May 7, 2012 in Articles, Spotlight
TRAVELING in the post-Awakening Arab world, I have been most struck by how few new leaders have emerged from the huge volcanic political eruption here. By new leaders, I don’t just mean people who win elections, I mean leaders — men and women with the legitimacy and the will to tell their people the truth and build the coalitions required to get their societies moving forward again.
April 2, 2012 in PLF News
By CHELSEA L. Y. NG and PRIYA KULASAGARAN
educate@thestar.com.my
The National Philosophy of Education aims to create holistic individuals but we do not seem to be producing such students.
THE LATE Prof Datuk Dr Syed Hussein Alatas once likened the education system to another Malaysian grouse – roads ridden with potholes.
“The potholes grow bigger, accidents happen, even loss of life, but the potholes continue to be ignored with no one wanting to take responsibility,” said the former Universiti Malaya vice-chancellor when speaking at a national education conference in 2000.
Any discourse on the current state of our schools causes fireworks, even among the most boring of personalities.
Remarks range from “our education system is a mess, it’s the Government’s fault’’ to “No, it is the teacher who must be blamed’’ or even that “students nowadays are different, they are just impossible to teach’’.
Fingers are pointed at parents too, as some firmly believe that teachers are just substandard baby-sitters in school while parents slog and slave for money.
There are kernels of truth in each of these remarks, but all these perceived problems do not appear everywhere and to everyone all at once.
Contrary to the nostalgia over how wonderful Malaysian schools used to be for our baby-boomer generations, this decay of the education system did not happen overnight.
The nature of economy, the lower levels of competition, and the strong community systems then may have simply masked the static nature of schools.
A high school diploma could still get you a decent job, so perhaps we didn’t care to look too deeply at the possible cracks in the system.
Also, the best schools then were mostly accessible to a minority of the population; the better-off, the urban, and the elite.
The students of yore were responsible for mapping out the country of today — if schools then were successful in breeding critical thinking intellectuals, how did we arrive at the current situation?
We have come a long way in terms of increasing access to education from the days of Independence; from a literacy rate of 48% in 1957, the latest United Nations statistics in 2009 indicate that 93% of Malaysians are literate.
But somewhere down the road, the cracks we previously ignored have turned into significant gaps, and we can’t move forward until all the potholes are plugged.
Reform, revamp, rehaul
A cursory glance at media headlines over the past decade or so suggest that the education system has been in a continuous state of reform.
In between official plans of reform are numerous calls by education stakeholders giving their two cents worth; when push comes to shove, the situation tends to boil down to educators demanding for better benefits, parents calling for lower expenses and extra classes, and employers crying out for skilled workers.
We fail to realise that the only important stakeholders are the students, and the fundamental reason for education is to empower individuals to live meaningful lives.
During pedagogy training, teachers are taught to fall back on the National Philosophy of Education as a mother-of-all-guides for their profession.
Established in 1987, the National Philosophy of Education states that education is the holistic development of “individuals who are intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and physically balanced and harmonious”.
It further adds that education should be designed to produce Malaysian citizens who are “knowledgeable and competent”, “possess high moral standards”, “responsible and capable of achieving a high level of personal well-being”, and will “contribute to the betterment of the family, the society and the nation at large.”
For some teachers, the philosophy contains “big words that exist merely in theory’’.
“In reality, schools want to keep the students under their ‘control’. No questions should be asked,’’ senior teacher Sheila retorts.
“Humanisation? How can students learn that in schools when schools carry out ‘body checks’?,’’ she says, claiming that her school’s administrators ignored her protestations.
“We do not need to search for prohibited items to the extent of stripping our students off their dignity. We should discipline them but not insult them.”
It is common to hear teachers using inappropriate words to describe and chide young pupils such as calling them “monkeys”, “goats” and “cows” while ushering them to their respective classrooms.
There is also the constant complaint by teachers about paper work and writing reports.
“Teachers who cannot write reports or do not have basic computer skills should not be allowed to teach. They should be repatriated back to schools to learn!’’ says a former secondary school teacher.
Meanwhile, genuine teachers just make use of their own resources to survive within the system. They have no qualms in spending their own money on the classroom activities.
Some say they use their own broadband in school because the network provided in school does not work most times, or promise their students lessons via LCD projector screening once a week to promote enthusiasm in learning.
Still others sacrifice time with their own children to act as surrogate parents to their young charges in the classroom.
The institutionalised nature and design of schools mean that students are treated like camp prisoners; good schools minimise this with dedicated teachers and visionary school heads.
Schools or factories?
It is strange that although everyone acknowledges the “changing global landscape”, our schools remain as the industrial-era brick-houses that were their origins.
Even now when we speak of revolutionising the education sector, most seem to be enamoured with employable graduates with “marketable” skills – this is one crucial purpose of education, but it seems rather limiting to view children merely as commodities to be churned out for the machine of industry.
