just the symptom of the dysfunction but also the causes. It is working to improve normal public schools by putting teachers and principals through rigorous evaluations — which include opinion surveys by students, parents and peer teachers — and requiring additional training for low-scoring teachers. At the same time, the government hopes to reduce the strain on students. Corporal punishment, an entrenched and formalized ritual in South Korean schools, is now prohibited (although students told me it still happens occasionally). Admissions tests for prestigious, specialized high schools (like foreign-language schools) have been eliminated. Middle schoolers are now judged on the basis of their regular grades and an interview. And 500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country's universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities. (Read "Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?")

The Parent Trap
No one defends the status quo in South Korea. "All we do is study, except when we sleep," one high school boy told me, and he was not exaggerating. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student. To be sure, some students opt out of this system — those who go to certain vocational high schools, for example. But most cannot transcend the relentless family and peer pressure to study until they drop from fatigue. "It breaks my heart," another teenage boy tells me, "to see my classmates compete against each other instead of helping each other."

Parents remain the real drivers of the education rat race, and they will be the hardest to convert. Han Yoon-hee, an English teacher at Jeong Bal High School in Ilsan, a suburb of Seoul, says parental anxiety is profound. "I suggest to [my students] that they should quit hagwons and focus on school," she says. "But their parents get very nervous when they don't take classes at night. They know other students are taking classes. They have to compete with each other."

Sometimes it's hard to know who is competing with whom — the students or their mothers. In 1964 a school entrance exam contained a question about the ingredients in taffy. But the exam inadvertently included two right answers, only one of which was counted as correct. To protest this unfairness, outraged mothers — not students — began cooking taffy outside government offices using the alternative ingredient. Eventually, the mothers won the resignation of the Vice Education Minister and the superintendent of Seoul, and several dozen students received retroactive admission offers.

Still, the Education Ministry can point to one recent victory in this long fight: spending on private instruction decreased 3.5% in 2010, the first drop since the government began tracking the figure in 2007. Does the decline signal a trend? Well, Koreans still spent 2% of their GDP on tutoring, even with the downtick. Andrew Kim, a very successful instructor at Megastudy, South Korea's largest hagwon, says he earned $4 million last year from online and in-person lectures. He agrees that the system is far from ideal, but so far he has seen no impact from the reforms on his income. "The tougher the measures," he says, "the more resilient hagwons become." In response to the government-imposed curfew, for example, many hagwons have just put more lessons online for students to buy after hours at home. (See TIME's special report on what makes a school great.)

Other hagwons flout the law, continuing to operate past the curfew — sometimes in disguise. The night of the Daechi-dong raid, the inspectors I am following wait for the door to open. Then they take off their shoes and begin a brisk tour of the place. In a warren of small study rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights, about 40 teenagers sit at small, individual carrels. The air is stale. It is a disturbing scene, sort of like a sweatshop for children's brains.

This is technically not a hagwon but an after-hours self-study library — at least in theory. Self-study libraries are allowed to stay open past 10 p.m. But the inspectors suspect this is a camouflaged hagwon. The students are studying from the same work sheets, and there are a handful of adults who appear to be teachers.

One of them denies any wrongdoing. "We are just doing our own work here," she says indignantly. "We don't teach." Cha, the squad leader, shakes his head. "I've allowed your excuses before, but we're getting too many tips about this place," he says. "It's an open secret in this community that you've been operating illegally."

Afterward, the squad makes a few more stops at other self-study libraries. It finds nothing suspicious. At about midnight, Cha lights a cigarette on a corner and chats with his colleagues. Then they head home for the night, having temporarily liberated 40 teenagers out of 4 million.

— with reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul

Ripley is an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation

This article originally appeared in the October 3, 2011 issue of TIME Asia