It is without a doubt that children who are taught to read early and exposed to positive learning behaviour like wanting to read for knowledge and not for the sake of preparing to score for exams, usually turn out to be better off than their peers who are subjected to rote learning only.
Illustrating this is how the popular debate on science and mathematics education got caught in the politics of language. Meanwhile, policy-makers lament the nation’s slow progress towards achieving its goal of having a science and arts student ratio of 60:40 respectively.
However, not many people have seriously questioned the way science and mathematics are taught to students in the first place – if all that is required to pass examinations are wholesale memorisation of formulas and experiments, it is no wonder that students are uninterested.
Compounding this is the arbitrary segregation of science and arts students in secondary schools, especially at a time when the real world is pursuing multi-disciplinary innovation.
In fact, this separation of disciplines in Malaysia was criticised in the Mahathir Report of 1979, written by a Cabinet committee chaired by then Education Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
The report cautioned that streaming students into the arts and sciences is contrary to the notion of a wholesome education, especially if the streaming is based on achievement tests rather than an assessment of talent and interest.
Aside from proposing a less academic and test-orientated curriculum, the report also stated that the primary school curriculum was too “middle of the road” where bright students were bored and slow learners failed to keep up; the strict separation of subjects left students with knowledge that “lacked usefulness and functionality” in the real world; and even the design of schools was not conducive to learning.
Although the 1979 report led to big improvements in the school curriculum, the core issues raised then remain true today as we continue to bemoan excessive testing and ranking.
When teachers and students resort to “spotting” questions in upcoming national examinations, this is simply a sophisticated form of cheating that circumvents the purpose of undergoing examinations in the first place.
Tests, key-performance indicators, and measurement tools of the same ilk are merely crude estimates of learning – a string of numerical scores cannot articulate meaning on its own. A more useful assessment is one that allows students to directly justify that they have grasped a particular concept or theory.
In this regard, school-based assessments are now seen as an alternative to high-stakes testing.
It is too early to determine the overall efficacy and reliability of these assessments, but when the proposal to abolish public examinations in favour of school-based assessments was made public, various parties voiced out concern over possible bias, leaks and manipulation, as well as a general lowering of standards.
The implicit message here is that we don’t trust our schools to assess students’ learning abilities; ironically, when students under-perform schools suffer the blame as well.
Going back to the National Philosophy of Education, the over arching idea of education that both policy-makers and laymen talk about is one that values learning and knowledge – a noble and humanistic view.
Why is it then, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty details and action-plans, we fall back to the checklist mentality of production assembly lines?
The big picture and the small details
From the National Key Results Areas (NKRA) to the ministry’s own five-year blueprints, it is fair to say that policy-makers do not lack vision in coming up with improvements to the education system.
The latest in these attempts at change is the i-Think programme launched by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak last month, aimed at inculcating critical thinking skills among students.
Using the Thinking Maps tools developed by American researcher Dr David Hyerle, the initiative is a collaboration between the Special Innovation Unit (UNIK), the Malaysia Innovation Agency, and the Education Ministry.
The pilot project had started in ten randomly selected schools across the country last year and will be rolled out to all schools by 2014.
UNIK chief executive officer Datuk Dr Kamal Jit Singh explains that this is first school-based project for UNIK.
“We started seeing results in just two months – there was a dramatic culture shift in classrooms, as students were actively participating in lessons and asking questions.
“The whole idea of this (project) is to equip teachers with the tools they need to spark critical thinking so that they can go on to apply them in whatever lessons they conduct.
“You can’t have creativity without critical thinking; the latter acts as a ‘reality check’ and helps students distinguish between facts and opinion,” he says.
He adds that the bulk of RM5mil price tag for the pilot programme went towards training the teachers.
“We may only be able to see the full results of the programme in five years time, when these students go out into the work force armed with problem-solving, decision-making and communication skills,” he says.
While the initiative itself has noble intentions, how will it fit within the current education framework?
While reform plans are fantastic on paper, the devil is in the details; how many times have we read news of unprofessional and unethical conduct by those within the system only to have them get away with a slap on the wrist?
The pressing concern is that if we are stuck in a vicious cycle of expecting indifferent people to execute excellent ideas, the ripple effect of inefficacy will spread throughout the system.
Real change will be more painful but with pain, there will be healing too – look at the Finnish experience. (see below)
At the heart of a public school system is a belief of the common good – we care about the education of our neighbour’s children as much as we do for our own.
This is not just for the sake of altruism or being politically correct, as there are practical and economical reasons for fighting for brilliant schools that are readily accessible to all.
By providing an avenue for social mobility and narrowing the income gap, a strong education system translates into less crime and social ills.
By equipping our students with both scientific reasoning and artistic philosophy, we will not just have a better leverage in the proverbial “marketplace” but a richer Malaysian culture as well.
By allowing students to pursue their talents based on their interests and ability, innovation and creativity will naturally grow without the need for special intervention.
We tend to forget that true innovation does not need policy nor a grand masterplan – it rests on the shoulders of ordinary people working to improve the way we do things and the way we connect with the world.
March 27, 2012 in Articles
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).
In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.
Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 25, 2012
The Gray Matter column on bilingualism last Sunday misspelled the name of a university in Spain. It is Pompeu Fabra, not Pompea Fabra.
February 10, 2012 in Articles, Books etc, Perdana Library, Resource Centre, Spotlight
A front page from 1887 of the Police News is now available online. Photo: POLICE NEWS
November 29, 2011 | By Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor
People will now be able to search the ‘British Newspaper Archive’, which is made up of four million pages – containing articles from local and regional papers going back to 1700, for details about members of their family who may have been eminent in their local communities hundreds of years ago.
The launch of the archive is the first time people will be able to digitally access and search through millions of newspaper articles from the comfort of their homes. Up until now, people have had to travel to the British Library newspaper depository in Colindale, North London, to access the entire collection of 200 local and regional newspapers.
Highlights of the vast collection include gems such as vivid accounts of General Garibaldi’s UK visit to a “magnificent reception at Crystal Palace”, published in the Dundee Courier on April 18 1864, and the creation of the phonograph by Thomas Edison, in the North Wales Chronicle on December 1, 1877.
Ed King, head of the British Library’s newspaper collections, said: “People will find this archive extraordinary on both a personal and historical level. For the first time people can search for their ancestors through the pages of our newspapers wherever they are in the world at any time.
“But what’s really striking is how these pages take us straight back to scenes of murders, social deprivation and church meetings from hundreds of year ago, which we no longer think about as we haven’t been able to easily access articles about them.”
The archive also features hundreds of letters from soldiers in varying war zones, which were published in local papers as a way of bringing attention to their needs and informing people about life at war. One such letter, published in The Reading Mercury on January 27, 1855, was from a soldier fighting in the Crimean War begging for food to be sent to him as the British army’s supplies had dwindled to record lows.
However, anyone wishing to fully access the newspaper archive will have to pay to do so. People can search the site for free but will need to pay either £6.95 for 48 hour access; £29.95 for 30 days or £79.95 for an annual subscription. Once logged in, users can download a pdf of a particular page to keep forever. The archive can be accessed for free in the British Library’s Reading rooms.
The digitisation project, which started last year, will take 10 years to complete, with a total of 650 million articles on 40 million web pages expected to be in the finished archive by 2020. British company Brightsolid, which also owns Friends Reunited and Genes Reunited, is responsible for digitising the archive – a painstaking process as much of it needs to be done by hand as so many of the pages of the newspapers are too fragile to be processed by machines.
Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, praised the project, saying: “The British Newspaper Archive is a rich and hugely exciting resource, packed with historical detail. It’s a great example of the public and private sectors collaborating to deliver something that neither party could have delivered by themselves. I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within seconds had 42,000 results – an indication of the breadth and variety of material featured. I’m delighted that the British Library and Brightsolid are working together to transform access to the nation’s published memory.”
February 9, 2012 in Articles, Speeches, Spotlight, Tun Dr. Mahathir
January 27, 2012 | By Tun Dr Mahathir
1. At the outset, allow me to express my sincere appreciation to Naresuan University for conferring on me an Honorary Doctorate in Political Science. It is indeed a great honour for me as I believe it reflects Naresuan University’s recognition on my contribution to the development of Malaysia and good relations with Thailand during the time when I was the Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 until I retired in 2003. For this, I am very grateful to Naresuan University and on my part, I accept this honorary doctorate degree with both pride and humility.
2. I am very proud to be associated with this prestigious and outstanding institution which in recent years under the able leadership of Prof. Krasae and Prof. Suhjin has strived to develope the university as an outstanding institution which places great emphasis on the maintenance of high academic standards in all of its faculties.
3. Established in 1967 when it was known as the College of Education, it attained full university status in July 1990. I am made to understand that I am the first Malaysian to be conferred with this prestigious award. A relatively young university, Naresuan University has been active in its outreach programme and in its internationalisation programme. In the year 2011, it has decided to extend the award to non-Thais as a form of recognition to the contribution made by eminent personalities. This is an honour I am proud to be associated with.
4. I am delighted to learn that Naresuan University has been collaborating in a number of academic activities with universities in Malaysia and more recently it has established its own Centre for ASEAN Education (CAE) which I truly believe bodes well for the ongoing efforts undertaken by all member States in this region to foster closer relationship in view of the important deadline of 2015 when the 10 countries in this region will become one community.
5. I am also delighted to learn that the university has been working very closely with all ASEAN diplomatic representatives in Thailand to ensure the success of CAE by having the envoys as Honorary Committee members. The university has also appointed representatives from ASEAN Embassies to be members of its Executive Board. The decision could be described as a brave step by the university to steer its ASEANisation efforts further and emerge as one of the leading tertiary institutions in this region by 2017 when it aspires to achieve the status as a research university. I have full confidence in the ability of its top management to realise that objective.
For the complete speech, do visit the NARESUAN UNIVERSITY official website